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Show RTVER about making a showboat out of her. What a fine life it would be, going up and down the river playing "Dixie" for the folks. I thought a lot about the farming I planned to do down the river. Even now I oftentimes wonder how a nice Mormon boy, born in the LDS hospital and raised in the very mountain heart of Zion, could wind up spending his youth as an itinerant marijuana farmer. I don't know how it got into my blood, but once it did it seemed to have found a home and it got a little bit hotter every spring time. It was an obsession. I wanted to raise acres of grass, I dreamed about endless rows of the lovely green plant gently swaying in the late summer heat, taller than corn and prettier than posies. I wanted to see lots of the living illicit weed soaking up God's good sun, drinking life from the ground. I wanted weed to roll in. I wanted to eat a reefer salad. Like many people who don't know the business end of a hoe, I was fascinated by farming. To turn a single seed into an enormous living plant with merely soil and sun and sweat and rain seemed like very powerful magic. I knew enough about farming to know that I knew nothing about farming, but my time in the tomato field and some experiments in the sand at Lonestar gave me someplace to start. I knew that randomly sowing the seeds wouldn't cut it-no matter how good the climate and conditions, I knew the young plants would have to be tended through at least their first critical month of growth. It also appeared, from all the tree-covered islands I saw, that I'd have to clear some ground and plant amidst the stumps. I poured over my maps looking for suitable sites. On the afternoon of the third day the fog began to break up but I stayed aboard Papoose and finished reading Tolkien. It was April Fool's Day and I had a -176- |