Wanna nip? Just add water
Photos and Story by Stacey Warde
I’ve known rascals, and loved some, too, those guys who thumb their noses at culture and the corporate value system that degrades humans (like a bad drug, or too much alcohol) and turns them into humanoid shells of greed and hubris.
Tam helped me to see what salt of the earth really means: Basically, people who have struggled, and sometimes thrive, on the fringes, along the margins and outskirts of fashion, and of what’s trendy like cold baths and avocado toast. He grew up beyond the reach of formal training and education, studying instead in books and magazines of his choosing, also in the hollows of wild pig dens and in the wide-open spaces of the Pacific ocean and fertile California farmland. His life trajectory spun him far and away from the familiar refrains of “how to get ahead” and “make it big” and “make a name for yourself,” which he already had in some circles, 86’d from more than one bar in his lifetime, no easy task. He scorned the chosen, acceptable path or standard, what is popularly sought after in our American culture of bozos and boosterism — notoriety, fame, money, security — and set his own course with his own rules. Some observers might interpret his indifference and way of life as low-brow, mean, and limited, a man with not much ambition. Just the opposite.
His mode of living might have appeared as if he didn’t love life; he did love life, on his terms. In fact, he was life, full of hardscrabble, grit, and grace. He lived closer to the cattle trails and cow pies of his chosen lifestyle than he did trying to be somebody who might be ok with recruiters and corporate hacks. His arc of life choices, for good or ill, stretched beyond the lies and false promises of a “good life” (who’s to say what that is?) in the US. He’d made it, as far as he was concerned.
“I wouldn’t trade this for all the money in the world,“ he’d say of his apparently rough circumstances, waving his arm across the open wild that was his front yard.
Salty people like Tam know how bad or good things can actually get, living close to the ground, and they appreciate how lucky they are, even though they’ve taken punches and blows, suffered setbacks, without worrying about “optics,” market share, bottom lines, or how much money they earn.
Their views and values haven’t been warped by a predatory corporate culture — owned and operated by vultures and wolves, we both agreed, of a sort more dangerous and cutthroat than one might find in the wild — people with major personality disorders, squeezing out the bitter juice of envy, greed, and corruption that makes America “great.” Salties have instead been shaped by real living, where sun and earth get under one’s skin and fingernails, and the juice tastes pretty good. There’s nothing like cutting into a ripe avocado to eat and fresh water to drink during a rest break under the shade of a forest of trees on a ranch in the middle of a hot California afternoon where the breeze feels fine and snakes slither off into the coolness of dried leaves. I doubt you can beat that on a New York holiday.
Tam was the salt that keeps life interesting and real, I knew it from the start, a modern-day Diogenes, far from time-wasting office politics and petty grievances that pepper and ruin the workplace; he was the Cayucos version of the Greek Dog from Athens, barking at distracted city fellows from his refuge in a wine jug to stop and breathe and enjoy life. He lived out loud from the moment I met him, unashamed of himself, often on the verge of drunkenness, and unconcerned about how to fit in; he lived the way he wanted to live, like Diogenes the Dog. Better to trek rattlesnake infested weeds than the halls of business filled with vipers and psychopaths. Most people who get ahead in America, he’d observe, are not well balanced. They don’t know how to live.
Neither, perhaps, do the salty ones, like Tam, with whom I am most familiar and most comfortable.
Flat out, with no sense of shame or embarrassment, when we first met, Tam told me he’s an alcoholic, didn’t mind being one, and in fact had learned not only how to be a functional drunk but had also acquired the expert knowledge to make his own booze, a master distiller, a skill he learned from his late father, a Morro Bay fisherman, and decided that living is fine, more than fine if you had the guts for it, but living without a batch of your own homemade whisky is no way to live at all.
He took great pride in his Scottish heritage, organizing and participating in rough-and-tumble Scottish games as a young man, self-reliant, fiercely independent, scornful of anyone who tried blowing smoke up his ass with promises of a better life, a “safe” and “easy” life of which he knew there was none. A man has to make his own way. That’s how it’s always been, he’d say, a lesson his father taught him raising a family as a commercial fisherman.
A Scotsman as devilish and feisty and short as a leprechaun, Tam lived in a dirt-floor shack that he loved and maintained just the way he wanted with its solar panels up top to power his lone analog tv and video player and some selected lights in a yard filled with scavenged treasures, tools, saws, tires, wood, a beater Honda that he rescued and drove with pride. “Forty miles to the gallon!” he boasted. “What the fuck do I need a new car for?”
He would observe the occasional wandering snake or feral cat passing along the dirt floor from one side of his shack to the other, past the row of bottles of booze he’d stored on some old wooden shelves, and he welcomed the fresh running spring water that fed his still; he was a modern day homesteader/hermit tucked into the quiet of an enormous open landscape filled with coastal oaks, willow, native scrub, invasive weeds, and running creeks, bothering no one, living his own life with no one to bother him. A world of his own where work and play were all the same.
We were employed by the same ranch outfit, a sprawling enterprise for cows and produce: He worked the cattle side, I worked in the orchards, mostly solo in our respective roles, and we got stuff done.
I irrigated, pruned, and cut down trees, made burn piles in the enclosure where the bulls were kept until breeding time. The bulls, all nine of them, would surround me, nudging me out of their way, looking for green grub among the leavings, as I unloaded the trailer with my cuttings and piled them into the center of the field where I would burn them in the fall after they dried out.
Tam plowed the nearby adjacent fields of the thousand-acre ranch and made sure we had plenty of feed to get us through the dry season, which was almost year-round in that parched part of coastal California. Tam later taught me how to drive the fearsome Kubota tractor so I could mow the orchards in spring and help prep the fields for planting grasses for the cattle, which Tam managed in his own gleeful ranch hand way with a smile, a wave, and a bottle of homemade whisky. He repaired the ancient tractors and harvesters on site, and he loved every one of them, almost as if they were his own family, or old lovers.
“I’ve been inside and out of that tractor more than I’ve had pussy, and I’ve had plenty of that,” he’d say, pointing to the lone menacing machine standing stuck in the middle of the field — again. Damn thing nearly killed him once when it rolled over him, he said, bruising his insides and breaking nothing. “The doc said I got lucky on that one,” he said, “coulda killed me if it had rolled over my chest and rib cage. Just bruised my intestines is all.” During the off hours, we sat at an old picnic table in his big open yard by the creek, or on old ‘50s-style Formica table type of kitchen chairs with fat degraded padding, facing each other, telling stories blown way out of proportion, laughing like fools, refilling our glasses, rolling in the dirt, loving life.
Each time I got up for another pour, he’d say, “Make sure you add a bit of water. Whisky tastes better that way.”
We sat on the far opposite ends of the political spectrum too — he thought liberals were hypocritical bloodsuckers — yet we enjoyed good conversation. He would never go on disability or ask the government for anything. No handouts. Ever.
Able-bodied people had no business asking for handouts. The government can’t be trusted either, he’d add. So long as he could get out of bed after a night of eating out barflies and waking up to grapple with the tractors and feed the herd, and get paid, why do anything else? You’d be a fool and a loser to go on food stamps. Tam lived large, as an unapologetic conservative with no interest in the buttoned-down universe of Madmen.
“The oceans aren’t rising,” he argued in our sloshed conversations about climate change. He knew the oceans better than I, I figured, because as a youngster he’d worked as a fisherman up and down the West Coast from Alaska to Mexico. “If you take a glass and fill it with ice and water and watch the ice melt,” he’d say, “the glass won’t overflow. It’s the same with the oceans. If the polar caps melt, there won’t be any overflow. It’s basic science.”
The point being, he’d explain, that environmentalists were mostly a bunch of cry babies who don’t know how to have fun, don’t know what they’re talking about half the time, have little science or knowledge to back their claims, offer no reasonable/doable solutions, and only know how to make life difficult for those who are serious about earning a living, actually doing stuff instead of looking for an easy way out. I loved Tam.
Women, as salty and crusty as he was, with voices rough like sandpaper, and generally not my type, came often to visit, glad to have landed at Tam’s hideaway refuge on the ranch, away from the mean streets of Morro Bay or San Luis Obispo (which a friend and writer famously christened the “Golden Ghetto” after a series of unsolved murders of three women, including Kristin Smart) away from state highways crowded with tourists, happy to be a part of his inner circle, generous with hugs and kisses, drinking Tam’s home-spun whisky, with a place to spend the night, if necessary, where the floor was made of dirt and the bed always made for love.
Tam, ever the gracious and sometimes unpredictable host, loved a good talk and welcomed evenings watching a movie on his solar-powered VCR and rolling in the arms of a wanton woman. He fancied himself a lover. Once, during a drunken fit, he tried to molest my girlfriend, who nearly punched him in the face.
Often, during work hours, I’d see Tam driving the ancient murderous red tractor through the fields adjacent to the avocado and orange orchards where I worked making sure the irrigation lines were intact, not chewed down or leak-sprung by coyotes or jerked out of alignment by wild pigs, which ran everywhere, tearing up the ground beneath the trees and making an unholy mess of things, fouling the low-hanging fruit with mud and dirt.
“I had pigs all over my place one season,” a neighboring farmer once told me, “just tearing the place up. So, I went out one night and shot 30 of the bastards, thought I’d cleaned the place out. Next night, they were back at it again, I could hear them, and I went out and bagged 18 more pigs. You can’t win. They’re everywhere.”
Occasionally, on an outside turn in the field, Tam would drive the tractor over my direction to say hello, not far from the section of dirt road where I found what I thought at first, in my limited imagination, were the hideous footprints of an old hag and which turned out instead to belong to a bear. The ancient tractor, pulling an equally ancient seeder loaded up with new seed, made its chugga-chug-chugga-chug lurch through the freshly ripped clay soil as he approached. Then, Tam stopped the machine not far from where I stood. The thing coughed a final blow from its smoke stack to rest sputtering from farm work. He was seeding about seven acres, which would produce much-desired grass for the cows. “Wanna nip?” he shouted, his own voice raspy with age, as he reached into his back pocket to pull out a plain bottle half-full with his home brew of golden-blond whisky.
“Sure,” I said, taking the bottle. “Damn! That’s good.” The smell of freshly plowed earth, alcohol, red diesel, and last year’s hay passed between us as I handed back his stash. The tractor continued to cough and sputter.
“Have another nip!” he offered, leaning in my direction from his perch on the tractor, hand outstretched. “OK,” I said, taking the bottle once more.
“What’re you planting?” I asked.
“Sudan grass. It’ll survive any drought, made for dry climates, the desert, North Africa, and we get lots of feed from it. If we’re lucky, we might even get two harvests from this planting.”
I handed back his bottle. “That’s awesome. Thanks for the nip! You do good work, Tam. I’m pretty sure the cows love you for it. Maybe more than your lady friends.”
“Never!” he said. “Come on by later!” he added, “I just made a new batch.” He was proud of his craft. He fired up the tractor, saluted me with a wave of his arm and hand, as if he was riding a horse, and began to chugga-chug around the field again spreading Sudan grass seed.
My after-hours visits with Tam were always a good plan. I dropped back into the cool shadows of trees to finish pruning, anticipating another evening whisky chat with Tam, who schooled me on the value of being a man and a rascal and the good life as he saw it.
Stacey Warde is retired from his labors as a farmhand and remembers his work there with fondness.
