Chapter 2 

"The house sat in a meadow of yellow flowers with the sound of a mountain stream constantly in the background. After awhile that, the sound, dissolved into the flow of voices. If I listened specifically I could hear the pattern of flow over the rocks, over itself as it cut behind a long row of pine trees and odd ferns.

Someone, somewhere, at some time had built a fine house out in the woods as so many had done during the building up of the frontier. It had its flaws that I learned about over time but in my mind it still seems as perfect an object as one could imagine. To put so much energy and love into a crude hovel was a mark of something special, of something that couldn't be written off by history.

The main house had doors leading up to the attic and down to a ground floor where it got very cold and often a person slept for reasons I only learned later on. The windows were small. From the kitchen you could look out on the woodpile and the stump they used to cut their wood. The main room was full of books and blankets with a generous fireplace that provided, for all intents and purposes, the heat for the house. During the summers the heat was so bad everything was left open with hopeless screens to keep the bugs out. Usuaully a cluster of fat bees hung aournd the kitchen and we told not to bother them. "you don't bother them, they won't bother you." And the bees would hover over my plate sometimes.

I learned later that the road was an old horse path that wound through the thicket of pine and manazinta. The first time I apporoached the place I noticed a small tractor being taken out of a shed and heading up past the house.

"They work here," I heard myself think as though I couldn't quite believe it.

I was brought up the road by a strange giant of a man who turned out to be a kindly nut. When we approached the house I saw a group of three people by the side of the road. They were discussing anything imaginable. They often talked in little groups and know one knew what was said but the communicants themselves. They were often jealous of their secrets. Then there was sudden laughter. One young man had thrown his head back and the other two turned away with faint smiles.

The house was old but well built. There were rusty implements hung from one side. The wood on it looked original. The roof was one of those roofs you see up in the mountains so the snow will slide off. It looked like tin to me and many times the sun refected off that tin and hit me in the eye. The whole house was built on blocks several feet off the ground and I learned later that was because of the proliferation of snakes in the area. One day I knelt down and peered under the house and saw the glint of old, dried snake skins laying askew over themselves.

As I said it was in a meadow and surrounding the meadow were two cultivated fields. Out of one were flourishing corn stalks. Behind all this was a rugged, wooded mountain filled I could imagine with every type of beast imaginable. The first dreams I remember having there were of strange beasts coming out of the woods and chasing me out. They didn't eat me, just chased me out as though I didn't belong. I would often wake up and go outside and stare at the bulging white stars pulsing down on me and then get settled and go back to bed.

Soon enough two dogs came up and started barking and yapping at me until the big man told them to, 'git git' and the dogs scampered wildly around me and then disappeared behind the house. The barking had brought people out and they stood and watched as the man they called Bear and I made our way up the path toward the entrance to the house. It was at this moment, my friend, that I lost all sense of the mountain beauty, its water and spectral hot sun bleeding through everything. No, I was preparing myself to explain why I was wondering around on their property.

A man emerged who had a distinguishing look to him that set him apart from the other men of this mountain. He was tall with a full beard that was, already, showing some bits of whiteness. He came out of the group and came up to me. I'll never forget the fierce expression in his eyes; eyes that were hard and penetrating without a hint of craziness that I saw later on among people of the mountain. The man they called Bear seemed almost apologetic as he explained how he'd found me wondering around. He called me, 'the wayward brother,' and his voice got defensive and the tall man put his hand up.

It was silent. I felt the people were not completely suspicious of me but concerned about how my presence was going to disrupt everything. And, at that point, had they told me to leave I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I would have turned and rambled down the road and not looked back.

"He says he's escaping the war," the Bear told the tall man. "Says he has no better idea than to lose himself in the woods where no one will think about looking for him.'

The tall man looked at me. "Is that true? Are you running from the war?"

I made a gesture of little consequence, an acquiescent shrug.

"You are welcome to our community, then. Glad to have you here." And he put out his hand which I took and he pumped the hand defiantly as though I'd been part of the community from the beginning of time.

And I suddenly spurted out, "I'll do anything asked of me!"

"Can you do anything useful?"

"I can always fetch water from the stream."

And when I said that the people broke out in laughter and made me feel like I was part of them.

"My impression of the place? The landscape was grotesque and stark in places. Manzanita flourished from the creek to the road looking like old dried coral in some empty ocean. The surrounding hills were covered with a thick sea of pines with bare spots I imagined were inhabited by a mountain lion. There was a time, believe it or not, that I felt cloistered. Up the long road from the town I saw lush farmland and pasture with old threshing machines in the middle of a brilliant green. Everything looked asleep and passive as the wind blew over them.

And there was always smoke from various chimneys and dogs lingering in front of doors or roaming out by a herd of cattle.

There was one place of subtle energy where I felt utter peace. It was in the shadow of great pine trees, near the sound of the stream, as sun filtered through arching limbs and the air cut through my mind. I would stand in this spot for as long as I could. But, in all other places there was the distortion created by granite, red dirt, and Manzanita. It was as if this place was the exhausted result of a violent fight within nature.

And I was not naive. I had known about communes and the whole movement toward the god-loving earth. In fact my friend, Jake, who you might remember went so far to join an Indian tribe in the Sacramento Valley. It was a tribe patched together by an old medicine man who wanted to teach the young whites the ways of the Indian. Jake got busted for growing hemp but I think he made it through ok. At any rate, the purpose of these things, the will behind them, was the will to health. We dissolve and fly apart under the pressure of the artificial so these mountain types had sought out a healthy alternative. And, I have to admit, for a long time my impression of them was of women giving birth to babes in the dry furrows and men sitting around smoking hashish from corn cob pipes, and large feasts of fresh vegetables and ample red wine with laughter and conversation echoing through the valley of the mountain.

Some of that, my friend, is true. But it is also true that they were a common lot of people looking like a band of itenerant farmers. Sometimes they looked as if they had been struck dumb by something.

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. It was starting to collect a history for itself but I had a strong feeling it didn't care for history and wanted to live in a splendid free present. People had come and gone. I later learned who some of the original cast were, the committed one's I used to say to myself. I was curious why the man had renamed himself after the mad monk of Russia because I didn't see too much madness in him. I never brought the subject up but when I think back on it is was his belief that either he or his idea were not very killable and that gave him a lot of confidence.

They put me up in a little cottage that smell old and was filled with twenty year old National Geographic magazines. Soon after the tall man named Rasputin 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 the Bay Area and was not much into school. That I had fallen in love, well, I said, maybe it wasn't love but we were closer than friends. 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 and had sacrificed much for my desire to avoid the dreaded war.

"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 guy 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."

Rasputin then did something unexpected. He began to explain himself in ways that made me uncomfortable. 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 from me, those damn, dirty years. 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 here hunting and he came across this place that looked abandoned enough. But, that's a whole different story that I'll tell you later."

I showed interest in his story, tired as I was of the stories of others. I had wanted my own story but it had to, I guess, move through many other stories to get to me.

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.

As far as I could make of it the commune had been built out of ideas. It wasn't the single-mindedness of Rasputin but ideas seeded from the beginning of time. Thoreau, who Rasputin talked about constantly, headed the list since he had re-taught American men how to withdraw their attention from the inane and porous world and listen in solitude to the intellect of nature; divine, sensuous, eternal nature. He said he read a lot of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Marx, even, because he was convinced that money made for mad men. He was always dismissing one of his old favorite thinkers. 'Ah, he was an old crank,' or 'he's obsolete now, no use talking about him.' He admired the Amish and Mormons and mentioned the Shakers and other groups I had read about in college. He said though, "we are not a religious group, we are spiritual rationalists." I wasn't sure what that was and let it be for a bit and continued to listen to him.

"The genders are allowed to develop freely without any prejudice or judgement. Some of the women have taken over the tractor as their own machine and nurse it like a child."

I was reminded of the early Christians and no matter what Rasputin had said some of the people told me that they had seen Jesus, had spoken to Him, and were continually inspired in their dreams by His appearance. And what greater example had been created than the simple, egalitarian, truth-seeking community of those early Christians that broke, finally, under the pressure of the will to power?

Many of the men had grown beards and let their hair hang down their back. There was always a woman sitting in the shade nursing her baby at her naked breast. She rarely smiled and looked out at the trees.

Food was collected and stored. Whatever supplies were bought from town became property of all. If anyone had a job in town (and a few were loggers or fire watchers) their wages were put into the commune bank account to buy essentials. Essentials were decided on by The Committee of Ten. The Committee took up the issues of the daily operation and articulated them fully, trying to wring out some conclusion. They would wring and wring it until the question was laying out stark for all to see. Then a resolution was drawn up and all the members voted; one vote per member, majority ruled.

I noticed that there would be various types of discussion. Sometimes they were very rational. And other times they were nearly violent over the smallest detail.

After a couple of weeks I forgot where I was. The silence of the morning was no longer disturbing. There was always a kind of grace in the air. It was utter silence and then a quick puncturing sound of a blue jay. Then the chicks started clucking and I could hear feet outside my window and then a laugh or low conversation. When I opened the door the clouds were hiding the ascending sun. I would think to myself, 'this is no place to work. It's absurd people want to labor in the middle of peace and beauty. For all that I started looking forward to my daily chores.

One day Rasputin confronted me. At first I thought he was angry about something. Instead he told me to take the day off. 'You're doing good work. Go off and meditate by yourself or read or anything you desire to do.' I was mildly shocked and felt uneasy. I went back to my shack and got one of the books you'd given to me. As I heard all the activity around me I knew I had to go somewhere that my conscience wouldn't bother me. I went down to the waterfall to contemplate some things I was mulling over. I thought about how long I would have to stay in the mountains? How long would the conflict last? Was my future ruined because of his decision? Was it an impulsive decision I would learn to regret the rest of my life? Would one day come when I would be confronted by the consequences of my decision? These were not kind thoughts.

I will take a walk, I said to myself. I will walk up the path by the stream and look at things.

I walked past Herbert, the ax-man, who was sharpening his ax on an old grinding wheel. 'Fine day today,' he said.

And then there was the woman. She was there.

David Eide
January 24, 2014