Cults, Pickles, and Monster Trucks!

We came across an Alternative School today – or in the director’s own words, “a cult”!

The school was in a home setting in the beautiful hills of Southern California.

It was late afternoon and the only person there to greet us was the “cult” leader.

My first impression of her was that she was a recent import from a parallel universe of weird folk.

She was watering a barren lot of dirt with some weeds she chose to identify as “shoots”.

She started our interaction by inviting us to eat an odd fruit from an unidentified tree, all the while spending an excessively long time discussing the similarities between that fruit and peaches…

Fruit ingested, we proceeded to tour the home, and then sat down to discuss school policies.

The school philosophy in a nutshell, in her own words, was “We don’t control students and what they do during their time here just like we don’t want anyone to control us and what we do during our time here”.

We exchanged a few words, and  left with a parting gift, which was the “School Law-Book” – a living document passed by majority vote of students and teachers.  

Here are some examples of the school's “Laws” from the School Law-Book:

“You can only play with guns in the backyard”

“One must be certified in order to use balloons, the piano, paints, and markers”.

Needless to say, we fell in love with the school but the only thing that held us back from enrolling was the law that stated, “One person may not use two bean bags at the same time”!!!!

In an attempt to re-enter earth’s atmosphere after the cult visit, we decided to venture East to visit a horse rescue.

We found out about this place during an event a few days earlier.  We met the couple who ran the place, they told us they needed young riders to show rescue horses available for adoption, and invited us to volunteer. 

We arrived at the rescue and were greeted by the husband who was driving a monster truck (you will want to google that if you don’t know what it is), and were introduced to his most recent birthday acquisition – a miniature donkey!

The wife was “teaching” a riding lesson while eating pickles and screaming at her daughter to 'git outta here!

She immediately recognized us and without further ado told us we could help feed the horses in a few minutes when she was done “teaching”.

At that point she experienced an Alzheimer’s moment as she completely forgot about her lesson and student, and rambled for 15 minutes  – I did not pay much attention to what she was saying as I was still processing the pickles!

We toured the rescue and did not feel this was the right place for us to volunteer our time.

We bid Miss Pickles farewell and made a quick exit.

During the drive home I thought about how travel often measures our tolerance for those different from us.