HEAVEN, HELL AND HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER SCAMDEMIC

If you read Dispatches From a Scamdemic, you know I’ve painted a dark picture of the past 27 months. While my anger is real, much of is vicarious. I have felt very bad for the many people, especially the young, who have lost two irreplaceable years of normal life due to the media and Democrat Party’s opportunistic fearmongering.

But while I’ve missed out on doing some stuff I like, I’ve had a better day-to-day Scamdemic life than most others have had. I feel some survivor’s guilt. Not guilt about surviving the Scamdemic; I knew it was a phony overreaction from Day 1. But I didn’t miss a day of work at a job, being face-to-face—unmasked—with people I like.

After doing thirty years of environmental litigation, I’ve spent the last seven years managing community gardens in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Our largest garden, in which I spend most of my time, comprises vertically varied, flower-capped greenery in an urban neighborhood along a busy, commercial street. This contrast entices people to explore the space. Homeless guys like to hang out and sleep there and use our hoses to shower.

The gardens were livelier than ever during the 2020-21 seasons. People were desperate to escape their cramped apartments and to be among other people. The gardens served both of those purposes. No vaxx passports were required.

Last spring, a willowy man in his mid-fifties, slightly under six feet tall, with expressive, almond-shaped brown eyes, wearing a loosely fitting, aqua, long sleeve, buttoned cotton shirt, faded cargo shorts and very faded orange, tattered cotton baseball style cap wandered onto the site. In a calm voice and a lilting, clipped, difficult to identify accent, he asked me what we were doing. I explained that people from the city and I grew vegetables and flowers there that we would eat and enjoy.

I would have guessed that this man was Egyptian. When I asked his name, I expected something Arabic, like “Ahmed” or “Marwan.” Instead, he called himself “Woody.”

Woody told me that he liked to grow things and asked me if I needed help with the work I was doing. I said that I always welcomed help. He explained that he didn’t have time to help on that day but that he would return. I told him my schedule and wondered if I would see him again.

A week later, Woody did return and said he was ready to begin. I worked alongside him pulling weeds from a flower patch. While we worked, he casually identified some weeds and flowers. Though he sometimes struggled to summon the common names of some of the plants, he knew all the Latin names. He began telling me whether these plants were edible or not—most were—what medicinal benefits the plants might have—most did— and in which other parts of the world they grew.

I had to direct some students working on another task, so I left Woody to continue weeding alone. He did so for at least two more hours before departing. Thereafter, he dropped in every few days.

I asked Woody how he learned so much about plants. He told me that he had studied natural medicines and plant genetics in a university. He humbly spoke of breeding a new, more potent cultivar of chamomile there that enhanced its inflammation and stress-reducing properties.

It turned out that his university was in the early 1980s Soviet Union. This became even more remarkable when he revealed he was the son of a South African father and an Ethiopian mother. Come to think of it, he did sound a little like Nelson Mandela.

After spending his first five years in Ethiopia and four years in South Africa, Woody’s family moved back to Ethiopia because they perceived no future in apartheid-era South Africa. Growing up in Ethiopia’s highlands, Woody walked ten miles to school each morning. In the evenings, he would run that distance, barefoot, to get home before dark, when packs of hyenas would come out and chase him. He told me his family had a horse and that he would race other kids, riding bareback. Yes, he broke bones doing that.

Graduating high school at 16, Woody received his Soviet scholarship because Ethiopia was then politically aligned with the USSR. I asked him what it was like to move to Moscow as a teen, if he returned to Ethiopia during school breaks and if he got homesick during those years. He described Moscow as a grand city, with very cold weather and bad food but good people.

I imagined how isolated Woody must have felt being a South African/Ethiopian young man in Moscow for even a month, much less for six years, during which he didn’t return to Africa. He admitted that he missed Ethiopia terribly. In his first semester, he wrote his parents a letter telling them he wanted to come home. His father wrote back telling him that he needed to be a man and stay. So he did. Woody told me that although he’s lived in many places, and his father died many years ago, he still has that letter, somewhere in the modest, dark, jumbled apartment that I sometimes visit.

When I asked him more about those university years, Woody told me that he was in a program of study with 300 students from many, typically Asian, nations. During his first year, seventeen of these students reacted to their surroundings, alienation and academic pressure by jumping off the top of their eleven-story dorm.

When he arrived in Moscow, Woody didn’t speak a word of Russian. He became fluent, via immersion, while compulsorily rooming with three Russians. I’ve heard him speak to some Russians who have passed through our gardens and he sounds…Russian. He’s dismayed that he’s losing some mastery of the language after three decades outside of the country. He told me he had recently discovered a New Jersey radio station that had a two hour Russian talk show and that he listened to it to preserve his language skills. After his university time, Woody lived in Siberia (!) and India. He still has Russian friends, with whom he Skypes. They tell him a different story about contemporary Russia and the Ukraine War than does the media, which alt narrative Woody, in turn, tells me.

In addition to English and Russian, Woody also speaks Afrikaans, Amharic and an Ethiopian tribal language. He doesn’t own a car. Picture a guy who can speak five languages and also knows a lot about Biology and History, and has lived in many far-flung places, loping through New Brunswick in tattered clothes with a faded backpack. Woody is the real-life Brother from Another Planet. He also says funny stuff and laughs easily. He’s ethereal, spiritual, amiable and grateful.

Many people who have had challenging and interesting lives pass us on sidewalks like ships in the night. But Woody’s life story is the most unusual I’ve encountered.

Another gardener, a woman named Mouna from Senegal, also speaks five languages. Both she and Woody were surprised that I could speak Spanish with the Mexican gardeners. They expressed a desire to learn Spanish. I told them that speaking five languages was more impressive than speaking two and that we could speak Spanish whenever they wanted.

On various days, Woody opens his canvas backpack, eager to show me that it contained some wild, edible plant he had gathered, during his mile-long walk to the gardens, from some roadside, vacant lot or park. He would say, for example, that Stinging Nettle has many therapeutic uses, including management of inflammation, and cleansing and fortifying various organs, including the kidneys and prostate. He would feed such cuttings to our 22 chickens or we would eat some and propagate it, and later plant it in our gardens. When they stop laying eggs, we kill and eat the hens.

Woody also forages wild mushrooms. He’s shown me some of what he knows, including secret locations where various types grow. Twice, we found multi-ridged Maitakes the size of a basketball. We sold each to the chef at The Frog and the Peach, a tony New Brunswick restaurant, for $75. In 2021, that was serious money.

Woody has shown me which mushrooms I can safely eat and which would kill me. So far he’s been right. I’m still here. It’s odd that while some mushrooms are nutritionally “powerful”—he uses that word all the time— others can end your life. It made me think of the “vaxxes.” Because the shots were labeled “vaccines,” many firmly believed in—and stridently promoted—them. But just as one “mushroom” is safe and the next is lethal, one nominal “vaxx” can be safe while the next is not. Same with berries. We grow some tasty berries at our site, while others are toxic. Hay que saber.

BTW, if you’re wondering, Woody sometimes wears the mask shown in the photo to cover his teeth, which are damaged, not because he fears a virus. He’s unjabbed.

Central New Jersey has many people from all over the world. A plurality of our gardeners come from Puebla or Oaxaca, Mexico. But we’ve also had gardeners from Colombia, El Salvador, Germany, Puerto Rico, India, Egypt, Morocco, Canada, New Zealand, Trinidad, Austria, China, Kansas, Virginia, South Dakota, Nebraska, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Ohio, South Carolina, California, Chicago, Buffalo and Camden. Two gardeners are ex-convicts. One was a sixth-ranked welterweight boxer who has fought at Madison Square Garden and in Vegas; legit, he’s on YouTube. I enjoy nearly all of their company. I have heard many interesting—often sad—life stories from gardeners. When you work alongside someone in a garden, it’s the dashboard effect, squared.

I teach most gardeners how to grow things. But the gardeners who grew up in rural Mexico know things I don’t. So they teach me, e.g., about unfamiliar vegetables and flowers and how to prune plants. During our chats, I learn of their lives “en mi pais,” i.e., in my (their) country. Having four or more children, starting around 16, is common.

Two unrelated Mexican immigrant gardeners named Angelica and Maria show up most mornings. Often, Angelica arrives on her bike, sometimes in a skirt, sees what I’m doing, and wordlessly works like a beast alongside me for a half hour before tending her own plots. When she speaks, Angelica does so faster and louder that anyone I know. Maria typically has at least two of her six kids in tow. After much time together and heartfelt talks about life, past and present, Angelica and Maria and I have learned to trust, like and laugh with each other. They’ve told me some touching stories. We sometimes run footraces or shoot baskets together.

They also sometimes give me Mexican foods, either grown at the garden, or homemade. I see their kids far more often than I see my nieces and nephews. Maria has invited me to her house for two family parties; we danced and ate in close quarters, unmasked, under rented tents. The Mexicans I know didn’t stop living during the Scamdemic.

The gardener with whom I’ve spent the most time during, and before, the Scamdemic se llama Carlos. Carlos is in his mid-fifties, short, wiry, with big, sad eyes and a crewcut under his baseball cap. He walked across the Mexican desert and sneaked into the US 16 years ago. Carlos is physically tough but tranquilo. He used to live two blocks from the gardens. But his son, a mason, with whom he lives, bought a house two miles away. So now I give Carlos rides to the gardens in my dented, red 2004 Ford Focus. He goes there on days when he’s not wage-working as a landscaper. He gets bored at home and being at the gardens keeps him out of trouble. Usually.

Carlos knows all kinds of stuff about growing things and shares his knowledge with me in an enthusiastic but respectful way. As with Maria, Angelica and the other Latino gardeners, we communicate only in Spanish. Carlos always has several projects going at the gardens. He also knows Mexican women who operate unlicensed weekend restaurantes in their unfinished basements nearby. We eat tasty lunches there at tables alongside furnaces and washer/dryers. Sometimes, Carlos shows me phone videos of his three other sons working on farms down in Mexico. On many nights, he calls me just to talk for a few minutes.

With some people, you make an unspoken agreement to like each other when you meet. You back that agreement by sharing time. Carlos tells me that when he returns to live in Mexico, I must visit him. I will, though I suspect that Carlos will die here.

There’s a spontaneous bond between people who like to grow stuff. We are drawn to a process that is, at once, simple and predictable and yet, deeply mysterious and complex, and perennially delightful. This fascination is inborn. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “To those who disbelieve, no proof is sufficient. To those who believe, no proof is necessary.” Same with growing plants. You either love it or you don’t; no one can talk you into it or out of it.

While I have doubts about the sustainability of mass-scale immigration, I admire the work ethic of the immigrants I know and their unfazed disdain for Coronamania and la vacuna. They’ve seen much bigger hardships and threats. They share my view that if this virus were so dangerous, they would know by what was happening to people they know; while there are many thousands of Mexicans in New Brunswick, very few of them are old enough to be scared of something named like a brand of beer. The Mexicans’ toughness, resourcefulness and grip on reality sets them apart from fearful, conformist, “educated” but gullible American citizens who have become ex-friends during the past two years, and whose judgment I’ll never be able to respect again. Immigrants have become my closest friends—except for my wife—during the Scamdemic.

During the past two seasons, I also worked often with two exceptional students who could think critically and saw what a scam this whole thing was. While working together, we took turns trashing the government, the university and its vaxx mandate and the injections themselves.

Those who believe in an afterlife conceive of paradise in various ways. Some envision floating on clouds and/or singing in choirs. Others imagine ecstatically moving toward, and being embraced by, a bright, warm, perpetual light. Some secularized, latter-day would-be saints wish for stuff like long walks on the beach, lively parties or golf courses. And of course, nearly all wish for—or assure others that the deceased will share—reunions with loved ones who predeceased them.

All of that sounds nice. But when I’m at the gardens, I wonder if I’m not already experiencing Heaven: laboring and co-creating, with God and nature, colorful, nourishing plants alongside interesting, positive people who look different from each other and come from many parts of the world. It’s hard to imagine that Heaven could be much better.

Floyd Mayweather, whom many consider the best boxer ever, grew up in the 1990s in a since-dynamited New Brunswick housing project about ten blocks from our gardens. He described his surroundings as Hellish.

It’s not always perfect at the gardens, either. Sometimes the sun is scorchingly hot and/or it doesn’t rain for weeks. Sometimes animals or people steal food, or people unwittingly undo my work or intentionally misbehave. We adjoin a city park, prosaically named “Recreation Park,” which contains another set of gardens that I also manage. Much herb is smoked there, at all hours. One of the students who works with me suggested renaming it “Recreational Use Park.” I thought of so altering the entrance sign. But I have a reputation for neighborhood paintings and mischief; people would suspect me. If I lose my job, it’ll be over the injections, not graffiti.

While there are chill times in the park, there are also profane ruckuses there. I saw two Kevlar-vested cops chase a guy through there one morning, twenty feet from me. While I was shooting baskets there a few weeks ago around 2 PM on a weekday afternoon, I heard two people having sex—prolly for hire, sometimes women stand on nearbv street corners—in an open-windowed van twenty feet away. Last summer, someone was shot and killed during the day just outside the basketball cages. Hey, man, respect the call!

At least two more were gunned down in the neighborhood last summer in separate incidents, also in broad daylight.

Sometimes Heaven and Hell are only a few blocks, or some short interval of time, apart. I’ve spent much of the past two years in a place that is, for me, a slice of Heaven, while much of the country around me went to Hell, for no good reason.