|
# 2018-10-16 - Naked In The Woods by Margaret Grundstein
# Prologue
Swaying together singing "We Shall Overcome" was no longer enough.
The tanks lumbering through my neighborhood, clanking down my street
brought home the futility of confrontational tactics. We needed a
new plan, one that was plausible and released us from the politics of
mutual hate. If we couldn't change the world, we could change
ourselves and build communities, where, as the Beetles told us, "All
You Need Is Love."
Did we fail? The measure is not in the duration of our community,
but to what degree we rode the rapids of the pent-up need for change
in Western, middle-class lives. In that sense we surely succeeded...
Our struggle to belong, to each other and the earth, was more
influential than we had anticipated... We lived an adventure, changed
ourselves, and left our legacy. The evening news covers a black
president in the oval office instead of sits-ins [sic] at the
Woolworth's lunch counter. Women run multi-national corporations and
are on the cusp of running our country. Sexual freedom,
environmentalism, alternative health care, and the politics of food
are part of the national dialogue. Organic is big business. Weed is
medicinal.
Now it is time to add our tale to the collective consciousness, to
feed the dreams for those who follow.
# Chapter 1
One thing was clear. This was not how i wanted to live.
# Chapter 2
[Margaret and Hak got married, bought a van, converted it to a
camper, and drove to Eugene, OR.]
Escape was as far as our vision took us, and that felt good enough to
me.
# Chapter 3
I stood there, camping pot in one hand, paper towel in the other,
slowly absorbing the impact of this information. Hak knew. He knew
all along there was no risk of deportation. When he pressured me to
marry him, arguing that he would be kicked out of the country if we
didn't, it was a lie. The asylum law protected him... All i knew was
that Hak had manipulated me.
# Chapter 4
Goodbye Armageddon, hello Paradise. Greenleaf, Oregon, became my new
communal home. With the move we stepped onto the stage of our new
life... When else if not now, when we were beautiful just by being
young and anything still seemed possible.
Most of the men in our group, being architects, regarded every
physical environment as a work in progress. We didn't buy beds, we
built them... Draped parachutes softened our bedrooms. Doors
disappeared from their frames. We celebrated the open and shared
quality of our new living situation.
[Margaret and Hak moved into a tree house that Hak built.]
# Chapter 5
We were children of the times and the grandchildren of past utopians.
Greenleaf became a stop on the underground map that marked these
longings; tribal tales passed through word of mouth.
In June, five months after our arrival at Greenleaf, we decided that
the upcoming solstice was a great opportunity to host a celebration
and further expand our network. Carol and Clint had discovered two
sister communes, Footbridge and Three Rivers, while exploring on
Clint's motorcycle. We invited them to our party.
Across my line of vision paraded Amazons, tall and confident, boldly
striding through the stubble of our backyard. The Footbridge women
had arrived. They were dark in mien, dusky in color, and perfumed by
a touch of wood smoke. I'm in trouble, was my first thought. These
women have knives. Not jaunty Swiss Army ones with mini scissors and
a can opener, but serious weapons with wooden hafts and six inch
blades set in leather sheaths tied to their thighs. They oozed
bravado.
# Chapter 7
Seed catalogues are to gardeners what Playboy is to men, fertile
ground for massaging fantasy.
There is nothing like living in an intimate group to get a humbling
and multifaceted reflection of oneself.
None of us had gardened before, let alone tasted fresh produce direct
from the ground. Pagan religions and fertility goddesses were
starting to make sense. Eating a carrot, pulled fresh and warm from
the ground, was a ritual as meaningful as a first communion or a bar
mitzvah. We crossed a threshold, changed, and committed ourselves to
our new truth. Back to nature was one of the things that worked as
advertised.
But where were the men? What did those guys do all day? The answer
was dope [cannabis].
These were the keepers of the counterculture, the nurturers of its
mainstay. I took care of the vegetables. They took care of the
drugs. It was a bumper year.
# Chapter 8
We wanted to be self-sufficient. Protein was always the challenge.
Meat and eggs came from animals with hearts that beat and eyes that
could see. They were alive, just like us, although we were starting
to feel that even lettuces had an aura.
Like any traditional family, eating together anchored us as a group,
the dining room our communal nexus. Ours was a "live and let live"
life. There was no room at the table for the uptight.
# Chapter 9
Fairchild's choice was risky. Midwives, even those with more
training, were illegal... and if complications arose, there was no
backup from the medical system.
# Chapter 10
As the green of Oregon replaced the darkness of New Haven, i healed.
Peace and love, the hippy mantra, sounded trite, but i thrived under
its mantle. We were living a life that matched my temperament,
harmony instead of combat. I also refused to take any drugs.
# Chapter 12
When the stars aligned and our stench arose, the time was deemed
propitious for a group cleanse [in a sweat lodge]. We bantered back
ad forth, checking each other out through the haze of steam and
sweat, until after enough baths, we no longer saw when we looked. We
were all family. We knew each other well.
# Chapter 13
Everything slowed down. The technology demanded it. Kerosene
lanterns were our only light... In February, darkness fell at 5:00
and it landed with a thud, forcing us inside, restricted to small
pools of glowing light that pulled us toward each other. To get
along in such tight quarters you needed to be mellow. Dope
[cannabis] was a necessity. [They smoked the bounty they had grown
at Greenleaf. Even the author used it.]
# Chapter 15
Those we lost through attrition were replaced by new arrivals. All
you had to do was show up. No Bedouin in the Empty Quarter could
have been more hospitable to brethren traveling the desert sands of
the straight world.
# Chapter 16
[Hak abruptly decides to leave and move in with Kathy @Footbridge
without consulting Margaret ahead of time. He walked out for good
and did not look back.]
# Chapter 17
This land and these people were my present and future, my community
and home. I belonged. What could be more powerful? I 'remarried'
before the bed had even cooled, transferring my loyalty and faith to
a new kind of union, my group.
[Margaret built a cabin using driftwood, hand tools, and lumber
scavenged from abandoned buildings. It took over a year.]
# Chapter 21
[Dumpster diving and foraging] were not enough. We needed a garden.
[Kathy threw Hak out and he returned to Floras Creek.]
# Chapter 22
We were always hungry and that lone box of Wheat Thins sitting right
in the center of the table, already open, its wrinkled wax lining
folded in on itself, looked mighty inviting. Carol, Clint, Stuart,
Rocky, and i, along with whoever had joined us on the truck, would
stand around making small talk. Our attention was not focused,
however, on the words coming out of our mouths, but on what we hoped
to put in our mouths. That golden yellow Nabisco box began to glow
as the spiritual nexus of the room, and clearly when you are hungry
your spiritual functioning is not on its highest plane. The
conversation may have continued, ... but the real dialogue was within
ourselves.
# Chapter 26
Without media we were isolated from the events of the day. While we
debated the fate of chickens, struggled to understand community, and
learned to live with less, the rest of the world carried on... Huge
parts of the culture were lost to us as we worked to build our own
world.
This was bitter fruit, as the feminists of the times proclaimed us
equals; women were just as hard and tough as men, we just needed to
claim the territory... In an effort to break the shackles of gender,
we were exhorted by our sisters to throw the baby out with the
bathwater, to devalue the nurturing inwardness of womanhood and
embrace the very traits of our oppressors...
author: Grundstein, Margaret |