PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

8. Drop City

        Getting my International step-van out of that little New Mexico town was my first priority. I couldn’t drive it; I’d pay dearly if they caught me trying to steal away in it in the middle of the night. But all I needed was to find a licensed driver to drive it across the border into Colorado, a distance of forty miles or so as I remember. But since I didn’t know anyone in that tiny town I had no choice but to head on up towards Trinidad where I figured I wouldn’t have too much difficulty finding someone to return with me to get the truck. But backtracking is a pain.  Standing on the outskirts of the town with my thumb waving in the crisp winter air I had it in my head that something else would turn up—and it did.

        A car pulled over to the side of the road to give me a lift. The people were a hippy family from Trinidad. They weren’t from the commune there though; they had a regular home in town. The mom’s name was Molly and she had two kids with her and a neighbor-fellow who looked slightly younger than me. Molly must have been about twenty-five years old; she was a real earthy young mom. I liked her immediately.

        In the course of our introductions and subsequent getting to know each other I told them what I had just been through and how my International was still stuck back at the last town and how I needed someone to drive it up into Colorado for me. Molly suggested that the young fellow could do that. Well that cinched it. We had reached the border but good-hearted Molly turned around and went back forty miles to that town and me and the young guy got into my truck and he drove it out of town and up the highway towards Colorado following Molly’s car. The roads were no problem at all anymore. I guess they were sanded or the ice had melted but we had no difficulty at all on curves. When we passed the Colorado border I relieved him at the wheel and thanked him for his help.   I told him if I hadn’t found a licensed driver to get that truck up to Colorado right away anything could have happened to it, out in the open the way it was.

        “Oh, no sweat; I like to drive!” he told me. “But I don’t have a license. I won’t be old enough to get one for another year...”

        Hoo Boy! I hadn’t thought to ask him if he had a license. I had just taken it for granted that he never would have volunteered unless he had one. And we had just driven the truck right out of the police station parking lot and out of that crummy little town and up to the Colorado border—about as nonchalant as it gets! How funny! The joke was sure on me.

        I stayed at Molly’s home for several days. Molly was sweet and her kids were fun. Besides she really needed a man around. I slept with her in her big bed and when the kids woke us up in the morning, with juice and toast and tickling laughter this feeling stirred my heart immeasurably and I knew I was healing some old deep personal wounds which had remained untended since I’d been forced to leave my own young family four and a half years before. I stretched out my wrinkled silenced soul and merrily, tearfully, gratefully joined the children’s games, luxuriating in this treasured opportunity to be restored to a rich-in-love quality of life that men so easily and foolishly come to take for granted. I felt needed being “the man of the house”.

        Then late one night the man of the house came home and caught me in bed with Molly. I hadn’t even thought of her as being married and she hadn’t mentioned it either. So I sat there quite naked under the covers while they carried on a rather loud family argument that had more than a little to do with me actually. Somehow I felt like the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin, in the midst of a serious comedy. The papa ended up crawling into bed with us on the other side of Molly and we all went to sleep.

        After that first night I took to sleeping alone on the couch in the living room—but Molly still openly dragged me off into the bedroom for hours at a time during the days. She had a healthy appetite. Her husband and I actually became friends somewhat. I considered him to be a sensitive, open-minded person and I liked him a lot. But being friends wasn’t easy in those trying circumstances—because he had developed the formidable personality of a family provider over the previous decade or so, and I was a young run-around trippy-dippy-hippy. But I had a guitar and he didn’t and besides Molly was tired of his attitudes and shenanigans and she needed some new passion to rinse out her socks of life so to speak. You know what I mean.

        Molly was a prize. The guy knew it, too. I seen him crying several times about the disaster that was happening to his family life.  He was afraid of losing her, losing his kids... I felt sorry for him. Actually I wanted to see them get back together and make it work. I told them so, too. Molly thought that was ridiculous. Well, it wasn’t up to me. It’s just that a family as beautiful as they were makes the world a better place for everyone and that reaches out to all the people of the world, even me eventually. You know? I loved them both. Molly knew how I felt. But she didn’t mind having someone crazy as me around as long as I continued to get it up whenever she wanted it; and you can’t blame a girl for that. At least I can’t.

        I went over to the Department of Motor Vehicles and got a Colorado driver’s license easy as pie. I also registered the International and repaired the tail lights. I was legal! Everyone loved my old truck. People were always trying to buy it off me. It was my home: but it was parked in Molly’s driveway. I told Molly's husband that I wanted to paint it some wild color. He said he had a large can of yellow housepaint and  a few smaller cans of various other colors. That would do nicely. We painted the old van, mostly yellow but with splashes of red and blue and  green. It was nice.

        I loved Molly's family. I saw no other way to help them to work it out other than for me to leave. I thought the guy would be happy when I told him I was leaving. But he wasn’t happy—he was angry! He wanted to know why I was going. He asked me if he hadn’t treated me well. I re-explained my position. He offered to leave instead of me. He spent the better part of a morning trying to talk me out of going away. Man, he was good people... And a good friend, too, truly he was. I think he basically liked the idea of an extended family. I still had stuff I needed to work out in my own head though before I could do that.

***

        The famous commune “Drop City” was just outside of Trinidad. I had been there for a while in ‘69 and again in ‘70. I considered it a most remarkable habitat. The large geodesic domes were made entirely of metal cartops cut from wrecking yard automobiles with axes and welded together. Every time I arrived at Drop City I found a totally different set of people. The place was a living symbol of our movement and our culture and our times. It was written up and photographed in innumerable publications, the Whole Earth Catalogue being the most famous. So I left Molly’s place and popped in on the Droppers to see how things were going and hopefully to stay awhile.

Drop City was on its last legs. Signs of disintegration were everywhere: unfinished projects, unrepaired damage, debris. It looked deserted but it wasn’t. Some of the last hangers-on lurked inside the main building. They all somberly sat around a large woodstove; large as it was it was too small to heat the great geodesic dome adequately against the winter cold and the closer they were to the stove the more tolerable was their afternoon. They were all wrapped in blankets. I was surprised when I recognized Nancy among the people at the stove. And she was also surprised to see me. She looked up at me and said,

        “Well! If it isn’t Pan!! Glory be; Long time no see!”

        I had brought Nancy to Drop City in 1970, and left her there. Our roady relationship wasn’t working out and I figured she needed to grow up a little into the culture before she could understand where I was coming from in some of my ideas. Well, I could see she had filled that recipe fully. She’d been there more than two years and I could bet that every day she had steeped the tea of her life with rich counter-culture experiences. She looked as beautiful as a little blond commune sister could look in a flannel shirt and blue jeans. We went off to her little red zome to have a private conversation. I parked my newly painted Metro outside. Zome and Metro looked good together. When my libido fired-up Nancy wasn’t surprised at all to see I hadn’t changed much. But as we made love she didn’t move her body so much as a millimeter. She just lay there looking up at the ceiling or at me. When I asked her if anything was wrong she said no and asked me if it wasn’t good for me? I told her she didn’t seem too... enthusiastic... and she looked up at me and told me that actually she wasn’t. She explained that although she didn’t have a regular male partner at the moment, she’d perhaps had too many in a way; and sex was not a big thing to her anymore. She nonchalantly suggested that if I were through and had gotten my rocks off we could get back up and resume our talking. Before we had a chance to untangle a guy walked right in without so much as knocking and went into a conversation with her. They discussed a matter of small consequence back an forth for a few minutes until it was finished and then he started to go back out the door. He stopped and looked at her and asked,

        “Are you all right. Nancy?”

        She answered that she was. He pressed just a bit further and asked,

        “I mean, you are doing that because you want to aren’t you?”

        And she reassured him tiredly that, yes, it was ok, and she added that she would be out in a few minutes. After he left Nancy and I got up and got dressed.

        So I got a pretty good picture of the way things were on the commune at that time. People were concerned with each other. Their attitude seemed to be that sex was a bothersome thing more blithely done by kids who didn’t understand responsibilities. Also Nancy told me in the same thoughtful small voice that she was pregnant and was getting an abortion in a few days. That explained some of her sobriety I suppose.   When I tried to talk her out of getting the abortion she did lose her temper slightly; she told me it wasn’t my decision to make nor my place to lecture her. So I let the matter fall.

        A few days later I was sitting in the bathtub with Nancy and we were loving each other quite nicely and having a good old time and laughing kind of loud when one of the guys walked in and told me they didn’t do things like that around there and he’d appreciate it if I would leave the commune. Of course I was piqued. It wasn’t up to him to say whether I stayed or left and besides I had been there years before he had arrived. And what kind of counter-culture commune is it where a fellow can’t even take a bath with a young woman friend? Whenever I saw him after that it looked like a fight might erupt and that was not the sort of feelings Drop City normally nurtured. We stayed out of each other’s way as much as possible. No wonder Drop City was on its last legs, with people like him around. Communes like Drop City were created so we could free ourselves from coercive male sexual modes and crummy violent attitudes.

        Molly came by a few times. We sat around. She drove people to town for supplies. She reminded me I was welcome back anytime.

        Nancy left and got her abortion. When she returned she announced she was intending to enroll in a junior college and get back into a regular lifestyle.

        I decided I really wanted to go see how Boulder was doing.