The Potato Lottery

Part of getting high sometimes is about simplifying your life and feeling grateful as exemplified in J P Dooley's Two for the Road now on Amazon:

"It was a parcel east of Azalea with a funky plywood cabin, on a south-facing hill above a recently paved logging road.

A hundred seedlings:  I put some in a hot-house cobbled together from a pile of old lumber at the top of the driveway, a few more in deer cages down the hill, ten or twenty in the damp spot below a barely weeping spring, others hidden in clumps of thorny blackberries and wild rose, a dozen in a straight row along a collapsing fence.

Except for the ones near the spring, the rest had to be watered, buckets carried up the hill and across the slope, five gallons at a time.

The ancient hermit’s life:  chop wood and carry water.  It makes you strong.

Hard times at first, after the fast life of the city, not much stimulation, no beating heart but fat quiet and inland heat, followed by cold.  A contemplative environment in which I scribbled down notes and ideas for paintings, quick sketches and color schemes on a couple of reams of white vellum from the Oakland Library System that Aggie Ina Kolb had handed in the window of the truck as we were leaving.

“You’ll need these,” she said.

We worked with a brush-piling crew, didn’t get paid for three months, and spent the summer living on a fifty-pound bag of rice and what we could forage.  No abundance of wild edibles in the southern Cascades, or harvestable forest products like moss:  we had pot, pinched tops from the plants, but no food.  We ate rice with onions, fried rice, rice gruel, rice cakes and peanut butter.  Unconcerned, we grew thinner.

On my birthday, on my way to a public spigot down the road for water—our shallow well was poorly sealed, and things lived and died in it—coasting on my bicycle, I came upon a potato in the road that had bounced out of a truck, and screeched to a halt, overjoyed, as if we had won the lottery."