Bung Ball

The little rubber stopper that fits in the hole of a barrel is called a bung. (Making the whole where a bung goes, the bung hole. Hehehe). There's one bung that floats around the cellar that looks like it's been very roughly carved into a little ball, chunks shaved off of it making it bounce all wonky. It's amazing what happens when you give something resembling a ball to a boy. In this case, it's resulted in what we call Bung Ball, essentially a simplified version of cricket. One of the barrel rooms is half empty right now, much to the delight of cricket-happy cellar workers who somehow, after several consecutive weeks of overtime manual labor (yes, I have a paystub that said I worked 140 hours in 14 days and the exhaustion-rendered retardation to prove it), have the energy to end a day with a beer and some rousing rounds of bung ball.
Invariably, someone will hit the ball with a little more zeal than necessary and the ball gets ricocheted (we close the warehouse room's garage door so we're essentially inside a refrigeration unit, read Squash court) into the labrynth of barrels, sending a frantic "fielder" in between rows of barrels with a flashlight, face against the floor looking for the ball, all the while trying not to spill their beer while the man up to bat is scoring run after run.
This, I'll miss.

All Is Full of Love

I often get completely overtaken by love. By the massive amounts of love and beauty I feel coursing through the world. Not the pretty kind of love, the heartcrushing, bloody, raging kind of love. Maybe some people call this god, although I can't imagine the white bread, follow-the-rules, frail image I have of christian churchgoers to at all be feeling what I'm talking about. Or maybe they feel and worship it but are terrified and choose to distance themselves by calling it something outside of themselves, not knowing how to partake. At times, this love gushes out of me so powerfully that I fall completely helpless to it and for some reason, all I seem to be able to do is cry. Cry so hard that I feel like I could choke. Or I'm sure I could absolutely rage out in the forest somewhere, scream and stetch my arms out. This is the kind of love that makes me want to fight, be violent although not hurt anything. Like the ocean crashing up against rocks, each crash humbling the last, so lucky to be able to express this raging sublime violence.

This will ebb, or quiet down, and I'll look at myself in the mirror, feeling so incredibly beautiful, radiant and powerful. But in the mirror, I don't look that at all. My face is red, my lips puffy and I look small and petty. And I'm always so surprised. That what feels so incredibly beautiful doesn't look that pretty. Yet some people have an ability to transform this heartcrushing beauty into art.

Lately, as this seems to be the interim period, as it has been for a while now, between one segment of my life and the next, I'm brought again and again- I seem unable to stray from it for too long- back to this love. I walk around in a cloud, everyone around me feels miles away, and as often as I can, I sit on my heels next to my bed, unintentionally genuflecting, my face in my hands, sobbing. And listening, over and over, to Jonie Mitchell, Nina Simone, Alison Krauss, Van Morrison, Bjork, Ani Difranco, singers who, in my book, are speaking for this immense love.

I happen to be stripped absolutely bare right now. I'm a wide open wound. I have no identity in the world, I'm not a student or a stoner or a massage therapist or a mother, I don't really have anything that feels like "home", I'm not sure what I value, what I want or where I'm going. I'm not on a "path", I'm lost in the woods. Unarmed, so everything seeps in and pries me open. I feel like you almost HAVE to be an outcast or a hermit in some way in order to keep that connection alive. Or at least never fully compartmentalize your life to the point that there's no wiggle room, no voids unfilled, no passage in.

Inclusion on a large scale tends to water things down, bring things to a lowest, or at least lowER common denominator. To appeal to the widest possible audience, things tend to gravitate toward "pretty" and pleasing, easy to follow, not gut-busting, tear-you-eyes-out fucking beautiful.

The world is dangerous with mediocrity! Drop out of college, don't send your kids to kindergarten, turn off your tv!

If I can find a way to manifest this massive beauty, create something outside of me this beautiful, my life will be a success.

A few days ago, Jordan killed a deer. Rather, his dogs, on a walk, ran after it and attacked it and brought it down, his girlfriend sat on it to hold it down and walkie-talkied Jordan who dropped what he was doing, ran up the hill to her and slit its throat. Kyle, who works at a salmon processing plant in Alaska half the year and who therefore always has an excess of salmon, has a smoker and brought it in to work for the deer. So yesterday, we had smoked venison tacos, set up on a picnic bench in the cellar.

Pulled 'Coon' Sandwich

A few days ago, after work, Jordan got word that he had caught a "coon" in one of the traps he has set up throughout the vineyard. So after work, right as the sun was slowly setting, Jordan whistled to his dogs, pulled a hefty looking gun of some sort (this is not my area of expertise) out of his truck and he, Henry, Kyle and I trudged up through the vineyard. His dogs, Golly and Grumpy, all razzed and in hunting mode, sprinted ahead toward the trap and tore the raccoon from the finger trap before we even got to it. The raccoon put up a good fight but these dogs tore at it like a rag doll until it was done. A strange kind of mood happened to all of us individually- a very subtle change in the air that made everyone a little unsure as to how to carry themselves- about seeing something so incredibly alive and then a moment later, so completely dead.

"Ah this is just a little scrawny coon", said Jordan, looking it up and down, warding off his dogs. "A girl too. Not much meat on this one. Shall we hold off then for a bigger one?" he asked looking at me. Earlier in the week, as we all sat around the picnic table under a tree outside of the warehouse eating lunch, it somehow got out that I "hadn't eaten coon" which, for once, was NOT a sexual inuendo. And apparently Jordan eats coon all the time. So I agreed that if Jordan killed a raccoon and cooked it up, I'd have some, and since then we've been dreaming up the types of coon that could be made. Coon jerky, smoked coon, pulled coon sandwiches...

I'm not totally sure how I feel about actually eating a raccoon. I think the aversion to bugs and animals that eat our garbage and live in our sewage is a completely healthy one. But I guess I agreed.

Anyway, this one was passed up- thrown to the two neighbor dogs going ballistic behind a fence nearby- after cutting the tail off. Which Henry and Jordan de-boned on our picnic table. And the fluffy, boneless, and totally beautiful tail was given to me as some kind of trophy- me, the City Girl by default. I guess because I haven't eaten coon, and haven't skinned an animal, and was the only one of us who was unarmed.

Afterwards, we went back inside and finished cleaning the floors, the last thing we do at the end of the night before going home. As the cleaning process begins, out come the beers, out comes the frisbee, and someone cues up the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. Which is the nightly ritual. Naturally. This time, our cleaning ritual was enhanced by the yipping grunts of Jordan's dogs rolling around having shameless- and painful looking- sex, in reckless, passionate, post-hunt celebration.

Kyle. This day, Tony took a look at him when he strolled into the office like this, holding a massive insulated lunchbox, and said "...what is this? You look like a construction worker in Munich".

He listens to metal and only metal- I wish I could specify what kind of metal he listens to in order to give an accurate portrayal but I'm not familiar enough with metal to differentiate. I asked him at one point and he said "Don't even get me started!" so I said "...okay".

Kyle has the most energy I've ever seen directed so productively. To get onto the catwalk above the fermentation tanks, he grapples up the metal support beams hand over hand. At the end of a 13 hour shift, I can barely walk up the stairs! "Stairs are for pussies!" says Henry, painfully following in suit with the grappling.

The Last Week in Pictures

Our forklift broke the other day. We were able to lift things up, but not dump. So in order to load the hopper to the sorting table, one of the guys had to jump into the bin of grapes and shovel. Things actually got done faster than normal.

That night, we worked until 8:30. By the end, it was dark, which made my already mediocre forklift skills even subber par. So, attempting to pick up a bin of compost, I didnt quite pick it up but instead just rammed into it with the forks. I tried to hide it, but there are only so many hiding possibilities for a half ton bin so before we left, it was discovered and beer-fined a six pack of something hoppy.

The 80 Hour Work Week

"Today was the first day that actually felt like harvest", Jordan said this evening- 7pm, sun setting sleepily into a crisp evening, beer in hand, lounging back in a little rolly chair in Tony's office/lab/break room off of the cellar. 12 hours- our longest shift so far.

We sorted six tons of pinot, transfered a tank of wine into barrels for storage, drained two tanks of juice off of their skins, transfered them to another tank, and then (this is my favorite part) jumped into the "empty" tanks with a shovel and shoveled out the remaining grape skins. But the layer of skins is about three feet deep, heavy, and compresses the more you stand around on top of them. And the fermentation process released CO2, which is thick and strong smelling and poisonous, and which lingers in the tank and gets trapped in the skins- and released into your face as you shovel them out. A few days ago, Kyle- the new guy- cued up some hair metal on our shoddy make-shift sound system, took his shoes off, and jumped into a tank and went absolutely balistic on it until it was empty- which took all of 12 minutes. It took me 25 minutes today.

We then pressed off the skins- which involves another full-immersion cleaning experience in the Press- a mazzive rotating stainless steel cylinder with an expanding bladder inside it that squeezes every last drop of liquid out of the parched and flakey grape skins. We did our morning and evening punchdowns (mixing the fermentation tanks to keep the grape skins in contact with the juice- they get pushed up the the top of the tank by the CO2 gas coming from the fermentation, and form a cap which is so strong you can walk on it). And then cleaned everything until it sparkled. "Welcome", said Jordan on our first day. "Work a harvest, learn how to be a janitor".

Then comes my favorite part of the day, driving the old, super broken down Ford dumptruck to the compost pile to dump all of the stems and pummace from the day. This truck is so trashed it's insane. I think it's Jordan's and works well enough for him. But the battery drains so bad that we have to disconnect it any time we're not driving it, the driver's side door doesn't have a doorhandle so you have to reach outside the window to let yourself out- or climb out the window when even that doesn't work. The radio flicks on and off randomly when you're driving. The upholstery is so worn that the entire interior of the truck is basically reduced to sawdust and chipping plastic. And the windshield is so thick with dirt that if the sun catches it wrong, you're completely blinded and have to stick your head out of the window or, as I usually do, just keep going and trust you'll be fine. For some reason, the thought of dragging a hose over and washing the windshield seems like sacrilege, although that would probably be a pretty logical thing to do.

Henry grabbed a beer out of the cooler as I popped the hood and reconnected the battery, and we drove up the gravel washboard road through the rolling vineyard and to the compost pile, beer bottle between my legs, stalling several times and laughing with exhaustion. And from the compost pile, climbing on top of the mound of sticky grape stems and yellowjackets, a pregnant half moon could be seen hanging in a glowing blue newly-night sky.