Well, it's made for a lot of not pleasant family arguments. See, this
property is held by my aunt and my father. I don't own a bit of property
except for my house. I think they are glad I did it, but I think they
probably think I was a little bit too fanatical about it. But I think
they are glad I did it.
It has cost me a lot of money. It has essentially set up a whole set of
career choices and time spending choices that wouldn't have been the
same. When I started this, I was a Child Abuse Specialist Social Worker
in Durham County Department of Social Work. As I'm ending this I'm a PHD
and Educational candidate and teaching in speech and communications. I
think a lot of that has to do with the people I met and the skills I
developed while I was doing this. So, rather that was good or bad, there
has definitely been a change.
I don't know … it has made me sad in a way I never really wanted to be
sad. In some ways I feel like it has permanently put a pall upon my life
that will never quite go away. My cynicism, which was incredibly well
developed, you've got to remember I was a child of the sixities, so my
cynicism, which was incredibly developed already has reached a magnitude
[Laughter] that is sorta astonishing.
There are so many personal things that have occurred in terms of people
I've met while all this process was going on. People I've become close
to and people I've drifted apart from. You are talking about something
that was probably for me a half time occupation and a seventy-five
percent time obsession for ten years.
Page 22 During that
ten years, I evolved myself with an incredible number of things that was
extended out of that, relationships with people and relationships of
notions and ideas; things like that.
This used to be a cotton field, my father used to grow cotton here. All
these pines have grown up since then. But anyway, all these things have
occurred. In some ways I've grown to love this place more and in others…
It is virtually impossible for people like you, who see this place in
the last few years to see this place in the last twenty, twenty-five
years. It is different.
We have gone from the depression… you know, when I was a kid we had
horses that we ploughed the fields with. We had a mule until I was 17
that we ploughed the garden with and we weren't unusual. Those things
have changed. The first job I ever had making money for someone else was
when I was like 10, 11, or 12, we picked corn for Alvis Lloyd who lives
next door. MY cousin and I did it. The way we did it was, we had two
mules that we hitched to a wagon and the mules walked through the field…
[text missing] In my mind that vision
is imprinted in an incredible ways, and I still do that. I went to a
class about four or five weeks ago, I'm taking a class in designing
educational media and the class was doing video taping. I walked into
that class, and that morning I had killed a steer. I killed it with some
people and we had skinned it and I had cut it up and had taken it out
there. And, in that space of time it took me to drive from here to town,
I moved into the world of the techno-elite. That is pretty weird.
It is like your reaction when you walked into my little cozy country
bungalow and inside I'm sitting there talking on my
Page 23 cordless phone and using my word processor. I think that is a result
of this. That transition for me has been a result of this. It is not
necessarily a transition I wel come. Ten years ago, my intention had
been to keep farming. To fence in these these pastures and to raise more
cows and stuff like that. That had been my intention; now that is
totally not in my cosmology to do that. I don't have the land now; I
don't have the capital and stuff I had then. I certainly don't have the
body and the energy. So that has been a part of it.
I have a word processor because of it. I've learned to type [Laughter] in a way I've never typed before.
There are people all over the state who know who I am, who had no idea
who I was and wouldn't have known. I get invited to speak at some fairly
out of the way places, that are all a result of this. I mean, there
would have been no reason otherwise to invite me there. So, yeah… but at
the same time, I mean the other half of that… is God, I feel cynical. I
think the world is really getting screwed up. I get very tired of yuppie
mentality.