This weekend we took a day trip to visit our dear friend and honorary crazy uncle, Wild Bill. Bill is always chock full of cockamamie tales from his colorful past and conspiracy theories about our collective colorful future. He has a knack for making even an uneventful narrative completely entertaining to listen to – a son of Tennessee, his musical drawl is peppered with onomatopoeia, “doowah-diddies” and “them’s the biscuits”.

Wild Bill is such a fascinating character that he is the subject of our only non-fiction Idiots’Book The Last of the Real Small Farmers, which basically was his running monologue one day while we had lunch with him. The book also features one of my favorite drawings of a democracy decimating device.

Bill lives in a ramshackle house on a farm in Virginia, a final holdout against the creeping suburbia that is the Washington Metropolitan Area.

Needless to say, visits with him are always a breath of fresh air, both figuratively and literally.

Bill knows pretty much everything about the woods – names of lichens, the ways the deer make their trails, the history of the Pawpaw tree, you name it.

Alden discovered a school of fungus, and in the absence of a good fishing hole (though the Potomac burbled by a short distance away, it was a rather steep vertical sort of distance too precarious to travel with a three-year-old, an unsteady almost-two-year-old, and a very unsteady Momma Behr) found gratifying enough entertainment trying to catch little fungi on the end of her stick.

Kato led a tour of Bill’s garden, which defies all the laws of rows and groups and tags and mulching and tending and yet thrives in a jungley sort of way. Summer crops have long since given up and tilt haphazardly back to the earth on brittle stems. It is a wonderland of birds, bugs and mystery greens, and Kato returned with a couple unripe tomatoes and some horseradish Bill dug up for him. He seemed quite pleased with this.

The inside of Wild Bill’s house is as much a wonderland as the outside (in fact, the boundary between the two is often imperceptible). Collections of all kinds hang on the walls.

(I particularly like that the short-handled axe hangs with the knife sharpener.) It is easy to imagine Bill’s life off the grid, sitting at the kitchen table by the wood-burning stove, eating breakfast and reading Kant (yeah, that’s what he does).

Though Bill enjoys some modern amenities (he has a phone, for example, and a tractor), he eschews much of what we take for granted as “convenient.” Though he has a stovetop, he confesses to rarely using it, and instead does most of his cooking on top of the wood-burning stove (being a man of the South, Bill keeps his house at a comfortable 90 degrees at all times, and often wears a wool hat to boot). The stovetop is most often used as a staging area.

But my favorite detail (and one of the most telling) is Bill’s microwave.

A closer look:

Yes, Bill uses his microwave as a place to store tape.

He is certainly one-of-a-kind.

While we snacked on Jerusalem artichoke and frozen blackberries from his garden, Bill rushed out of the room to fetch something he’d been saving for us since September.

The Swanson sweet potato. How appropriate. For those of you who have read The Last of the Real Small Farmers, you know that the story begins and ends with a sweet potato.

Life can be so sweet. Thanks for a great visit, Bill.

(…and now I have to print this post out and send it to him via the good old USPS, the only folks who can track him down.)