So, here I am, reeling from the events of the recent weeks...and then comes a blessed respite. One of the "perks" of being on the janitorial crew was that, every summer, tradition sent us to Mountain Farm for a couple of weeks, to pick strawberries.
Ahhhhhh!! Back to the farm fields, doing what I did every summer in Oregon: picking berries, in between being a vacation pioneer (as it was then called). I did it well, and as I was very tall, I was also a prime candidate to stay on and thin the apple/pear/peach trees that were also on the property. So, when the rest of the crew went back to Brooklyn, I was asked to stay, and I gladly accepted.
So much for Bethel Entrant's School--they didn't have an "extension" university there outside of Clinton, NJ. So much for service and meetings--I went to one meeting and went out in service just once over the next 3 months. I was a worker: that was my job, and all the "spiritual" stuff was relegated to a distant second place.
Except for the rifle. There were a lot of rabbits and woodchuck on the property, and I was told that they whacked at the trees pretty badly in the spring, and so "pest control" was needed. But, because of the anti-gun feelings of the WTS (and, mind you, I'd never been a hunter), the Farm Overseer could only provide me with the weapon: he couldn't provide me the shells. So, in my dutiful way, I pulled out from the $14 a month that I was given by the WTS, and bought my own bullets.
Every evening, I would do a walk-about, bare-footed (my shoes had worn out), blasting the heads off these little critters, and (this may sound very strange) thinking that by so doing I was serving Jehovah in thereby protecting His "crops" for the benefit of all my fellow Bethelites.
No replacement clothes for that entire summer: I scabbed thread-bare shorts and shirts from a discard bin in the farmhouse. No haircut since before I had arrived there: my locks were down over my shoulders. I hadn't shaved in well over a month. And then, one day, Knorr arrives, in his Cadillac, while I'm hunkered down in the berry field. I hide myself, like some vagrant who is afraid that they'll be escorted off the property. He enjoys his breakfast, while I eat the few straggling berries that are left on the plants. I was so relieved when he left without seeing me.
And then, in the fall, I was told that it was time to go back to Brooklyn. The very first thing they did was to immediately usher me to the barber shop, and clean me up.
I was so psychologically disoriented at this point that I really can't say that I could even tell up from down. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was going according to my expectations. But, the self-denial kicked in even stronger: now that I was back at Brooklyn, things would get better, right? The homosexuality scandal was over, the episode at Mountain Farm was a mere aberration, and soon everything would be all right.
