Tarantulas

In the summer of 1983, my spouse and I bought a twenty-acre plot of Paradise for $675 an acre. Paradise Township, that is— an historic Oklahoma settlement, now mostly free of humans, nestled between the Tallgrass Prairie and the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. Nourished by the utopian visions of Helen and Scott Nearing, the Shakers, and the Mother Earth News, we aimed to do our part in the imminent revolutionary transformation of our consumer society by living a life of ecological sustainability and voluntary simplicity. Originally, our twenty acres was hunting ground for Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Osage, Quapaw, and Kaw, until the passage of the Federal Homestead Act of 1862 opened up the land for white settlement. The infamous Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 probably accelerated the revolutionary transformation of the North American continent away from ecological sustainability and voluntary simplicity— think “Big Oil.” Our deed to the property originated with the first white settler who got his acreage for free in that vast land grab from the natives, and the tumbled stone foundation and caved-in well from that settlement were still visible—as was a rusty old whiskey still in a grove of cedar trees, bootlegging undoubtedly being more profitable than trying to eke out a living growing crops on the stubborn red clay soil.