For my paid subscribers, I’ll be posting sections of a memoir outlining how my family became part of a doomsday cult in Tucson, Arizona in the 1980s, and how I found myself traveling across the country to seek revenge on the cult’s leader.
These posts will be part of the first draft of a final compilation, so keep in mind that they are works in progress.
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Today, I’m continuing the story of life on the farm. You can read part one here. In part 2, I’ll explore our daily work routine and how we relaxed between tasks.
For a while, life on the farm was simple and serene. Our days consisted of work, meals, and a good amount of downtime to ponder life’s intricacies—or just get shitfaced drunk.
The guest room where I slept was nothing more than a large canvas military tent set squarely on top of the incubation shack, the roof of which was flat and made of particle board. The tent was accessible only by an eight-foot ladder, the top rung of which was about three feet shy of the roof—requiring me to climb to the top of the ladder, grab the roof’s edge, and hoist myself into the room.
The tent itself was mossy on the outside and sooty on the inside, thanks to a small wood stove in the corner. Its stovepipe jutted out through a hole crudely cut in the canvas. Event though it was summer, the marine layer often enveloped the mountains in a chilling fog. On those nights, I’d light the stove and close the flaps to stay warm.
The interior was coated in a layer of sticky oil—residue from years of use as a trimming room for the weed harvest. My bed was a severely aged faux-leather couch, with unimaginable horrors packed into its crevices. Each night, I laid down a blanket over the couch and slept in my sleeping bag on top of that.
My only comfort in that shack was knowing that in the case of a mountain lion attack, Jesse—cozied up in his ground-floor cabin—was far more vulnerable and appetizing than I was in my soot-stained hash burrito 10 feet off the ground.