When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Daily Chores

A day starts at 8am. Not bad for a farm-I've dealt with earlier. Also, my commute is a 5-minute walk across a ranch full of animals as the sun rises in front of me. We'll soon start at 7am when the goats need to be milked. We're enjoying the winter quiet now.

We split up and pile into our two farm trucks, one group doling out grain and one group dropping hay. We visit the camels, llamas, water buffalo and bulls first, usually.

Camels, llamas and water buffalo are exhibition animals, kept to educate rather than for productive reasons. The bulls are breeding stock.

Then on to the pigs.

We have 11 pigs of different ages. Gloria, the one standing, is the oldest. We have four piglets that get bigger every day. They'll all get huge soon. Then we eat them. Until then, it's fun to play with them, and throw them a flake of hay, which they tear up, squealing. It's their favorite thing.

And the rams and bucks, kept for breeding.

The goats are everyone's favorite.

There are meat goats and dairy goats. They have such personalities, and will do almost anything for food. They can open certain types of latches on gates, and enjoy running around the farm when they get out. They'll descend on an area and strip it like locusts. They're pretty clever and very strong. I want to get a goat cart, but I can't get anyone to sign on to the idea...
We eventually check the cattle, which are split into a group of fat ones and a group of skinny ones.

Somewhere in there we check on the horses and the donkeys, who are exhibition animals only (they have quite a life--no need to work).

We have 4 Belgian draft horses, who can all drive and are all trained to be working horses. We have two giant donkeys, who are large enough to be ridden. We'll probably be downsizing our herd soon.

Back in the Show Barn, where field trips of school children are taken to learn about all of our animals, we check on the rabbits and turkeys, and collect the eggs from the chickens and ducks.

Eventually we head on down to the Bottoms, the flood plain by the river where our huge pastures are. That's where the sheep are until lambing. We feed their three guard dogs, who keep the coyotes away (but sadly can't herd) and check the flock for limpers, stragglers or other sheep needing attention.

After morning chores, we all head to the projects we've scheduled, which we'll do all day, with a break for lunch, until evening chores. Until babies come, everything is sane, with a nice routine.

When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Home on the ranch

I had no idea what to expect when coming to Heifer. I asked, "Who else volunteers for you?" They replied, "People aged 18 to 80." I stopped asking questions.

Well, to be fair, volunteers are all ages here, literally between 18 and 80, but here's the more helpful version of that answer.

18 is the minimum age to volunteer at the ranch, so no one is younger. There are a few 18 year olds, mostly on their way to college, taking a year off between high school and higher education.

There are a lot of 20-somethings, finished with college and on the way to the "real world" of corporate jobs or another few years of education at grad school. They make up the majority of the work force, in all fields from livestock to education to gardening.

There are also a few older volunteers, retirees who greet visitors or staff the gift shop or coordinate maintenance.

No one else seems to be in the middle of a career. Everyone's either evaluating their options or enjoying retirement.

Everyone is very environmentally conscious, and interested in green lifestyles. People buy organic, local or vegetarian or any combination thereof. Also, they like to cook and prepare food. We have weekly potlucks, and often pool resources to make scrumptious meals.

What an awesome society to live in.

Residential volunteers live in volunteer houses on the ranch grounds. I live in the largest house, Valley View, which is divided into two households (upstairs and downstairs). I live downstairs with 4 other people. There are three rooms, with two people per room (oh, the joys of sharing a room... I thought I left those behind after freshman year of college). There's one man all alone in his room, and 4 women in the remaining two rooms. The kitchen is huge, well-equipped and spacious. Each room has a bathroom, and there's laundry right here in the house. It's very nicely laid out, and volunteers are well cared for by the company. It's not a bad set up at all. There's no college feeling around the place, as one might expect, with group-living in provided housing with 20-something-year-olds.

People work any of the 7 days, and get away on fun social activities on their time off. It is Perryville, Arkansas--so quite in the middle of nowhere, but we manage to find things to do.

Live Hard, Play Hard

After 5 days of orientation and no regular work, the weekend was tediously long for everyone on the ranch.

The snow on Monday didn't help everyone's restlessness.

When the ranch closed on Tuesday, that was it. A group of us organized to go play snow games.

We had too few for capture the flag, and too few resources for a productive snowball fight, so we improvised games. After too much running, we settled on frisbee with a 5-gallon bucket lid. Perfect improvisation.

When that got boring, we added in a snowball fight, throwing snowballs at the person who caught the frisbee. Every once and a while the game would dissolve into a full-scale snowball fight as people charged the catcher. Once everyone was sufficiently tired, we would settle down into regular frisbee again.

Making snowballs was particularly hard with my right arm in a cast (and not wanting to get it wet), but luckily the snow had a crust of ice, and small sheets of ice could be prized up and lobbed at other people. I was also able to use my cast as armor, blocking fierce throws of the frisbee that would have hurt to catch.

During one of the degenerated snowball fighting bouts, someone shouted "Look out!" and I was able to look up from prying up a small ice sheet to see the bucket lid whistling its way toward me (in a remarkably straight trajectory, too).

Well, it fortunately didn't hit my nose or knock me unconscious. It did, unfortunately, hit my teeth, chipping one of my front teeth pretty badly.

Crap.

So I now have a chipped tooth, which was rapidly repaired by a local dentist (after two days of drinking meals through straws and self-consciously avoiding smiling).

Although I look normal again, I apparently cannot ever again eat corn on the cob, or bite into an apple or anything else that laterally stresses my front teeth.

Despite our limited ability for regeneration, you only have what you're born with, and everything else is subtraction. That being said, though, you don't get extra points for dying with all your teeth intact.

Here's to stories.

Starting a new job amid chaos

My new job, for the next few months at least, is being a Livestock Volunteer at Heifer Ranch in Perryville, AR.

Heifer is a non-profit organization that operates on a global scale to end world hunger. They operate on a sustainable and continuing model of social and economic growth. Instead of giving starving people milk, they give them a cow. And many other things, like the knowledge and support needed to care for and profit from a cow. And those previously-starving people, once they have food, motivation and even some income from their cow, must pass on one of their cow's babies to another family in need, who have been appropriately educated. That's the simple version, and that's how Heifer is going to end world hunger.

Amazing.

So I'm here at their educational ranch, enlightening the general public. We're an educational facility, and I am here to help raise awareness of world hunger and how Heifer is working to end it.

And in order to do my job, I need orientation. Two whole weeks of it. Heifer is a huge agency, and has many protocols and procedures that all volunteers must learn. It's surprisingly corporate, even though I'm just here working for free. I'm coming from the theater world, where I'll work for a company for a day or a week or a season; where we're all friends and the organizational structure is lax; where no one's really an employee and everyone's a starving artist. The first week of orientation here was a welcome into the corporate structure, where titles carry meaning, people have desks in offices and promotions are sought after. And I thought I was just gonna herd some sheep.


Departmental orientation (week two) was interrupted by 'massive' snowstorms. There were a whole 4 inches of snow on the ground on Monday. Arkansas shut down for 3 days. Two weeks into my sojourn on the ranch, I still had no idea what my job was.


There are only 6 new volunteers this season, with the rest of the volunteer staff being filled out by returning volunteers rolled over from last year. That's an extremely high retention rate, giving everyone the sense that they've seen it all and done it all before, and making orientation haphazard for us new folks, especially with the snow.

I will be working with sheep, goats, cows, camels, water buffalo, llamas, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, pigs, horses, donkeys and bees. This should be good.

Into Lands Unknown

Seeing as I had spent 3 months mostly in one city (some forays into New York and Delaware excluded), it is time to move on.

On to Arkansas! I will be working for Heifer International as a Livestock Volunteer on their educational ranch in Perryville.

Things that I knew about Arkansas without investigation:
1) It's pronounced R-Kansas (like, the 18th letter of the alphabet and the state that's friends with Nebraska)
2) It is in the South.
3) It's flat.

Things that I have found out about Arkansas through investigation:
1) It is west of the Mississippi River.
2) The density of churches here is higher than in Rome.
3) There are mountains in Arkansas (the Ozarks and the Ouachitas).

Also, it is an 18+ hour drive from Philadelphia. In good weather.

It was certainly not good weather this weekend. The largest winter storm of the season hit the southern US, shutting down everything from Oklahoma to North Carolina. It took me a little longer than 22 total hours of driving. But I broke it up by spending the night (in my car--how else?) Saturday night.


Here's a brief state-by-state greatest moments list:

PA:
Ready to go at 11:30am Saturday, January 30th.

DE:
I crossed the border from Pennsylvania under typical grey overcast winter skies. 20 minutes south, I saw a couple snowflakes. 30 minutes south, snow covered the road.

MD:
(At this point the storm had done its worst, and no one could find a plow) So superhighways have banked turns. Apparently those banks are pretty steep, which you don't realize until you're crawling along bumper-to-bumper in a foot of slush. You realize it when the car in the slow lane, which is now 10' above your head, slides sideways into other lanes of traffic. Hilarious when not terrifying.

VA:
Kudos to Virginia for its snow removal services. By the time I got to I-81, I was cruising along at regular speeds. It was just me and the trucks. Occasionally I would pass a herd of plows trudging along at 30 mph, sparks flying from the plows hitting the asphalt. Pretty cool to see at night...

TN:


My bike was strapped to the back of my car. About the time I hit Tennessee, I discovered that my poor bike was encrusted with ice, slush and road salt. Same with my car... I've never gotten it this dirty before. Luckily the gas station squeegees take off road salt pretty well. Just don't forget to squeegee them dry too.



Mississippi River:
I have never seen the Mississippi before, although I have flown over it several times. I came upon it quite suddenly. I was driving through the rolling hills of western Tennessee, counting down the miles to Memphis with the help of the road signs, when all of a sudden, a big pyramid building pops into view and the land falls away on every side. I was hustled over a bridge and across the river by the time I realized it was the Mississippi. I turned around and went back, visiting Memphis briefly and taking pictures of the sunset over the huge river.


AR:
After crossing the Mississippi, the roads were straight, flat and deserted. I set cruise control and was able to sit with my hands resting in my lap, my legs crossed on the floor. It was an interesting experience to be carried along in the car while I was supposedly in charge. It was also very late, and it had been a long weekend of driving. And NPR had given way to religious sermons. I had to entertain myself somehow...


And like all good road trips, it ended. I arrived at my new home.

Touring to the theater capital of the country

The culmination of Chekhov Lizardbrain arrived in New York City this week. It's our final stop (excursion? It was a non-continuous tour), and our highest-stakes. And the most challenging.

You'd think that New York theaters would be well-equipped and hospitable. Well, the Broadway ones probably are, but they're union houses and for-profit businesses. There are other types of theaters in New York. And those are the ones we inhabit. 'We' being the non-profit, art-oriented companies, less focused on mass entertainment and more focused on message and artistic and intellectual content.

And those theaters are not easy to work in.


Our venue was a converted public school, with crumbling 13' ceilings and black columns dispersed throughout the space.

And non-profit theater is like the most stubborn mountain climber, persevering through steep and slick, making the completion of even the most difficult tasks inevitable.

I broke my wrist loading the truck, as we prepped to drive the set up to New York City. Luckily, I had the 6 hours to spare to sit in the emergency room, and was able to spend a quiet evening in the ER hallway, reading a book.


After a 5am wake-up, we were off to New York in the company van and the rented box truck. A smooth drive up there started the day of load-in, with 4 truck loads of rental equipment meeting us at the venue. We spent the first 8 hours building a theater inside the venue, installing audience risers, constructing a monstrous cage of aluminum truss to support the set's rigging, building our own lighting positions and putting up walls to make a backstage and audience area. Finally, after a regular work day's worth of work, we were able to start loading in our show.

A week of 16-hour days followed, and our company succeeding in doing the seemingly-insurmountable: we opened on Thursday to a group of international presenters shopping for productions to sponsor and companies to commission.

The story sounds exotic and mundane at the same time. Technical theater is a mystery of magic-making to the layperson, and a grueling but much-loved process for the participants. Every show is fraught with problems. Every show is exhausting. Some more so than others, but even the smoothest process is impossible at some split-second. And the number one rule of theater is that it always happens. Every process is possible.

Eventually, the ground stops rising and there's no more mountain. We can keep climbing for longer than the obstacles in front of us keep arising.

James Sugg in Pig Iron Theater Company's Chekhov Lizardbrain

Mummer's Day Parade

Apparently this is something that only happens in Philadelphia. Well, maybe in other countries too, but in the US, it's restricted to Philly.

Having spent my first New Year's Eve in the Philly area, I was able to spend my first New Year's Day at the Mummer's Day Parade.

And I knew nothing about it.


I heard 'parade' and thought it'd be worth attending. And what a sight. The colors and kitsch are spectacular, but the more interesting thing is the culture behind it. Aptly described by one of my friends as 'middle-aged, working-class fraternities,' these groups of fabulously dressed men cavorting in formation are a shock to the status-quo-numbed mind as well as the winter-dulled eye.

An hour of shuffling through crowds and dodging Uhaul trucks in frosty January temperatures satisfied my curiosity for this phenomenon, and I left to attend a more humble New Year's celebration. But I was fueled with plenty to talk about and to inquire about later. What a unique experience.