6. Between a Chicken Farm and a Slaughterhouse
Our house in California was haunted by the spirit of a little girl who’d died of a tumor, but there was no aura of oppression as there was in our new house on the other side of the continent. In Lee, New Hampshire, the very earth itself seemed possessed by the spirits of darkness, ignorance, fear, boredom, and dread.
Our neighbors consisted of a chicken ranch across the street and a cattle slaughterhouse down the road, both run by people for whom killing was all in a day’s work. One of them was the town sheriff. The only escape from the stench of chicken shit and death was when the temperature dropped well below freezing.
I have few memories of those early days in New Hampshire, no doubt having blocked most of them. Looking back there is one memory, one scene that replays in my mind like a nightmare, because it foreshadowed my future-to-be in that cold, lonely place. In this memory I’m running uphill toward my house from the other side of a field, waist deep in snow. I’m in pain from the bitter cold. I am angry, crying, screaming, and fighting furiously against the snow, moving forward only inches at a time. It was the first time, but certainly not the last, as my numerous cases of frostbite would attest to, that I had ever experienced snow and I had no idea of what the cold could do. It was also the first time I felt like a victim of a cruel and unforgiving nature. The second time I felt like a victim of nature was in the spring when every sort of blood-sucking, flesh-biting, and orifice-tunneling parasite with wings mistook me for something delicious. I can clearly remember my borderline psychotic anger-driven, jumping, screaming, crying panic attack freak-outs when I had to walk miles home from school, and the entire way I was beset upon by a biblical scale of biting insects…thousands of them of every kind! Horse flies, deer flies, black flies, gnats, mosquitos. My imagination was too small to have ever thought such a horrible place could exist, let alone call it my home.
I felt like a refugee. Nothing was familiar. The locals with their heavy rural New England accent barely spoke the same language I had grown up with, and they had a completely ridiculous version of American history. In California we were taught about how the awesome Spanish conquistadors bravely conquered the savages and built Los Angeles in their search for gold. Now I was told stories about some silly-looking, uptight, boring Puritans and pilgrims who bravely conquered the savages to build Jamestown in their search for religious freedom. Outside of the brave conquering of savages for personal gain and profit, these two worlds had little in common.
My “neurologically diverse” perspective of life, combined with the adamant rejection of my new world, quickly got me categorized as a serious “social challenge.” Of course, that wasn’t what they called it back then. Our backwoods educational system, at the time the worst in the country after Arkansas, had no means whatsoever to deal with anyone whose life goals went beyond winning 4H medals for egg spotting and hog slaughtering. 4H clubs, for you city slickers, is a USDA sponsored, somewhat nationalistic, right wing rural youth club that helps children, or anyone with a 6th grade education, develop farm skills. 4H stands for head, heart, hands, and health.
Under increasing pressure from my family and other authority figures, I begrudgingly made attempts to integrate myself. I had not yet become so jaded and bitter that I had no desire to be accepted and liked, but my few attempts were more humiliating than hopeful.
At the town’s quatercentennial celebration parade, the population of two hundred showed up for the festivities. The parade itself was a marching band followed by a convoy of heavy farm equipment. The few young boys of the town were invited to decorate their bikes in a patriotic fashion and ride alongside the farm equipment. I decorated my bike with red, white, and blue ribbons and mounted a large gold tray embossed with an image of the Spaniards who’d colonized the west—an image these New Englanders found confusing, based on all the “What is that?” comments I received. In my mind my bike was by far the most beautiful of the parade.
The parade was to last a couple of miles and end in the town park, next to the town dump. I joined the parade halfway through. There I was, proud as could be, riding alongside a John Deere backhoe. At some point I must have lost control or wasn’t paying attention because all of a sudden my bike fell right in front of this tractor’s huge wheels. I jumped out of the way to keep from getting crushed, but there was no hope for my designer bike. It was squashed like a tin can! The entire parade stopped to examine the damage.
Not only was my beautiful bike turned into a piece of scrap metal, but I was humiliated in front of two hundred rednecks. “Oh, it’s that Stroud boy. He’s not from around here, you know. No, he’s from Los Angeles,” I could hear them saying.
The children of this community were not the children of the American Dream I was used to. They were children of farmers, chicken ranchers, leather and mill workers, and first cousins. As an outsider, I was ridiculed, scorned, beaten up, and shunned by my peers. Worse than that, I was forced to learn how to milk cows and square dance.
Needless to say, I sucked in school. I passed the fourth grade, but just barely. By the time it came to start fifth grade, I was so depressed, angry, and lonely the last thing I wanted was to go back to that circus of freaks called elementary school. I began that year poorly and ended it worse, failing miserably, despite the daily counseling, lecturing and blaming of “You’re just not trying hard enough.”
To my parents’ credit, they brought up the patently obvious fact that the teachers and the school were simply not very good, which had the unexpected blowback of my parents being called communists. Keep in mind, this was 1965, the peak of the Cold War, and folks ‘round there were still hoping Joseph McCarthy was going to make a comeback. Being called “commie” in those days was like being called a terrorist today.
By the time I was twelve I was in the “special” classes wherein the teacher’s prime objective was to keep this rabble of preteen alcoholics, emotionally damaged, mildly retarded, and severely learning-disabled misanthropes occupied for seven hours without incident. Academically, I was to remain at the fourth grade skill level of reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic.
The system had already assigned me to the loser lot of life before I’d even realized there were losers, although by now I was beginning to grasp the concept. My friends were all part of the same social tribe of misfits. On the outside we all believed and helped each other believe that we were just fine and that the system was completely fucked up. Inside, each of us there was a never-ending battle in which losing, however each of us defined that, would mean surrendering to the realization that we truly were broken and worthless. These inner war wounds were obvious in the way we did everything in our lives and especially in the way we tried to burn ourselves out as if committing a slow suicide, because we were terrified of the day when we’d look at ourselves and secretly say, “They were right.”
Next -> Part 1: Chapter 7 -- Kill, Killing Killed
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Duncan Stroud can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy