TwinOaks3

Seven states, six days, and one interesting commune
My little visit to Virginia's Twin Oaks

In the days I was at Twin Oaks, I met a bunch of cool people. Keenan, my host, was a friendly and even-keeled guy. He was born in Thailand while his father worked for the CIA. He had reddish hair and a beard, but both were short and well kept, unlike the photo I saw in a book from at least ten years earlier. Keenan had been in charge of several TO building projects and so was put in charge of assembling the yurt. He worked hard on the project � never sweating or appearing sore, like me � and he was patient with Arlo and Rowan.
Keenan was often critical of other people at TO, but never confrontational. He seemed to be one of the most respected and well-known members in the community.
Thea was a ubiquitous presence on the farm. She could always be found with her son � Jonah Raspberry Tupelo � carrying him on her back, wheeling him around, watching him crawl on the ground, or breastfeeding him. She had an upbeat, bubbly personality and we had several conversations. She told me she had come to Twin Oaks from another community, East Wind, more than two years ago, but that she didn�t think she would stay at TO because it was too large of a community, with over 100 members. She definitely wants to raise Jonah within a community, but she would prefer a smaller one.
Later, Thea had a long conversation with Keenan while we were working on the yurt. It was about her dissatisfaction with the experience of raising a child at TO. She was pushing for a separate building on the farm for parents and their young children. As builder, Keenan said he would take on the project if there was money for it, but privately � after Thea had gone � Keenan said that she was unrealistic.
Thea is currently one of three �planners� for the Twin Oaks Community. This is the closest the commune comes to centralized executive power. Each planner serves an 18-month term, and those terms are staggered. I told her that I assumed that the planners were older, long-term members. She said no � in fact, no one wanted to have the job. One of the three seats is currently open and the community is having trouble getting anyone to serve.
Meredith was a student at Kenyon College in Ohio when she came to Twin Oaks. A native of Hawaii, she is around 20 years old, wears glasses and seems very sweet. I asked what her parents thought of her living at a place like TO. She said they weren�t too happy about it. She told them she was just taking a year off from school, but laughed when she said it, as if she knew that wasn�t the case. She has been living on the farm for three months and when I asked her what she thought of it, she said she loved it. She talked very excitedly about her work shifts in the tofu hut and the sewage plant.
Soon I noticed that Meredith was often in the company of a man whose name is Shaul. Keenan, who has been at TO for 18 years, said that Shaul had been there for �a long time.� Though his whitish-gray mane of hair and his length of time on the farm put his age at mid-40s, Shaul�s boyish looks, his athleticism and his trim frame make him appear younger. Right away I could sense that there was a relationship between him and Meredith, which was confirmed later. Maybe I am being harsh because Shaul was the person at TO I liked the least, but I couldn�t help wonder how many sweet and slightly na�ve young women had filled Meredith�s role before.
Jesse is also mid to late 40s and easily looks it. He doesn�t live on the farm any more, but is involved with a woman with does. Her name is Shaktze and she has a teenage daughter named Sage. Jesse told me about how Shaktze is having trouble dealing with her daughter and so is thinking of leaving TO. This led to a discussion of teenagers in the community and Thea said that Sage and her friends � there are three others � had been disrespectful to her, as well. Keenan commented that no teenager who grew up at TO had decided to settle there. Either they came in late teens or older, or they left before or during their teens.
I talked about how it is natural for teens to rebel and to reject their parents� way of life, and how, while attending public school (as the girls did) it must be difficult for them to explain their parents� way of life. The others agreed, but Jesse also added that the TO community was part of the problem � that the way the other parents raised their teens, letting them do anything, had negatively affected Sage.
Rich was also around the same age, and he cornered me while I was washing clothes. He told me that he had been at TO for three months and was planning on leaving. He had too many opportunities to make money on the outside � he is a painter � and he couldn�t afford to let those opportunities pass him by. He kept talking about how he had a teenage son who had just got his license, as if buying his son a car was his sole motivation for wanting to leave, but it seemed clear that Rich was the only person I�d met on the farm who put money ahead of principles. Though most of the others talked about problems that they wished could be corrected at TO, no one else seemed to totally disagree with the income regulations and to long to return to the cash-motivated world.
Then there were others: Mala, a twentysomething woman with a shaved head who seemed very nice; Tom, Thea�s mate and Jonah�s dad, who spent a lot of time caring for his son; Kristen, Keenan�s partner, who was extremely friendly; Ted, Kristen�s former partner and Arlo�s dad, who seemed uptight; the young couple who lived in the room next to me and would go to and from the bathroom naked; and quite a few older men and women, who I didn�t get to talk to much.
There was also a group of visitors, about eight of them. Visitors are there to go through the official three-week process for those who desire to become members. TO hosts about 10 groups of visitors per year. They were mostly young and lived in a separate building, known, of course, as the visitors� building. Visitors are required to meet the same work quotas as members, plus they must go through a series of meetings and orientations on various topics.
I talked a couple times to Gabrielle, who was from Atlanta and had been a student at Yale, but was probably taking a year off from school, and it seemed that she meant that, unlike Meredith. Gabrielle helped us build the yurt one day, and another time I found her cleaning up the kitchen. She wasn�t sure if she wanted to join TO when we spoke, but she was only several days into her visit.
She, and the other visitors often had looks of confusion on their face when I saw them listening to how one signs up for certain jobs or to the tangle of income regulations that the commune have in place. At least one of the visitors, a Brazilian named Mauricio, was planning to leave before the end of the first week.