Me? A Bald Headed Hippie

 This picture typifies where I have spent most of my life being a bald old hippie. I belong there, I searched it out... it just felt better than anywhere else, especially towns and cities.

My daughter advised me that I was a bald headed hippie... by reading Omnivore's Delima. I'm sure she meant it in the nicest sorta' way. She wants to borrow the book from me. It'll scare the pee out of her, being the hard nosed emviromentalist that she is. It scared me!

I was reading the like of the Last Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News, Organic Gardening and a host of other "concerned youth" publications before she was born.

I was taking water samples of the upper Potomac River with a Hach water testing kit I spent 100 dollars on in 1973...only to have the EPA ignore our plea. We found the mill purchased a "permit to pollute". So yes, I'm guilty of being somewhat of an old, fat, bald hippie...

I actually earned the name "hippie on the hill" for refusing to use fertilizer on a garden that didn't need it. I am not a food snob, and definitely no a restaurant goer. I will eat most anything that don't eat me first. I've been  to pick morel mushrooms in the quiet, drippy, sunrise of an April morning in the mountains. I've frozen my butt of sitting in a tree stand to hunt the King's deer. Never like hunting, or butchering much, but it's part of the Omnivore's Delima. Again, an old bald hippie.

Meat is good, veggies are good, fruit is good, and all are better if you control where they come from, and how they are raised, which takes a little work and planing. This is not available to most of the American Public anymore...they are too busy trying to keep body an soul together financially. Even old hippies have that problem now days.

I'm big  old and fat...strong as an ox, happy go lucky, interested most everything except modern culture, sports heroes and movies. I can still work. I enjoy working the ground, making pottery, planting garlic and living with someone who shares the same values...an old bald HAPPY hippie.

Rivers are cool, springs are cooler. Water is not a right, it's a necessity that we all need to share...period.

Mountains shouldn't be torn down for coal. "Crime lights", or security lights are an American passion and paranoia. They waste of electricity that could save tons of coal a year. This statement is not aimed at anyone in particular...I just think motion lights are more effective and efficient that giving the power company 25 dollars a month to have a light come on at dark every night. How can one sleep with that thing shining in the window. Yeah, just an old bald hippie talking.

Don't like loud music...any songs with more than four chords are suspect. Stories are good, TV sucks, for the most part. Old people and their stroies are the best. Nothing like a rocking chair and a few old hippies to talk to. Guess I qualify.

 Red roses are nice but a field of Queen Anne's Lace, Golden Rod, Iron Weed and Jo Pie Weed trump a rose every time.

Oh. by the way, I planted my collard plants by moonlight last night...I could see perfectly well. No smog. The plants were glad to get in the ground without frying in 96 degree heat on Sept 21. I'll have to shade them today...but planting at night listening to owls, crickets and some insect I never heard before was neat. Old bald hippies don't like to fry in the garden if they don't have to.

I guess I am an old bald hippie...I imagine the only difference in myself and the real 60's and 70's hippies is that Credence Clearwater Revival, Goose Creek Symphony, Ozark Mt. Daredevils and Taj Mahal were as close to rock and roll and psychedelia as  I ever got in W Va! I admit I did listen to the Beatles once, but I didn't inhale.

 Course the corn likker and homemade beer weren't THAT bad on Sat night. Yeah, old bald hippies celebrate Saturday night, not as late, or as boisterously as we used to!