PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING
HEARTS
12. EPP Baggage
The way I always
saw it, the beautiful abundance of sexual opportunities constituted primary perks in our
“alternative” lifestyle. EPP in the
early 1970s was one of the last bastions of sexual freedom.
Elsewhere hearts of liberty had battened down their hatches and prepared for
rough seas. The sixties were over indeed and life was getting tough. Easier by far to shear off the old freak-flag,
retire from the road. and go hide in a back office of daddy’s business. And as to the
old glory days of sexual rambunctiousness? Join a Baptist church and Repent! Repent! Repent! And that’s what many people
did.
There is nothing
more anarchistic than sexual freedom but we were anarchists of many other forms too,
ecological, economical, political. In most cases our search for liberty had brought us
into serious conflict with the world. The brothers and sisters who drifted into EPP were
purehearts buffeted by storms, shipwrecked and surviving but struggling mightily against
heavy seas: some of them kissed the ground when they arrived -- as though EPP were a holy
place. It was certainly one of the very few pieces of acreage that existed soley to
provide sanctuary for our culture’s wounded. Rumours of its existance spread far and
wide.
Still there were
always “Tories” among us like in the revolutionary war -- people who wanted to
keep the traditional social enslavements unchanged regardless of the heartsongs in their
ears, possessive people who had no desire to share anything; people who had no inclination
to listen to new ideas: people who wanted all libidos detuned and chained to convention,
or at least scrubbed clean of any personality -- and even some who believed women should
be “freed” from the tedium of heterosexuality. The varieties of the Tories
defied description: their eyes glared out from tangled hair and their venom found its mark
upon unwary celebrants. They believed their anger and poison were the true core essence of
our alternative society. One learns to avoid spiders that bite. Fortunately. EPP seemed to
be such a hard lifestyle that most of those spiders remained in toxic America where their
venoms were almost unnoticeable alongside all the napalm consciousnesses; where life
wasn’t such a hardship, and convenience stores were perceived to be closer to God.
We at EPP were
an earthy bunch of nature junkies, rarely clean enough to be accepted in a restaurant
without an argument; so brotherly and sisterly in our mannerisms that society, which
preferred a propriety of constrained self-discipline-cold-hearted consumerism -- easily
felt attacked when we cavorted in their presence. Our ebullient hugging made their eyes
bug out and about gave them fits. And if in some public place a sister happened to meet a
brother whom she knew intimately and they forgot themselves for a moment of passionate
abandonment -- the aroused consumers sometimes seemed to be considering whether murdering
them would be appropriate.
I’ve
recently met people who lived through those days who told me they thought the sexual
freedom thing was a myth made up by the media. They
say they never saw any of it so it must have been a figment of someone’s imagination.
They must have been wearing blinders. But it’s true: a good many people did nothing
but read books and eat bananas through the whole thing. Others did nothing but drink wine
and sleep under tables. Making love took too much exertion. Or it was too risky.
The Beatles sang, “And in the end the Love you take—is equal to the Love you
make...” Some people just saw no reason to make any. A good many alternative culture
people believed the freelove energies were chaotic and irresponsible, and that they needed
rechanneling into something more constructive: timid people with tight reins on their
passions. Retentive.
Whatever. The
point is we weren’t all at EPP for the same reasons—and six hundred acres
offered plenty of room for variety. You had your homesteaders in one place, usually with
babies and blueberry-faced children under foot; then over in this other corner you had a
contingent of derelicts, good-old-boys who primarily liked to drink together; wine, beer,
whiskey, anything... guys who just weren’t constituted at this time of their lives to
saddle themselves with the obligations of familyness—or even with a sexual encounter.
Generally, and usually overlapping either of the other two categories, you had some
hardcore dopers, acidheads. potheads. etcetera; planters of the herb. Also overlapping yet separate in some ways you had
the vegetarians and all their organic wisdom and homilies. Juxtaposing them rather
pointedly you had a rough collection of hunters and trappers who balanced themselves
precariously on the land since the concepts initially held by the original founders
promulgated the conservation and appreciation of the wilderness creatures with whom we
were to cohabit. You had assembled here a vast assortment of road gypsies, children of the
road, and mingled with them were people who had never really even hardly left their
hometowns until they arrived at EPP; people who stayed rooted wherever they happened to be
until forces beyond their control uprooted them and sent them scurrying through chaos to
seek a new home, people who thought freelove
was just more weird sin, and people who would gladly jump back into mainstream society in
a golden minute if any opportunity presented itself. You also probably had a government
agent or two who tried to infiltrate as the hunter/trapper element so they could keep guns
around without arousing suspicion.
Some people who
landed in or near EPP had never even heard of our dreams—they were merely looking for
a convenient situation. EPP was usually in too much of a state of flux for them to be
comfortable and most of EPP’s inhabitants appeared too weird and unsavory to people
who had always lived sheltered lives. Nonetheless. EPP seemed to offer some of them
something which caused them to find a way to rent or purchase land nearby where they could
commute back and forth as was convenient to their purposes—hunters for instance who
didn’t want to deal with vegetarian psychologies but who wanted access to the
six-hundred acres of animal habitat. Sounds mercenary doesn’t it? Well, they’d
argue they had as much right to kill as you had to preserve life—so you go ahead and
preserve life in your house and they’d kill in theirs. Let everyone give each other
privacy. I know what you’re thinking: that is the dumbest thing you ever heard. That
couldn’t possibly work. Right. But now we’re getting into some of the intense
differences which divided the land irrepairably during most of the years EPP existed. In
my experience I have observed that there is no headache quite like a conscientious
animal-lover facing off an armed renegade trapper deep in the woods. This was daily fare.
It seemed to me to be a deliberate tactic being used scientifically to destroy us from
within. I was probably right about that. At any rate there were sure more than enough
crazies around thinking they were Davy Crocket.
One day, soon
after I arrived I heard a lot of yelling and screaming and I headed in that direction to
see what was going on. A man was laying on the ground dying with a knife in him. His
murderer had taken to the trees. We bundled the victim into a stationwagon and proceeded
to attempt to get him to a hospital before he expired. The nearest one was twelve miles
away across the Quebec border; the border station was within a mile of the EPP entrance.
The border guards would not let us pass into Canada to save his life; we had to turn
around and drive forty miles to a hospital in New Hampshire and as it turned out he was
dead upon arrival. The murderer was caught and sent to prison. They had been fighting over
the ownership of a tent or some such thing.
Other similar
eruptions shook the land from time to time. Marie and Wally often speak of the
“sloppy shit” debacle that occurred at a time when I was absent. A potluck was
happening and five gallons of wine were consumed. Bernie was a tall thin leather-clothed
hippy propelled by wild-west dreams: a fairly common mindset in places like EPP, where
people were inclined to humour each other’s dreams if not outright collaborate in
them. Anyway, supposedly the argument had humorous tones (Marie laughs when she recalls
it...) Bernie told the other guy that he was eating some “sloppy looking shit’
and the other guy told Bernie he was eating “sloppy shit”... and so it went back
and forth like that and then Bernie sneers: —“White man speaks with forked
tongue” and next thing anyone knew guns were flaring, a pistol and a rifle. No one
got hurt that time luckily—but there used to be big fifty gallon drums in that meadow
which held water for community use—and they got riddled with holes; to what advantage
I don’t know. “Mindset”, yes...
Boston Bobby
hung out with EPP’s alcoholic clan, of course. Each one of them had a story.
I’ve kind of figured out that most people don’t get to the point of trying to
drink away their problems unless they are afflicted significantly by some catastrophic
event that shatters forever any beautiful perception of the world they might have held. At
least I’ve seen it sometimes. They gathered every morning and pooled their finances;
then they’d walk the mile or so into the little town of Norton and buy as much wine
as they could afford, usually a gallon for around five dollars. If they could go through two gallons a day sitting
on the railroad tracks or beside the river they were happy, in their own way. At least
they were oblivious to any reasons for being unhappy, or any ability to reason it all out.
I saw Boston
Bobby a little over a year ago, in October of 1991. We clapped each other on the back and
sat around a table jawing about old times. He hadn’t changed much except that
alcoholism tends to age people rather fast. He looked kinda ragged. I saw him twice in two
weeks and observed that the same mood swings still ravaged his life.
Pinky was
another one of the brothers. You know the term, “sentimental drunks”? Well a
good many of them fit that phrase pretty well: but Pinky was the sentimentalist.
That’s a somewhat attractive personality, I think, kinda. Well, in a sick way I
suppose: but nonetheless, it has its qualities. I think Pinky was a black hole. Have you
ever read about black holes in space? They are stars that go through a cataclism that
causes their entire mass to collapse inward into itself.
Energy can’t escape from its suction, not even light escapes. Nearby solar
systems are sucked in, too. Everything.
Pinky’s
brother committed suicide in a jail cell sometime in the late nineteen-sixties. Pinky
loved his brother a lot and never got over it. Pinky was a real strong person; about five
foot nine. He was a drunk; that’s almost understandable; but he hadn’t lost all
vestiges of purpose. He seemed to be
wrestling with an enigma: if a forlorn heartsick person were to put a lot of good energy
into life—would he get back as a result sufficient essence to make life... happy...?
We thought similarly, he and I. Sometimes I could start a sentence and he would break in
and finish it for me; or vice-versa. Sometimes
I would say something and he would exclaim. “Yes! That’s right. That’s how I see it!” Other times he
might think about it, take a breath, look at me and say. “No. I don’t think like
that. I see it like this...” I liked talking to Pinky. Pinky’s vacuum—the
loss of his brother—sucked me right into that place: I wanted to be his brother. I
wanted to replace his brother in his life if I could. Naturally. I didn’t say that to
him; but I felt it in my heart. Pinky understood though. Probably because it wasn’t
unusual at all. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone who knew of his tragedy felt the
same as I did. As a result he had a lot of brothers and sisters.
We all had a big
thing about “healing each other”. Among hippy philosophies that one is probably
on top. And I believe that people who earnestly seek in their hearts ways to heal each
other are bound to find some. For the most part Pinky rose above his grief. But when he
got real drunk sometimes he lost control of himself; he was prone to crying. Something about that, too—none of us felt as
bad about our own problems after we saw Pinky dealing with his.
He was a real
good gardener. In Vermont’s three month growing season it takes some skill to produce
vegetables in abundance and quality. He had the knack. His tomato plants had hundreds of
huge red tomatoes on their waist-high bushes. He canned them too. He grew all kinds of
things. I suppose he got a lot of satisfaction out of the hard work he put into his
garden. You’d see him out there in all kinds of weather; it kept him muscular and
tough. And unlike most houses on the land his house was always neat; a place for
everything... I remember his shelves full of various herbs and teas, all hand-picked and
dried. He lived alone. He wanted a woman to live with him but his drinking made that too
difficult; plus he had grown so used to his hard-work regimen, his private ways of dealing
with his pain, that a woman would have had a hard time squeezing herself into a niche
inside his life. Or maybe he really couldn’t let anyone ever really get that close to
him again for fear of losing them, too. But solitude may be a form of starvation and that
may be the reason he passed away from us.
It jumps way
ahead of this story but I’ll tell you the rest about Pinky anyway. We’re talking
1990 now—fifteen years forward in time...
Some rude
rascals took over EPP. They wanted his warm well-cared-for A-frame for themselves—so
they figured out that they’d have to remove Pinky to get it. He was too tough for any
of them to handle singly so several of them lured him outside on a pretense of needing aid
and then they beat him mercilessly, as though he were a dog. They ran him off the land on
which he had lived for twenty years. So Pinky had to leave his home, his gardens and his
paths; and he suffered from the ignobility of his beating. When I saw him in 1991 at the
Vermont Rainbow Gathering he barely mentioned any of it to me, though we had some good
talks and I even managed to get him on video just a little, camera-shy as he was. He had
blue tears painted on his face. I never really noticed them—until later. I featured
his photograph as the largest portrait in the annual Rainbow collage for that year and
when I telephoned Marie and Wally to ask them for Pinky’s address so I could send him
one Marie told me:
“If you
want to send one to Pinky you’ll have to send it to Heaven. Pinky killed himself last
week. It was a shock to all of us. I have a Christmas card sitting right here on the
bureau addressed to him that I was just going to mail off when I got the news. He never
knew how much we all loved him. He thought he was all alone.”
***
I will be
changing some of the names in this narrative, just to let you know…
Denny Bartleson
had one of those old Mercury sedans with the rear window that cranked down. The motor
hadn’t run in years and it sat there. He
was always going to fix it up. I guess we all have our sacred relics. Denny lived in a mole hill. It was a hole in the
ground but it had a small dome structure built over the top so a person could just about
stand up. Inside it was a rat’s nest. He hung out and drank with Boston Bobby and
Pinky and Bungalo Bill and those guys. He was a wild dude; once he chased a very nice
young woman around with a baseball bat. At least I will always remember things like that
about him although others will probably remember his more rational moments. When I knew
him on the land at that time in 1974 we got on just fine and I liked him. I have forgotten
most of those times. It’s a mindblock. A couple years later on in this story he plays
instrumentally in some events that caused considerable harm to my partner in life, a thing
he has never thought much about. He wasn’t a sensitive person. Still later he became
very fortunate: he met and married an extremely beautiful and head-strong young woman
named Nallia and they settled down in a nearby town and raised a family. He became a wiser
man then, fatherhood is known to do that. He probably never told Nallia about the thing he
had done but his avoidance of us caused Nallia to have an attitude of caustic aloofness
towards us which added a heavy weight to my life-partner’s difficult burden. I’m
sure Nallia wouldn’t remember any of it today; she was so busy then with the raising
of her own little family...
Many are the
years since those things happened and a lot of water has passed under the bridge at Earth
People’s Park.
Laura was
another strong young woman who made the land her home.
Inasmuch as she is probably the individual who spent more years on or near
the land than anyone else there should be plenty of stories with her in the middle and no
doubt there are. I don’t have them though for several reasons. She was a somewhat
reclusive lady with her own cabin and her own circle of friends. But when she partied she
enjoyed alcohol and caroused with the best of them, toe to toe, glass to glass. I drank
with them only rarely; alcohol scenes have never been a big thing to me. When I do attend
the occasional party I usually indulge rather quietly on the fringe for a couple hours and
then go home. I’ve often wished I wasn’t such a sober person; wished I could let
myself go like they do but no matter how hard I’ve tried I have almost always flunked
the test. Most parties bore me. There have been notable exceptions.
Most people find
that overdoing the booze trip causes a state of neglect to grow like an ever enlarging
puddle of quicksand and that’s how EPP finally swirled down the drain. What I think
is remarkable is that it languished in agony for twenty long years before it finally gave
up the ghost.
The boozers
totally inherited the land in its final years and someone had to take it upon themselves
to do the paperwork and keep the books. Because she loved the land and wanted to see it
continue as a refuge for our people (even though it was getting so blighted that fewer and
fewer folks came to use its “sanctuary...”) the job fell to Laura.
Actually the final scene hasn’t been played out at the time of this writing; and Laura is still in the center. The government, having confiscated the land because of pot-growing operations is charging her with several crimes that could put her away for many years if they have their way. The truth is that she was small potatoes. She was just a volunteer caretaker; the person who paid the bills and handled the mail and tried to get the trash picked up. That’s the function she assumed because there simply was no one else to do it. It was her way of helping out her brothers and sisters. Now the government really wants to nail someone to the cross and Laura is the only one handy.
Bungalo Bill was in love with Laura. He courted her off and on for many years. It turned into a good friendship. In 1974 he was a rough and tumble Ohio fellow with a gallon of wine and a house trailer. He was party people but he also had a studious side and spent his winters curled up in books. He was a good friend if you ever needed one.
***
Will and Sabra were an awesome couple. They seemed to radiate light. They were continent-crossing hitchhikers, too, and I saw them elsewhere coincidently, Laguna Beach once and a few other places. She was startlingly beautiful and had a rich accent from somewhere mysterious. He had a long light beard and soft blue eyes and the unfortunate misconception that he was the only far-wandering gypsy man; the only eternal ethereal hitchhiker; “the premier angel of the winds whose heels barely touch the Earth”. He was upset and angry when he found me in various farflung places ahead of him. He thought I was following him! He’s not the only windwalker I knew who thought he was the only one...
But then there
were the individuals who were way way out in deep water. They didn’t fare well at
EPP… At EPP when someone had a messianic complex it was common to threaten to nail
them to a tree. It was kind of funny really. Yeah. Just like dumping a bucket of cold
water on their heads. Hillarious. EPP was definitely a place to avoid if you didn’t
have anything but a messianic complex going for you.