Trespassing

By John Blossom

Harrowing true experiences of Award-Winning Author, John Blossom.
"As a civilization we seem to be tumbling headlong into a cataclysmic conflict with nature, and Blossom's writings can be a useful guide as we struggle to decide to what extent our own lifestyle and relationship with nature is indeed harmful to the planet as well as ourselves." ★★★★★ Reviewed by Jerry Bleckel

It is a privilege to grow old; not all of us get to do it. The author is lucky to still be alive for all the mistakes he made. Same with the human race. Can we learn the necessary lessons to save life on earth as we know it?

"It's surprising that all these adventures happened to one man and that he survived. It was a very fun read, especially since all the stories were true. I also appreciated the conclusions the author made at the end, tying all the threads together and making sense of it all." ★★★★★ Reviewed by Allison Gibbons

Must-read adventures from Vermont to the Big Island of Hawaii, including nail-biting stories from Wisconsin, Colorado, California and Alaska. A head strong and truly lucky man experiencing the world as it may never be experienced again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Blossom
• Release date: Nov 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9780999615621

John Blossom

Mr. Blossom holds a BA degree in English from Carleton College and an MAT degree from Colorado College. Teacher and artist, Mr. Blossom concerns himself deeply with technology and environmental issues and feels there is hope to create a better world through the power of stories to change hearts and minds. He presently lives on an organic farm on the Big Island of Hawaii where he gives away fruits and vegetables and maintains an active free library at the end of his driveway. 

Book preview

Epigraph

"DO NOT FORGET THAT

the value and interest of life is not so much to do conspicuous things...as to do ordinary things with the perception of their enormous value."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Introduction

THERE IS A RUNNING joke in my family. Every time we manage to break out of our various routines and get together to do something wonderful in nature, like go for a hike along the ocean, for instance, one of us will say, This is a really nice place; we ought to come here sometime! We laugh because none of us is particularly outdoorsy in our daily lives. We’re busy teachers and artists stuck in houses and buildings like most people are, unfortunately, these days. We regret this lifestyle necessity most acutely when we do manage to get out in nature and rediscover how deeply we miss it.

Yet, somehow, despite my leading this long and relatively normal indoor American life, a large number of very unusual and dramatic things have happened to me outdoors. The truth of this didn’t sink in until I summoned the social courage to start telling the stories to others. The incidents are indeed extraordinary, but why this huge variety of dramatic things happened to the lowly introverted me is a puzzle.

Here’s one thing that's not a puzzle—climate change is a genuine worry. Although I make a sincere effort to tread lighter on the planet now, I am still a first-world consumer who just by living a middle-class American lifestyle has contributed more than my share to the serious problem everyone on the planet is now facing. I believe that nature was trying to wake me up about the crisis repeatedly in my life, but I am only now starting to think about and pay attention to the messages.

This is a memoir of dramatic stories, but it is also about the unspoken assumptions of a privileged male American lifestyle that influenced my actions toward others and nature and, unfortunately, led to much of the drama. It is a memoir of lifelong blindness toward destructive cultural assumptions and toward the loneliness that comes in their wake. It is also a memoir of my reverence for nature despite all that.

Finally, these stories are about the tough love message Mother Nature is trying to deliver, with increasing intensity, about our egos and our disconnection from each other and from her. Maybe by chronicling how one trespasser (me) didn’t listen very well, others will learn not to make the same mistakes. The clock for all of us, unfortunately, is ticking.

Minnesota 1978

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, said my landlord, Phil, owner of the biggest dairy and pig farm in Northfield, Minnesota. He was perched on his new motorcycle, a Honda Gold Wing, shooting the breeze in front of the milking barn with his grizzled right-hand man, George. This was more than a metaphorical employee term for their relationship. Early in his farming career, Phil had almost lost his arm to a manure spreader that unexpectedly wrapped twine about his wrist and pulled his forearm abruptly into its filthy and hungry blades. The most advanced antibiotics and, at the time, an experimental hyperbaric chamber in St. Paul saved his life, but his arm and hand were more or less useless now, except for draping over the handlebars of his road bike and awkwardly slapping the backs of reluctant milk cows or pigs in their prison feedlots.

That’s not exactly a dirt bike, grunted George, referring to Phil’s habit of riding motorcycles across his expansive fields.

Yeah, but it sure does make me look pretty, don’t it? said Phil, fully aware of George’s jealousy. George, in his forties, but looking like he was a grumpy sixty-year-old, lived month to month and had never known a life other than one of cruel hard work and minimum wages on a farm.

Phil, on the other hand, had an enthusiastic smile on him that wouldn’t quit and a work ethic that put my otherwise stellar Carleton College study habits to shame. A typical day for him and George was fifteen or sixteen hours long with only forty-five minutes off for a farmhouse lunch that honestly could feed six. He liked renting a trailer on the farm to college students in exchange for various labors that arose – such as trucking pigs to the slaughterhouse and walking the fields with a corn cutter to decapitate the unwanted volunteers that would ruin his soybean harvest percentages.

As you might have guessed, I was that college student. It was the summer before my senior year, my last year in the Midwest before making Colorado my home. I lived on the farm with my partner, Terri. About once a week at 4:00 AM, I would put on old jeans, a flannel shirt and a pair of mud-encrusted rubber boots and meet Phil and George in one of the many pig barns that dominated the property on a small hill just outside the city limits. We would chase the pigs around their filthy pens with plywood boards and guide the fattened 220 – 245 pound animals up a wooden ramp and into the crowded flatbed of Phil’s International Harvester stake truck. After George would muscle the last eligible pig into the crowded truck with stiff kicks and shocks from an electric prod, Phil would slam the tailgate, and I would climb into the cab for a contrastingly relaxing three-hour ride across the Iowa border to the Hormel plant. The fresh early morning air from the window was always a relief after the stench of the pig barn where the inmates stumbled about on narrow metal grates strategically positioned over a concrete pool filled with excrement.

Once at the slaughterhouse, which had its own overwhelming smell—Spam, I would wait my turn to unload the forty or fifty animals. They were usually cooperative after the long truck ride, happy to be mobile again, even if it meant herding their way through a series of dark wooden holding pens that eventually led to a giant scale deep in the bowels of the rank-smelling building. There were always a dozen or more semis and small trucks like mine unloading in the front of the slaughterhouse. As my herd proceeded in line through the labyrinth of gates and corrals, it was necessary to be careful to open the latches at just the right moment to prevent Phil’s pigs from rushing forward and mixing with the ones ahead. If I was too cautious, however, and delayed even a moment too long, the anxious truckers waiting impatiently behind me would yell at me. It got intense sometimes.

A receipt would follow the weighing along with the price paid. The pigs, no longer my charge, were herded off the scale and along a further series of pens and gates to their doom, and I was released down a narrow hallway to the sunshine of the breaking morning outside. I would dutifully bring that important stamped receipt back to Phil at the farm before grabbing my backpack and mounting my Sears three-speed bicycle. It was good exercise to pedal the three miles to school to attend literature classes with students of privilege who, happy for me, never figured out the olfactory source of my particular aura.

Today, though, was a holiday at the college. It felt great being outside on the farm in the sunshine, and Phil was also very happy with the economic timing of the run to Hormel that morning. The price had risen between last night, when he made the decision to deliver, and this morning when I unloaded. A little luck like this could mean the difference between loss and profit for him. Too often the gamble went the other way. Prices were frustratingly unstable. Also, if he waited too long to sell, the pigs would grow too large and be graded downward at the scales. There were lots of angles to consider, all fraught. It wasn’t easy making a living as a farmer, and I admired Phil for sticking with it for as long as he did. Eventually, though, years after I graduated from college and left for Colorado, he finally gave up and sold his land to a developer who transformed it into a golf course with luxury homes for the expanding Southfield housing market. It was an incredibly beautiful piece of property, and I hoped Phil’s retirement was comfortable.

Today, though, there was farm work to be done, and I was eager to knock off my required rent hours. It was a hot and sunny early September day. Phil, who I could tell would have preferred going on a breezy Gold Wing trip to Minneapolis, was nonetheless committed to the hard work of the fall harvest. The fields were overflowing with feed corn, and all of it needed to be combined yesterday. Today’s plan was to unclog an auger at the bottom of the giant metal silo so he and George could load it up with tons of fresh kernels.

Phil, straddling his Gold Wing, said, Virgil (my nickname then), grab a pair of gloves and a mask and we’ll meet you over there, gesturing to the silo. He flopped his arm onto the handlebars, hit the starter button under the clutch and deftly parked his shiny new machine in the shade by the barn.

With Phil, my general strategy was to do pretty much whatever he asked me to do. If you were on a sailing ship and the admired and experienced captain with a hook for an arm asked you to pull on a rope, you pulled on the rope no questions asked. It would just be rude (and stupid) not to. No doubt Phil was the admiral of his territory, and a beautiful territory it was in so many ways. I loved how my body felt working outside on the farm compared to being cramped up in the old-style oak chairs with attached writing tables that graced the English department classrooms at Carleton. Moby-Dick is a great read, but genuine life in nature, even in measured doses on a farm, stirred my soul more deeply.

So, Virgil, we’ve got to run all the old moldy corn out of the bottom of this silo before we can fill it. Take that three-prong. There’s a ladder inside to climb down. It’s a mirror of this ladder outside here. See? Get on top, climb down the ladder and straddle the opening with your feet. You won’t fall in. Just keep your legs spread. When you’re ready, shout and we’ll turn the auger on. Feed the moldy corn right into it. That’s all you have to do. Just shout again when it’s done. You ready?

The thirty-foot silo loomed in front of me. It was one of the new modern varieties, all metal and fatter and squatter than the tall cement silos that abutted the cow barn. Climbing silos was not my favorite activity. The cement ones used cheap rebar for the ladders that would often work themselves loose and fall out when you put weight on them – a terrifying experience when you are forty or fifty feet in the air. This silo at least looked easy to climb with a dependable-looking metal ladder bolted securely to its corrugated body. I examined the situation as my hands flexed inside my cheap leather work gloves. The auger output was at the bottom and off to the side like a misplaced elongated nipple at the bottom of a funnel-like metal breast that hung below the body of the silo. If it was indeed clogged with rotten corn, nothing could get out. How Phil knew this was the problem without X-ray vision was a mystery to me. Experience, I guess.

So you want me to get inside, in this part of the silo, and clean it out? I said pointing to the output below the metal udder that was apparently clogged. This did not seem like an attractive job at first hearing. It sounded even more dangerous than the average daily farm task, like castrating pigs, delivering breech calves, or rolling dead animals into the front-end loader for a trip to the animal graveyard across the road called Boot Hill. What if I slipped and my foot got caught in the auger? How fast could they turn the power off if I shouted? Would they even be paying enough attention? Phil is always a little under pressure and distracted. So many risks were taken on that farm just to get through the day. Surely Phil and George realize that this was my life they are toying with...?

Um... I articulated.

You know if Virgil doesn’t want to go in there, I could climb down there, volunteered George.

True, but your back is sore, and I need you on that combine today, said Phil.

It’s okay, I’ll do it, I said, not wanting my reluctance to impede the day’s progress. Just please keep your thumb on that off switch.

You got it, said Phil with a smile.

See ya, Virgil, said George who then turned and lumbered away toward the barn faster than his usual pace. Phil followed him, arm on his shoulder with some last-minute instructions.

George climbed into the huge green combine. Frankly, I did not envy his long hot day sitting in that thing mowing row after endless row of corn stalks despite listening to its state-of-the-art radio. What a life he led. So much of farm work is just pure tedium – but that’s only when things are going right and the equipment is not breaking down. My job today was to get the silo ready for George’s harvest. A sense of purpose energized me. I swallowed my saliva. Even though I am a wimpy college boy in his eyes, I could make George’s life a little better by accomplishing this thing. When Phil returned, I grabbed the fork and the white paper dust mask and started climbing. The warmth of the sun penetrated my t-shirt as I pulled myself up the hot rungs. I concentrated on not dropping the pitchfork on Phil, or looking down too much.

Opening the metal hatch of the silo was like opening a spoiled jar of leftovers someone had left in the fridge too long. The stench rising from inside the silo had the same warm knockout punch as the pig barns, except with strong additional notes of sourness and mold. Am I really going in there? Through the darkness, the caked mass of rotting corn that filled the breast far below me was barely visible. The challenge now was to climb down the curving inner ladder with the pitchfork firmly in hand, to breathe, and not to fall. I straightened the dust mask’s thin elastic band on my head and gripped the pitchfork upside down where it was thinner and easier to control. After feeding the handle of the fork through the hatch, I grabbed the rungs inside, swung my legs over one at a time, and started carefully down the inside ladder.

Immediately the sour air penetrated the mask and heated my nostrils. The metal sides of the inside of the silo were scorching from the outside sun. It’s a solar oven in here. The heat and the natural moisture in the corn had certainly been kind to the microorganisms feeding on the kernels. It wasn’t going to be easy to dislodge the offending community of rot that had made such a comfortable home below me.

At the bottom, I spread my legs and straddled the silo in my rubber boots. I looked up at the hatch, now a small, bright hole in the roof letting in a shaft of light that caught the dust swirls set off by my descent. I poked at the middle of the rotten mass below me and exposed the resting but potent-looking auger in its metal aureole. It was like peering into a giant version of the meat grinder my grandmother cranked in her kitchen in Florida to make German sausage. The thought of slipping into it was horrifying. Pressing hard on my feet to keep them from slipping on the slick hot metal, I forked the first chunk of rotten corn into the opening.

Okay, Phil. Can you hear me?

You ready, Virgil? he shouted back. Phil’s voice was tinny and distant. I was hearing him as much through the opening above as through the hot metal.

Yeah, can you hear me? I shouted louder.

Phil’s answer was to turn on the auger. The noise was deafening. The circulating teeth caught and bit into the rotten corn chunks sending up a cloud of white mold into the air around me. My eyes blinked rapidly against the assault while my mind concentrated on keeping my feet glued in place. When my tears flowed enough to allow me to see again, I noticed the shaft of light was almost blocked by the dust. Only my flimsy mask kept me from choking. In the near dark, I quickly but carefully shoveled the bathtub-sized growth at my feet chunk by reluctant chunk into the auger that turned below me.

In the middle of it all, I heard Phil shout something, but it was unintelligible above the grinding of the powerful blades, the banging of my pitchfork against the corrugated metal, and the stress of my desire to finish that job as fast as possible and get the hell out of there. I just shouted, I’m okay! He said nothing more that I could hear. Sweat was pouring off my neck and forehead.

Five sweltering minutes later the silo was empty. My pants and t-shirt were soaked and covered with a film of white mold, as were my arms and head. It must have been well over one hundred and thirty degrees in there. I could gauge it pretty accurately from my many evenings watching the thermometer in the Carleton sauna. My dust mask was so filthy and wet with sweat that it no longer filtered the air. I’ve got to get out of here now! I yanked it down onto my neck and shouted to Phil to shut off the auger. He did, but it took him ten seconds or so.

The dizziness didn't start until the journey back up the ladder. Am I going to pass out? This can’t be too good for me. My head was swimming and my hands were weak, but somehow my body rose to the light of the hatch. I emerged gasping and tossed the pitchfork to the ground away from Phil to improve my grip on the ladder. The purity of the outside air felt like my head was poking into a freezer. What a relief to breathe clean air again! Clutching the last rung to shake off the dizziness, my dust-encrusted eyes blinked hard against the abrupt sunshine. I am a heavy-weight fighter hanging on the ropes. Slowly I regained my equilibrium and climbed out of the hatch.

That’s it, Virgil. It’s over, Phil hollered up below me, his crippled hand shading his eyes. It’s over was Phil’s stock phrase when a task was done, and it was on to the next one. It was code for I know that was hard, but that’s life on the farm...get over it.

It was kind of a bitch in there, I said, not able to help myself, and coughing up phlegm. I’m sorry, but I think once I get down, I’m done for today, Phil.

Yeah, okay, Virgil. No problem. This was the big goal of the day anyway, and now we’re set to go! Go get an iced tea or something. I’m going to take the wagons out to George. Thanks for your help! he said, picking up the pitchfork with his good hand and heading off to the equipment barn.

I was able to descend the ladder, walk to my trailer, and pour myself a glass of cold water before a sledgehammer struck me in the forehead and brought me to my knees. The linoleum floor was spinning so crazily that I could barely crawl. What’s happening to me? I aimed my nauseous body for the black wall phone by the door, remembered a number, reached up and somehow spun the dial.

Terri rushed home from her assembly line job in town at Malt-O-Meal to drive me to the emergency room. It should have been an ambulance, but Terri's