by Dana Spiotta
“We just follow Hurricane Brook north, stick to the left bank, and we should be there in two hours.”
“I have to carry this beer for two hours?” Berry said. She shook her head and then took two beers out and handed one to Caroline.
Eventually they came to a dirt trail. There was a sign at the foot that said,
No visitors. No tourists. No exceptions.
Then another sign under it, apparently hammered onto it later, read,
This means you, freak!
They ignored these injunctions and continued on the path. A couple of hundred yards up the trail, another sign,
Keep out!
with another addendum sign; this one read,
Whose sister are you?
Caroline couldn’t tell if the question was addressed to the interlopers coming up the trail or was a response from them.
At last they saw the woods open up to a clearing. Glinting in the sun was a dome composed of multifaceted pieces of hard-enameled metal, all different colors—most shiny, some rusted at the edges, some primer matte—welded somewhat sloppily at their interstices to create a large, ragged futuristic dwelling. A painted sign said,
Harbinger Hut, Version Two
“Turn around, both of you. Slowly.” From behind them. They turned slowly toward the voice. A woman with a rifle and a yellow white-chick ersatz Afro faced them, barrel pointing. She wore what looked to Caroline like a Brownie uniform, including the kneesocks but without the sash and the badges. Her large army boots somehow emphasized rather than disguised the shapeliness of her long legs.
Berry started laughing. Caroline squeezed her arm hard to make her stop.
“What are you doing here? Can’t you read? This is a closed community. We got no room for new members.”
“Yeah, so we gathered,” Berry said. “So much for communal spirit—”
“Look, fat chick, look at this in my hand and shut up. This isn’t a commune, it is a community of women.”
Berry’s mouth dropped open, and she began laughing even harder.
“Hey, it’s okay. We’re here by invitation. We are here to see Mother Goose,” Caroline said.
“You know her? She knows you’re coming?”
“Not directly, but yeah, she knows we are coming.”
She lowered the gun. Flashed a two-fingered V at them and waved them toward the dome.
“Sorry. I have to be vigilant in the summer or we get overrun with every speed freak and junkie moocher the city can spew our way. They come and piss in your streams and you’re supposed to mop their brows and nurse their strung-out, parasitic hearts until the whole place becomes a flophouse, you know, Bowery in the foothills, right?”
She stopped at the entrance to the dome. “I’m Jill, by the way. Hill Jill, I watch the perimeter. Come on in and I’ll get you some food.”
“We brought beer.”
“Not allowed.”
Berry looked at Caroline and raised an eyebrow.
“So let’s get it inside and drink it quick,” Jill said.
Hill Jill’s dome was as comfortable and airily spacious inside as an omnitriangulated polyhedral dwelling could be. It had a rose-stained, translucent resin skylight, handmade simple wood furniture and a wood-burning cookstove. There were macramé decorations and many brightly colored yarn god’s eyes strung from the ceiling. The dome apparently also ran on electricity: Jill used a small refrigerator and a state-of-the-art, vinyl-veneer-encased hi-fi stereo system surrounded by stacks of records. Her platform bed was covered in Indian blankets, and an entire “wall” was hugged by a curved bookshelf full of books. Caroline could see books on Eastern religion and the requisite copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Several panels of scratched and cloudy Plexiglas embedded in the sides of the dome served as the only windows. Through the Plexiglas they could see the hills and woods beyond the trail.
“Nice space in here,” said Caroline.
“I built it myself out of abandoned car parts. Reclaimed from the refuse of industrial society. Everyone builds her own house. You can’t stay if you don’t.”
“Are they all domes like this?”
Hill Jill shrugged and slammed the bottle cap off the beer on the edge of the cookstove.
“Some are. There are your usual Buckminster Fuller dome freaks up here. You can just follow a recipe and build a home out of junk. Put a little resin sealant on the seams, caulk it with tar. Some of us are more elaborate. I’m tied in to the grid with electricity. I used fiberglass insulation, PVC pipe. Plastic sealants. I have a well with running water. But every woman does her own thing.”
“They let you decide, huh?” said Berry.
“Technology will set you free.”
“You could spend all day hauling buckets of water. Or keeping a fire going,” Caroline said, flipping open a beer.
“Exactly. Technology to eliminate drudgery. We are right in the midst of hardscrabble nation, twenty below in winter. I am no primitivist.”
“What’s this community called?” Berry asked. Jill ignored Berry and continued sipping her beer. Berry repeated her question.
Jill glanced at her finally and smirked. “This is Total Bitch Ranch, sister, Full-Tilt Pussy Ridge. This is High Daddy Farm, you dig? Heretic Homestead, Come-Down Campus, Hepatitis Hill.”
“C’mon.”
Jill cocked her head and gave Berry a slow once-over.
“Classified, sorry. Drink up and then we’ll go up to El Dorado.”
Berry started to flip through the LPs leaning in a stack by the stereo. There were several Ohio Players albums that featured cover photos of a black woman with a shaved head and a bored expression in various states of bondage. One of these albums opened to a gatefold of the nearly naked woman in a studded collar wielding a large leather whip.
“What is this?” Berry held up another album using two fingers, as if the record smelled bad. This cover photo showed a black woman buried up to her neck in dirt, her mouth open in a scream, her huge Afro framing her head. Crooked letters spelled out Maggot Brain.
“Well, it isn’t Joni Mitchell, is it?” Hill Jill said, taking the record from her. Jill turned on the stereo and put the needle down. The distorted guitar and funky rhythms of Funkadelic blared out in badass dissonance. A voice intoned cryptic nonsense about the earth mother. But then, slowly, mournfully, from some far-off place, a long, emotional guitar solo sent stingingly beautiful waves of sound into the room. The guitar sound elongated and contracted for second after second. They all sat and listened, and Jill closed her eyes, making it clear she wanted silence and respect for her music. The music evoked an underlying loneliness that at first made Caroline sad and then started creeping her out. It occurred to her that the guitar solo might go on forever. Berry stared at the cover and killed another beer. At long last the guitar resolved itself back into a sort of melody and the track ended, the whole thing segueing seamlessly into some sexed-up, dark funk.
After they finished three more beers, Jill decided it was time to go, and they started the walk from the perimeter toward what was called the common house. Along the way, Caroline saw dwellings of various and unusual construction. None of them was in sight distance of any other. Sometimes this meant artful placement of shrubberies and ditches. Other times it meant long walks between paths. Some of the dwellings were like Jill’s, variations on dome construction, multiseamed hemispheres. One was a log cabin, rough hewn. There were adobe, cavelike buildings; simple, flimsy thatched huts; rammed-earth-brick houses covered in plaster; even a clapboard saltbox painted white like something from a Christmas card. There were pole-construction, barnlike, prefab homes, gnome-type tree houses, and straw-bale-earth igloos. At each one, artful touches seemed to be added for beauty or whimsy: stained glass set in plastered walls, leaking, unfinished. Mosaic patterns made in rough masonry. One even had turrets and minarets. Another had an actual moat. Caroline had heard about communes like this, seen the pictures in magazines. Up on the hill she saw other dwelling
s built into the earth, some of them jutting oddly to accommodate trees or boulders. These houses were like submarines, or sci-fi movies. Two distinct categories could be discerned despite all the various details: either simple modest shelters, such as tepees, corrugated-tin sheds and mud huts; or high-tech conceptual houses with recycled industrial waste, pod rooms, pressed plastic and synthetic particleboard construction.
“That one over there is Hesperides’ house. It is all found refuge, rescued and liberated materials from abandoned factories in Utica and old farmhouses along the hills. She calls it Cake Corners. She’s part of the tech-yeses, like me. Over on the other side you have the tech-nos. They are strictly no running water or electricity. Self-consciously primitive, Rousseauian idealists. They cook and wash in one common space and share everything.”
“Sounds groovy to me,” Berry said.
“Yeah, some of us did that scene before and learned our lesson. That’s why we call it Hepatitis Hill. Me, Mother G and some of the others are followers of Hygeia.”
Both women just looked blankly at Jill.
“You know—running water, clean flush toilets, septic tanks and hot showers.”
“Oh yeah, right on.” Caroline smiled. Berry shrugged.
“Do you move to the rural sect because you believe in the perfectibility of human interaction? Or is it an escape, an expression of deep misanthropy?” Right away Mother Goose started giving them her set-piece commune rap. She had met them at the path and was leading them to the common house. Berry squeezed Caroline’s arm when she saw where they were headed. A huge clapboard building, painted brown-purple with brightest pink detailing. It was a simple rectangle shape with a gambrel roof and a perfectly intact stone foundation. Each window contained twelve small panes of old glass above and below each sash.
“It was built in the 1840s by two renegade New Harmon Community women. Really. Not purple originally. White, of course. And built to imitate the original Shaker buildings of the 1790s. You’ve heard of it, New Harmon Community? They named the local town after it. This land has a history of radical alternative community. Christian extremists who thought private property was the root of all evil. We are talking complex marriage, total communal and shared living, including the raising of children. There is even an archive of their papers and journals at the town library. The rednecks that run the town have no clue what New Harmon Community was—if they knew, they’d probably change the name.”
Mother G was an older woman, heavyset and sturdy. She wore her gray-streaked hair back in a bun, with a plain muslin blouse and skirt. She seemed every inch the religious reformer, unmade up and defiantly plain. The furthest thing, Caroline thought, from sexy. She felt garish in her hat and glasses. Caroline glanced at Berry, who appeared becomingly wide-eyed. It was funny to see them face-to-face, both large and fair, but Berry dripping with panels of diaphanous fairy materials and her tendrils of angel hair; Mother G, neat and tucked.
“You see, I am an empiricist. Out here we can try for some precision, eliminate variables.”
“Such as?” Berry asked.
“Well, men, for one obvious thing,” Jill said. Mother G looked at her. Jill scowled.
“You cannot base a community on subtraction, on mere opposition. It becomes reactionary and escapist. Cryptofascist. And people can fixate on the most sensational aspects of what is a much more subtle and sophisticated vision. Nevertheless”—and here Mother G paused and took in Berry’s swollen lip and Caroline’s odd hair color—“you are here for your own reasons, and I can offer some refuge, at least temporarily.”
“Great.”
“But if you want to stay more than a week, you have to petition for membership. No tourists, no freeloaders,” said Jill.
“We would invite you to partake in the governance of the community as well as its work,” said Mother G.
Mother G lived in the main house in a small private room. She put Berry and Caroline up in the dormitory on the third floor. There was a bathroom with a large claw-foot tub, and rows of perfectly aligned and spotless single beds. Built-in shelves lined the walls, along with peg boards to hang clothes and brooms. The first rule they learned—one of many—was nothing on the floor. There were drawers for shoes, and the brooms hanging from pegs were meant to be used. Nothing on the floor so everything could be swept clean.
Next Berry and Caroline were introduced to the work wheel, which assigned each woman in the community work credits for jobs of her choosing. Everyone, no matter how long she had been here, had to obtain a certain number of work credits each week. Jobs that people hated, such as cleaning the stables or washing the toilets, were assigned more work credits. Things people liked, such as baking pies or collecting eggs, were assigned fewer credits, until jobs had equal appeal and everything eventually had a volunteer. Unfortunately, it also meant that everyone did everything, instead of people doing what they excelled at. So although someone with Caroline’s experience and talents in the kitchen should be cooking and cooking often, the wheel offered no more labor credits to her than to Berry, who was an awful cook.
“This model is not perfect, but it is the most egalitarian way to structure things, I think. It’s an experiment. Each way of organizing creates its own repercussions. Simple things, like organizing work, can have dramatic social effect. We may, at a later point, encourage people who excel at something to do more of it, but then we will end up with people born to clean toilets who never get to do the good jobs. So at the cost of efficiency and quality, we have an extremely high level of fairness and equality,” said Mother G to Caroline over a breakfast of fruit preserves and sourdough bread.
Caroline enjoyed the possibilities of the community. She even liked the element of no men. Berry showed less enthusiasm. She spent her days up on the tech-nos’ ridge, smoking pot or hanging out in the sweat lodge. She found the tech-yes industriousness exhausting and a little suspect. She preferred to have fewer amenities at less effort. But she still slept at the dormitory with Caroline and did the labor assigned her on the wheel. After their first week ended, Caroline and Berry told Mother G they would stay and wanted to petition for membership.
Mother G explained that if you wanted to stay you eventually had to build your own house, and not in view of anyone else’s house. You could participate in community meals and decision making as long as you participated in the work wheel. If you wanted to fend for yourself, like some of the tech-nos, you could opt out of the labor credits.
Caroline learned that most of the women had dropped out from the Harvard Classics Department, where Mother G used to teach. Others were design and architecture heads from MIT. She also discovered that Mother G was the financial benefactor of the community. It would take years for actual self-sufficiency to develop, so she’d put up the money to buy the land and initial equipment. Many of the women were veterans of other communes, usually defunct, that had open-door policies and absolute freedom. These became overrun with drug addicts and social outcasts. This place was to be a revision of previous communities. Mother G wanted to have a space where basic cultural assumptions could be challenged. Such as what women were like without men. And whether we could escape the cultural paradigms we were raised with. She restored the old Shaker-style house, paid the taxes and often bought supplies for the community. Although they grew vegetables and kept chickens and cows, they were not anywhere near self-supporting. So in a sense Mother G was deeply in charge, and this too could not be escaped, no matter how many work credits she clocked in.
But Caroline liked her. And she liked the place despite its contradictions. She liked the cloistered effect, the way each woman reinvented herself. No one admitted to their past lives here. No one wanted to cop to anything but the moment and the future. It was the perfect place for someone like her, wasn’t it?
Temporary Like Achilles
AFTER NEARLY two months, Caroline and Berry still hadn’t built their own house. Instead Berry managed to convince the cloistered women on the hill to le
t her move in with them. But she took frequent breaks—after a few days huddled with the tech-nos (open-fire cooking, barefoot basic farming, infrequent bathing, spell casting) she escaped to the tech-yeses (hi-fi players, refined sugar, clean water, Band-Aids, tampons). Caroline still saw her most days, in her floppy hat and granny dress, when Caroline decided she wanted a moment of sotto voce commentary or just an unspoken collusion of outsider feeling. Caroline still didn’t feel entirely comfortable at the commune. She had been living at the dormitory as discreetly as possible—certainly she should have moved out by now. But building a house seemed a big commitment for someone in her position.
After collecting her weekly work assignment, Caroline met Berry on the trail, and they took a walk out beyond the edge of the commune. They sat eating sandwiches on some rocks by the stream. Caroline turned on Mother G’s portable radio. The Beach Boys’ song “Good Vibrations” came on. Caroline turned up the volume, and the song played up into the hills around them.
“This was the song my junior year at high school. That fake end, when it segues into this whole other sounding song but still is connected, somehow, to the old one—that blew my mind.” Caroline talked as she braided Berry’s hair. She just began combing it and braiding it without asking Berry. Otherwise Berry would start to get dreadlock mats and knots that were impossible to remove. Berry didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
“This song is all right.”
“This is a great song,” Caroline said.