Lick and chew, think and blink

Horsey girls, farming with Haflingers, and lifesaving horse paste

PAST

I had pecked girls on the cheek when I was still in elementary school, but the first time I really kissed a girl, I was in eighth grade. I was attending RHAM Junior High School in rural Amston, CT where we lived on an oil and stone road, between woods and a swamp, . It was Christmas time, and there was a community gathering up the street. The party was in a house built in 1790, and had a stable in back — along with some real live horses. I was trying to disappear into the couch as I nibbled cookies and listened to the adults talking and laughing.

Suddeny this girl was standing in front of me, with a halo of Christmas tree light behind her like my very own angel of mercy. “Can I sit here?” Jesus, Joseph and Mary! “Uh, yeah, sure.” Awkward, so awkward, but somehow we started talking. Before too long, she asked if I had been out to the the stable. Shit, I didn’t even know there was a stable. “Nope.” “Do you want to check it out?” “Yup.”

As I write this forty two years later, it’s the first time it occurs to me that this was a girl who knew what she wanted and had a plan. She had long, shiny chestnut hair, and gold rimmed aviator glasses that made her look kind of like a young Farah Fawcett to me. How could I have never not noticed her before? Granted we didn’t ride the same bus, and we weren’t in the same classes, but we sure had some quick chemistry.

We talked for a long time that evening. I have no recollection what we talked about, but I do remember the novelty of having an extended conversation about a wide range of topics with a girl my age. I can recall the explosions in my brain that came from the kiss which she initiated next to the horse stables, but more than that, I was thunderstruck by what it felt like to be attracted to another human being, and have those feeling reciprocated.

There was something magical about the holiday music drifting from the house, the cold air and smells of the tack and straw, and the quiet sounds of the horses moving and breathing. It turned out that she was a horse girl, so this was her comfort zone. She had been riding horses since she was little, and this helped explain her predilection for plaid shirts and blue jeans. I made a mental note that horsey girls had a lot to offer until proven otherwise.

School was out for Christmas break, and since she lived just up the street, I called the number she had scribbled on a scrap of paper the night before. She picked up on the second ring, and yes, I could come by to hang out. She lived in one of the many saltbox houses that can be found on back country roads in New England. Her parents were both at work, and she had her own bedroom. Geese, I couldn’t hear what she was saying for my heart pounding in my ears. More kissing ensued.

Sadly, it didn’t last beyond the first day back at school. I remember looking up from my open locker to see her walking down the hall with some girlfriends. Our eyes met, and then she looked away, and that was that. Her mom answered the phone the next few times I tried to call. No explanation, no note, no nothing. The rejection stung, but I didn’t languish. I figured that her clique had passed judgement and I didn’t meet the bar. It sure was nice while it lasted….

LESS DISTANT PAST

In 1989 I was studying international business in Copenhagen, Denmark. The net effect of my efforts was to persuade me that I had chosen the wrong path, but I stuck with it in order to finish my degree in business economics rather than add a fifth year of classes and pile of debt to my college experience. It was around this time that I became very interested in farming, and set a long-term goal to acquire some practical knowledge on the subject.

Yves Carlier working with the Haflingers

If the Fall of 1993, I headed to south central France for an apprenticeship at Le Couteil, the farmstead of La Famille Carlier. The 120 acre farm raised organic meat, which was butchered on site and taken to regional farmers markets in a refrigerated truck unlike anything I’ve seen in the states. The farm house dated back to the 1700s and had been the poker retreat of a French duke.

My first assignment upon arrival was cleaning the leather collars for the draft horses. These horses were in fact double ponies called Haflingers, which hailed from the Swiss mountains. They are beautiful and intelligent creatures who are sturdier than horses and love to work. Fieldwork at Le Couteil, whether it was spreading manure, plowing, or harvesting hay, was done with the team hitched up four abreast or two and two, depending upon the task. There was also an enormous Percheron on the farm which was used more for pleasure riding in a carriage.

The farmers market truck

Cleaning out the cow stalls, bringing hay to the cows in the pasture, and generally working about the farm left me in the leanest, meanest state of physical strength I have been before or since. The biggest meal of the day was lunch, and Brigitte would create the most magnificent dishes from the simple pallette of eggs, farm cheese, leeks, potatoes, butter, onions and the range of meat and poultry grown on the farm. She would also make mouthwatering tarts from the apples kept in cold storage. Almost everything, including the wheat for the flour used to bake our bread, was grown on the farm.

The only dietary objection I had during my tenure with the Carliers was beef tongue, because I simply couldn’t get past the texture. Ultimately, I enjoyed the blood sausage (saucisson noir), but I needed at least a week’s distance from the blood-covered kitchen table and the site of the slaughtered pig’s head bobbing up and down in a huge stock pot on the stove!

Yves, Frederic, The Italian, and Brigitte

This period of my life could and will serve as a rich repository of stories for Lightning Bug, as the learning was so deep and extensive. For now, I’ll say that I learned I was not meant to be a farmer, as the physicality of it left me with two shoulders burning and aching to such a degree that I couldn’t lift my arms to wash my face. Perhaps with better pacing I could make it work, but in the meantime, I pivoted to a career in healthcare and have been at it for more than thirty years. Even with the supports in place from the French government, and people willing to pay the equivalent of $10/lb for organic meat in 1994, the Carliers struggled. I could foresee the backbreaking work, debt and uncertainty that farming in the United States was likely to involve. There was a good nursing program at the Community College of Philadelphia which I could pay for as I worked my way through school. The pay wasn’t great, but the job security was appealing, and it would be a skillful way to serve humanity.

PRESENT

Long before we ever met, I watched Pierre’s testimony in front of the US Senate Subcommittee which eight million other people watched before You Tube took it down. My wife had called me into the living room with “Hey, you’ve got to see this!” Halfway through I was certain of several things: this guy had guts, he was smart, he was risking it all, and going to the mat for what he believed. Two previous conversations clicked into place like the tumblers on a combination lock to a safe holding the crown jewels. The first conversation had been with my cousin Danny, who follows the latest on solar flares and is a prepper. He had asked me if I ever heard of this drug called ivermectin and whether it could help treat COVID. I had arrogantly responded that I’d never heard of it, and because I worked in a unversity hospital with world renowned medical researchers, it must be a non-entity or we’d be using it. The second conversation was with my dentist, who had done black box research for the Department of Defense in a physiology lab at Temple University before his foray into dentistry. He asked me the same question as my cousin, except this time the source of the question got my attention. Then came Pierre’s fateful senate testimony.

The next day I was in the feed store at Agway with a $100 bill looking for horse paste. I found it and cleared an entire display of it off the shelf. The exchange between the clerk and I was hilarious, mostly non-verbal. She, in her worn flannel and Carharts, who could have easily bench-presseed three of me, her eyes saying “If you’re a horse owner, I’m Barbie.” Me, in my LL Bean fleece, Italian beanie, and Keen shoes, daring her with my eyes “That’s a Ben Franklin on the counter baby, and I mean business.”

My wife and I figured out that the 0.2mg/kg dose was easy-peasy, just dial in the syringe for our weight, give a little push, and a pea-sized dollop of titanium dioxide, propylene glycol, artificial green apple flavor, and ivermectin landed in the spoonful of applesauce. We toasted each other with a clink-clink of our spoons and down the hatch it went. Until the day we could get a human prescription, after paying $400 each for a consult with a telemedicine doc and $120 each for a prescription, it was weekly horse paste and applesauce for us. The worst thing that happened was eventually I developed some wicked heartburn.

I’d had two doses of our special applesauce before my first Pfizer. Yes, I know, I know, the unvaccinated in the crowd are shouting, “Why?!?” I didn’t know yet. I was terrified of dying. I was practically kissing COVID patients and spending two hours at a time sweating my tuckus off in a plastic gown, providing care in a 10ft by 10ft room.

There was one other colleague at work who was on the same page. We both started the horse paste at the same time. I rarely have contact with him now, as he has continued working at SUNY Upstate. It was helpful, though, to know and strategize with another nurse who had made the same calculations and decided that the risk-benefit ratio said to do it.

I used to be ashamed about taking the horse paste and wouldn’t have wanted to share this information. Today, knowing that both my wife and I are vaccine injured from bad batch shots: mine, Pfizers, and hers, Moderna, I am grateful that we did what we did. For my part, if I didn’t have two doses of IVM in my body before the first shot, I think I would be dead. What I understand today, which took a while to comprehend, is that it isn’t me or my wife who bear any shame. It is the physicians who went along with the system and endorsed untested and lethal shots for us who should be ashamed. We were just trying to survive.

Dr Paul Marik gave a brief interview after the recent news of the FDA settlement in the case he and two others brought against the agency for its “Ivermectin is for horses” campaign, and subsequent movement to block physicians from prescribing IVM to prevent and treat COVID. He said “This idea that ivermectin is a dangerous horse-deworming medicine is horse shit. I’m sorry to say that. It is nonsense. Millions of people on this planet have been treated with ivermectin. It is one of the safest medications…After penicillin, this is probably one of the most important medications ever developed by medical science.” Truth be told, Dr Marik, truth be told.