I wish I were still this brave.
Since three of my siblings are much older than me, I experienced many things that the friends I grew up with knew nothing about. The most significant was the back-to-the-land movement—communities of like-minded people who fled to the countryside, turning their noses up at the known for the unknown.
My older brother Steve was 21 years old when he purchased 125 acres of land in West Virginia, in a place called Brushy Fork. He paid $125 an acre for it. There, he built a log cabin by hand using the trees from his property. The cabin had no electricity, running water or interior bathroom. To wash the dishes, you had to pump the handle attached to the kitchen sink to draw water up from the well. The outhouse was located a few hundred feet away. Getting there was a trial in bravery. There were bugs by the gazillion, and animals that I’d never seen or heard the sounds of before. The dirt road turned to mud in the rain, and it rained a lot. Whenever I drove in or out of the hollow, there was nothing to protect my truck from sliding off the hill.
I loved everything about the place, even if I was scared out of my wits most days.
The first time I went to Brushy without my parents was shortly after I graduated high school. I was supposed to visit for a week but ended up staying eight months. I still carry tremendous guilt for sending my younger brother Santis back home on a Greyhound bus without me. But given that my parents kept moving our family across the country, and given that I went to four different high schools, once I found this backwoods community, nothing—not even my younger brother’s betrayed eyes—could keep me away.
I eventually moved up the hill from my brother Steve’s house into a vacant, round cabin that was built and owned by Paul from California. I paid no rent. Paul’s studio cabin also had no utilities or indoor bathroom. Worse, it didn’t even have a pump to wash the dishes or fill a glass of water. If I wanted one of those luxuries, I had to walk down the steep hill with two five-gallon buckets in hand, fill them at the well, then climb back up the hill, all the while trying not to slosh the water from my pails.
My first night at Paul’s did not go well.
The afternoon before I moved in, I learned that my aunt had died of lung cancer. I had just turned 18 and was still terrified of seeing ghosts. I made a pact with myself to keep my eyes closed, even if something startled me awake in the middle of the night.
Of course something did.
Sensing a presence in the room, I laid there for the longest time with my eyes squeezed shut trying to convince myself that I was imagining things. When I couldn’t bear the suspense a moment longer, I peered around the room, and sure enough, I was not alone. A bat was flying high up in the cathedral ceiling, circling the room. I ran screaming from the house and slept at my brother’s place once more. Shockingly, I went back to Paul’s the next night.
Even more shocking, I became bolder by the day.
There were no lights anywhere in this backwoods community. If you were walking home at night when the moon was dark, you could barely see two feet in front of you. But Lord if the moon was full—what beauty! Every leaf on every tree glowed with a silvery light. I felt like I was living in a true-to-life Disney Wonderland.
Walking through shoulder-high wheat to get from one place to the other, the grasshoppers that used to scare the living hell out of me, soon became a thrill to feel their little feet jumping on and off of me.
I was terrified of horses, but given that I was too lazy to walk back then, I rode my brother’s horse in what was likely a five mile loop each day. Bird was known for throwing everyone off her back. But somehow, she sensed I was an innocent, so she let me be. I eventually grew so courageous (but still lazy!) that I didn’t even saddle her up. Just rode bareback throughout the hills and valleys for hours on end, stoned out of my mind on homegrown pot, discovering hidden landscapes and calling on friends.
Never in my life did I think I could be alone, and especially not that alone.
But each day that I discovered and fell more in love with nature, I was also discovering myself. The more powerful self that was there all along.
Eventually, I needed money to live, so I went to work for my brother’s roofing business.
Each morning just after dawn, I plopped into his truck and we drove 45 minutes into town to the next job site. There, I carried bundles of shingles up a ladder and spread them across the plywood roof. When everything was in place, one-by-one I handed each shingle to my grumpy sibling and waited while he nailed it into place.
This was the most horrible job I’ve ever had.
I had to get pretty crafty to not die of boredom. With a joint hanging from my mouth, one day I started singing and ballerina-dancing the shingles across the roof and tossing them to my brother. Finally! A laugh from this super-wound-tight guy. And luckily so. Because once more, stoned out of my mind, I nearly danced myself off the roof. Had it not been for his hand reaching out and pulling me back from the edge, I would’ve perished from a two-story fall.
The reward for getting paid a buck fifty an hour was, one, having money to buy groceries, and two, listening to this community of like-minded people playing bluegrass music or the Grateful Dead as we dined together on food straight from our own gardens.
Here’s to you! if you were also braver in your younger years than you are decades later. I was counting on age bringing me more guts, but sadly, I have less now than I did before. And what a pity that is. Today, you will not find me smoking a joint, I’d be too scared of getting paranoid. I would never climb a ladder for fear of falling. And there’s no way that I would walk through tall grass without being hypervigilant looking for snakes and checking my body for ticks. I guess some would call this wisdom, but man, how I long for those spontaneous, fearless days gone by.
The Photo: Me, just turned 18, in front of my brother’s cabin at Brushy Fork, October 31, 1976. This was my first time seeing snow in 3 years. If you can even believe it, I thought I was fat! Funk sure got lucky catching this girl! And yes, that’s a goat in the foreground.