The next day Dave came back to commune with us around the hole. He and Aaron repaired the stand pump with Leo’s parts and tried it out. It didn’t work. For hours it didn’t work.
“Cripes, we know there’s water there,” Dave said. “You’re just going to have to try to dig down to it. I don’t think you have a choice.”
So Aaron, who could dig, dug. Four feet down, then six, until the top of his head lined up with the grass. Standing way down in the hole, he screwed the pump onto the pipe and tried it again. It worked. We took turns pumping. It was nearly too stiff for me to pump—How convenient, I thought, Aaron will have to pump it all—and then I filled up a quart jar to taste.
“Pipe dope!” Aaron spat. It tasted like chemicals and clay, worse than the adhesive at the dentist. Once it ran clear it tasted delicious, though, and we eventually had it tested: about 99.5 percent pure, with a touch of added calcium. As close to perfect as it gets, and as cold as water floating with a disk of melted ice.
Aaron lined the pump hole with stones that he’d picked up from a neighbor’s field pile and finished the steps with flat stones. He pumped up two five-gallon plastic jugs and lugged them up the hill, as he would every day afterward.
The first time the water came rushing out, rock-cold and forceful, I felt more rooted than I had in years. This one small improvement to our simple water-and-power situation made it feel like we had entered yet another new era. Without the constant sense of a diminishing water supply, our days lost some of their anxiety and began to feel more comfortable. I could now cook, and wash dishes, to my complete saturation.
Before I could give that a spin, we scrubbed up at the wash basin because it was time for Bruce and Cheryl’s party.
—
Prior to my entrance into his life, Aaron prided himself on his ability to smoothly, strategically, stop by other people’s houses at happy hour. If he was lucky, as he often was, a drink slid into a dinner invitation. At Bruce and Cheryl’s, if they were feeling devout and healthy, the drinks offered were milk-thistle tea or freshly extracted beet-carrot juice, all from their garden. There were homemade pickles to start and soba noodles for dinner.
If the collective hungers were up, they served gin and tonics floating with precious ice and slow-grilled pork ribs. As the fire jumped up and down in the pit, guitars were pulled out.
This was a party of the latter variety, a feasting time. Bruce made pulled bison barbacoa in the solar oven, monitoring it all day while they worked outside in the yard, and he’d called potluck for the rest.
I crawled sideways out of our low-riding Buick holding a covered dish that contained my most recent crush—buttery fried corn, browned in a cast-iron pan until it tasted like the sun had roasted the sweet kernels on a twirling spit. I kicked the Buick’s heavy door shut. Outside, it was what you’d call authentically dark.
The night air, without any electric light around to dilute it, thickened into a material substance. The dark vibrated fondly around me like an invisible swarm—either gnats or a force field, it was always hard to tell. As usual, neither Aaron nor I carried a flashlight, even though we’d been negotiating similarly blind pathways all summer long at our own place. With the insouciance of twentysomethings, we felt freer without a flashlight, like it deepened our trust. It was kind of like a woods version of going without underwear.
We walked blindly down the sandy path, like bugs drawn to the warm flames of the campfire, our pace keeping time with the conga drums. The compiled effect of the darkness, the zippered beats of the drums, and the distant sound of party voices made me feel like we were entering some kind of womb. Why must the woods settlers of the ’60s’ back-to-the-land movement be reduced to the word hippie? I thought. It puts such a negative spin on the contagious generosity, the backwoods magnificence, of that cultural moment in perfect action.
On the potluck table where I set my corn, a full landscape quickly sprouted: there was falafel; tangy, fermented tomato salsa; black threads of a hijiki-carrot salad; Dutch-oven potatoes; and three bowls of cucumber salad, two creamy, one vinegary. (It was the week for cucumbers.) A whole slew of open quart jars lined the middle space, all of them stuck with forks: dill pickles, sweet bread and butters; pickled asparagus; sweet spiced beets; mixed hot vegetable pickles; dilly beans.
Cheryl walked up from the house carrying an earthen pot of black beans. Small-boned, barefoot, olive-skinned, with long brown curls falling down her back, she wore a large scarf twisted up behind her neck to make a tropical halter dress. They were calling this their Shangri-La party, and she was dressed for it.
After dinner, sitting with Cheryl in the dark screen house, I heard about her own transition to the woods, nearly fifteen years previous. When she arrived with her long nails and city clothes, all of Bruce’s friends nicknamed her Barbie.
“As in Barbie doll,” she said, shaking her head and pulling on her beer. “They thought I’d never make it out here, with no power and no shower. I was like Ha! Bruce, just show me which ones are the weeds and which are the baby plants, that’s all I need to know.” She smiled, having long since become the woman who gingerly relocated wildflowers with the tip of her spade, who spent her days weeding their walking paths.
“That first year Bruce told me to give away my city clothes, including all of my heels and my collection of lingerie—vintage lingerie—and trade them in for Birkenstocks and cargo pants.”
Now, proudly braless, her transformation from city sexpot to hippie princess complete, Bruce was now asking why she’d thrown away all of her nighties.
“Good riddance to the heels, but I wish I’d kept those corsets with the covered buttons!” she pealed. “Gorgeous little satin buttons, and all to Goodwill!”
“Wah, wah, poor Bruce!” I replied, wearing my own woods uniform, a matronly calico button-up and baggy olive-green military pants hitched up with a sturdy belt. We clinked our longnecks in solidarity.