Marfa Potter stood over her blender, unsure of what to make this morning. She felt well but bowel tremors had awakened her during the night, so a good onion-parsnip infusion would be just the thing.
At the same time her nerves were a bit on edge because if the kerfuffle at the pharmacy where she worked - a woman demanding, absolutely demanding a medication that had long since been discontinued and taken off the shelves. Near hysterical with anger and frustration, the woman banged on the counter with her cane, and demanded to see the manager.
'It's Mrs. Goldblatt', Marfa informed the manager who was in the middle of compounding a drug. Lexington Pharmacy was one of the few independent, family owned pharmacies in the Washington suburbs, and one of even fewer which still compounded drugs, so the manager took special care and pride in his skill. 'Tell her I'm busy', he said to Marfa and went on with his business.
Now, Mrs. Goldblatt was demented, that much Marfa knew, and her condition required patience and consideration, but she caused a ruckus when she came in every Thursday and upset the applecart. It took infinite patience and some diversionary tactics to calm the old lady down,
Stirring in some bone broth along with tincture of bloodwort and anise blossoms, she very much needed the infusion's calming, restorative properties.
Marfa's kitchen shelves had as many potions, tinctures, powders, grains, and seeds as an ancient Egyptian apothecary. Despite working in a pharmacy - or perhaps because of it - she eschewed any of the concoctions brewed up, bought, and sold. Every day she prescribed more anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, ADHD drugs than she thought the leafy suburb's residents could possibly consume. It might be God's will, but this corner of the globe had some serious problems.
Problems which she took home with her, requiring the bone broth mixture.
Every morning after a healthy, well-proportioned, and carefully balanced breakfast - like every other meal, it was comprised of foraged plants - reeds, sea grass, lichen, moss, algae, and fox burr - mixed in with rugged, unhusked, organic grains and goat milk.
Whole Foods of course carried none of these items, but Bruce Davidson's shop did. Davidson had spent years in the northern forests of Humboldt County and the deep woods across the Oregon border, and he with his fellow refugees from the city concocted brews from Yakima and Aleut Indian herbal recipes, bottled them, and once a month made the trek south to the city to sell them.
When the cold damp weather finally go to him with a bad case of rheumatism, he decamped, left the business to his colleagues, and headed East where from his small confectionary tucked away in a back alley, he tended to the ailments of people.
This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg. America is filled with people like Davidson and Marfa Potter, men and women who have found ways and means of surviving in the impersonal world of today, turned their alternative life style into a religion, and became cadres of belief.
Marfa did not really believe in djinns and evil spirits, but did not disbelieve either. Her amulets, sprigs of honeysuckle and birch, inscriptions, and engravings were 'just in case', but the truth of the matter she was as disoriented and mentally discombobulated as Mrs. Goldblatt.
Bruce Davidson, the dispenser, before moving to Humboldt County had lived with other members of the Church Glorious and Resplendent, a large congregation of over a thousand souls tucked away in a broad valley of the Mountain West. The Church was millennial, apocalyptic, and charismatic and had moved to the mountains from California, convinced that it would be hived off from the mainland in a cataclysm of existential proportions.
The relocated church, far from the coast and from any big city would thrive and when Armageddon would come they, burrowed deep below the mountain in shelters, would emerge to repopulate the earth.
The Church was just the place for Davidson, for he was a seeker, discontent with the platitudes and homilies of organized religion, and hungry for spiritual awakening. At the Church and in the hands of its charismatic leader, he found what he had been looking for. The Reverend Blanton A. Parsons invoked the Inca gods of the Peruvian altiplano, the spirits of the Mesoamerican Mixtecs and Aztecs, and the souls of the departed Mauryan saints. He was the incarnation of the descended masters in whom the energies of all holy men before him resided.
Every day Davidson and his fellow congregants prostrated themselves before Master Parsons and begged the many gods, saints, and spirits of the past to watch over them, give them spiritual sustenance and eternal life.
When the Church was raided by the FBI in a notorious episode not unlike that of the Texas Branch Davidians but without the carnage - they simply rounded up Parsons and his inner circle, handcuffed them, charged them with money laundering on a Bernie Madoff scale, and carted them off to federal prison.
Accounts in the New York Times whose reporters had had access to Madoff and Jeffrey Skilling, the infamous Enron con man, said that both men were impressed with the scale and intricacy of the Church affair. 'Rank amateurs', Madoff was reported to have said. 'Hayseeds; but impressive to say the least'.
Nothing new here either, nor anything surprising. America is full of credulous seekers and the snake oil salesman ready to take them for a ride. The financial empire of Parsons and the Church was impressive, all the more so because it had so long remained anonymous and undiscovered. 'Along the way', said Parsons to an FBI agent in the paddy wagon taking him to Helena, 'I did some good'.
Things have a way of revolving in a 'what goes around, comes around' kind of way, and so it was that Davidson's colleagues who had stayed in Humboldt County after he had left, had joined the Ken Kesey-inspired cross-country caravan and on January 6th marched on the Capitol. It was quite an event, for Davidson's crew and their associates, the heart and soul of the neo-hippy, Great American Circus, cavalcades picked up every sort, variety, and species of crazy along the way. By the time they got to Washington and marched on Congress, they were a doo-dadded, Viking helmeted, face-painted, fright-wigged, barnstorming mob.
Although the political Left howled 'Insurrection!', it was nothing of the sort. It was just America being America, as wacko, unhinged, and freaky as can be. It was a show of solidarity and character. For once and for all the stuffed shirts of Washington would see what America was really made of.
Much is made these days of 'diversity', a catch-all phrase meant to assemble people of color, the disabled, the alternately sexed, the poor, the marginalized, and the homeless into one large, accommodating basket.
Yet the real diversity is not that politically-driven, narrowly focused, self-interested category. It is the cultists, the uber-vegans, the foragers, seekers, nonsensical believers, millennialists, and naked Humboldt County holy men. It is the scammers, the con men, the fraudsters, the make-a-buck tricksters and modern-day snake oil salesmen.
It is the hilarity of Congress, the nicky episodes of grilling witnesses, the fraudulent ankle-biters from the inner city, loudmouths, pretenders, and buffoons. It is the store-front churches packed to the gills, televangelists, and spiritual hucksters. It is lockstep neighborhoods with electric cars and COVID vigilantes, Hollywood tarts, Las Vegas tinsel, La Cage Aux Folles transvestites....The list is endless.
'What a great country', say patriots who are thinking of money, opportunity, warfare, and the world's biggest economy; but real patriots recognize the absolutely irredeemable bourgeoisie that gives the country its cheap excesses, the clown shows, the soapy serials, the gunracks, bass boats, and tobacco chaws of the swamps.
'Pomegranate juice and flax seed', said Marfa. 'Just the trick'.
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