She rested her elbows on an unfinished project on the kitchen table, open books on top of other open books. She was more restless that winter than usual. She stood up for more coffee but her mug was still full. “He needed direction,” she said, sitting down, rimming her mug with a finger. “You wouldn’t know it from the way he was later, but he was just one of those guitar-strumming kids at the time. Back then, all he could do was pick a tune and catch a fish. That’s it. He picked up everything else later.”
It was 1982 when they set out, she told me, nobody’s idea of a revolutionary time. They were eight adults altogether, plus three half-grown kids. Because my mother was older than the rest, because they were good with talk and she was good with plans, she’d been the one who’d arranged the timing of the departure, assigned jobs to the others, convinced my dad to lift a few axes and rifles from a bait-and-tackle shop. “You understand?” my mother asked me. I didn’t answer. I’d heard most of these stories before. I’d heard her describe that first winter in the cabin many times when I was young: all the scrappy little crises, the one fish they had to eat, the two new babies that came before spring, the ex-nutritionist’s kid who’d set one of the babies on fire by accident one night and the frantic drive to the hospital in a storm, the broken-down van on the road, the baby who was fine after all, and the kid-turned-teenager who wouldn’t speak again after that. I’d heard the stories, but never quite like this, never with this mix of bitterness and nostalgia. Before, she’d always emphasized how young they’d been then, how ignorant and misguided. But she hadn’t been young she told me now. She was thirty-three, long past her high school and college years. Everything she did, she did when she should have known better.
“Listen,” she told me. And she went through it all again from the very beginning. The van stolen from her parents’ garage in the middle of the night, the perilous winter drive to her uncle’s abandoned fishing cabin, the big new bunkhouse they’d built the first spring, the relief of summer, and summer again, the commune charter they’d copied in calligraphy on parchment and hung over the door—but then set on fire when everything fell apart six years in. “It was pretty bad at the end, sure. Everybody fighting everyone else, everyone jealous and getting confused about the kids. What to do with you guys. But not all the parts were bad, not most of the time. We had good ideas, good plans. We wanted kinship, not obligations.” She paused. “We believed there should be more than the nuclear family. We really thought we could see something better—”
She glanced at my sleeping dad, his cheek smashed against his shoulder.
She went on: “We really thought we could do more with the world—”
I looked down at her from my stool and waited.
“But then everyone took off, and we started over with just you.”
17
P.S. THE SEQUOIAS ARE MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN THE OTHER REDWOODS, IN CASE YOU EVER GET OUT TO CALIFORNIA. There’s a difference just so you know. The coastal redwoods grow (obviously) on the coast and the sequoias are in the mountains. You can drive straight through a sequoia, right? That’s one of the things people do. Plus the sequoias are older. I thought you’d appreciate knowing the difference. I used to go camping in the Sierra Nevada with my dad, and we’d eat canned soup and sleep in this tiny two-man tent he had from the army. It was great. Those trees really do seem permanent, they’re so big. We stayed for weeks, never washed our hair, drank Tang. The woods look like The Time of Dinosaurs or something. Of course, things always seem more impressive when you’re a little kid. That’s one of the reasons I don’t really want to go back. I mean, who wants to ruin one of the things you like thinking about most? Who gives that up on purpose?
Thank goodness for the back of the card but now I’m really out of room.
Bye again,
Mr. G.
18