Her life is an amazing story, wherever you might want to begin, and I have spent many an hour listening to accounts of her childhood, her indentured years, her determination to get to America, and her adventures in this country. Her life began in Paraguay where she was a child of a sect of White Russian Mennonite missionaries who had settled in Paraguay.
Now, 34 years later, I still correspond with this woman by email-- sometimes several times a day! At the moment she lives in the wooded Appalachian folds of West Virginia where she has, for some ten years or so, a house perched high over her several hundred acres, and tends to the varied wildlife who find sanctuary there. It requires active posting and patrolling of her perimeters (with loudly blaring "boom box") to keep hunters from poaching deer and turkeys, and she has taught the animals to trust no one outside of her property lines. They know that even she will act menacing if they venture out.
When she first came to her mountain she wrote such stories of wonder that I thought I would write a children's story about the woman who could not count the trees. I sketched out illustrations of this womanly creature who fearlessly traipsed among her hardwoods in lumberjack boots and a peasant dress trying to tally the trees in a notebook. I think she still has that set of sketches. I never did finish the project. I still think it would be a good one.
But she is not finished yet!
She has not finished counting the trees or collecting the animals. She is not finished making her visions come to reality. This week she tells me about her progress in getting some funding for adding Friesian horses and some camels to her collection!
Along with the descriptions of her "forest friends" come remarkable photographs that she takes point-blank while they graze and nibble the "goodies" she sets out for them in strategically placed feeding grounds. Where else might you find, free to come and go, a couple of eight point bucks looking you calmly in the eye? Or a mother skunk with young? Or little foxes? She has kindly given me permission to use her photos.
The food merchants in the small town nearby know that she will come regularly with a pick-up for the produce wilted or otherwise unmarketable to humans. She has taught them what sorts of things to save out especially. She tells me that the truck sometimes is very smelly. Yesterday she mentioned that she had "seasoned" some meat bones a few days before offering them to the vultures that visit. It is good she has a lot of acreage for her projects, and a nose tolerant for the task.
As I think over the chunk of life that I have been privy to through my friendship with her I realize that it reads like some mythological tale. Any part of it would seem an exaggeration if I did not really know it to be true. The extremes of her childhood in Paraguay, connection to the forest inhabitants and creatures that somehow trusted her, the enslaving lifestyle she willed herself to escape from, the bizarre life she found as a young adult in America in the 60's, and her emergence from that into a heartbreaking marriage that she will never get over. The saga of her life include privileged years, periods of great need, adventures in India and Peru and eastern and western Europe, times when she owned many properties but had no cash, times when she constructed fine houses for other people and lived in a shack, times when she wore silk and lived in a palace, but flew away like a caged bird.
In her life there are real shamans and real princes and a dying artist who took refuge in my friend's house for comfort in the last days of her life. There are Paraguayan officials she has dealt with to enable her to make things better for her beloved native friends in the deep forest of northeast Paraguay who have inducted her into their tribe. These small brown people lovingly built a hut for her so they can receive the medicines they need.
Child of Robin Hood, she might be, sometimes getting "burnt" helping the down-and-out people she meets, but rising up like a phoenix and insisting on giving the next one a chance to do the honorable thing. Or maybe she is Artemis, but she will not hunt. She confronts hunters with the same wiles as she uses to handle the Paraguayan politicians-- making them comfortable and making them laugh, and then making them do what she wants. Maybe she is Artemis-in-Reverse, -- a goddess begotten of and for the woodland who specializes in overcoming rapacious humans! She wins by wiles, as a fox or raven!
I am enriched for having known this woman, and I know it. I am still leaning forward to hear her words because they are so quiet and because they are absolutely fascinating.
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