As I write this I am sitting in an oak forest. The purple picnic table that this tiny laptop is propped on was probably made just a few hundred yards away right here at Twin Oaks, the intentional community famous for its hammock and tofu businesses. Twin Oaks is the most well known secular income-sharing community in the USA. It's one of the several communes that outlived and transcended the reputation of communes as haphazard collectives of worthless hippies in the woods. These people are very worthwhile hippies in the woods and they've proven that socialist village life can work really well. Passing through the place any time of day I see infants and elderly people, young elders and young adults. And everyone looks fit and healthy, no surprise because most of the jobs around the place are pretty physical and all of the food is made from scratch, nearly 100% from the gardens this time of year. This atmosphere had me electrified, I danced and cleaned carrots from the garden for about an hour and a half one day. Lucky they have a woodfired sauna.
So how the heck did I get here? I am wondering that myself. It all started with the idea that, having dropped-out of my internship with Tara, I really ought to find a good way to prepare myself for this one-way ticket's date of October seven. What could be better preparation for leaving home than to leave home? I decided to pack as if I were going to Italy and instead go do whatever the heck I want in this country! (If I must...) Well, I wanted to go back to Hendrix. I had been a bit uneasy about my sense of profound loss at leaving Hendrix.
A quick aside: I hadn't been prepared that I might not be ready to surrender the ease and comfort of college life. Everyone I ever talked to was ready to move on, but my senior year left nothing to be desired. I had arrived; classes were fascinating, I had full access to the ceramics studio, I had lots of wonderful friends, and every Friday we ate shabbat dinner and drank fabulous homebrewed beers together.
Well, I blocked out five or six weeks of time for travel and made about a week and a half's worth of plans. The plan was to take a greyhound up to Little Rock, stay with my old roommates, then get to Hendrix where my friends were back early, planting and expanding the garden that I spent so much time tending, *sigh* back in the golden days. I'd chill there for a few days and then drive with Emily, a friend from school, out to her sister's place in Asheville NC. Then I imagined I'd find a farm to work on out there. Little did I know...
Well, all of that happened as planned. Seeing the garden unfold into something so much greater warmed my heart and the thrill of being on the road eased my separation anxiety for Hendrix. Then the real adventure began.
Emily and I were in Asheville and we wanted to go visit a friend of her sister's. This girl is young, recently married, and they are homesteading a small biodynamic dairy in the mountains by the river north of Asheville. I was pretty thrilled at the chance that I might be able to help out there.
The day came that we hoped to visit and, like good little children of the information age, we called them that morning. No answer. So we decided to go to Warren-Wilson College and keep calling in the mean time. Warren-Wilson had been described to me several times before as a magical paradise of sustainability, a place where everybody is a wood nymph or benevolent lumberjack, all standing in a united front against a culture of consumerism, shortsightedness and waste.
Well we got there (after a missed turn that took us to a trail to a pretty bald filled with wild blueberries on the blue ridge mountains) judging by their pastures and gardens, their recycling sorting yard and 20 foot compost tumbling drum (homemade on site), their free store and their healthy hippie glow of real food and hard work--at first glance I judged that the descriptions were true. Emily and I agreed not to speak on how great it would be to be a student there (Emily has a few more years left at not-so-progressive Hendrix). More magic was to follow...
We went up the steps to the garden cottage, artfully banistered with finished twisted tree branches. There, over a plate of empty honeycomb we found Davey Bar-Shimon and his friend. We introduced ourselves etc. It turned out Davey had finished his summer forestry internship (benevolent lumberjacks) and was already moved into his dorm with two more weeks before classes. He said he was thinking of going to an intentional communities conference. I said "take me with you". Laughing it off he asks if I'm 25, I'm not, so that doesn't help with the price of a rental car.
Well, Emily and I mention that we'd planned on getting up to this dairy homestead, shockingly Davey not only knows the couple, he also knows how to get to their farm! So he packs a backpack in about 5 minutes and we launch in Emily's car heading to the homestead.
Davey continues to impress us like crazy, he knows the circuitous route out to this place and next thing we know, this good looking young couple is showing us their six cows (three giving milk), their milking room, the winter squashes still maturing in the garden that are an heirloom of their friend's family (big beautiful elongated pumpkin-looking fruits with creamy peach colored skin). They take us on a walk past plunging vistas over the river, by towering cliffs, we see a repossessed house once owned by a weed-growing Columbian (busted) and his Swiss wife (or some such ethnic pairing)its stuccoed walls match the color of the heirloom squash, we see an "earthship" a house built from local or rejected materials (tires). It is completely off the grid, the temporary electric meter used for construction still stands, its wheel motionless. We also pass a Hindu retreat center and meditation station, it's a building of conjoined domes upon a bald hill with a little community garden on one side, mostly left in the hands of Vishnu to preserve.
Well, the professionals were laying block for the homestead house when we got there and so I would be of no help for a few days were I to stay. It was time to go and we all got back in Emily's car. On the way back down we're considering our next step. Davey had already told some stories about his adventures with hitchhiking, including that he had hitched to work every day for two months this summer. So I was psyched when he proposed that Emily pull over that very moment and drop us off to begin our hitching journey to Charlottesville VA.
It was late afternoon then, our first ride was in the back of a ladies truck, her two little girls were in the cab. She was so nice, she drove us right up into the development where Davey's older friend was living. He let us stay the night and dropped us off at the interstate onramp the next morning in the wee hours on his way to his job as manager at Starbucks. We lounged until the light, Davey in his camping hammock, me on my backpacking bedroll working on Rosetta Stone Italian.
When the sun came up over the interstate we roused and got our thumbs out. Ten rides later we are surrounded by lightning in Marion Virginia, searching for an alleged shelter in a city park. We find it, and a comfy port-o-john to take a dump, I unroll my bedroll by a picnic table under the shelter but Davey prefers to pitch his hammock in the trees, foolishly believing the locals that "that's just heat lightning, we probly won't get any rain tonight."
Well, I didn't get any rain, just some wind whipped mist. But poor Davey comes running into the shelter butt ass naked having frittered every possibly scrap of dryness under his hammock's rainfly. Lucky for him I have a microfibre towel and another hammock just like his that I bought earlier that day at an AT (Appalachian trail) hostel. We both get a nights sleep only briefly interrupted by a cop who shined us awake to ask if we were coming off the AT, "no, we're hitching to Charlottesville" we explained groggily. He quickly lowers his light and lets us know that he'll let the other police in the area know we're here so they don't bother us. True story.
A guy who picked us up the next day told us that once Marion had made national news because the cops heckled a guy who was riding his horse across the nation for some cause. That may have had something to do with our luck.
Well, we scored a lucky ride on Thursday, saved our butts. This guy Wyatt, a skilled woodworker, resident of a craft retreat school in Tennessee where master craftsfolk give workshops, picked us up and took us all the way down I-81 and even detoured one exit north on I-64 to get us pointed the right direction. Then two carnival workers picked us up and dropped us on the shoulder by an exit for Charlottesville where we were in walking distance to a shopping center and bus stop.
I met some refugees from Bhutan and then we bussed into downtown. We got a call back from a couchsurf host who picked us up from down there and showed us around downtown a bit. We picked up some local beers and heard about his doctoral work on trees' response to atmospheric pollutants (their pores get stuck open and they basically become unregulated wicks putting water from the soil into the air). This guy is named Eric and he was a tremendous host (but a skinny guy incedentally).
The next morning we bussed down to the library on the freebus and met Wizard from Twin Oaks to pick up the shuttle out to the Commune. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! This life is outrageous! I don't feel sad that I'm done with Hendrix anymore!
There is more, but at this moment I am in Pittsburgh and I'm expecting a call from a guy named Peter who I found on a hombrewer's message board. I called him yesterday and he's gonna give me a ride about an hour north to Slippery Rock where there's a big homebrew festival at a campsite this weekend with outdoor brewing on Saturday and a tasting tournament on Sunday. Who knows, perhaps I'll be a judge, I'm going to volunteer to help out wherever there's a need.
For now, enjoy these few pictures and know that the story is coming of how my weekend workshop at Twin Oaks became a week-long stay, also how I got to Pittsburgh. All routine is obliterated on this travel and it's all I can do to jot a few notes each night. I know I started by saying that I'm at a purple picnic table in an oak forest, but I finished writing this at my aunt's sister's house in the Mt. Washington area of Pittsburgh. Such is life on the road when laptops just don't want to fit into the day, no matter how small and endearing HP makes them.
Pax!
