The Floating World

I have just received my Appalachian ID -- the food stamp card. It is emblazoned in glorious, hopeful, faux-credit card fashion with our very own red, white, and blue, and, like a huge beer, it makes me feel both very relaxed and a touch off-kilter. Let me tell you, friends, my days of crashing art galleries for Flufferspam hors-d'oeuvres are over. I am dining at big brother's table tonight. When I called the help line to hear my balance read to me by the kindly machine-matron, I had to keep pressing the repeat button. Really? No, REALLY? I burst out laughing. It effectively trebles my monthly income. Now, it is crass to discuss personal financial matters in public, but bear with me. I am trying to decide how to feel about this.

I could think of it as an extended government loan. I will pay it off unless I die in February, in taxes or whatever. I am learning a skilled trade, which is far better than a liberal arts degree, so it could be a kind of scholarship. Plus the only people I know who don't have food stamps just moved here. So I'm joining a community.

Still, in some way I feel slightly robbed of reality. This is simply absurd. No single person, however poor, could eat this much in a month. Why should I be given this? Because I'm an American citizen? What the hell is that? I will, of course, be giving large amounts away. I will also be stockpiling, Depression grandma fashion, nonperishables and canning/freezing perishables in case when the term is up I'm still broke. But there's something warped about it, the way it feels warped to get infinite free plastic bags for life whenever you check out at a grocery store, or to be able to fly through the air across the world in hours for a month's salary. It doesn't add up. The labor, the benefits. Somewhere, someone is paying. Food does not come from a card. Food comes from work, and only work.

In a bout of homesickness, I started doing research on south central Texas. I found an online database of native plants, complete with descriptions of edibles. The list is long. I remember living on the Medina River (the banks of which are now known to have been peopled continuously for over ten thousand years). I remember the plants, every strange fruit in all their seasons, wild seasons that made the snowflake cutouts we did in school seem naive and picturesque. The native plants were not like our peach trees, our fat hybrid sweet corn, simpleton carrots, foreign cabbages. They were spare, strangely colored, and terrifying. Poisonous? Who knew. I picked them sometimes and mashed them into soups and pretended to eat. If one of the uncountable numbers of Medina River people could have seen, they might have laughed, or cried, or marveled at my devotion. Because I always carefully poured out and buried the stuff after, afraid of poison. They were feasts. Nearly all those unstoried fruits I feared were gifts, and I never knew. Learning this, a plan sprung fully-formed from my newly blown mind: what if one were to remake one's own body with the materials of one's land, eating only what one could dig, catch, pluck, and snare? They say it takes seven years for all the cells in the body to turn over, and then, almost alchemically, one could become a place. An urban myth, maybe. Seven is such a poetic number.

The first European in south Texas was Cabeza de Vaca, Head of a Cow, who was shipwrecked at Galveston Island with a boatload of would-be conquistadors. They crawled ashore, "naked as the day they were born," and lay down to die in an alien land. But they were found and nursed back to health by a people who subsisted entirely upon what their hands could dig, catch, snare, and throttle. Beetles, spiders, fish, lizards, roots, mussels, termite eggs, and soil. "I believe these people would have eaten rock, if their land was made of rock," said de Vaca. He also said that they were never full. They wandered the coasts and rivers up and down in search of food. He was astonished at the women, who woke several times in the night to tend the root-cooking fires (they had the misfortune of having for a staple food a kind of root, lost to posterity, that had to be cooked overnight) and rose before daybreak to hunt more food. In the late summer, all the peoples of what would later be south Texas and northeastern Mexico convened in what is now Atascosa County and southward to gorge and celebrate the prickly pear. De Vaca eventually became a trader between tribes, and then a doctor, healing by the sign of the cross and a prayer to God. Interestingly, he wandered with those people for seven years. His body, once that of Spain, with perhaps an admixture of Marco Polo's Eastern spices, became purely that of the new world.

Those, then, are the kinds of labors it should take to keep a toehold in the world. How is it that I am floating above the earth now, that I live without having to dig, to chase, to tend fires all night, to watch the seasons, even to pray? How can I do this? They say it's technology that has multiplied our powers so that I can walk into a building and get food for free all this winter, without the faintest shadow of fear of starvation, but I don't even know what that technology might be. I don't run any machine that produces food for me. I am a beneficiary of some potent sleight-of-hand.

When the Betsies and I lived out of the organic boutique dumpsters, on the fat of the fat, we sometimes prayed to the dumpster gods to be kind to us and deliver us extra large papayas. And you know what? They did. They always did. But how?

What is this unreal world that secretes papayas in the dead of a Denver winter, where food from anywhere in the world flies into my arms at the swipe of a card? What are we standing on? Or whom? When will we come down?