LETTERS 

This commune or farm or whatever it was had been organized five years before by the tall man whose name he had changed to Rasputin. Soon after they put me up in a little cottage the tall man called me into his place and offered me a glass of wine. There was activity, no question about that, slow as it was, nearly hidden from view. This Rasputin plied me for information. I told him how I'd grown up here in this area and was not much into school. That I had fallen in love, well, I said, maybe it wasn't love but we were close. In fact, I told him, my adventure was particularly difficult without her. I felt foolish for saying it, as though I was embarked on a great epic.

"Well," Rasputin said. And he looked up with his lips closed together. "Sounds reasonable. What did you take in school?"

"Journalism. I was being trained to write for newspapers.

"Ah journalism. We have no need for reporters up here. Did you learn any useful thing? Did you learn business or farming?

"Journalism prepares a man for many things; a bit of law, a bit of business, a bit of everything.

"Hm, I see."

Rasputin was slipping his eyes all over the place. He stopped and explained that sometimes people would wander and stumble in out of the woods and expect all kinds of things from the farm and end up being parasites rather than any use. So he had started to question every person who came through 'this particular part' to make sure they had a background with the sort of fit needed in their community. It was nothing personal but Rasputin claimed he could read an entire life in a few sentences and the way they were spoken. He made it clear he was insuring that the farm wouldn't fold under 'parasitism.'

"That's why most of us come up here; to get away from it in the first place."

Now it was Rasputin's turn to explain himself so I sat back in my chair. It was growing dusk and I became conscious of the stream running on the otherside of the trees twenty yards or so from the house. I couldn't see anyone. It seemed strange to me since I had been conscious of the movement of people all the time I was up there. Rasputin began to speak.

"I did a lot of things, did a lot of surviving, before I found the light if you know what I mean. That's all past me now. The light remains but the past is dead and that's just fine with me. I'd gone through all the phases. First I was an intellectual demon if you know what I mean. I was the type of guy who got depressed and disillusioned after reading the Confessions of Rosseau. What a jerk that guy was masked by his sweet idealisms. But I had a plan. And the plan was to pull together the best elements of the on-going out of the limits of ideas and put them to work in an academy of some kind. I was going to purchase some land and set it up out in the country where there'd be nothing but art, beauty, ideas freely exchanged without the mundane responsibilities to worry about. People thought of me as a nuisance in school because I'd always get this plan together and try to get others interested but all they wanted to do was to party and think of their careers. Anyway, the idea kind of died in me along the way and for a while I ran with a strange group of people who had devoured a lot of chemical substances and read Castenada and all of that. I call that my getting to know you phase after the song you know? Well, after awhile I see that the only thing these people had in common was a desire to kill themselves as quickly as possible though they might call it something else. At any rate, I began to preach to them informally about these intellectual ideas that no one knew about but a few professors and these people started to cling to me like I'm the truth. Then I started to teach them in a more formal manner and bring in some of the eastern ideas that had been floating around. But, it's just trying to get these people to open up to one another and to forget their pettiness and forget their nonsense and live from the heart. But sure enough, don't you know, they no longer trust me because I bring them up to a certain point and then can't tell them where to go next so the whole group goes dissolving into the city somewhere and I'm left wondering what happened.

After a time I realized that it was me who didn't know where to go next. I spent a couple of bad years after that. Can't say much about this now except that they are gone. But then the idea of a nice, respectable commune without any high flautin' ideas came pretty naked to me one day. Actually, it came to me after I'd thought and read about country living for awhile. But, to actually get up and try to get one of these things going was hard. I contacted a few people and one thing led to another. A fellow named Roy, who you'll meet, had been up her hunting and he came across this place that looked abandoned enought. But, that's a whole different story that I'll tell you later."

I showed interest in his story. Looking closer at Rasputin he must have been in his mid or late 30's. Looking into his eyes I could detect a wide range of experience and, if not sadness, great world weariness.

David Eide
February 7, 2000
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