The Strain Relief Cord
F.F.
The future of the world hinges on a small non-profit you have never heard of in the foothills of the Sierras of Northern California, called the Felix Gillet Institute.
Felix Gillet was a sailor. He arrived in California from France in 1866. Once in California, he opened a barber shop. Later, he took a year-long sabbatical to learn about plants and DIY agriculture. Felix Gillet eventually opened his own nursery and brought seeds to California from more than 30 nations. This seed stock became the basis for most of California’s fruits and nuts, which, in turn, accounts for seventy-five percent of all fruits and nuts grown in the United States today. Nearly 100 percent of the U.S. artichoke crop is cultivated there.
The Felix Gillet Institute is a non-profit founded in 2003 by Amigo Bob Cantisano and Jennifer Bliss. Cantisano has been described as “the godfather of California organic farming,” and was one of the first activists to organize California farmers against using toxic pesticides.
The institute seeks out the oldest fruit and nut-producing trees in California’s abandoned gold mining towns and cultivates the next generation of fruit-bearing trees. These “grandmother” trees have adapted to the most severe climate conditions of the Sierras with no human intervention for more than 100 years, creating the most robust fruits and nuts available in the U.S., a truly climate resilient seed stock for the next century. Cuttings and seeds from these rare trees are utilized to make seed stock available for communities that want to grow their own climate resilient food.
To learn more about the mission and history of the Felix Gillet Institute or to purchase seed stock, visit felixgillet.org
I only found out about this work because I bought an abandoned house in a ghost town in the Sierras near the institute. The house was cheap because it was haunted. Like, really haunted. As in, nobody could live there it was so haunted. People in town told me not to do it, that I was out of my mind. The stories about the house were impressive but I needed a place to stay, since I’d been priced out of the Bay Area, like everyone else. I figured if there were ghosts in the house, they’d done an excellent job at reducing property values, so I could afford to buy it. Still, I took the warnings seriously. I reasoned that the ghosts were the neglected and traumatized voices of our collective history.
At the time I worked as a residential counselor in group homes for 15 to 18 year olds who were in and out of the juvenile justice system. So I was sure I could do some restorative justice. It would be an opportunity for historical catharsis. I remember sitting at a cafe called Trouble Coffee one day ruminating on whether I should buy the house, going back and forth in my mind about it. As a committed poet who follows the laws of chance, I decided to ask the universe. At that moment a woman in a purple convertible tore down the street. She looked like a gospel singer, wearing oversized, red, rock-star sunglasses. She was sort of gangster. She came to a screeching halt in front of the coffee shop and paused. Right before she turned left into the parking lot of 7-11, she looked me in the eyes and nodded. So I bought the house.
The house was majestic, with large rooms under the towering pines of the Sierras. There were creeks and deer and wildlife everywhere, and some of the best swimming holes in California nearby. When there weren’t extreme weather events and raging forest fires destroying the state, it was heaven.
The house was a fixer-upper, having been abandoned and exposed to the elements, boarded up with no light or electricity for at least five years. Apparently, the ghosts had evicted the last three owners. There were fifteen old buildings and one old couple who lived in the town. From them, I learned my house had once been the town brothel.
Most of the weird energy came from one room upstairs. It had a lot of unusual activity at night: Objects seemed to move around and you could hear the floorboards creak under the weight of footsteps. I soon discovered there was more than one ghost in the house. There were at least three. One of them used to come and fuck me in my dreams at night. She said her name was Clarissa and she had been a prostitute. I told her this wasn’t a healthy way to relate, and it was time for her to find some harm reduction strategies and alternative pathways to a different livelihood. But one of the other ghosts, her pimp, had a different idea. He was a miner who lived and died in town. He was unpleasant, and extremely jealous. Neither of them seemed to know they were dead.
I knew with great clarity that I was at least somewhat dead. As the psychiatrist Milton Erickson used to say, “Every 10 years wipes out half a generation, their bodies remain alive even though their personalities have died.” That was me. I had a day job, after all, doing paperwork to process distressed overmedicated youth in a group home. I stared at a screen working under flickering lights with a dilapidated air conditioning system that blew a wind like a desiccant that turned you into a dried insect. It was awful. But I had recently given notice and was starting to feel like I had gotten my life back. I could feel the blood pulsing in my veins again, particularly as I started this new exciting chapter of my life, reclaiming a lost part of history in a ghost town.
Through some neighbors who lived in the next town over—people who made the most delightful strawberry jam and rhubarb pie—I learned that the ghost town where I lived had been overrun by a group of neo-Nazis in the 1980s. They showed me pictures with every house on Main Street sporting a swastika, and a marching band with people in SS uniforms doing the “goose step” in front of the old dance hall, a registered historic building. They also mentioned that the local leader was a pagan named Heinrich who taught "Aryan yoga" and worshiped the Norse god, Wotan.
“Wutang?” I asked the neighbors.
“No. Wotan.”
According to them, he was also an international expert in Esoteric Hitlerism.
I asked them where he lived.
“In your house,” they told me.
Of course.
I could tell they lived for this kind of routine. They’d grown up in the foothills of the Sierras and hated people from the city. When they asked me what my plans were for the residence, I told them I was mulling over the options but considering reopening the brothel, if I could get a conditional-use permit.
“You know,” I said, “like Renaissance faire, with poker players and fascists and human trafficking.” They stared at me in slack-jawed amazement, which allowed me to depart.
What I actually did was hire a carpenter friend of mine who needed somewhere to crash, while he fixed the place up.
I didn’t tell him much about the house, other than the fact that some folks said there were ghosts.
“Doesn’t every place have ghosts?” was his response.
I did warn him that he should never, under any circumstances, go into the room upstairs that I’d nailed shut. The fuck room where the bad things lived.
My carpenter friend, a bit of a nut job, was eager to move in and begin work. He was between places and jobs, and it was now summer, so he was excited to leave the city, breathe the fresh mountain air, and live among the pine trees. He planned to work every day and take a swim each afternoon when it got hot.
I drove up on the weekends to help him. One day I checked in on him to see how things were going. Great, he said, but something kept waking him up at night—a large man appeared in his dreams, threatening to kill him, telling him to leave if he valued his life.
“Hmm ...weird,” I said. “Anything else?”
“He said he’s German.”
“Are you sure?”
“He was insistent. He asked me if I was Jewish.”
“Are you?”
“No. Well, maybe just a little bit: my great, great, great grandfather.”
My carpenter friend had to drive down to the Bay area for his girlfriend’s birthday. During this time, another buddy came to visit. Javier arrived Saturday morning. I don’t know why I said this (I knew it was a mistake as soon as I opened my mouth), but when he arrived, I greeted him saying, “Mis casa, tu casa! Welcome to your new house!” I was just being hospitable. We heard something go thud upstairs. I told him to look around while I made coffee.
Well, shit.
In the first five minutes, he managed to step on a rusty nail coming out of a floorboard in a remote corner upstairs.
For someone to step on this nail, they had to make some very unusual choices, including stepping onto and off a pile of wood, doing a kind of pirouette, and landing onto the nail. It went clear through his foot.
Neither of us had noticed until that moment that he was under attack. The bad things were foaming at the mouth like a pack of dogs when they overheard he was potentially the “new owner.” It was their domain, after all. I only realized this after I saw the blood pooling in his Adidas as he removed his foot from his new white trainers. It seemed they disliked him even more than me, which was sort of flattering, in a way.
We agreed that he would need medical attention, at the very least a tetanus shot, but was otherwise fine. His foot had swollen considerably and was changing color every five minutes, but he seemed mostly disappointed and embarrassed by his carelessness. As a marked man, I suspected I should try to get Javier out of town while I still could.
“Man, you need to get that looked at,” I told him, gesturing at the blood that had pooled in his shoe. “Best not to delay, in case it gets infected.”
“Yeah,” he said, resigned, “But I’d like to drive through town at least, before I go back to the city.”
Bad idea, I thought to myself, but I couldn’t think of a simple or sane justification for telling him to leave immediately. He took a three-minute drive the ghost town before driving off the road, by the cemetery. I heard him honking for help. When I ran over, I could see the car precariously balanced on the embankment, above the creek bed. The car had slid as he tried to back it up and turn around, and now it was dangling over the road. He must have misjudged the distance when he was backing up, he said bewildered, and in shock.
The bad things were having the best time.
I directed Javier to rest under the shade of a nearby tree and stay off his foot as I secured the vehicle with some straps stowed in the trunk, which I tied to a tree. Then I placed some rocks and wedged an old board under the front tires for traction. I climbed into the driver’s seat and put the car in low gear, started it, and inched it forward on the boards until it was out of danger.
“I don’t know what came over me,” he said.
I knew exactly what had come over him.
That’s when I decided to take measures into my own hands. I made a deal. They could have the upstairs room, if nobody got hurt. I figured if I gave the ghosts some space, like the teenagers I worked with, maybe they would give me some space. It was best to keep things calm until I could find an exorcist. This plan seemed to work, temporarily.
When my carpenter friend returned, I told him nothing about what had happened but I reiterated that he should not mess with the room upstairs, which was nailed shut. There was a lot of progress on the house for the next three weeks, until he decided to do something stupid. I got a call from him one evening. After his afternoon swim, he’d sit in his reclining chair behind the house, in the shade of a giant pine tree. He would relax and drink beer into the evenings and get to thinking about what was inside that one room. Obviously, I was hiding something.
“You’ll never believe what happened,” he said, when he rang to say he had almost died. He seemed really excited about it.
“Yeah, I would ...”
That derailed him. “Huh?”
“I would believe whatever happened, because I told you explicitly to not go in there.”
“You did,” he chuckled.
“Fuck.”
“Well, you know, curiosity killed the cat,” he said. “Anyway, you’re lucky I went in there, it turns out.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I had been tracing an electrical wire downstairs, and it went up into the ceiling and into that room. And when I went in that room, I saw it peeking out from the corner coming out of the attic in the ceiling, so I got the ladder in there to fish the line out and that’s when it happened.”
“What happened.”
“It was like someone was arm wrestling me in my head, telling me to get out of there. And then there was a feeling like an electrical shower down my spine, and all the hair stood up on the back of my neck …. You know me man, I’m gonna finish what I started and get things done, right? That’s why I am up there.”
“Sounds like you.”
“So I’m up there, on the ladder, and there’s this tug of war, and I’m fishing out the line in the ceiling, and all of a sudden the whole thing, like an earthquake, a giant jolt, the whole house sways back and forth violently and knocked me off the ladder!”
“What?”
“I got thrown off the ladder!”
“I picked myself up and went outside. A giant tree had fallen on your house!”
“What?”
“But it’s ok.”
“Meaning you’re OK or the house is OK?”
“Both. The tree kind of glanced off the side of the house. Right by that room. Not a lot of damage. Lucky as hell. At least you’re gonna think it was lucky, as soon as I tell you the next part. You know how I used to sit in my recliner under that tree out back? Wait until I text you a picture of my recliner.”
His chair was smashed flat, peeking out from under the fallen tree like the wicked witch’s shoes peeking out from underneath Dorothy’s house.
“Everything’s OK, seems like. Not a lot of damage. But good thing I was not in my recliner! I mean, shit, I had just been sitting there. I know you’re pissed off I went in that room, but if I hadn’t, I might be dead.”
“Silver linings, man” I told him.
Obviously, the truce was over. What to do? It turns out, exorcists are expensive and useless. I called a few and said I’d pay them. Each said they had never encountered anything like it before. I won’t go into detail about the first two. The thing in the room upstairs dispatched them one at a time like a pro wrestler. It kicked their asses. One guy seemed like he was about to wet his pants.
As a last resort, I called one of my old teachers I hadn’t talked to in a few years. We had been somewhat estranged. Meanwhile my house was a carnival. Each night things got more unhinged.
After I explained my predicament, he said, “I’ll tell you what you did, you walked up to a grizzly bear and hit it with a baseball bat. what you needed was an elephant gun. There’s a very specific puja for that. I’ve only needed to use it twice.”
“Are you saying you’re going to help me out?”
He’d look into it.
The following day he let me know that the thing in the house had come to him in his dreams, daring him to visit. “Kind of unusual,” he said. “Definitely a shit-talker. Keeps egging me on for a fight. It seems agitated so we might have to wait.”
When he finally drove up, I remember he got out of his car and stood in front of the house for a long time, just looking up at the second floor, twisting a piece of straw in his mouth. “Well, shit,” he said, after about ten minutes. “I’m not going in there.”
My heart dropped.
“There’s one thing in there that’s like an attack dog. I don’t even know how you’re able to be inside the house at all. How many people have owned this place before you?”
“I don't know. Why?”
“Because I’d like to know how they are doing. You know when you drop a mouse in an aquarium with a snake? It eats people alive. You want my advice?”
“I do.”
“Sell the house.”
“Yeah OK thanks. You want to buy it?”
“Hahaha. No.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re familiar with the greater fool theory?” He smiled. What a dick.
“Is there nothing else I can do?”
“Of course there are. But I mean, think of the risk. How many other people have owned the house before you? How many of them are alive?”
“Come on,” I said, “You’re just trying to scare me, right?”
“The Indians used to call these things Rakshas,” he said, “because they chew on people. I haven’t seen one like this before, except once. They like blood—makes them very excited—maybe the origin of the vampire story. So the thing you want to know is, when did this thing have its last meal? How hungry is it? Let’s start with the last person who owned this place. Did you meet the last owner? “
“I did.”
“Ok. How was he? Was he OK?”
“Not exactly.”
“Yeah?”
“He looked a bit green, I guess you could say.”
“Green?”
“Uh-huh. His color was bad. Said he was renovating the place but he got sick so he had to stop.
“Did you hear what you just said?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“He said he had a heart attack.”
“Are you listening to yourself? That’s why I’m not going in there. Furthermore, I’m very curious why you’re able to be in there. You know my friend Ed? He had a boa constrictor for a pet. It basically roamed his apartment at night. He kept the cage open. One day, he’s taking a nap. When he wakes up, the boa constrictor is lying in bed aside him, and it’s doing something very strange.”
“What’s that?”
“It was completely stretched out—like, from head toe.”
“Why’s it doing that?”
“Why do you think?”
I shrugged.
“It was measuring him—trying to see if it was big enough to swallow him whole.”
That’s when I decided to move to the outskirts of town, while continuing to work on the house myself. Things were fine during daylight hours, mostly. The only place I could find was an Airbnb three towns over, owned by Jennifer Bliss and Amigo Bob Cantisano, the founders of the Felix Gillet Institute. They told me my ghost town had the best apple orchard in all of California.
F.F. prefers to remain anonymous online.
View next: Three Fold Commissions Paul Schwarz