Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 11, Cont.
Third Time's a Charm, Part 2
Howdy!
Heartfelt thanks for journeying with me through this recollection of events leading to my realization that there’s more to life than suffering, chaos, greed, loneliness and remorse.
I phrase it this way because there was something that I had to shake off to realize I had other options. I had to let go of many false beliefs about the actual fibers of reality. The unraveling process on such an odyssey is a strange one, to say the least, and for me it turned out to be comical in many ways. Well, I choose to laugh about it. LOL
If you’re just getting here, you can start from the beginning and subscribe below if you’d like.
Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 1, Part-Time Disruptor
Otherwise, we left off as I was about to join a second disbanded cult that wasn’t a cult, that I didn’t know was or wasn’t a cult (or disbanded).
August 2018 — Klickitat County, Washington
The website read:
“Intentional Community for those interested in long-term membership, forming intentional conscious relationships, and participating in a self-sufficient group community living off the land.”
My instructions were to fly to Portland International Airport (PDX), where the driver would pick me up.
To say the driver was a cult leader would be conspiratorial. She most certainly was not a leader. And there was certainly no cult to speak of in Klickitat County, Washington in August 2018. It had disbanded well before I got there.
From the awkward conversation I had on the two-hour drive to Klickitat with the non-cult non-leader taking me out into the woods to live off the land with other non-cult people, I learned that there were only a total of five long-term residents currently living on the 20 acres of intentional community land. I was joining the project as the sixth—well, not counting the pigs, goats, sheep, chicken, cows, stray cats, wandering dogs, pigeons, crows, ravens, squirrels, and other land and air critters living out the intentional dream life that South Central Washington has to offer.
We arrived at the property just before supper. I quickly met the gang and discovered that two of these “self-sufficient” participants were teenagers. One was seventeen (and a half) and the other was nineteen. They recently came up together as friends from somewhere near Eugene, or something like that.
The other two were, by default, the unofficial “parents” of the non-cult/commune. They had lived there the longest and were apparently married through common law. My driver turned out to be Mother Hen to the crew. She was just a few years older than me. The Farm Papa was as old as dirt. Not so much in age, though he was up there in years, but in his beliefs about how the world outside the commune worked and how the world within the commune should work. It seemed like everything he fathomed about politics, healthcare, social ideology, etc. had come from a time long gone, now held together with prosthetic parts acquired from random reality television shows, such as “Alaska: The Last Frontier” (2011).
I think they expected me to be familiar with the show.
Indeed, I was not.
The fifth participant was in their mid-twenties. I would say they were the most coveted companion in the group.
For my living quarters, I was given the tidy, newcomer/visitor mushroom shaped cottage, adjacent to the community dining building.
Mother Hen said I could live in the little mushroom for the first couple of weeks while I picked out and set up my personal long-term residence in one of the vacant trailers permanently parked around the vast property. Later I found out that none of the vacant trailers had running water, and most were punctured with rust holes and housed the intentionally silent variety of slithering community members. Along with their prey.
My new enchanted mushroom home, for all its magic and wonder, didn’t have running water either. So Mother Hen showed me where the public outdoor showers and outhouses were located. She and Papa Farm were the only ones housed in trailers with running water. But, she assured, I could ask them ahead of time to shower in either one of their trailers whenever I wanted, or when it got too cold to use the outdoor showers.
In addition to the unweeded garden plots, piles and piles of forest wood, chicken coops, pig pens, goat casitas, unoccupied campgrounds, and unused campground amenities, the 20-acre fantasy forest farm was festively decorated with broken down campers, abandoned trailers, rusty old cars, and other moderately functional heavy equipment. Mother Hen and Papa Farm owned the only two operating motor vehicles around, and the nearest bus station was… well… there was no bus station in that part of Washington.
The next day, Mother Hen did her best to get me up to speed on Klickitat forest farm life. Then, after approximately two and a half days, it was clear that she didn’t want to be friends with me. She gave me instructions and went about her way. If the children didn’t catch on to the instructions the first time, she had no time to follow up. We were all there to be self-sufficient, after all, weren’t we?
Was I? I had to ask myself this question a few times.
In conclusion, I agreed with myself, I most certainly had not come there to be self-sufficient. I had come for community.
I knew nothing about farming, living on a farm, homesteading, gardening, keeping house plants alive, feeding animals, not getting bit by animals. None of it. The manual on the website explicitly said that training would be provided.
Mother Hen assigned the teenagers to babysit me.
This turned out to be a good pairing. Teenagers are perfect for telling it like it is. So I came to find out that, just prior to my arrival, a mini-scene had formed related to companionship and inclusiveness versus exclusivity and exclusiveness. Apparently, I had walked into a post-high school after school dramedy—I would say mostly drama, with little to no comedy (unfortunately for me, as I could really use some comic relief right about then).
Yes, in hindsight, the situational comedy is amply apparent. LOL
By the third night, I was starting to get sucked into the companionship conversations.
One might be inclined to blame the teenagers for this, except the parent leaders were just as involved in the dramatics, if not more so because they had been there longer and this very topic is why the original “cult” disbanded a few years prior, or so the teenagers said.
A brief history of the commune’s companionship commandeering controversy was accounted (by the teenagers) as follows:
Papa Farm had purchased and donated all the land to the commune over 40 years prior, and was one of the founding members who built the intentional community and cultivated its farmable land from the ground up. Mama Hen moved to the commune around 20 years prior, after getting out of the military, and she and Papa Farm eventually ended up married through common law.
The 50, or so, other commune members that had joined over the years made a mass exodus just a couple years prior because one of the original female founding members had more words or ideas than Papa Farm about how the commune was to be run. This is where the history gets a bit fuzzy. It’s possible that this founding female member had fewer ideas and more lovers, but equally possible that she possessed more ideas and more lovers, but clearly none of the land. Mama Hen owned half the property, and she wasn’t going to give it up. Here is where the family feud of commune companionship modeling blew up. Some requirements were either made or broken related to exclusivity and un-inclusive selectivity versus open circle inclusivity.
My takeaway was that the founding matriarch preferred a pyramid model of inclusivity—to her liking only—which, by nature, may tend to break a commune apart, as pyramid schemes cannot be replicated by every member of the pyramid. Some are at the top, but most are most definitely at the bottom. Apparently, it mattered not to this matriarch because, as a true matriarch, she did only what/who she wanted. Obviously the majority of the commune liked it, as they made their exodus with her and remained her loyal companionship servants. Well, this last part may be exaggerated by the disgruntled, un-included, retelling of the story from Papa Farm and Mama Hen’s perspectives to the teenagers, who retold it to me.
So much for the “conscious relationships” advertised on the website.
Two Weeks Later
Yes, I joined two (non-)cults, two years in a row and un-joined them both exactly two weeks later, at precisely the same time of year. [Re-read about the first non-cult I didn’t join here: Peace, Walk, Now: Chapter 2]
Yes. This feels like a flashback. IKR.
So what happened this time?
As mentioned, my motive for leaving Alaska and traveling down to Washington to live at an intentional community was, well, to live at an intentional community—preferably somewhere sunny and not remote.
After a few days at the farm, I did some quick math and assessed that once winter arrived, I would be living in a remote area with no immediate access to work, food, or transportation, and I would have to walk half a mile just to use an outhouse or find a functioning shower. This meant that I would be holed up by myself in a busted old trailer or have to “commune” with people who were like extended family that I knew nothing about, had nothing in common with, and had very little interest in getting to know. Moving back to Romania would have been preferable to this. At least in Romania people dance, tell jokes, and have fun. But clearly, living in Romania was even more geographically prohibitive to seeing my kids, so I never considered this as a serious option.
In short, this commune didn’t feel like a community to me. With only five people around for miles, it was even more remote than Anchorage, Alaska. (Yes, in hindsight, the impracticality of this living situation is amply apparent. LOL)
But I did give it a chance…
Up until the day of the wasp infestation—also known as the day everyone got stung repeatedly by wasps on their faces and bodies. Also known as the day Papa Farm drove Mama Hen to the emergency room, which was over an hour away, so she wouldn’t die after sever allergic swelling from wasp stings.
Well, everyone got stung except me. And I wanted to keep it that way.
I had not come all this way to be surrounded by non-community and be stung to shreds by a wasp infestation that could have been mitigated if the mass exodus hadn’t occurred due to a commune companionship culling of cult-like proportions.
The wasps had effectively taken over every cool corner of the community building structures, along with a great deal of the forest brush under-covering—which was extensive on that much land—not to mention every broken down piece of equipment offering any from of shade from the 100 degree summer heat.
So I did what anyone in my position intentionally does in that kind of situation sometimes:
I called for help.
And as it turned out, I didn’t need to go to Romania to commune with extended Romanian family members.
Unbeknownst to me, I already had over a hundred extended Romanian family members living nearby in Portland, Oregon. IKR?!
Okay, this is a lie (for dramatic-comedic effect). I did know. Though—to my credit—I had barely just found out about them recently and didn’t know any of them very well. They were all related to me by marriage to a cousin’s cousin from Romania. (If you were paying attention a couple chapters ago, I mentioned one of them was storing my mom’s Honda Odyssey mini-van while I was journeying on my own mini-odyssey.)
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just go stay with them to begin with?
Well, at this point in time, I was asking myself the same question.
I texted Christine.
“I need your help,” I wrote.
“Wait, are you okay?” she texted back.
“Yeah, nothing bad happened.” I wrote back, forgetting that texts like this tend to scare people. “I just need a ride to Portland.”
“Ohhhh,” she wrote back. “Where are you?”
“I’m on a farm in Southern Washington.”
“Give me a few minutes and I’ll call you. I’m at work,” she said.
“Okay, thanks,” I texted back.
Christine called me back quickly and I caught her up on where I was and what I was doing there. She told me she knew a group of Romanian women from church who just had a vacancy open up in their five bedroom house in Portland. The house was owned by a Romanian couple, who she also knew through church (a different church). They kept the rent low to help out friends and family who were attempting to immigrate from Romania. She said she would tell them my situation and ask if someone could come pick me up.
Angelica picked me up the next day.