This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).
February 19, 2022
Mainers are conservative, in the old school, practical definition, by design. We reuse bits of lumber scraps for shelving or hodgepodge pieces of furniture. Cut ends whittled down to little pieces make for good kindling in the wood stove or maybe even a birdhouse or boot scraper. We already reduce and reuse.
Beyond that basic practicality, many of us also wonder, What will cause the least amount of damage? We love our lands. Plus, it's a legitimate question to ask for many an endeavor in the twenty-first century. It's a question that is not unlike the Hippocratic Oath's proclamation to do no harm. All of us share this earth, air, and water. Doing no harm would do us all a favor.
It turns out that hemp plants can sequester the PFAS chemicals found in Maine's soil and waterways. According to research being conducted with the Aroostook Band of Micmac and Upland Grassroots, hemp plants are capable of sequestering toxins lodged in soils. As with the nutrients they take in, the plants can draw chemicals from the soil and store them away in the heavier fibers of the plants' stalks.
While many of the plant's medicinal uses have been touted lately, this added layer of soil cleansing provides further evidence that Cannabis sativa needs to be a staple agricultural product in North America. The uses take off from there. One of the most tangible products, one that most Mainers have a stake in, is lumber.
Used in composite flooring, layered timbers, and even as the fiber in "hempcrete," there are all manner of applications for this amazing plant. Maine still has a thriving timber industry, employing nearly 1 in 25 working adults, but that has been on a gradual decline for decades. Why not give a boost to our builders and wood product manufacturers by expanding this industry right here in Maine? As the fourth coldest state in the nation, we could even be brainstorming ways to make biomass pellets for our stoves!
None of this technology is new, per se. Their production, however, is the result of a shift in mindset. If we can keep that shift going, give it light and air, we could see new growth in these industries. As the pandemic has shown, there is no end to the demand for homes in Maine. Lumber isn't getting any cheaper, either, and we definitely need alternatives for heating our homes. Why not go all in on hemp?
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, coal was the primary source for heating homes, either in stoves or boilers. We couldn't imagine walking around a river valley town under a weather inversion packed with coal smoke now. Perhaps some day, we won't be able to imagine chimneys belching out effluents from non-renewable resources. Perhaps, some day, the smoke would issue from something a bit sweeter.
A familiar New England scene.
We're only one small piece of the puzzle here at Island Oasis, but the picture is coming together.
This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).
January 24, 2022
Maine has had a medical marijuana program for 22 years now. The state has enjoyed legal, recreational marijuana since the close vote on Question 1 in 2016. While that measure only passed with .6% of the vote (a difference of some 4,000 votes), it was enough to seal the deal. In 2012, when Martin Lee published Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana–Medical, Recreational, and Scientific, it was stunning to many Americans that both Washington and Colorado voters pulled for total legalization. Now, ten years later, only 14 states remain where both medical and recreational marijuana are illegal.
Reading Lee's book ten years after publication, it's amazing to consider how much ground medical and recreational marijuana efforts have gained. Already, in three of those 14 prohibition states mentioned above, marijuana possession has been decriminalized, a step toward a humane treatment of cannabis users. People of a certain generation can be forgiven for being absolutely flabbergasted by walking into a store and hearing the spiel of a seasoned budtender. It's a sea change. But one thing that Lee documents which is difficult to forgive? The years U.S. law enforcement agencies spent ignoring science at the highest level.
Lee makes the war against marijuana seem clearly ill-considered.
Lee's project draws the reader in with a great rendering of Louis Armstrong's life as a dedicated jazz performer and "viper" (1920s slang for someone who puffed). Satchmo's story is compelling no matter what, but what makes this angle work here is that Armstrong smoked gauge his whole life without suffering ill effects. His personal physician, Dr. Jerry Zucker, publicly signed off on the trumpeter's good health, and Armstrong took to calling his daily doob his "medicine." Having grown up with tonics made from dandelion greens and tinctures of nettles, this other plant medicine made sense within the pantheon of home remedies.
“It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics. . . . It’s a thousand times better than whiskey – it’s an assistant – a friend,” Louis Armstong.
One of the more disappointing threads leading to outright prohibition following the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 is the issue of race in America. Pushed onto Congress by Harry Anslinger, the zealous leader of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), the 1937 act set a tax rate so high on the creation and sale of medical or recreational marijuana products that no one could rightly produce this medicine without being afoul of federal law. In addition, by this time, 24 states had passed prohibitions of their own and temperance wasn't the only thing on their minds.
These state's prohibitions followed in the footsteps of El Paso, TX, "which passed the first city ordinance banning the sale and possession of cannabis in 1914." The city had seen an influx of Mexicans following the Revolution of 1910, people in search of steady work and a quieter, safer life. They followed a long-standing tradition of cannabis consumption in the New World: laborers seeking a break from the tedium of their lives at the end of the day. However, in the context of early-20th century America, anti-marijuana and "vagrancy statutes, in addition to legally sanctioned segregation in housing, restaurants, and parks, comprised what [UCSD historian Curtis Marez] described as 'a web of social controls' that were 'mobilized to police Mexicans.' "
Meanwhile, the fact that marijuana and its derivatives had been used as a home remedy for centuries was willfully ignored. As early as 1860, an Ohio State Medical Society cataloged the various maladies cannabis helped patients manage and made recommendations to physicians accordingly. These maladies include, but are not limited to, bronchitis, rheumatism, postpartum depression, migraine headaches, nausea, menstrual cramps and insomnia. And yet, the federal government relied primarily on the testimony of FBN chief Harry Anslinger, who "fed titillating tidbits [of depraved pot crimes] to reporters, who wrote articles that the FBN chief would then cite in making the case that society was in imminent danger of moral collapse because of marijuana." Mostly, Anslinger was afraid of the FBN losing funding, and fear of racial mixing in the Jazz Era was an easy card for him to play.
Harry Anslinger inspecting a big haul.
The only authority in Congress back in 1936 who challenged Anslinger's fear mongering of miscegenation and deviance, was a doctor. "Dr. William Woodward, the legislative counsel for the American Medical Association (AMA), . . . challenged Anslinger's claim that cannabis was a dangerous drug with no therapeutic value." Thus begins a 70-year-cycle during which the federal government repeatedly ignored, suppressed, and even buried the very studies that they, themselves, had commissioned. The continual pattern throughout this period is that when the feds would commission a study that would purportedly make weed look bad, and when the medical community and scientists would offer evidence to the contrary, law enforcement and members of the executive, legislative, and judicial branch would ignore said study.
Here are a few examples:
In 1944, the New York Academy of Medicine published a report commissioned by then mayor of NYC Fiorello La Guardia studying what, if any, threat cannabis use posed to New York City. The report found that not only did cannabis not pose a threat, but instead "Americans had been needlessly frightened about marijuana's supposed dangers." Moreover, the report noted that "marijuana is not addictive and it does not cause insanity, sexual deviance, violence, or criminal misconduct."
As a result of the La Guardia commission's report, Anslinger tailored his marijuana narrative to meet the needs of Cold War fear mongering about communism. In 1948, he testified that " 'Marijuana leads to pacifism and Communist brainwashing.' " This came some nine years after he had testified that marijuana was " 'the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.' " Not satisfied with that assertion alone, Anslinger went on to beat the drum of the "gateway drug" theory–pot smoking leads to the injection of heroin or cocaine in a few simple steps–a theory that the La Guardia commission had handily debunked.
In 1951, Congress passed the Boggs Amendment which raised the stakes on the casual user. Dealers, users, opiates, cannabis, no distinctions were made. All drugs (except for alcohol and tobacco, naturally) were painted with the same broad brush, and anti-American, international communists were to blame. All this despite the fact that America's #1 anti-communist, Sen. Joseph McCarthey, was himself a morphine addict. By the time the Kennedy administration commissioned yet another study of drug abuse in 1963, "the White House Conference on Narcotics and Drug Abuse concluded that the hazards of smoking marijuana were 'exaggerated.' "
The social upheaval of the 1960s led to an even sterner federal approach to marijuana. J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon sought to rein in any social dissent through the prosecution of narcotics. Marijuana was an easy target. So, as part of the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, the federal government initiated "a National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse . . . to establish the dangers of cannabis." Much to Nixon's chagrin, the "Shafer Commission," as it came to be known, "found no evidence that marijuana causes physical or psychological harm or any tortuous withdrawal symptoms following the sudden cessation of chronic, heavy use–no brain damage or birth defects, no compulsion to use hard drugs, and no evidence that a single human fatality has resulted solely from marijuana intoxication." Nixon never even read the commission and forged ahead with stepping up federal law enforcement. He enlisted the benzodiazepine and opiate addicted Elvis to be his pop-culture icon to boot!
Despite Jimmy Carter's attempt to backpedal on the federal law enforcement approach to marijuana, Reagan fired up the war on drugs, taking federal interdiction to a whole new level. In an effort to eradicate cannabis cultivation throughout the nation, "Reagan broke with long-standing legal tradition, which forbade the U.S. military from engaging in domestic law enforcement." In keeping with many of his predecessors, Reagan also ignored the findings of the National Academy of Sciences six-year study "which found 'no convincing evidence' that marijuana damages the brain or nervous system or decreases fertility." This did not stop SWAT and CAMP teams from terrorizing rural landowners from Maine to California every fall.
Dennis Peron, pioneer of the California Buyers Club and promoter of Brownie Mary’s healing edibles.
When, in 1988, the DEA's chief law judge pronounced that there is no reason why marijuana should remain a Schedule I substance, he was ignored. After having commissioned a rescheduling hearing on the matter, and after hearing testimony from cancer, HIV, and epilepsy patients, the Reagan-Bush team ignored the findings of their own study. George H.W. Bush also ceased the Compassionate IND program (the federal government's initial foray into medical cannabis with 8 patients), favoring instead the potential uses of the recently patented pharmaceutical Marinol (a THC pill).
From here on out, Lee's exhaustively researched history follows two lines. The first documents the rise in marijuana use for medical purposes through Buyer's Clubs and finally California's Proposition 215, which effectively legalized medical use. The other documents the federal government (often in secret collaborations with local law enforcement agencies) arresting, harassing, and targeting medical cannabis users and caregivers. We have come a long way.
The long shadow of this era of demonization, though, is still with us. It is reflected in the fact that Maine's vote to legalize came down to less than 1% of the vote. It is reflected in the fact that in many towns and counties, opposition to legalization constituted more than two-thirds of the vote. The anti-marijuana tactics of fear mongering, ingrained into several generations of Americans, will take time to overcome.
In this manner, maybe then Maine's slow roll-out of legal, recreational cannabis is a good thing. Mainers may begin to recognize that this is not a demon in their midst, but perhaps a new opportunity to develop better relationships with our own scientific community.
This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).
August 20, 2021
In February of 1977, the United States was facing an energy crisis spurned by a cold winter, wasteful habits, and dependence on foreign oil. Then President Jimmy Carter suggested that "[a]ll of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night we could save half the current shortage of natural gas." This was not a popular sentiment. He then pledged that by 2000, 20% of all US energy would be from renewables.
Market complexity and pricing issues aside, one of President Ronald Reagan's first energy policy changes was to deregulate the fossil fuel industry and to roll back EPA enforcement. The free market would weed out inefficiencies. True to form, that administration immediately cut research and development funding for alternative energy by as much as 85%. R&D for wind was all but eliminated. After all, in regards to the California Redwoods, this was the guy who famously said "you know, a tree is a tree, how many more do you need to look at?"
Policy-wise, we are a nation that has been teetering between these two, polar-opposite approaches to environmental concerns ever since. One administration implements strict CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards; the next administration cuts them. This has been our dance for quite some time. However, the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is striking. Climate change is real; and humans' love for all things carbon is largely to blame. What is an American to do? More specifically, how can Maine's entrepreneurs adapt to a rapidly changing future?
Katahdin obscured by wildfire smoke from the West (August 2021).
One thing Downeast Mainers know to be true is that increasing temperatures to our south (combined with COVID cabin fever) has ratcheted up interest in the Acadia region. To meet the demand, more locals are adopting innovative ways to capitalize on this increase via AirBnB, VRBO, and HipCamp. There is a more subtle force that continues to draw people to our region, though, and Island Oasis Farm believes that it is this: Americans crave small-scale authenticity and a healthy environment. And our region has no shortage of locally sourced food, spirits, and crafts, not to mention the experience of unplugging in a quieter corner of our busy country.
The connection to climate change may not be all too obvious at first glance. However, as we continue to witness the effects of heat, drought, and fire out West, excessive flooding and heat in the Southeast, we cannot help but question what is and what is not sustainable. According to the USDA, 70% of the 76 million acres of the US soybean crop was used for the livestock industry. Without even examining the farming methods used for such output, it is safe to say that this is not an industry focused on slowing the process of climate change. The acreage involved is mind-boggling. But what if there was a 30% reduction in meat consumption meant that much of that acreage could be devoted to small-scale, local produce for human consumption? What would that look like?
Looking west toward Number Four, Lily Bay and Prong Pond Mountains with wildfire smoke (August 2021).
Here in Hancock County Maine, we have a pretty good idea. On a given summer day, residents of MDI, alone, have several local farms to choose from for sourcing their food. Whether one opts in to a CSA (community supported agriculture) share from the Bar Harbor Farm or purchases brisket for the barbecue from Brown Family Farm, that consumer choice cuts a lot of transportation out of the equation. Yes, some of these farm organizations are non-profits or dependent on financial backers, but aren't big agribusinesses (not to mention the trucking industry via federal highways) also subsidized? We have to start somewhere.
Locally, our small-scale farmers, often certified and supported by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), provide an incredible bounty. Hancock County boasts farmers' markets in almost every substantial town with a central gathering place: Blue Hill, Bar Harbor, Ellsworth, etc. They are a great place to make CSA connections, too. Most people bring their own produce bags, and large-scale models of trucking and distribution are all but eliminated. This is not a panacea, of course, but it is a step down the road of changing the way we think about production, consumption. and emissions.
The scale of American agribusiness is staggering. Is this the only model? (Rural Indiana, August 2021.)
While cannabis production on a large-scale can often involve questionable practices, especially regarding CO2, on the small-scale significant changes are possible. Adding solar to run lights, exploring regenerative soil practices, using hoop house methods, composting hemp stalks, eliminating the need for large-scale transport (aka "food miles") are but a few possibilities. Closing the loop on waste is a start. It is the local farmers and fishermen of our region who have provided the steadiest examples of how buying local is possible. Now, even Fogtown Brewing is providing a model of reducing food miles and supporting locals by sourcing ingredients from Maine.
Could any of this mirror Jimmy Carter's adage about lowering thermostats? We believe it does. Island Oasis is just beginning this journey, and we are committed to maintaining high standards for quality, locally sourced medicine for our patients.
This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).
May 25, 2021
Community is something that has been lacking these 14 long COVID months. It’s a subtle thing, too, community. It takes time to grow, and like aging, one hardly notices it happening until it has arrived or there are drastic changes. The absence of community can creep in the same way. Once COVID began to settle in, and we adjusted our lifestyles to being more solitary, that became the norm. Now that we are gradually returning to making more face to face contact, we can experience what had been missing.
Island solitude
Just recently, folks were gathering for a night of glass blowing at Ken and Linda Perrin's Atlantic Art Glass in the heart of Ellsworth, Maine. They live the example of building community from the ground up, gradually, over time. Their studio had long been home of an annual winter solstice fire gathering and a variety of other art glass events. Little by little, they built a thread of community where like-minded folks can gather to appreciate the craft of glass blowing and art, in general. Their love of the art emanated outward, drawing in others with similar passions. In turn, their studio became a cross-roads that seeded inspiration and ideas for newer, blossoming projects like the Fogtown brewery below, another place where the like-minded gather. In Belfast, the Three Tides has been reawakening in similar fashion.
Our first live music since March 6, 2020 at the Three Tides in Belfast.
Building community is part of what such projects are all about. Likewise, Island Oasis Farm is not just a grow operation distributing “weed.” This is not a business driven by profit or market share or "crushing the competition." This is a small operation devoted to a type of quality that weaves like-minded folks together in a larger fabric of common pathways. Medical cannabis is a product, yes, but it is more than that. It is reaching out and making deliveries to patients during a pandemic. It is taking the time to talk shop and compare notes with other farmers. It is the hub of one wheel within a community of many wheels, overlapping and Venn diagramming.
Many Americans lack the town square or open air marketplace that so many cultures around the world enjoy on the regular. We are car culture, rural Americans anyway, and we are dispersed. COVID made that clear for many of us, and it is a welcome change for things to start opening again. We thrive on that connection, even if it's non-verbal. Isn't that why many of us are drawn toward farmers' markets? We can connect produce with the actual farmer, and there is a closed loop. There, we can bump into other folks who share a similar mindset seeking small-scale, organic, products from the heart.
Obviously, not everything in our lives can operate this way in our modern society. However, COVID showed us that the absence of such community leaves a gaping hole in people's lives. This is why there is such a high demand to return to live music in America: it is a place of gathering. Restaurants and pubs, too, are a part of that fabric. It is deeply wired into our DNA, a piece of what makes us human. Scurrying through the grocery aisles, grabbing products in a hurry, scanning them and checking out is not the same community experience. It never will be.
We choose to inhabit these spaces; and we rely on our friends.
While Island Oasis Farms may not have begun as community builder, we can now see that it actually is. Derrick's values about growing a superior product, regardless of the extra time and effort and detail, attracts patients who expect the same. His passion for doing it right is what keeps a steady roster of patients returning. The alternative, the transactional grocery store version of massive scale cannabis sales through large dispensaries is more akin to the grocery store transaction. The patients, here, want to know their farmer, to know their product, and to have that deeply personal connection. That is community.
Some months ago, this webmaster shared the Island Oasis blog with some acquaintances online for feedback. One critic wrote, “There should just be pictures of the buds with prices, and then show me how to buy it. Period. This website looks like an ad for a lifestyle or something.”
While we would never act on this criticism, in part, we agree. It is about lifestyle, and that lifestyle is all about building a strong fabric of community.
No man is an island. We may inhabit them, we may need them, but we are not islands.
This blog post originally appeared on the Island Oasis Farm website, now decommissioned. Not sure if it translates over, but I did want to preserve some of that writing (2020-2024).
January 24, 2020
A new year and a new decade is upon us. What will the future bring? Of course, we're always hoping for great things, but there are always bumps in the road, too. 2020 was no slouch when it came to dealing everyone tough blows, and 2021 started on a few sour notes for some of us. No one among us can say that the Presidential transition was anything but usual. In the long run, most Americans want to know that we can continue pursuing our lines of work and creativity without anything more than the natural disruptions in our path. They are plenty. But, enter Maine's Office of Marijuana Policy (OMP).
Toward the end of the 2020 calendar year, OMP dropped a possible new set of regulations on the laps of Maine's marijuana caregivers. The onerous 80-some pages of legalese are no picnic to wade through, and these pages raise some concerning questions. Chief among them is this. If the US Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy reports that in 2019, 99.2% of Maine businesses are classified as small businesses, shouldn't we all be working tirelessly to maintain this diverse and vibrant economic ecosystem? Why would we want to make being a medical cannabis caregiver so onerous that the average Mom and Pop shop cannot survive?
This is at the core of farmer Derrick's ethos, too (as covered in the August posting, "Know Your Farmer"). Island Oasis Farms is a small operation providing the highest quality organic product possible to patients, and it's local. From seed to cured flower, patients can know exactly what is in their medicine, not to mention the soils it grew from and who raised it. This is a healthy, reliable, and trusted way to keep patients in touch with a small community of like-minded souls. In our far-flung rural areas, these sorts of communities are an essential part of who we are, part of our fellowship and trust.
Why, then, would we want to open our medical market to larger, out-of-state forces who can set up and operate at a scale that Maine's homegrown industries will have a difficult time competing against? This is counter intuitive. Recent news that Massachusetts-based Nova Farms is buying up a 170-acre parcel in Thorndike might be welcome news to some, particularly to landowners and farmers looking to retire through land sales. However, this is a vertically integrated farm-to-retail industry that will siphon the majority of the profits to out-of-state owners. The product might be good, but that isn't necessarily supporting an independent, Maine economy knit together with small businesses.
A large, vertically integrated out-of-state business does have it's advantages. This means that a company controls everything from the seed to the packaged product. However, a cursory glance at their product line reveals a lot of packaging: prerolls inside cartons like cigs, pre-packed, disposable pipes and vapes, and every manner of edible imaginable. Power to them (provided all this packing doesn't end up on my lawn alongside the Fireball bottles, COVID masks, and food wrappers). Still, it is difficult to ignore the return address to headquarters: Attleboro, MA. All those profits will be heading out of state. In the aggregate, what does Maine gain in this new equation with recreational sales?
Island Oasis is not here to rail against business. Rather, we aim to encourage smart growth that is sustainable for our local communities. Much the way Maine is proud of its burgeoning beer industry, we hope for something that starts and ends in Maine. The lobster industry is another parallel. Ambitious entrepreneurs can strike out on their own, here, on the coast. The money they earn stays in our communities in the form of home improvement, land stewardship, boat building and marine services, not to mention spending in our local restaurants and pubs. Businesses that begin in Maine, powered by Mainers, invest in Maine.
In David Brooks's new book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, he expends a great deal of energy extolling the virtues of community and looks askance at the nihilistic solitude of our new techno world. Technology, he argues, can be a great tool for building community. However, all too often, it reinforces a withdrawal from community. People inhabit echo chambers that do little to relieve their sense of isolation and being misunderstood.
Rock Creek Park 1989
I've always loved the opening track to Wilco's Being There, "Misunderstood," as it resonates with this emotional landscape Brooks is describing. It's a feeling of being around people but not being of them. It's a feeling of looking at the world through rain splattered window panes rather than being wet out on the street. Much as I try to describe it, the feeling is ineffable. While such emotion can be beatific at times and lead to great insight (see Kerouac), without a community to share one's epiphanies, such insights are empty ephemera. Thus, loneliness.
As a middle-aged, working stiff in Post-Truth America, my sense of loneliness can hit at the weirdest of times. The loneliness can hit hardest when surrounded by all sorts of people at work, home, or even going out. (How could I ever explain, for example, as Garcia once did, that psychedelics were one of the most formative and important experiences of my life?) Stubbornly, as a Mainer, alienation and isolation are not uncommon or even unwelcome feelings. My county in Maine is 60% larger than the state of Rhode Island with a population of 54,000 as compared to Rhode Island's 1,000,000. We like it that way. Still, emotionally, there can be dead zones, deep ones.
In various interviews, Brooks argues that one way to cross the moat between oneself and the community on the other side is to find like-minded people doing like-minded things. Well, duh, I've thought, for the 8th or 9th time hearing him say it in radio interviews. And yet, like Occam's Razor, the simplest solutions are often the most profound. Why wouldn't I be feeling bouts of loneliness in middle age? After all, I'd spent my teens and twenties immersed in the American hardcore and Deadhead scenes. (Yes, I see a Venn diagram overlapping Dead and punk.) From the time I started going to concerts, hung out on the streets of Portsmouth, NH, took my first stage dive, dropped acid with friends, and hugged a sweaty stranger at the Richmond Coliseum, I belonged somewhere.
In Amir Bar-Lev's brilliant documentary about the Grateful Dead, Long Strange Trip, the central trope is Jerry's fascination with Frankenstein. A freak cobbled together out of other dead body parts and technology, the monster finds gentle, earthly delights in a meadow inside a copse of poplars beside a stream. There, a young girl offers him a flower. It's basically the same trope that Jerry used to describe to Sam Cutler who the Grateful Dead were, when they first met around 1969. A monster, feeling like a social reject, struggles through a tight forest only to stumble into light, and warmth, and welcoming. A teenage, mohawked punk meets a skater kid and a Two-Tone skanker in an otherwise desolate town, and BOOM! Suddenly, there's a scene, a community.
How many of us felt this sense of relief and joy in community we'll never know for sure. My guess is that we number in the millions. How many people stumbled into that copse only to thrash about and run back to the main, paved road in fear, we'll never know. I bet they number in the tens of millions, though. Fear of being led astray is funny that way. Still, when the light shone down on me, and it all clicked, yet again, I'd felt a community. I belonged. My behavior wasn't aberrant or abhorrent. My dreams and visions and concerns didn't exist in solitude. Shouting my passion from the rooftop (or tailgate), I'd receive hi-fives and hugs in return. I could find my own brand of introverted solitude in the comfort of the crowd, not just any crowd, but my people.
Naturally, one's 30s come knocking. Some prepare for these transitions better than others. I was not prepared, and like a horse resisting the saddle, the bit, and the spur, I did every damn thing I could to resist the Puritan work yoke. Stubborn as a mule, economic necessity and the ever droning "get a job" reality of modern America stifled my wandering ways. On the other hand, that's a natural transition, too, and, as one Maine islander said to me back at the turn of the millennium, "Well, everybody's got to be somebody somewhere." Thank heavens I'd landed in a community of rummy fishermen and islander renegades. Community takes all forms.
Way leads to way, and that chapter ended, too. Being on the mainland, entering into a "bigger job," dealing with more and more adulting by my 40s, finding connection and community seemed tougher and tougher. The feelings of isolation or being unseen crept in more and more. And why wouldn't they? The early 2000s Phil Quintet scene had dried up. My show experiences were catch as catch can. I was eternally grateful for the Gathering of the Vibes summer fests and the momentary presence of Furthur. Phish's reunion has been a revelation, too, but these are moments that I slip into like ice fishermen huddled around a hole, hikers sharing a camping tip or two; it's seasonal.
Fare Thee Well 2015
Connection to a like minded community should never be seasonal in the best of worlds. It should be an "everything." But unless you went all-in on a Mapleton or Walton, Oregon commune and spent all winter preparing for the Country Fair, unless you hitched your wagon to the music industry or vending in festival lots, unless you made a concerted effort to paint outside the American lines, you have probably found yourself longing for the community of like-minded Deadheads with whom you can grok up on music and psychedelic enlightenment, speechlessly, warmth in the eyes and tinkle of ankle bells and hugs and dancing and no judgment. Unless you have painted outside the lines, you have probably had the experience of driving home from work while an exhilarating Dark Star plays, wondering what would happen if you just kept on driving.
We were introduced to community and connection in such a profound way in our youth that it is understandable that we might not feel the same in middle age. Philosophically, David Brooks is late to the party (but we'll leave him a seat at the table if he so chooses). We know this, because we keep coming back, trying to connect and find one another in the dark, American night. Hoping, hoping against all odds, to "keep the mother rollin' / One more time."
Prior to my April 14 departure to SFO from Bangor, ME, a lot of pressure was building. Looking back, I can point to the November 1st lockdown at school when I was escorted out of my classroom, AR-15 barrel pointed at my chest by a man in tactical gear. It was not a drill, and thank heavens the threat had been only that. In February, our small school was rocked by the subsequent deaths of a student and then a teacher the following week. No one was clear about the circumstances at the time, and the latter of the two remains unclear to this day.
Short on ceremony, we simply plowed ahead. In the case of our departed faculty member, her room was purged within a week, and a new teacher had taken her place. And, of course, March is a very busy month, careening down the calendar like a truck barely hanging on to snowy switchbacks. While I hadn't seen it clearly, on weekends, I'd been seeking oblivion, washing out the senses during those times when I wasn't flooded with work. Mid-month, I'd gone downstate to visit with my ailing mother, and at age 86, she brutally and unceremoniously cut me to the quick. Basically, she saw me as a degenerate like my father, a mannish boy in his 50s on the verge of losing everything. Her perpetual scowl said it all, and that hurt.
Two mornings before my departure, I sauntered into the guidance office to communicate student progress to one of our counselors when I overheard a conversation. Based on the context, the names and tone, I knew something was up. Later, I asked principal Haney what the deal was. "I couldn't help but overhear you talking," I said. "Did something happen to Drew?" He had been a student of mine when I first began working on Mount Desert Island. While it wasn't always easy, I had put a lot of effort into getting this kid through English so that he could graduate. Even though it had been over 10 years, that first group of boys really stuck with me. It was easier to remember them than students from 5 years ago, just prior to the pandemic.
Staff Sergeant DaGraca.
"Yeah," Haney said. "Drew died last night." He took a long pause while looking out the window and added, "Took his own life, actually." My stomach dropped, and my head buzzed. I had about 10 or 15 minutes before the start of Freshman World History, and I wandered off into my classroom stunned with tears streaming down my cheeks. Yes, he'd done some dumb teenager shit just prior to graduating, but who hadn't? I'd scolded him at the time, consoled him when a Class A Misdemeanor disqualified him from the Marine Corps, but he found his way into the service. In fact, he served with distinction in the 173rd and 82nd Airborne. Later, as a staff sergeant, he became a teacher, a drill instructor. I hadn't known that.
The next thing I knew, though, I was hailing an Über at drop zone D by the United terminal in San Francisco. It was four am Maine time to California's one, and I asked the driver to stop off somewhere I could buy beer. Dazed and edgy, disoriented, the lights over the Bay and freeway streaked past in smears. Up in the La Loma Park hills of Berkeley, I settled into my new VRBO quarters by two am local. On a balcony poised above the city, I cracked a beer and stared at the boulevards strewn across San Francisco Bay in amazement. It had been a push with the weekly grind and emotional chaos of loss, but I had arrived, glad and self-congratulatory that I had brought my down jacket and winter hat. I saw my breath between each sip.
Later that day, Saturday, I was slow to rise. I hadn't eaten since lunch on Friday, Maine time, and so I indulged myself with breakfast beer. Clocking in at 9% ABV, Sierra Nevada's "Big Little Thing" offers 250 calories per can so that two can make a meal. Fortified, I climbed the Berkeley hills, stopping just shy of Grizzly Peak. The views were stunning. My head was spinning. Hungry. Tired. Feeling battered. I wanted food. What to do? Distances seemed much vaster on foot than they did by map, and there was nothing in the VRBO fridge except for a beer or two.
Down the hill I went, lumbering, lumbering, my tie dyed socks chafing the ball of my left foot, new sneakers breaking us both in. Eventually, gaping at architecture, flora, fauna (I startled a spotted fawn), wandering in an overstimulated daze, I found a food truck on University Ave. and mowed down some excellent carne asada tacos. Muy bien. It was now three or four o'clock in the afternoon, Maine time, and I could feel myself going down. Sleep was stalking me, and I was fighting it.
Next stop, Trader Joe's for some pasta, marinara, spicy chicken meatballs, chicken thighs, bread, butter, eggs, lemons, limes, clementines, apples, cheese, and . . . tequila. For some reason, the huge Cinco de Mayo display and wall of Trader Joe's tequila seemed like a good idea. No gluten. No hops. No allergic reaction, right? I'd already hit the dispensary up for some edibles just off campus, and this would fortify me, I thought. Besides, it's California.
We'll cover every emotion from happiness to sorrow
And the conversations I forget you'll tell me about tomorrow
When the phone calls start, am I in bed or in a hearse?
The things you tell me about myself can't make me feel any worse
Well I'm awful sorry you got pissed
Just have to cross you off the list
Of my true friends...
And tequila's where that starts and where it ends
Unfortunately, the Sierra Nevadas had already robbed me of any logic. Had I thought of this song or been reminded of the full spectrum "emotion from happiness to sorrow," things might have been different. But I'm in control, right? A couple of miles back up the hill to La Loma, sweating and out of breath, I plunked myself down on the porch with a tequila lime on ice. The Yeti travel wine cup made this poor choice seem fashionable, the edibles fogged the bay.
One can easily imagine the rest. It's a blur. Tie dye socks propped up on a chair. A view of the Bay. The sun creeps in and only begins to warm that side of the mountain by four-thirty or five, a late lingering light after the breeze has died down. Western jays and California towhee. Northern mockingbirds, song sparrows, and black phoebes. Hummingbirds streaming through the garden below. Yarrow and all manner of flowers. My eyes feasted on the colors and sounds. It was a solitude I'd longed for, and yet there was that yearning to connect. The number dials.
Late Sunday morning I re-emerged from the apartment shadows to walk, clear my head, move back down the hill, absorb light and air. Vision blurred, memory disrupted, angst in the pit of my gut, I was hungry but couldn't eat. Coffee was sour. Teeth clenched. I was in North Berkeley and then University Ave. Back around Oxford, Shattuck, MLK, Tenth St. It was like a television station with rabbit ears that tune in and tune out. The world seemed shabbier, less polished, frayed. Each grocery cart, each disheveled wanderer I saw, it could be me. My father. Destitute at my own ripe age of 55, saved only by his money, a forever-drunk, 1989, scraped knuckles and knees, coasting on fumes and drowning. How easily we can end up on the street.
The weight of desire leading to destitute desperation, the craving of something missing, the lonely heart hunting some thing that it doesn't have, turning corners, alleys, hunting vanishing points, dodging cars passing, the glare of the sun. . . . I didn't even remember that I'd awoken to 1993 in jail, that just one year prior I'd prayed that my legs would carry me over the Brooklyn Bridge, that I'd awoken on a BQE stoop, stammering. But here I was.
It strolls the sidewalks and it rolls the streets,
Staking turf, dividing up meat.
The heart felt like a broken Venetian blind pulled down against the bright world, and my feet directed me to another resupply, another mistake, another shot at oblivion, another bad idea, the forgone conclusions of my mother. My father's ruin. And then, like a lens coming back into focus, it's hours later and I'm in the La Loma kitchen making coffee at four in the afternoon. Doing laundry. The oven is on, and chicken thighs are cooking. There is marinara simmering with meatballs, and I'm about to prepare some ravioli, burn the place down or burn myself with boiling water. Panic and calm. There's a drink on the butcher block table. There are footsteps upstairs. The hosts hear everything.
The camera loses focus again, and my friends have arrived. I'm self conscious, clearly breathing out a horrid bender, swollen and battered, broken, drowsy with insomnia. Drunks don't sleep, they slip instead into unconsciousness. It's dark, and I can see the city lights again across the Bay. How long have I been here? Why have I come? What is it that I'm missing? Why . . . the questions reel as I stare at the ceiling, darkness and jet lag, the hour I would normally wake for work on a Monday.
(I came all the way across the continent to arrive . . . home?)
Then it's coffee again. A shower. Phil has to head down to San Jose to meet someone on the Google campus. Lynne and Jeremy are coming by. Lynne is the driver dropping Jeremy off so that she and Phil can split. I make eggs. Toast. The construction crew has begun in earnest outside where a tech guy is converting an old elementary school into his luxury home complete with 10 car garage for his Ducati collection; and there will be a swimming pool. My host has briefed me. Earth pounders tamp down gravel, jack hammers, concrete mixers, the gamut. I am the picture of idleness, beside, feeling guilty without time to react. "We'll see you on line," Phil says, "just gotta pop down the Bay for a few hours."
I know how that goes, Bay Area traffic and the usual non-commitment of time, Phil's calling card since we were teens. "Sure," I say, and Jeremy and I are left to scratch our heads. I chow down some of the edibles after coffee and we go on a walking tour of North Berkeley, oddly absent of people. It's a common theme of mine walking in America: Where is everyone? Cars stream past, houses hanging on I-Beam girders lean over impossible hillsides, gorgeous gardens and gates. I take Jeremy down some of the alleyways I found on my hazy rambles, stunned I can remember anything, dying of cold in the heat of the sun.
Looping back through campus, admiring the redwoods and quiet students and simple campus life, after some pizza, Jeremy is serious. "We gotta get on line, dude." I'm whining inside because it's only two o'clock, but what else did I come here for, honestly? Telegraph Ave. isn't the bending telephone poles of Buster Foyt and the Fabulous Furry Freaks, it's all fairly ordinary, really. Not much to see, really. So we shrug off the city and head up to the Greek. A line? At three o'clock? Really? I never even did this for a Dead show, but what am I gonna do? Jeremy wants pole position, and Phil and Lynne should be back momentarily.
We wait. We wait online for hours. We wait online until it starts moving around five or six o'clock, maybe? One step. Two steps. I'm thinking of the Bill Graham line that Deadheads are the only group who would wait in a line to the moon and back and not complain. Must be a Bay Area thing. But we get in, despite the snafus with Ticketmaster wallet v. Ticketmaster app type stuff, here in tech central where no one can get steady service, and we wander over to spots on the wall between two levels in the bowl. "Should we take it?" Jeremy asks. We do, and reserve four.
Numbers painted on 120-year-old concrete are different than seats, but we have jackets to toss down and whatnot. I stand on my spot for a better view and find Jonathan Harris sitting right behind us. What? "Hey, dude!" I have to identify myself because context is curious, and Jon is on it! We chat for quite a while, and I start to realize that we have scored a plum spot indeed. "You might have people bump into you a bit," he says, but this is as close as I've been to the stage at a Phish show in a while. It's a lot of prepositions, and I'm sanguine. We're here.
The funny thing about going through a personal hell and keeping it locked inside is that it never manages to be contained. When Lynne and Phil finally arrived, Lynne kept talking about friends of theirs that they had seen in the airport in Mexico, a dude bringing another dude who was going through a divorce. "Man, that guy was going through DTs so bad he was shaking," Lynne said. Phil said, "Why didn't he just hit the airport bar?" Good question. Guilt. Hell. Personal angst. Who knows? It's all so subjective and internal and idiosyncratic that people either write book-length memoirs or novels or go weekly to a paid therapist or 12-step group or more.
When the band opened, and I was making my way back to my friends through the crowd, the song "The Curtain With" boiling with meaning. "Please me, have no regrets" was a line that had been plaguing me. Why can't I conduct myself in a manner such that I have no regrets about my own self? Anger. Regret. Sadness. Longing. Self-hate. All these emotions surface in me with terrible consequences, and I gazed far past the heads in attendance, far past the band on stage, wondering, gobsmacked, What have I become? Half the audience wasn't born when I started seeing this band, and here I am on the merry-go-round again.
During the song "Halfway to the Moon," I began to regain some fraction of internal composure. This was 2014. This was me and Nancy painting a deck, scraping, sanding, nailing, brushing, rolling, cranking music on a hot afternoon in Maine when NPR had a "first listen" of the new LP Fuego. We played it on repeat, and it seemed like a middle-aged anthem I could relate to. Now, it was an acknowledgement of death, well past 50, we are indeed half the way to the end. Am I making the best of it? Thankfully, Page is forgiving. It was comforting on a day when my own thoughts were not. Anxiety and depression kill that way when all it takes is looking at something from a different light, "if you look at it right."
At set break, a woman like a lightning bolt appeared before me and Jeremy. "I've decided no one is what they seem," Elisabeth said. "Everyone leads a double life," she said. "Yup, that's my theme for this week." When she made eye contact, she pressed in harder, tipping a bit, "Sorry for my partying." I wasn't sorry at all, feeling like a sack of shit for my own lack of control. "I can change your life," she said. When she discovered I was a high school teacher, she added that people are never what you think. Not knowing what I project or even show (an area for improvement), I started to get woozy. So, she knows the bender that I've been on and the guilt that is tearing me to pieces? She knows my weaknesses and failures?
It turned out, she was a Johns Hopkins educator looking to "change people's lives" with an amazing program at the university. I felt like subject A, but it passed, and so did she, back into the crowd. And then, Phil and Lynne returned, and the lights dimmed. What should they play when I'm feeling torn and despairing like Thomas Cole's portrait of manhood in the Voyage of Life, barely hanging on inside, time in the hourglass running out? My Soul. Nothing too complex, the power of this Clifton Chenier song comes in the repetition. "How do I sit and cry / Without a reason, I don't know why / It's my soul, woah it's my soul / I don't why people, woo it's my soul."
At times like these, emotionally distraught, opening little by little as entheogens crack the door to the basement, the repeated phrase of my soul can touch the depths. The despair is airing out, and it's common. There is value in that, knowing that such despairs are not unique to me. Trey knows this. Lived it. The Grateful Dead lived it, too, right here, at the Greek. It was as if my set break friend from the Johns Hopkins Instructional Resource Center had a nose for this despair, too. Without knowing it, she was like Rilke to me, imparting a message about the "Archaic Torso of Apollo," "You must change your life." My Soul.
And though it feels like a transition from the sublime to the ridiculous, Tweezer kicked in. At first glance, it's just the goofiness of absurd lyricism and pranks. The Fishman samples just jarring enough to remind us that this is precisely a song geared toward capturing the unfamiliar. This version, sounding murky and a bit underwater, began to unravel me as the samples melded together like random thoughts unleashed by the shattering of ego regulation. Stimulus pouring in and flowing out at the same rate, uninhibited by the cognitive barriers I have erected. Suddenly, it's off to the races. My flashes of thought reflected in the musical dashes right to left to right again, the sound rolling over the audience like a treadmill inducing release.
Of course, as the improvisation takes shape, there are mutterings of words, hummed passages, barely contained thoughts hissing through dancers' teeth and lips, sounds of feet scraping surface, fog rolling in, trees lit from below. The landscape takes new shape and form. The audience working demons out through dancing, three blind mice following the rambolings of Fishman's kit, funk and no filler. Bass slides into and out of the funk help gin up the dancing machine, and the tension, here, is of extension, no direction, finding a way despite the fog that won't quit rolling in, occluding. This is why I've come. The band hits the refrain, but it is not a reprise. New directions unfold, squeezing more angst out of me.
About half way through, this jam finds a dark, Zeppelin-like space. Our crew was calling for No Quarter. To me, it was as if they had drilled through the first few layers of bedrock and mantle to find my cache of decaying primordial goo. They were going to give it a good stir, too. All the desire and need, the drives to obliterate, it all swirled and boiled and slopped over the edges. It was a slow burn resurrection of items I had never wanted resurrected. Street shadows and broken glass dreams of blister-wandering for fixes to cover over empty spaces that can't be fixed over–stomach full and heart empty.
That's the catharsis of dancing. Combined with the set and setting, the intense and inscrutable emotional pathos of the moment becomes a lesson in self-reflection. I have a long way to go to right my ship on this journey with my soul, but these guys have it Simple. Right. Simply pulling the energy out of the hearts and minds of the audience and self, audience and band self, that many headed hydra hitting on a refrain at one point that musically expresses my despairing ambiguity, my noncommittal commitments, my half-lived life. They've got it simple? Maybe not.
The darker echo chambers of the one-hour jam had squeezed me out like a towel, and the set landed in the Velvet Underground anthem Rock 'n Roll. "It was all right." In the long run, I knew it would be. I'd been here before. Still, there were echoes of some new direction pulling me, some twilight clarity of a dull and rising awareness. During the Tweezer jam, Page's electric key flourishes let me know that everything would be all right, and here too, more reassurance. The end of Simple's nod to the Band's song Chest Fever was not lost on me: we carry the weight.
"Remember to love Keith," my sister had said to me once. I hadn't the foggiest idea of what she meant. More than a decade later, I was beginning to understand. It was starting to make sense. How does one do that, and remain loyal to all, and clear the head and heart to be a good person, a good soul? It sometimes gets very, very cold, and one does a journey like this alone and together. Together in aloneness? The sense of non-sentient beings being part of the collective consciousness, of the tree roots toe tapping, of the curbstones being aware of every sin and misstep, every move on the errant path, was alive and well.
The Miss You and Sand continued the themes for me. Loss in death and never having the proper chance to say goodbye, the sense of religion and self unraveling into self-deception. My Soul drifting like lost time and sand through the fingers, slipping away. "Wait a minute brother, watch what you're doing with your time." Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh hadn't been too far from my thoughts all weekend as this was a bucket list venue, an opportunity I missed twice in the summers of 1987 and 1989. KPFA, where Lesh was volunteering sixty years prior when he met Garcia, was across from the Trader Joe's, the ghosts of Berkeley's Keystone, lurking.
The effects of such a shake up linger with me. The next day's show opened with Olivia's Pool, and I couldn't sort out which side of the joke I landed on:
Was I more like the narrator or the target of the sneer? All in the mind. Breathe for a change. Breathe. In and out. It's just a chest fever, all in your mind, let it go. What do we expect? Why expect so much of our own selves that we can never fulfill our own expectations? Building all the energy I could muster, day two's Seven Below brought me to the cool forests of Maine, the quiet hikes and paddles and health I'd always dreamed of, and yet I had to throw bombs in my own way, on my own life path, even though "I'm already there."
