by Peter Coyote
It was a wrenching awakening, to say the least, and for the first time, the men experienced the never-ending, distracting, and maddening demands of simultaneous children and housework, the fragmenting of every thought and task into small, child-ruled increments. A chastening experience.
On off days, we attended to collective necessities of our own—primarily firewood, it seemed. We’d fell trees and buck them into eight-foot lengths, manhandle the logs to a tractor-mounted rotary saw and cut them to fireplace length. We split and piled wood until the porch was stacked five feet high. Firewood was ubiquitous, fragrant, and pregnant with future comfort.
We gleaned corn from neighbors’ fields for our pigs, gathering fallen ears dropped by the mechanical harvesters and transferring them by the bucketful into the back of our Jeep. We filled a corncrib this way and were able to feed our pigs for free. When they reached two hundred pounds each, we shipped them to a local butcher, who in return for two, turned the other seven into hams, bacon, chops, lard, sausages, and everybody’s local favorite, scrapple.
Apples and pears littered the frost-stiff autumn lawns, and we collected sack after sack and brought them to the local press and filled three fifty-gallon wooden barrels with apple and pear juice, which we fermented carefully into potent cider. The town’s plumber, an old family friend, bequeathed me a kitchen-sized copper still from his depression income-enhancing days. It could “cook” five gallons of cider or wine at a time. Cooking that distillate again, giving it a “double twist” in brewer’s parlance, produced a 90 percent pure alcohol that could be mixed back into fruit wines or cider to produce a potent energizer for music and storytelling that we called “rocket fuel.”
The larders were full, our bodies were healthy and hard, and at night, after our boisterous communal meals, we made music until the house vibrated. Vinnie, Kent, Nichole, Sam, and I played guitars, piano, tambourines, and drums. The songs were free form, sometimes country-and-western or rock-and-roll classics, more often than not homegrown meanders that grew in intensity and power until finally the music overwhelmed language and directly expressed the joys and ills, bounties and strains of our collective life. Fires glowed and crackled in the stone hearths, children played, quarreled, and raced among the players, and snatches of conversation penetrated the instrumental solos until the whole complex polyphony became the song of our existence.
Years have passed and I continue to play music, often with professional and remarkably able players, but I have never again experienced that same intense mélange of shared experience, commitment, and risk expressed in those musical Free Family fetes. It was transcendental . . .
Sometimes.
23
gravity wins
Two of the unfortunate by-products of heroic visions are heroic expectations and the inordinate cost such expectations exact on psychic life. How could “heroes” be troubled by greasy sinks, disorderly workshops, envy, spite, anarchic sexual passions, jealousy, and depression? We associated such petty feelings with civilians and the workaday world. If we recognized them at all, we identified them as the psychological by-products of capitalism and private property. We were forging a new nation and believed that the old would reduce itself to ashes.
While we developed refined vocabularies to discuss free economies, bioregional borders, subsistence economy, intercommune trade, media manipulation, political subversion, and drug-related mental states, we possessed almost no tools for discussing interpersonal conflicts and personal problems or resolving the sometimes claustrophobic stresses and strains of communal existence.
Nichole’s visit, conceived as a simple gift from Sam to me, developed into something more byzantine. Sam decided that the fact that Nichole and I were sleeping together was no reason for her to abandon the field. She suggested that the three of us create a new unit, sleep together, and get it over with.
It was a stimulating experience to be regularly attended by two comely women, intent on and even competitive about giving me pleasure, and it was eye-opening to hear them compare notes: “Oh, I never thought of moving that way,” or “Hey, that looks like fun. I want some of that.” This was precisely my idea of a good-humored, openhearted, and cooperative future.
Several weeks into this brave new world, Sam sat bolt upright one morning and said, “What is that woman doing in my bed?” Startled, embarrassed, and with no ready answer, I pointed out lamely that we had already “been through all this”—but to no avail. Sam was adamant; she wanted her own bed back.
I discerned an advantage to acquiescing, reasoning that if each woman had her own bed, then I would have two. I concluded Sam just needed some private space. But the following day, Sam delivered an ultimatum: either Nichole left or she did. As far as I was concerned, Nichole was now a part of the family. By invitation, she and her child had traveled three thousand miles to live and work among the rest of us, and the decision about her residency at Turkey Ridge was not Sam’s to make unilaterally. When I said as much, Sam announced that she was leaving.
Nichole and I moved into a downstairs room, while Sam began making her plans in our room over the kitchen, haunting it like a mad ghost. If she was deranged, she had reason. I remember this period as “the time of carrying my mattress” and have an enduring image of myself as Kokop’ele, the humpbacked, pack-carrying flute player from Anasazi petroglyphs, laboring up and down stairs carrying mattresses from room to room, exchanging singles for doubles and vice versa. Nichole and I then moved from the main house into a little cabin by the barn that had once belonged to the caretaker and later became the ranch office. It was in that cabin, twenty years earlier, that Arthur Donovan, the farm’s dour Scot manager, had killed himself one lonely winter night with my dad’s pistol. The smell of wood smoke and lamp oil that I remembered from childhood visits still lingered. It was double walled and well-built, with a lovely slate roof. Nichole and I removed the old office equipment and files and swept and washed the floors, walls, and windows. I spent several days constructing a bunk bed from pungent cedar logs for Ariel and Nichole’s son Jeremiah. We installed it in one corner, opposite a large pot-bellied stove with the word ABENDROTH cast into the top and MONICA cast into the bottom. I built a trampoline-sized platform bed for Nichole and myself with space beneath it to stow our gear. Besides being charming and cozy, the cabin was quiet, blessedly removed from the chaos of the main house.
Sam decided she couldn’t take Ariel with her. She didn’t know where she was going or how she would live and felt that Ariel would be better served by staying in her current environment with familiar adults and children. Sam chilled the house and grounds like a bitter wind, her pale skin parchment tight, her hair fastened in a severe knot on top of her head like a samurai warrior. While Sam’s usual relationship to people was tangential, her isolation was now absolute, sharing no contact whatsoever. She moved among us in a parallel reality, visible but beyond communication. Life swirled around her—farmwork, convivial chatter, gossip, communal plans—while she appeared and disappeared wordlessly, a specter floating terrified through the house, pinched off from the mother group like a dandelion seed, waiting for a gust of wind to deliver it to an uncertain fate.
I drove her to the bus the day she left. She said she’d write for Ariel when she was settled, but could not meet my eyes. She was traveling in “straight” clothes, a plain blouse and skirt. The tiny black star beauty mark that I had tattooed on her cheekbone with a needle and thread winked at me accusingly. The door of the bus opened and closed around her like the shell of a giant clam, and then the bus, roaring and groaning, disappeared around the corner.
Sam’s absence calmed things temporarily. At night after singing the children to sleep, Nichole and I lay in the quiet, cheery cabin, spinning fanciful stories about the mythological gods of our stove, the love of Abendroth for his paramour Monica. Nichole was warm and fragrant. The kids were snug in their beds. Everything was right with the world—unless I thought of Sam, wandering alone without the comfor
t and support of her tribe, or considered the anxieties that might be roiling in Ariel’s mind concerning her mother’s abrupt and corrosive departure. If those thoughts didn’t unhinge my equilibrium, I could ponder the humiliations of the pending week on Wall Street or the fundamental uncertainty of the future of Turkey Ridge.
But I had a cure for all these blues. A local doctor loved to fish our well-stocked lake. During one of his visits, I confessed to him (in an earnest and responsible manner, of course) how I “used to” abuse heroin but had given it up now that I was a parent. Still, from time to time, I told him convivially, I did like to get a buzz, just as he might from a couple of martinis. But responsibility to my health and family had made me vow never to use street dope again. How would he feel, I wondered aloud, implying by my manner that it was merely an exploratory question of no consequence, about prescribing me something like, “oh, say, Demerol or Dilaudid so that from time to time, I could get off the hook—recreationally, that is, of course?” He had no principled objections to this—or to much else I suspected, having previously explained to me that he had arrived at his decision to become a proctologist only after researching the Medicaid reimbursement schedules. He confided that he did have some anxiety about his reputation and the law, and I assured him I was experienced in such matters and would cause him no problem.
The day after our conversation, I appeared at the back door to his office, swathed in stained bandages that obscured my head and right arm and, not incidentally, my identity. He opened the door, saw me, said, “Oh, my God,” and closed the door without another word. Rather than resembling the accident victim I’d intended (justifying powerful painkillers), he later told me that I looked like the failing final exam of a mummy maker. While I stood there wondering what to do, he opened the door again and thrust a brown paper bag into my hands, then disappeared. Inside the bag were several syringes and a brand-new bottle of Demerol—synthetic morphine.
After that, the ice was broken, and whenever the “doc” came to fish, he’d chat a while in the living room. After his departure, I’d search the couch and find another brown paper bag under the pillows. It made country life so convenient and certainly helped mask the twisted reflection of Morris’s life I had made of my own. Here I was, back on the family homestead, working in the family firm, and I’d already replicated the most sophisticated of my father’s support systems.
Despite the good doctor’s generosity, other problems stressed group solidarity—little things supposedly beneath the notice of heroes: social fault lines as anxiety-producing as small tremblers in earthquake country. As a “free” family, we had neither patriarchal authority nor claims of ownership available to us to resolve conflicts. Furthermore, our commitment to exhaustive reexamination of cultural premises demanded that nothing be taken for granted, since the most innocent personal predilection might represent decadent conditioning.
Nina remembers this period with clarity: “I think we had expectations of one another that were kind of heroic. And sometimes it was very hard to live up to them. When we saw them falling apart, it was difficult because how do you talk about this stuff and stay heroic?”
Freeman House defined the Free Family malaise accurately: “We were creating a culture instead of creating a life.”
It’s difficult to convey to outsiders how far removed from the majority culture we had become. We did not have a TV and never listened to the radio or bought newspapers and magazines. We did not have the money to buy records or tapes so we made our own music. Nothing in the major media reflected our interests or concerns. We had no money—and so were forced to create the culture that most other people buy. While we were political and understood current events, our concerns, like most people’s, were specific and provincial.
We operated under the assumption that America’s leaders would continue to support their class interests and shortchange the people, refusing to invest in education and infrastructure repairs, and that no major media would seriously question or propose altering the dominant cultural paradigm. We reasoned that as more people became impoverished, disenfranchised, and betrayed by the corporate state, our numbers would swell; then we would be prepared with the operative alternatives produced by our social research. Reviewing the past twenty-five years, I am saddened to observe that even though we were perhaps wrong about our swelling numbers, we were certainly correct in our assumptions about our leaders and the fate of American workers.
Yet this stringent political focus was part of the problem, since world events did not offer islands in time on which to experiment endlessly. Current events demanded participation, exacerbating our overextension and stress.
Metropolitan Edison Company (MECO), the local utility company, planned to build a nuclear power plant in our community. Ironically, before he died, my father had already arranged the sale of several farms and rights-of-way to MECO. As dates for community hearings approached, we began to consider the ramifications of such a plant on our future and on the area.
I knew nothing about nuclear power but did understand how to use a library, so I volunteered to do basic research for the family. One book, Poisoned Power, by nuclear physicists John W. Gofman and Arthur R. Tamplin, impressed me greatly. It pointed out plutonium’s impossibly long radioactive half-life (twenty-five thousand years to diminish its potency by half—two and a half times the number of years since the invention of agriculture!) and argued the impossibility of guaranteeing social stability long enough to keep it out of the biosphere. Furthermore, the book argued that once nuclear power was ubiquitous, the dangers critics now cited would become the justification for political repression to ensure the necessary public stability to prevent possible disaster. The authors went on to explain that the Price-Anderson Act passed by Congress to encourage the new industry relieved utility companies from financial responsibility for a major calamity, making it impossible for citizens to get sufficient insurance. By the time I was through with my research, it was evident that the power generated in this tiny rural community was intended for New York City and that the plant was being located in Portland, Pennsylvania, because it was considered expendable. I decided to attend the board of supervisors meeting, where the issue was to be discussed, and to make a case for the opposition.
The Northampton County Board of Supervisors met in a utilitarian, undecorated chamber with church buffet tables at the front and several rows of folding metal chairs for the audience. Four or five elected officials shuffled papers and saluted people from their seats behind the row of tables. A motley assortment of civilian petitioners seeking easements and permits coagulated in small clusters around the room. My presence created a stir because our group was locally infamous, and I was no longer the “li’l Petie Cohon” some of the locals remembered.
When the issue of nuclear power was raised, I asked to be recognized and spoke uninterrupted for nearly fifteen minutes. Though the subject was new to me, I’d studied it intensively for several weeks. The information was fresh, and I was able to reel off facts and statistics with assurance. When I finished, there was a stunned silence. The audience was, in Lenny Bruce’s words, “an oil painting.” After a few uncomfortable moments in which the loudest sound in the room was the squeaking of metal chairs, the chairman turned to two men sitting beside him, dressed in starched white coveralls. They were engineers from the power plant, sent by MECO management to dispel public anxiety, and he asked them if they’d like to respond. They were disoriented, like witnesses to a disaster. One of the two, a pleasant-looking man with a red mustache, declined for them both, saying, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we were just not prepared for something like this.” Their abdication galvanized the audience. Two supervisors and several members of the audience expressed interest in learning more about the subject, and the Atomic Energy Information Group (AEIG) was formed then and there to study and disseminate information about nuclear power. It exists to this day, a grass-roots citizens’ group that has successfully blocked the building of any n
uclear facility in the Delaware Water Gap region.
There were additional repercussions from the nuclear power issue. Nuclear power plants demand uninterrupted access to vast quantities of water cooling the reactors, and this in turn requires the construction of dams. Near Turkey Ridge, where aeons ago the Delaware River cut through the Kittatinny Mountains to form the Delaware Water Gap, a bucolic farming community called Shawnee-on-the-Delaware nestled on the river’s floodplain. The required dams would flood the area permanently, so the power companies seized the land under the quaintly named but brutal process called eminent domain and evicted the farmers who had worked the land for generations.
When construction of the dams was delayed due to the uncooperative ignorance of locals like myself, selfishly advancing our own interests over the concerns of strangers in a distant metropolis, the power companies decided to rent the now-vacant properties until matters could be resolved. They did not rent the farms back to the original inhabitants but advertised for tenants in the Manhattan newspapers, perhaps hoping the displaced owners would not notice. The lovely farms were soon inhabited by Puerto Ricans from the lower East Side, hippies of every color, back-to-the-landers, welfare mothers, and anyone else who fancied rural life at bargain-basement government foreclosure prices.
Local bitterness (and xenophobia) caused the power companies to pirouette again and compound their maladroit decision by evicting the new tenants. However, the immigrant rabble did not mimic the acquiescent behavior of the original farmers. They dug in their heels, invited more friends to join them, and the “Squatter Community,” an anarchic, free-for-all aggregation of tents, shacks, farms, and buses sprouted on the floodplain like mushrooms after a rain.