Growing a Garden City: An Excerpt

By Jeremy N. Smith, Guest Writer, 10-07-10

	"Now I have that community for my baby girl, too. I’m nineteen. I was alone for the last month of my pregnancy. ...I should have gone to stay with my mom in Seattle, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Maya not being born here." Photo by Chad Harder.

Every year in this country, approximately 500,000 young people enter detention centers. Not Hannah Ellison: “I was never in the court system. Because I never got caught.”

As the excerpt from that follows starts, Hannah Ellison, “The Teenager,” is a 16-year-old drug addict dragged 500 miles from home by a father desperate to save her life.

The Teenager: Hannah Ellison

“I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be a good person.”

I was living in Seattle with my family—we had been living there since I started fifth grade—and I became a lost, terrible person. Just drugs and running away and bad people and hurting people and ruining my whole life. And one day my dad found me, bungee-corded me, took away my shoes, chains, knives, and drugs, threw me in the back of his Subaru, and drove us all night to Roundup, Montana, where his parents were living.
I detoxed there for a week, but I don’t remember being there. I had also shaved my head. So. [Laughs] If you want to know how crazy you go, you shave your head.

We were just going to pass through Missoula. My father wasn’t sure what he was going to do with me. He kept threatening to put me in a foster home where they were going to put me in some other drug program. I would have just run away.

My dad went to college with Josh Slotnick and I’ve known their family since I was a little baby. They’re good, wonderful people. Josh was like, “Geez, I hope everything turns out well, but I want you to talk to this guy, Tim Ballard.” So Tim met us at the Good Food Store for lunch and my dad and I proceeded to have a screaming match in the eating area and Tim saw that we were obviously not getting anywhere because I was just enraged. Then we went for a walk, Tim and I, and he asked me if I wanted to be a part of Youth Harvest program, which would basically be me working up at a farm for a summer. And that’s what I wanted. I was ready for my life to change.

This was spring. I started before everyone else. I was with the last group of college students before the summer program, just prepping everything, getting ready for the season, mulching, and planting early crops. That first day I remember going up there. I didn’t have any clothes with me. My dad had just bought me this white dress. I still had really short hair. I had a cigarette, one of those rolled cigarettes, behind my ear, and one of the girls comes up to me: “Is that a joint behind your ear?” “No, it’s a cigarette.”

I remember walking with all those girls and talking with everybody and just having a great time. I wasn’t used to being treated like a human being. I remember being really happy that first day. Really excited and hopeful. We planted onions. The first week or two, that’s what we did. I planted onions for a week. I was a rock star already. Everybody was like, “Wow, you’re doing great.” This felt so good.

It was a couple weeks later that the Youth Harvest program started. There were four boys and me. No other girls. It was a court-ordered thing for them. We were all getting paid, but it wasn’t really a choice for them to be there. It was either juvie or playing with mud. I ended up getting along really well with them, too, though. One kid got in trouble and dropped out, but they were, in general, good kids. More city kids, you know? They didn’t want to get dirty.

It was a job. Tim Ballard was our boss and mentor. He was up there every day with us. We needed to be at the PEAS Farm from eight until about noon. Everybody made lunch for each other. After lunch the college students would keep working and we would go home. Pay wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad either. It was more than minimum wage, which was awesome, and after a while I would get more hours and just stay up there. I worked as much as I could.

You go through life and you hope for those lucid happy moments, and I had those when I was up there. The purity of being there. Hot in the sun. Sweating my ass off, pulling weeds out of the garden. We made soil, we worked in the greenhouse, we planted seeds, we planted starts. I used the tractor. I laid out the Reemay. We prepped the vegetables. Later in the summer, we harvested the vegetables and washed them and cut them nicely and set up the table for the CSA.

There were also other parts of the program. Once a week we would get together and go for a little walk and get a treat and talk about our feelings. Normally, I would have [gives the finger] to that whole deal. But Tim Ballard was great about it. He wasn’t a cheeseball. It was easy for us to talk about what we wanted for our lives.

I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be a good person. And I felt all that coming to me through this program. Not just because of the structure and the guidelines, but because I was so excited and because whatever I did was okay. Nobody was holding me up in the light and saying, “You must do it this way.” They were like, “Well, here are your options. Take it or leave it.” It made everything easy for me. I’d been ready to be an adult since I was nine years old. I wanted a lifestyle. I wanted to find out where I was going to fit. In the garden I was able to watch things grow. For me, I was able to watch my hair grow. I was able to feel a change in myself. After you’ve done hard drugs for a long time, time doesn’t really make any sense at all. I had no idea what time was doing, but I was watching the garden and I just knew that I got up every day and I rode my bike up to the PEAS Farm and I had a good time and I hated it when the day was over.

I connected with the university students. I had a great relationship with those guys. I don’t know what it was. They weren’t kids, I guess. They knew their direction. They knew where they wanted to go. That’s who I wanted to be around then. People who knew what they were doing. I definitely needed some guidance, I needed to be pointed in the right direction, but I wanted to walk my own path.

Everybody really liked me, and everybody was so nice. I was just so happy putting my hands in the ground, being around people who also liked putting their hands in the ground. There’s something beautifully communal about it. But also fantastically original for your own personal . . . salvation. It’s for everybody. But it’s also for just you. For selfish reasons and for the greater good.

In later summer we planted all of our potatoes and they rotted. All of them. Every single one rotted in the ground. It just rained for a week after we planted them. So we all had to come up there on a day we weren’t supposed to work. But we all came up. It was pouring rain. It doesn’t rain like that very often, but it was just pouring, and we were trying to plant these potatoes in the mud. Generally, that’d be a pretty depressing scene. You have to redo work you’ve already done and it’s raining and it’s cold and your shoes are sticking in the mud, but we had a great time. We were throwing mudballs at each other. We were throwing rotten potatoes at each other. At the end of the day, work was done, I was covered with mud, and it was a great day. Everything rotted and it was good putting it back in the ground anyway.

Once all the hot peppers were in season, one of the Youth Harvest kids, Donny, and I, we ate a lot of hot peppers. I discovered you could actually hallucinate from eating a pepper that is too spicy. [Laughs] There are these peppers, these Bhutanese peppers, these long, reddish-orange witch’s-finger-looking peppers, right? I ate the whole thing in two bites. Yellow and orange streaks started coming across my vision and I felt like—you know?—hot. It wasn’t even spicy yet. I thought I was going to die. The next thing I remember, I’m running through the sprinklers with two cucumbers in both of my hands, just trying to douse the fires. After that I challenged everyone I saw to a hot-pepper-eating contest. “I’m just a little girl, I couldn’t possibly eat this whole pepper, but you could do it. You’re a big dude.” I got to the point my tolerance was so high I was eating entire cherry bomb peppers, seeds and all, chewing them up, swallowing them. And Ari, one of Josh’s friends, he ended up eating part of a pepper, and just . . . I mean, he got down on his hands and knees and we had to feed him honey and cucumber.

I had, I think, a lot of anxiety about it ending. I didn’t know really what I was going to do next, and that’s when I left. What happened was that the woman I was renting with, she couldn’t stand living with a seventeen-year-old. I don’t blame her, you know? I was so wild. So I ended up getting kicked out. I was seventeen, I was about to start school again, I was working, but no one would rent to me because I was too young. It started to get cold and I broke up with a boyfriend and I was like, “I’m trying my best and I’m still getting nothing.” I just took off. I hitched a ride and went to the String Cheese Incident show outside Seattle.

For a while it felt great. There’s a great romantic pull to being in that whole circle where everybody’s for free love . . . and drugs . . . and wildness. It was two weeks and it started winding down and I’d been high on acid and mushrooms for a while and you come down and you’re like, “Wait.” You can’t do it every day. You can’t be high every day. You can’t just party all the time. It’s not always going to be summer. You realize that half these “free” hippies running around are trust kids— trustafarians is what you call them—and the other people, they go back to their jobs, they go back to their wives, you know? What was I going to do? I wanted to keep it up. I wanted to be that Into the Wild guy minus the dying. [Laughs] But it’s just not good enough.

I thought I had burned my bridges. I don’t think I told anybody before I left. I couldn’t for some reason. I just left. [Shudders] I still thought the world of them. I didn’t want them to think I was such a loser. I felt like such an idiot. I came down and thought, “Oh, geez, here I am burning bridges again.” There’s shame in it. You feel like a beaten dog. “I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.” I called my mom and said, “I think I want to go back. Could you please ask Tim if I could come back?”

So she called Tim Ballard and Tim Ballard, of course, said, “Yes, you can come back.” So I did. I finished my summer and everybody was like, “Where the hell did you go?” And I was like [high, innocent voice], “I went to the String Cheese Incident and did lots of drugs, but I’m back now.” And they were like, “Okay, let’s get back to work.” Nobody passed judgment.

I was glad that I went back. Summer ended and I worked to the bitter end. Until the pumpkins were out of the field and everything. In the fall I started high school. I went to Willard, which is a fantastic place. For kids who cannot fit into the regular high school scene, that’s the place to go. I got two years of work done in two months and graduated, and I was living in my own place by then.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but my life has been so golden since I came back to Missoula. I think there will be more good times ahead of me, but that was the golden period of my life where I found a place and I was accepted, and beyond that I was loved, and I was so in love with everybody around me and the work I was doing. It was the best possible thing I could have been involved in. There’s something to be said about home, you know? I’ve had lots of homes over the years, even just different houses in Missoula. I’ve moved probably twelve times in the past two years. But I want to stay in this town. This is where I belong. Josh Slotnick gave me a CSA share, so I go up there once a week and get my vegetables—vegetables I used to grow—and I don’t know, it makes me happy. I still feel like a celebrity. I go up there and everybody’s like, “Hannah!” and I’m like, “I’m here!”

Now I have that community for my baby girl, too. I’m nineteen. I was alone for the last month of my pregnancy. My fiancé was out on a fire in California. I should have gone to stay with my mom in Seattle, but I couldn’t bear the thought of Maya not being born here. Someday I want to get some property out in the Bitterroot and set up my own garden and have my own business and have my babies. That’s what I want for my life because of the program I was in, because of all the experience I got. That’s exactly where I want my life to be—invested in all this, but my own. I’d like to grow my own food and for punishment the kids can go weed the garden. [Laughs] That sounds pretty good to me.

GROWING A GARDEN CITY by Jeremy N. Smith with photographs by Chad Harder and Sepp Jannotta and an introduction by Bill McKibben is published by Skyhorse Publishing and distributed by W.W. Norton. For more information about the book, visit the website growingagardencity.com.

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