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 detail: LOC: HQ799.7 .G78 tags: biography,book,counterculture,non-fiction title: Naked In The Woods Tags ==== biography book counterculture non-fiction