There’s No Such Thing as Garbage or “They”
“She ain’t an easy lover but she’ll please ya.”
Three weeks ago, I took an impromptu trip to Montana to WWOOF (Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms). If you read my “Outdoorsy” post, you’ll rightly assume that I have absolutely no farming experience. WWOOFing is something that I’ve wanted to do for over a decade, long before romanticized homesteading took over the Millennial zeitgeist, but I’ve never had an extended period of time to dedicate to it.
This trip was not planned. A three-week window opened up after biblical plagues of mosquitoes thwarted our plans to spend July in BC, and going to a farm in Montana seemed as good an idea as any. Lee stayed in Washington and California for some car and doctor’s appointments, and I landed in Missoula having only exchanged two emails and a brief phone call with Kathy, the woman who owns the farm. I like to research places a bit before I arrive to understand the local history, culture, and attractions, but I didn’t have time to do that, so I showed up completely ignorant of my destination with zero expectations.
It has been a wild three weeks, and an experience I’ve struggled to put into words. Each person, place, and event has what feels like dozens of hilarious or bizarre anecdotes that I could spend hours delving into. I considered breaking the experience up over a few blog posts instead of just one, but a) the stories don’t all translate well into writing, and b) I don’t know if people really care enough to read three blog posts about Montana, so feel free to ask me for details next time you see me, if you’re interested ;)
People
Two other WWOOFers, Ashton and Alexis, picked me up at the airport. I liked them immediately. Ashton radiates enthusiasm; she has a sharp tongue laced with an impeccable Kentucky twang. She speaks in what I at first assumed was a vast array of southern adages, but it turned out she is just skilled at shooting proverbial-sounding statements from the hip (e.g. the quote heading this post). It was impossible to have a conversation with Ashton and not roll into fits of laughter. Where Ashton is exuberant, Alexis is stoic. I quickly noticed the two of them had a charming brother/sister relationship, which made all the more sense when I learned that Alexis is the eldest in his family with three younger sisters. He is the quintessential big brother; I scraped my shin up one afternoon, and even as I laughed it off, he pulled me aside with wide, serious eyes to confirm I was ok. Alexis was also the resident chef, keeping us extremely well-fed; in the week and a half that our time at the farm overlapped, he fed us sirloin, roast duck, and king salmon, among other dishes. Ashton and Alexis had been at the farm for nearly two months when I arrived, and they went above and beyond to ensure I felt at home. Their hospitality was such that I have a hard time accepting we only knew each other for nine days.
I leave Montana with a surprising number of new acquaintances. Kathy is generous in introducing her WWOOFers to her friends and the community; this combined with the friendly spirit of Montana made it easy to get along with folks. The prevailing ethos seems to be “the more, the merrier,” so I found myself getting invited to outings by people I had only met once in passing, and treated with a warmth usually reserved for good friends. I had many assumptions before arriving that were solely based on stereotypes and quickly debunked. There were fewer political signs than I expected, and I was humbled to observe that people’s beliefs here don’t fit so neatly into the box I reserve for rural areas. Most of the people I interacted with had a disdain for the political system in general, bordering on anarchism more than libertarianism, which makes sense considering the frontier culture of self-sufficiency. Other revelations were more surprising. One man I spent an afternoon with displayed clear feminist beliefs, only for me to later learn that he is a round-earth skeptic. I talked to multiple people who were staunchly against the covid vaccine and denied climate change, but who spoke of racism with disgust and despise Trumpism as much as I do. Obviously all of these attributes are not mutually exclusive; you can support abortion rights and think the earth is flat, just as you can deny climate change for reasons completely unrelated to right-wing rhetoric. Despite knowing that people’s belief systems are multi-faceted and not defined by a political party, I am guilty of vilifying those who carry beliefs that are associated with Republicanism, so I appreciated spending time with people who challenge those assumptions.
Kathy’s farm resides on the Flathead Indian Reservation, so in speaking about the people I met, I’d be remiss to not mention the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. This trip was my first experience visiting a reservation, and the history, politics, and culture of the region were largely lost on me. Several people asked me if I had been on a reservation before, and when I answered no, they responded with “you’re lucky, this is the nicest res in Montana, maybe in the entire US.” It was difficult to tell whether this statement was pejorative or complimentary (or both), since some of the people who said this are themselves members of one (or more) of the local tribes. When I probed, they would cite the safety of the area and range of public services provided to residents, the latter of which is apparently uncommon for reservations, but then in the same breath talk about rates of meth addiction, poverty, and crime. While not everyone on the reservation is Native American, the region’s identity is shaped by the history and culture of the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d'Oreilles tribes as much as it is by agriculture, geography, and American frontierism. One experience I am particularly grateful for was being invited to a pow wow, something that I ignorantly assumed was only for members of the tribe. While some pow wows are indeed private events, many are public and open to non-tribal members as a way to share culture and create community. Not to sound trite, but the regalia, dancing, and music were beautiful and emotional in a way that I did not expect to experience as an outsider, and evoked conflicting feelings in me. On one hand, I appreciated that this is part of my own country’s heritage and was humbled to experience something that was so foreign to me as a white person while being more endemic to the United States than anything that I consider to be American culture. On the other hand, I felt embarrassed by my ignorance of modern indigenous culture, especially given the oppressive legacy of my ancestors. I have grappled with my white guilt before, but this was my first time really confronting it in regards to Native American culture, and I’m grateful that it came out of such a positive and celebratory event.
The Farm
The farm itself has “been a deal,” to quote Kathy. She is a former cartoonist from the 80s and 90s, and did background animation for shows like Madeline, Popeye, Tiny Toons, Pinky and the Brain, Batman, Animaniacs, and Darkwing Duck, among many others. She worked under Chuck Jones, Stan Lee, and Steven Spielberg, and alongside Mark Hamill. She partied with Led Zeppelin and Red Hot Chili Peppers. She has five Emmys! After years of living in LA, she decided that the culture, pollution, and pace were wearing her down physically and mentally, so she bought 22 acres of land in St. Ignatius, MT and built her home from scratch on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Her property sits on a slope at the foot of the Mission Mountains, a part of the Northern Rockies, and looks west over Flathead Valley to another offshoot of the Rocky Mountains. As the sun sets, the entire valley glows, a golden fog lingering near the ground as farmers water their crops after the heat of the day. The valley is arid much of the year, but a canal fed by mountain snowmelt runs behind Kathy’s property, supplementing her well and keeping the hillside verdant. Trees she planted decades ago create shade during the day and insulate against the cool night breeze. Four dogs, two cats, two goats, ~30 sheep (including 7 new lambs!), ~20 chickens (and nine chicks!), four turkeys, and a swarm of bees call this place home. It is an idyllic plot of land.
Calling this place a farm, however, is a bit of a stretch; I suppose it is one, by definition, but not in the traditional sense. It’s more of a homestead dedicated to the arts, sustainable living, and permaculture. Kathy doesn’t sell any of her products except her sheep’s wool, and after 27 years of living here, her home is still incomplete. She built it herself from a wood frame with straw insulation and mud walls painted with lime wash. It reminds me of a playground I used to go to as a child, Kid’s Cove, built in the golden era before lawsuits when playgrounds were still dangerous. Staircases and ladders lead to loft areas and nooks throughout the property. Narrow wooden boards form rickety bridges across the canal behind her house. Glass bottles filled with trinkets are cemented directly into the walls, acting as mini-windows between rooms. Caves dug into the hillside under the house provide shelter to various animals seeking refuge from the summer sun. Vegetable and herb gardens are scattered throughout with little apparent rhyme or reason. Repurposed feed bags filled with sand shore up walls. The roof line flows into the slope of the hill, so it’s not uncommon to look up and see a dog on the roof 25’ above you. Everywhere you look there are sculptures made of salvaged scrap metal, wood, glass, and ceramics. The closest comparison I can make is to that wacky wind chime garden at the beginning of Harriet the Spy, but Kathy’s home makes that garden seem minimalist by comparison. Harriet’s zeal when she’s chugging soda, however, is actually pretty close to Kathy’s energy. For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to take photos of the inside of her home, but you can get an idea of the vibe in her Airbnb listing.
Philosophy
Kathy told me about a bumper sticker she used to have that read “there is no such thing as garbage or ‘they,’” meaning our garbage doesn’t disappear and the “they” who inherit it, whether it be poor people in the US or overseas, are no different from the people who discard that “garbage” to make it someone else’s problem. The heaps of discarded lumber, metal, auto glass, appliances, doors, windows, antique furniture, etc. throughout Kathy’s property are testament to this philosophy, as are her building methods. An example: before I left, I was helping Kathy prepare an area to build a decorative wall. We shored up the dirt slope by filling repurposed dog food bags with soil and sand. We then evened out the slope by making clay out of soil from her land mixed with water and torn up newspaper, mashing crushed cans into this slurry to create a sort of brick-like pattern up portions of the wall so it’s ready to cement over. While not all of her building methods are ones I’d want to mimic in my own home, I have been astonished by how effective some of them are: her home, with the straw-insulated mud walls, stays a consistent 75-80 degrees all day, even when the outside temperatures soared to 100. Her personal mission is to live in harmony with the land, producing as close to zero waste as possible. She executed this vision while raising two young sons as a single mother, weathering harsh Montana winters for the first ~8 years without electricity or indoor plumbing. She sees her endeavor as a community-based one, inviting friends and their families over to learn about permaculture, recreate on her land, and have a hand in the more artistic aspects of her various projects.
Fin
I’m writing this as I sit in the airport, waiting for my flight back to Seattle. I will spend the next six weeks bouncing around Washington, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, and Minnesota attending weddings, meeting friends’ babies for the first time, seeing my grandparents, and spending time with most (not quite all) of my closest friends. The past three weeks have both flown by and dragged, but not in a bad way. I haven’t done as much farming as I expected in my time here, but I’ve been anything but idle. I’ve gone whitewater rafting and kayaking, I got to see newborn lambs take their first steps, I went to two concerts, I built things, I fished, I swam in lakes and rivers, and I made friends. Outside of Montana, life didn’t stop either. Lee and I navigated our longest period apart in well over two years. My grandmother passed away. One of my dearest friends gave birth after an excruciatingly difficult pregnancy while another of my dearest friends got engaged and then lost her father two days later. I arrived in Montana feeling overwhelmed, and while it has been a full three weeks, the peace, simplicity, and beauty of the farm have buoyed me.
