Ancient Footskin

It happened on a Saturday in June, about 2:00pm, on a strawberry farm in Fairfax, Vermont.  Weston and I had been commissioned to help our friend Corbett scrape, chisel, and brush at an archaeological dig site he and some of his students have been working on for the last 2 years.  Corbett's girlfriend, Maggie, and their dog Josie had come along too. They had found three fire pits among fields of Swiss chard and romaine, buried 2 feet below the worked soil.  They knew the pits belonged to the Abenaki tribes, and they knew the last of the coals of the fires had gone out nearly 2,000 years ago, right around the turn of the first millennium. 

We knelt barefoot next to one of the pits, dug out in a perfect square (3 feet by 3 feet in diameter), methodically scraping the top of the mud - or "Chocolate" as Corbett called it - until we got to black.  Black being the coal, the coal being the remnants of a meal cooked hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years ago.  We scraped while Corbett told us the history of the world, as slowly and as meticulously as our blades were moving across the ancient ground.  He started with 4,000 BC, ("When there were two miles of ice over our heads"), and went from there, in what seemed like 10  year increments.  As the afternoon sun beat down on my back, my sweat dripped into the pit, and I was fascinated at how much modern man knew, and also at how much we still don't know.  Here, we were looking for bits of discarded seeds or animal bones or tools that might tell us more about the lives of the original people of Vermont, back when there weren't state lines or political leanings or the Kardashians.  Just food, shelter, and survival. 

I took a break when there was a pause in the story of our earth's history (probably around 400 BC), and went behind Corbett's truck to pee.  Josie was happy to have the company; she had been tied up to the truck all afternoon.  When I started walking back through the fields to the pit, Maggie let out a piercing squeal.  I watched as everyone gathered around to see what she had sifted out of the soil.  Corbett looked fascinated, pulling and tugging on something small in his hands.  When I finally returned to the site, they had gone back to work. 

"It looked like someone had left a thumb print," Maggie told me, excited. "It was the perfect cut-out."  After being significantly grossed out, the archaeologists tossed the piece of skin into the lettuce rows, surely shaken by the strangeness of the find.  Corbett told us that if they found any part of a homo sapien, they'd have to pack up their shovels and go home.  It's illegal to dig on Native American burial grounds.  Things were quiet for the rest of the afternoon.  Though we hadn't found a scull or a recognizable human remain, we still felt a blanket of silence come over us as we realized that real people, people with forefingers and thumbs, actually existed here, so long ago.

We drove home after a couple of hours with dirt stuck in all of our pores and redness from the sun spreading across our shoulders.  We ate strawberries that we had picked and listened to Crosby, Stills & Nash, not talking much still. When we got home, I took a shower right away to wash the grime from off my hands and my feet, barely able to stand from exhaustion.  I had to sit on the edge of the tub to wash my feet, and as I scrubbed I felt something odd and looked down.  On the ball of my foot, there was a perfect circle missing just below my big toe.  An old blister from a few weeks ago.  A new artifact, tossed into the romaine leaves. 

Gator Jerky

We took the day off from Disney World, traded amusement parks for a State Park: from 4D ride to canoe.  At Wekiwa Springs, we were on the look out for wildlife.  Alligators, specifically.  As we paddled slowly along the river, canopied in Spanish moss, we saw mangy swamp birds, mating dragonflies, bullfrogs, red-bellied cooters, and loud Memorial Day revelers, but no gators.  When the rain began to fill our vessel we decided to turn upstream and drive back to Orlando. 

Just before Kissimmee, on Route 4, we passed two hand-written signs that shouted “GATOR JERKY” in big, bold capitals.  We figured if we couldn’t see them in the wild, the least we could do was eat them.  We pulled over to the side of the highway where a rusty blue pickup truck had parked, ass-out, under an overpass.  Rainbow-striped umbrellas gave the contents of the bed shade, and a woman with a few teeth missing grinned at us as we approached, cars zooming past.  She offered us a sample of the jerky right away, knowing that this was why we were here: two pasty tourists looking for an off-the-beaten-path Florida experience.  I was afraid to try it, so I stalled by asking how they caught the gators.  Weston was already munching.

“His uncle does it.” She pointed behind her at a man sitting with his tattooed legs dangling out the passenger door.  He was smoking a fat cigar.  “We give him a six pack of beer, he takes his airboat out on the St. John River, gets drunk, and comes back with ‘em.”  I took a bite, and it tasted, well, like jerky.  “I don’t get involved with the process,” she flashes her half empty smile again.  “I just sell it.”  She offered us a package – a Ziploc of jerky and a watermelon, but we told her we were just here for the meat.  I handed her a ten-dollar bill and we kicked dust back onto the highway.

Feeling good, like we had had an authentic gator experience, we munched on the jerky and turned up the base-heavy Cuban tunes on the radio.  A few bites in, Weston turned to me.  “This is beef jerky.”  Sure enough, it was a waxy, dark, salty meat straight out of a convenient store bag and repackaged for our willingness and gullibility. 

Weston immediately called the Kissimmee police to report the crime, not about to get jerked around.  I kept eating it.