writer & storyteller
In The Dirt
I worked at a farm camp for a few summers and our staff team had strong bonds; nothing brings you together like teaming up to catch an escaped goat. Most of us were teachers during the year and a couple others worked at the farm. There were some wild cards, like a nice but mysterious lone wolf who went by Mav, short for Maverick. I never got a look at his driver’s license, but I’m not sure it was his real name. He rolled into camp from Arizona, where he’d been a ropes and rock climbing instructor. We also had Stacy, who taught yoga, made jewelry, and had a famous cat, Napoleon Bonaparte, now starring in a Netflix documentary. Stacy had bought a van she wanted to refurbish and take cross-country, but it was taking forever to get the different parts and pay for repairs, so it was stuck in her driveway. Stacy dripped magic and the campers loved her. When we had campfires, she drove everyone there on the hay wagon with a confident speed.
Allison worked at the farm during the year. She was tall and beautiful, knew an alarming amount about chickens, and had the best posture I’ve ever seen. Allison loved rules. But dig a little deeper and she had you peeing your pants with a good story about pallbearing a sheep with a hot farmer at six a.m. She lived in a huge old farmhouse with other interesting people and took renters for the summer if any camp staffers needed a room. One summer she rented to a new guy, Freschi, who we called by last name only.
Freschi was still in college with a year to go, ten years younger than most of us. He double majored in physics and philosophy and had invented a solar energy device that won him a bucket of money. Before that, he worked on a farm in South America for a year. He was passionate about renewable energy and excited to share a lot of facts, but I didn’t retain much science because I was distracted by his performance. He was like an energetic puppy. You loved to stop and play with him.
Freschi always started his stories with both hands gripping his backpack straps like he would propel upwards from excitement if he didn’t restrain himself. As the story went on he added hand and arm motions that along with the thrill on his face would’ve got the point across with no words at all. When he and his campers came back from one of their offsite adventures – he had the oldest group – he had things to tell. A bear got into the food on a camping trip. The kids waded a river and they all got leeches. He loved it.
I usually heard his reports when he came into the barn in the morning. My group’s headquarters were in the back, and all the camp equipment was stored in the front, so the barn became a spot for water-cooler conversation when the staff came in for frog nets and bug jars and spare rubber boots. Since I was always there in the morning I caught everybody’s news and heard anything I’d missed the day before.
I had the youngest campers, called the Junior Fiddleheads. A fiddlehead is a baby fern; sometimes we saw the real fiddleheads in the forest, near skunk cabbage and spiderwebs on walks along the creek bank. At the farm, life was everywhere and we grabbed it and looked close. Worms in the dirt, sunfish in the pond, butterflies in the meadow, tomatoes in the garden, eggs in the henhouse.
Everyone else followed a set schedule, but the oldest and youngest groups did their own thing, so sometimes we visited the thirteen-year-olds at their hangout by the garden. Next to the cornstalks and cucumber plants Freschi goofed with my kindergartners until he ran out of material after five minutes. The other staff always said they’d never be able to deal with the littlest kids all day and I felt the same about the oldest. We rotated if someone was out, but just like during the school year, I hated having a sub fill in for me. There was nothing worse than having to deal with some leftover-from-yesterday issue while goats screamed for breakfast and the rooster screeched his manliness near my untouched iced coffee. And it was important to communicate about information both good and bad with my families because they were all nervous about sending their five-year-olds to a free-range farm all day for the first time. The Juniors program was brand new and I’d put it together, so my name was on whether it worked or not.
So far it did. The Juniors brought hay to the cow, T-Bone, and built dams in the creek. They kept a duckling for a pet and sang along to Freschi’s ukulele at the campfire. Every day I went home streaked with fish guts, frog slime, puddle mud, thistle pokes, garden dirt, sticky s’more, blood, sweat, and tears. It was great.
After his days with the teens, Freschi carpooled home with Allison to the farmhouse. He had a nightly Oreos-and-milk routine and before long he’d roped her in. They seemed an unlikely friend pair, but somehow it fit. Kind of like our whole group. We all camped in the farmhouse backyard to watch a meteor shower. We went down the Jersey shore (Freschi played Pokemon Go) and to a swamp in the Pine Barrens (Freschi dipped in). At some point, somebody met his grandmother.
I brought the camp team into Philly one night to go to an open mic story slam. Everybody knew me there; I went all the time. I felt responsible for my friends, like I was bringing outside guests to a family picnic – especially because I was kind of interested in the host, this guy Tim. I texted him to say I would see him there and that I was bringing a crew.
All of the farm group put their names in the hat to tell a story onstage. There was a strict five-minute time limit; the host rang a bell at the four-minute warning and then at five minutes to kick you off. The audience was full; Tim started the show, charmed the crowd, told a hilarious story, pumped the room full of good energy, and then pulled Freschi’s name out of the hat. Freschi went up to the mic. Tim went and sat at a table to the side of the stage.
Freschi started a story about when he was eighteen and worked on a farm in a remote village in Ecuador for a year. He didn’t know any Spanish and the family he lived with didn’t know any English. The first week he drank from a bull trough and got sick, and the family’s traditional sacred healing rituals surprised him.
By minute four of the story Freschi had only gotten as far as the part where he fell ill and was staring glassy-eyed at the stars through an outhouse roof. Tim rang the bell for the minute warning.
By minute five, Freschi was still sick in bed. Tim rang the bell; time was up. Freschi didn’t acknowledge it and kept going.
Minute six: The family rubbed raw eggs on his stomach. Tim rang the bell.
Minute seven: A healer came from the village, covered him in a white sheet, and whacked him with a mint bush. Tim rang the bell.
Minute eight: A more important healer came from the village with a handle of vodka and a live guinea pig. Tim stopped ringing the bell. He looked at Freschi like he was going to kill him.
Minute nine: The healer took a swig of vodka and spit it in Freschi’s face, then kept going til he used up the bottle.
In minute ten, the healer hit Freschi with the live guinea pig until it died. Tim brought the bell back and rang it aggressively every twenty seconds. The third time it rang, Freschi glanced over, but he kept going until he wrapped his story at eleven minutes and three seconds.
I was dying inside. Freschi came back over looking like he’d just given birth after thirty-six hours of labor. The energy of the crowd was split between awkward rustling and chaos-appreciative applause. The farm camp crew screamed laughing and ripped into Freschi for the bell ringing seven times.
“I didn’t hear it,” he said. “I was so locked in.”
Tim got back on the mic, enraged. I wanted to cover my face. At the same time, I couldn’t be mad at Freschi. It wasn’t just that the camp team was ride or die. It was also that he was so excited about his story.
I felt like I needed to fix it, though, and when the show was over I said sorry to Tim for bringing the guy who went over time. He looked personally insulted and shook his head.
Back at camp the next week, a storm knocked out power and the pigs busted through the electric fence and wandered to the campfire. Freschi reported that his kids caught twenty-five confirmed frogs – confirmed meaning he laid eyes on bodies – on an overnight. Stacy drove our group and a few others down to the creek on the hay wagon, went behind the trees and shoved her legs into a ten-foot rubber tail, and introduced herself as a mermaid. Brody, one of my campers, called her bluff, but nobody cared. The campers swam with the mermaid under a real-life waterfall where the creek water, tinged a healthy orange from iron-rich soil, spilled over a rock shelf. It was magical.
My campers were excited to tell their parents; everything was cute and happy. The Junior Fiddleheads program was in the home stretch. I felt good.
A couple days later I had to stay home sick. The next morning I passed one of my early-dropoff campers on my way to the barn; the rest of the families would arrive any minute. I saw Freschi cross the grass and stop to say hi to my camper. Then he met me at the barn door, excited.
“Yo, I had your kids yesterday,” he said. My brain cell that scans for danger woke up, wiped the drool off, and stood at attention.
“I didn’t know what to do with them for five hours so I’m like, we’ll do a wilderness survival activity,” he said. “So we tried to catch a rabbit and couldn’t.”
Okay. The brain cell got into position like a shortstop.
“So I go, well what else could we eat if we’re hungry, and a kid said worms,” he continued. “So I found a huge worm and I ate it.” He beamed. “And the kids all looked at me in horror.”
People went in and out of the barn. I stayed focused. I sensed he wasn’t finished.
“Then they just went bananas,” he said, throwing arms out and laughing insanely, “grabbing fistfuls of worms and eating them whole!”
A pit formed in my stomach. The brain cell tagged itself out.
“We were so dirty,” Freschi went on, “Crawling in the mud all day eating worms! I swear every kid ate at least two!” He was thrilled.
Parents were crossing the grass with their kids and heading toward us.
“And listen to this,” he said. “Brody just came up to me with this huge grin on his face and he said, ‘I threw up when I got home last night, but I didn’t tell my dad we ate worms!’”
In two seconds I processed everything he had just told me. Then I put it away forever. I decided I would take the fifth.
I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t be mad at him. He was so happy.
Suddenly something registered. “What the f*#k were you going to do if you caught a rabbit?” I asked.
“I didn’t think that far ahead,” he said.
Since farm camp, Freschi’s lived in Thailand, New York, and Canada; during the pandemic he submitted to the Canadian government a thirty-page document with photo evidence to prove the relationship between him and his girlfriend was authentic, so he could stay there legally. He also made a horror movie called Kentucky Fried Manmeat and opened a fish market, all while working for an energy consulting firm that predicts the price of electricity.
I asked him if he had any hot tips on gas: I could plan which day to fill the tank. He had to remind me that gas and electricity aren’t the same thing, which I would’ve known if I’d paid more attention to his stories.