NINE

ALL ONE FARM

Laura Schylur and I decided to celebrate our high school graduation with a three-week road trip. We weren’t sure what our graduations meant to us, but we knew that a celebration was in order, so we talked about what we would do and then made the money to do it. I put new tires on my ivory Chevrolet and we took off with a screech, happy to be leaving it all behind before returning to waitress jobs and junior college in the fall.

Everything was planned when, about two weeks before our trip, Steve wrote out of the blue to say he had returned from India and was reacclimating to the United States somewhere in Oregon. I was delighted to hear from him and wrote back saying that Laura and I would soon be traveling through the northwest ourselves. To my surprise, Steve sent another letter inviting us to visit.

Laura and I drove north from San Francisco up the California coast on Highway 1. Our first stop: Eureka, California. It was a long drive made longer by our decision to take the coastal route, where we passed picturesque fishing towns as charming as any Welsh seaport the imagination can conjure. I had read a lot of Dylan Thomas, which is why, I suppose, the notion of the Welsh seaport came to mind. Those outposts of human endeavor colored our drive in every sense of the word, and they turned me inside out with aching wonder about a kind of life I would never know.

The northern California shoreline offers a rugged uncommon beauty. Pristine and wild with riptides that tear at the land, with waves that crash their sloppy magnificence all over craggy cliffs and sharp jutting rocks. We stopped to swim when we found a bank of sandy access to the water’s edge with a safe place to pull off the road and park. I had been taking cold showers all that spring which enabled me to walk straight into the ocean without anything but pure lust for its bracing coldness. This was a new kind of freedom, like sprouting wings or, something just as fantastic, swimming bare skinned into the northern Pacific as if it were temperate.

In Eureka we stayed with both of our older sisters, who lived there with their boyfriends and attended Humboldt State. We visited for four days, taking hikes in the damp wilderness, walking around the cute college town, and spending good time with family before setting off for Oregon, All One Farm, and Steve. If we stopped overnight in a camping ground on the way, I don’t remember now; I just remember that from Humboldt we turned inland, and that it was a relief to trade the winding road of the coastal highway for the ease and speed of the open freeway. I also remember that it was a small thrill to cross the state line into Oregon.

Getting close to our destination by midafternoon, but not sure of the directions, Laura and I took turns calling the farm from gas station pay phones. A woman named Abha always answered—Abha with the lovely ethereal voice—and she would hand the phone over to her husband, Robert, who would direct us from our newest lost location. It didn’t matter that we called six times, Robert was patient and kind each time he spoke to us. Eventually, we found our way.

We could hear the gravel kick out from under our fat tires as we drove down the long drive to All One Farm. We followed some tire tracks under a hood of deepest greens, until suddenly everything opened into broad daylight and we saw a bright expanse of burnished silver rolling hills, dotted with dark pockets of lacy trees, and a sky of confident blue overhead.

Laura was driving when we reached the farm. She sat with her left leg tucked under her, leaning forward to peer carefully ahead on the long, cool, driveway. Her feminine conscientiousness always made me wonder what it felt like to be her. With her big sometimes care-laden blue eyes and her high sweet voice, she didn’t look as if she could get angry. And she couldn’t. Not convincingly, anyway. (She would eventually become a kindergarten teacher.) Laura was a large-boned, well-proportioned young woman with a little girl’s sweetness in her beautiful face. She could have been the immortal inspiration to a German clockmaker of an earlier time. Maybe her great-great-grandmother had been such a muse. Laura was bright-faced, intricately watchful, towering, a little unsure of herself because she ran so tall, too big to hide. But that’s where the laughter came in, like waves of delicate chimes at the top of every hour. No choice but to crest and fall into laughing at it all. Laura and I loved to laugh. And we laughed a lot.

We parked where we were told—just north of a big tree—and got out to stretch. We looked at each other from over the top of the car with raised eyebrows. Laura was teasing me, wiggling her brows up and down. She knew my stomach was filled with butterflies to see Steve again. It felt good to shut the motor off and repressurize to the weightless expanse of the great outdoors. The air was fragrant with fresh smells of nature and bright with the sun overhead. I still remember the smells. Looking around at our home for the next week, we saw an old, weathered barn, a large vegetable garden, and a big cow that we’d later find out had come along with the purchase of the farm. The main house was to the south.

It was Robert Friedland who greeted us. He went over everything about being on the farm and sort of humorously laid down the law: we were to get up at dawn to meditate under the big tree with everyone else, and we were to help with the work. Robert, who was then called Sita Ram, was nicer than I expected, but I was on my best behavior because I’d only met him a few times (and briefly), when he came with Steve to the café where I worked, and at Reed. I assured Robert that Steve had told me about the requirements and that we would be very happy to contribute in every way we could, and to meditate, too.

Robert then pointed to the barn down the hill and told us there would be a small room to the right in the back of the barn’s main hall where we could stay. From my dyslexic blur I straightened up and got myself to suss out right from left, and we then proceeded, lugging our backpacks and sleeping bags.

We found Steve resting in his blue sleeping bag in the center of the main room of the cavernous barn. He looked terrible. Worse than I had ever seen him. “Hi,” he groaned out. “I’m sick with parasites.” He was so ill and he was also reserved. I sensed that he was ambivalent about my being there, and it made me a little mad because he had invited me. I wanted him to be happy to see me, but he didn’t show it if he was. Nonetheless, he was kind enough, and encouraged us to run around and meet everyone.

Laura and I were both shy but we made our way up to the kitchen to meet Abha. In the early evening of that first day we helped lay colorful blankets on the grass in preparation for the dinner. We also brought out huge bowls of salad, which everyone ate with chopsticks, sitting on the blankets picnic fashion. I was curious to find that there were three or four different salads served at every meal, and a strong emphasis on zwieback breads and almond butter over peanut butter. The whole farm was vegan, with a focus on nonmucus forming foods. The Mucusless Diet! Its helps the emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual bodies integrate, and this place was serious about it. About eighteen people sat down for dinner that night—some who lived and worked there and some, like us, who were there for a short stay. Steve was too sick to join the group for the meal, so I felt freer to meet people on my own terms. The conversation moved like popcorn and I enjoyed the fond familiarity and the cajoling about the day’s work. I was delighted to be sitting with these people, each of whom was under thirty.

That first night, after the dishes had been done, Laura and I returned to the barn and laid out our sleeping bags. I was deeply aware that Steve was sleeping less than twenty feet away from me. Laura and I whispered about the day so as not to disturb him. Then she fell asleep and the barn came to life with miniscule and unfamiliar sounds: little animals, creaking timbers, and the quiet shuffles of people coming in at all hours. I heard them moving about as they got ready for bed, and imagined them lighting tiny candles, and meditating, in the transparent windswept building. I lay awake for a long time feeling the massive structure as if it were an extension of my own body.

The next day Laura and I worked in the kitchen canning dill pickles with Abha and two other women. We were like extras grafted onto a movie scene. The circa 1940s kitchen was clean and orderly, with eggshell-colored enamel painted many times over. Abha had scores of shining glass jars on shelves high up around the walls: grains, pasta, beans, lentils, seaweeds, dried fruits, and vegetables. The variation and abundance was beautiful to look at, a gorgeous sense of order in multiplicity of the gifts from the earth.

I had canned before, but never pickled. Abha boiled the jars and lids and we listened, comically carefully, to her instructions before moving into action. We stood in the middle of the production line and filled our hands with the herbs and spices, packing half a Meyer lemon, a couple of garlic cloves, a small hot red pepper, turmeric, and fresh dill into each cucumber-filled Mason jar. We moved quickly so as to not drag the system, cleaning up spills whenever there was a moment. After the spices, another woman poured in vinegar and boiling hot water over this cluster of good things, then placed the liner caps on the jars until they cooled. Every finished jar caught the light and became its own jeweled world of deep, forest greens. I looked into each one for its compositional beauty as if they were drawings of the same still life. At the end of the first day we had lined up about twenty jars of pickles. They were magnificent. The next day we checked them and screwed their lids on tight. It was completely delightful to complete the job, and I was awed to realize that our work in this one week would extend into the community’s future. I imagined Abha reaching for the jars throughout the year to come and I remember thinking it a real pity that I wouldn’t taste any part of it. I didn’t know then that I would return within the year.

At about twenty-eight, Abha was five years older that Robert. She was six months pregnant with their child when I first met her, and she had a magical daughter of three from a previous marriage, whom Robert would later adopt. Tall and radiant with a healthy pregnancy, Abha seemed both powerful and very sweet at the same time. Her face was covered in bronze freckles and her hair was a deep bronze with coppery pink highlights. Abha’s gold-flecked eyes were more than piercing: they appeared to look straight through people. And when she laughed her face broke into a thousand lit-up facets.

Abha was as solid as she was aloof, in the way you would expect of someone who cared for so many people while simultaneously being so cosmic. She managed the kitchen well and was a remarkably gifted cook. I learned about new food combinations from her, like cottage cheese with dulse seaweed or fresh dill and soy sauce and farmer cheese or brewer’s yeast tofu stroganoff. I would watch Abha’s face when she cooked and tasted the food, her mouth mulling over flavors, her facial muscles tuned in to decide what more, if anything, was needed. Watching her face when she was tasting gave me pathways into my own new recipe ideas.

Years later, after Lisa’s birth and after Steve became well-known, I felt I had to hide my identity when meeting new people because they had far too many projections—both negative and positive—and far too many questions. I’d just keep my mouth shut and become more and more quiet as Steve became more and more famous. However, over time, keeping a low profile turned into a problem. My history was filled with Steve and hiding it diminished my presence in a room of people. In effect, it silenced me.

All of this came to a head years later when I began taking classes to learn how to visualize information for corporations. As part of the process we were given huge sheets of paper—four by eight feet—on which to use our histories to illustrate the paths our lives had taken. I think I did about six of them in different group settings. It was only as a result of being forced to reveal myself at these classes that I first became conscious of how truly uncomfortable I was about being seen—and unseen. I certainly didn’t want to put my life and everything on display in a professional environment. I couldn’t handle it and had decided my colleagues couldn’t either.

Now I regret that I wasn’t more outrageous and inventive. I could have drawn a big black gangly vortex and strung the disasters one by one, around and around, tunneling inward into the center where a tiny exhausted figure holding a baby looked up from the bottom of a great hole. But I didn’t. And after taking a number of these classes and being extremely conscious of all I sanitized (and embarrassed by what looked like a milquetoast life), I eventually realized that I could use food to refer to my past and develop my timeline in a public way. It would be through food and cooking that I could talk about all the people who had introduced me to new ideas. It would be through food that I could talk about my life and illustrate my timelines and my passions. This was the subject that would braid itself into an easy narrative. And in this version of my history, Abha would be the first of my influences, once I had left my mother’s home. I thought I was brilliant when I finally figured it out, because the subject of food is always a way to be visible, personable, and enthusiastic while staying private. Finally, I could smile inside myself for having found a happy little middle ground in which to stand and be a part of the world without raising eyebrows.

*   *   *

After that first day of being in the kitchen, Abha apparently told Robert that Laura and I were great workers and so we were welcomed into the community. We hadn’t understood that this was such a big deal at the farm, but when we had learned that we’d passed with flying colors, we soaked up the unexpected happiness of this approval.

The farm must have been a bold experiment for Robert, who owned it with his uncle, Marcel. If I remember correctly, it was Robert’s job in the partnership to get the farm into good shape so he and his uncle could turn it around and sell it for a profit. As there were innumerable projects that needed hands, Robert had ongoing ads in classifieds all the way up to Portland in the never-ending search for people who would work in exchange for fresh garden food and a place to live in the country. This business structure—extra farmhands working in exchange for food and a room—was an old farming model with an added new twist: hippies and meditation.

Two types of people seemed to respond to Robert’s ads: those I thought of as spiritually oriented and those that I thought of as normal—young people who had moved to the farm to work, eat well, and live in nature, but who were not so spiritually motivated. The combination was a true yin and yang: the mystical and the mundane, and the comic spin between the two.

The nonspiritual people thought the spiritual people were hilarious. Informed, for the most part, by a materialistic and matter-of-fact view of life, they laughed at what they thought was the comedy of an overly spiritual perspective. When, for example, the spiritual people at All One called each other saints—“Oh, you’re a saint,” someone would say. Or “Would you be a saint and do this or that for me?”—the nonspiritual ones would roll their eyes. But it was all in good fun, and it seems to me now that no one believed they had the single scoop on truth, which was why this group of people was so important to me. We coexisted in a kind of common wealth, bonding over the bounty of the place, the daily work, the healthy meals, and the naturally forming relationships. It all held together in some basic and very agreeable way.

There was so much to do and so many rich conversations at all levels that I felt endlessly happy at All One Farm. The sense of space and time, the hands-on work, and the variety of people so filled the hours that by the end of the first day I was baffled to think that only one day had passed. Truly, it seemed as if an entire month had gone by since dawn. Laura felt the same. The next night, as I pulled into my sleeping bag, I checked myself for the sense of expanded time and I saw that it had happened once again. And the day after that … and the day after that. In the end I decided that time must behave differently on a farm. It was a little insight I tucked away for future reference.

*   *   *

I didn’t see Steve very much those first few days. I was busy, having fun meeting people and working. Of course he wasn’t feeling well and he was grumpy; even so, I wondered if he still liked me. Teenage girls are always wondering if someone does or doesn’t like them. It’s a total waste of time, but there you have it.

On day two, Abha gave me a huge bowl of the densest green parsley salad I have ever seen to bring across the field and up the plank into the barn to Steve, who was so miserably sick it was alarming. She made these salads just for him, to kill off the parasites in his liver, and calm the itchy bumps from the bedbugs he’d brought back with him from India. I arrived with these “lunches” a couple of times and Steve would stir himself slowly, then lean heavily onto one elbow to reach for the bowl. I sat next to him while he ate, happy to have an excuse to see him. I really wondered if this was going to do the job, especially since eating this much parsley seemed like a lot of work. But he committed himself to it with resignation and eventually some interest.

The care that Robert and Abha bestowed on Steve was clear and dear. It was as if he were a son or a beloved younger brother. I would watch them look at him with humor and tenderness. They called him “Steven.” In fact everyone was called by their longer names at All One Farm, which felt rather grown-up and loving to me. It seemed like more of a person’s whole self was present when people used the full name that their parents had given them. I even felt more intact when I heard another’s name fully pronounced. I’m sure that was the point.

During the week of our stay I met Greg Calhoun—Gregor—who was funny and smart and terribly cute. He had also gone to Reed with Robert and Steve, and had moved to the farm to live after he graduated. Greg’s father had died when he was young and his stepfather was an Episcopalian minister. Greg was one of the spiritual ones—a tight-muscled, petite man with a trimmed blond beard and mustache. He had a sweet temperament and twinkling steel gray eyes with huge blond lashes that swept the landscapes as he thought. He played the piano and a number of other instruments, including the bagpipes.

On the farm Greg had remodeled an existing chicken coop into a home for himself. I found it to be the nicest dwelling on the property, though it had no plumbing.

On one afternoon, Greg walked me around All One to show me the different projects that were being worked on, or were soon to come up. He showed me the apple orchard from which Apple derives its name. It was a good twenty-minute amble from the main house and it was the oldest orchard I have ever seen. The trees had a crazed growth pattern with branches going every which way, covered with layers of lichen in all colors, like peeling paint. The orchard had not been pruned in what seemed like a hundred years and it had a scarecrow quality. Greg called them “old soldiers.”

Soon after this, all the young men on the farm would be at work to revitalize them. I have the pretty image that their working in that orchard was for Steve a St. Francis-like rebirth. After he had gone to India and then been so ill, it must have been wonderful to return to life there, with all his friends working together like a brotherhood in the bright, limitless air. Orchards are a kind of church in any case. You walk under limbs that meet in graceful flying arches, filling up with blossoms and birds and rain in the spring and then grateful heavy fruit in the fall.

*   *   *

I looked for ways to talk with Steve through his sickness and our distance. He had done a lot of work to separate from me, but I wanted to know who we were now and what my place with him was. On a few nights, I tiptoed out to where he lay in the barn and slipped into his sleeping bag next to his feverish, skinny, scabby body. We curled up together for hours, and there were a few moments of real tenderness and love, but we both knew it wasn’t a good idea. I’m not sure why I was reaching out; neither of us could have opened up to each other at that point. I think I was just trying to feel the perimeter of the changes in him and in us. Holding out for what might be possible, I was trying to connect beyond the strangeness, too. I missed him, and I imagine that he was trying to see if he could sleep next to me without being attached in the old way. After all his longing, which was truly overwhelming to me in the first two years of our knowing each other, our new distance unbalanced my sense of everything. As exhilarating as it is, change grieves me. And I’ve never quite understood separations or endings.

Since that first day on the farm, I’d had to cope within myself with Steve’s growing distance. That earlier deep, young love had changed. With just a few exceptions Steve didn’t extend himself to me and I hardly saw him. I voiced a complaint on one of the days when he was up walking around, concave and fragile. As we happened to be standing near each other without anyone else nearby I said, “You seem to not even like me!” It was the verbal equivalent of stamping my foot on the ground in hurt and frustration, but I was sinking rapidly from the effect of his apparent indifference, and I felt I had to say something or go under. In response to my little bomb of outrage he said that one of his friends at the farm had just told him, after meeting me: “Steve, I knew you had taste.” Oh, I thought, he said this about me to compliment Steve. It felt like a lifeline, a connection, and an acknowledgment of my value but with a curious twist. It was as if he’d reached into his pocket to find something to offer, gracious and immediately given, to ease my pain and confusion. Yet in the alchemy of gift giving I think it surprised both of us because it was so brilliantly crafted for good-bye. I found a confidence in that statement that set me free. After that, I felt I didn’t need to pull on Steve for affections he didn’t want to give. I was unburdened, happier, set up on an even keel with wind in my sails.

The very fact that Steve had invited me to All One was a gift of sharing something he cared about with me, and for me. I do know this: Steve had a generous spirit when it came to bright things. Over the next fifteen years he would invite me to a number of events at Apple and it would always be a puzzle, because once I actually did all the work to show up he would invariably ignore me. Likely he was acting on moments of inspiration because he liked my mind and wanted to share with me, but in the end he could never remember or carry it out with sustained friendliness. I always had a hard time holding up under it, too.

*   *   *

One day in the late afternoon, toward the end of Laura’s and my stay, I walked into the kitchen to discover that a new wave of visitors had arrived. Among them was a woman with her four-year-old daughter. The two stood center stage on the kitchen floor with about ten people surrounding them, including me. The little girl was wearing a long dress and sandals. Her mother was dressed in long hippie skirt with a pretty blouse and flip-flops. She was a confident tree of goodness, standing tall and firm next to her little one. Everyone was talking, as women do, pouring praise and greetings onto them. Someone said the child was born in the month of May and was a Taurus. Oh, I thought dreamily, a little Taurus! I was very taken by the child because she had such a powerful soul-light around her. Without thinking, and in a complete wonder, I floated a new thought: I want a little girl like this one, a little Taurus! I knew the woman was a single parent, but in this one moment even that looked good to me. So fast and full did the wish fly through me, so at-one was I with my dream that I didn’t fully understand that I was engaged in an act of creation.

Years later other women—at least three that I know of—would look at my child and would also decide to have one like her. All had been taken by Lisa as I had been by that child at All One Farm and all went on to have daughters of their own. Incredibly, each one sought me out after the fact, to proudly tell me, as if from a hushed secret society, “I now have a daughter and she is like Lisa.” Tipping their heads forward, they would smile, clear-eyed and glowing with pride as if to say what couldn’t be said, “My daughter is also like her.”

*   *   *

I wept when Laura and I left the farm at the end of the week. It felt like home to me in a way that nothing ever had. It wasn’t just about Steve because he was way too ouchy to be around without others to dilute the hurt with laughter and kindness. It was the farm and the life at All One itself that I loved. There was some rare, incomparable nutrient that had saturated my being in that place, a quality that, as Rumi says, “your whole life yearns for.” Getting up at dawn to meditate, the rich gold feeling deep in the bone of focused work with others, and yet so much more on the side of the ineffable. Maybe it was Neem Karoli Baba’s influence, because it sure seemed like someone with that kind of love over-lit the place. Steve used to frame things as being greater than the sum of their parts, and this described All One. I wanted to stay forever and ever. Nothing in me could hide the depth and purity of the sorrow I felt about leaving. I had a commitment to drive on with Laura but I stood outside the car door and cried. Next lifetime, though, I’m staying.

All One Farm was a wisdom society when we were all still so young and foolish. It was a spiritual community working to turn a profit. A sanctuary. It was the time and place where Apple got its name and where I first had the yearning for my chirpy, happy, soulful daughter.