JUNE 14, 1974
Deb hitches north in a beat-up van with a guy she barely knows—a friend of a friend named Ron. She thinks. Or maybe it’s Ran; he says it with some kind of southern drawl though she’s pretty sure he’s from Baltimore. The drawl matches the clothes he’s wearing—weather-beaten overalls and a torn plaid shirt as if he’s straight from the tobacco plot, as if he’s six generations deep in some backwoods holler, except that his blond hair is long and pulled back into a stringy ponytail and he hasn’t shaved for days. She’s pretty sure no tobacco farmers have ponytails.
The world is a mess and she’s looking for salvation. Nixon’s tapes released. The oil embargo. India building the next nuclear device and naming it, of all appalling things, the Smiling Buddha.
Deb’s heard about the communes from a handful of old friends. They say all you have to do is drive north until you hit the Vermont border and you’ll find one. Find a town along 91 and ask any ponytailed person around. Ron or Ran is driving his van north to find one, too, and said he’d happily take her along. He said, “It’s a free world, honey,” passing her a joint, and does she have twenty bucks for gas? Deb is twenty-one, has just dropped out of Swarthmore, and is not going back to her parents’ house outside of Pittsburgh, her father working at a factory that makes parts for helicopters, her mother’s dutiful complacency.
Two of her friends died in Vietnam. The war might be over, but the toxins are everywhere: Patty Hearst’s shoot-out in San Francisco. Nixon’s lies, ongoing. Every time you open a refrigerator door you are complicit, Deb read somewhere.
It’s Deb’s grandmother, Zina, from a village outside of Vitebsk, she wants to be. Zina died when Deb was ten, but Deb still remembers the way she spoke of the farm where she grew up before the Germans came: cows, ducks, sheep, chickens. Since then Deb has dreamed of getting back there—to fields, farm animals, to doing the good work and using her hands, her arms, her strong legs. To a world apart from wars. She takes the joint from Ran’s thick fingers and puts it to her lips—breathes in. Relax, she tells herself, face into the sunlight. Dresses, fields, farming—self-reliant, purposeful, free. Her grandmother’s warm eyes would grow moist, look out the window: Nothing like waking up on a farm in the morning, she would say to Deb, eyes following a passing crow or swallow or blackbird.
In her backpack Deb has paperback copies of Thoreau’s Walden and Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. Her bibles. The Nearings: “The value of doing something does not lie in the ease or difficulty, the probability or improbability of its achievement, but in the vision, the plan, the determination and the perseverance, the effort and the struggle . . .”
The pot makes Deb’s mind lift in a cloud, and she looks out her window at the fields flying by. They’re in Massachusetts now, and already she can breathe easier. Smell the earth through the open windows. Smell the Connecticut River gliding by them like a silver belt, lit by sun. Janis Joplin comes on the radio, and Deb tilts her head back and smiles. Her mother will be arriving home from the club, half-wasted from three martinis. She will see the note on the counter, surrounded by a ring of purple clover gathered from the backyard: Off to live the good life. Love and peace. D.
Her mother, who has never done anything unexpected or, Deb thinks, brave. Deb wants to be brave. The road north feels like it fits the bill, there in the van listening to Janis’s pitched yearning, feeling the wind in her long hair, feeling the sun on her cheekbones. But Ron/Ran is suddenly putting his fingers on her blue-jeaned thigh and turning to give her a stoned grin, and so she is torn from her reverie. She slaps his hand away and says, “Lay off, asshole. You can let me off here.”
FREEDOM.
It feels different when you’re alone, without wheels underneath you.
Deb finds the back road that runs parallel to the highway and starts walking.
She passes: farms surrounded by cows and crumbling outbuildings, trailers with dogs out front, some cabins tucked up against the trees. She gets a chill along her spine. Likes the way the landscape feels wild, unfettered, free.
There’s a creek running alongside the road, its water flickering. Deb climbs down the bank and splashes her neck and face. It tastes sweet on her lips. She wets her hands and rubs the cold water against her armpits. How real, Deb thinks, as she starts walking. Her heart lifts into her upper chest. How serene.
IT’S NEAR DUSK WHEN SHE SEES THE SIGN ON HER LEFT. White with a rainbow surrounding the letters: FARTHER HEAVEN. Smaller letters in blue: welcome.
There’s no house or farm in sight, just a long driveway, steep and rutted, weaving up through some fields and, farther up, tall trees.
At the top of the hill she stops.
There is a big old house, white paint fading. There are barns, sheds, apple trees. Under the apple trees to the right of the house are two women in blue jeans and loose blouses doing something with their hands. To the left of the house are three men, shirtless, moving hay bales. The late light catches their long hair, their sun-loved chests. The scene is so quiet, liquid in the late light, like a scene from an Ingmar Bergman film. She recalls her film class last spring: Liv Ullmann amid the stone cottages; Tarkovsky’s fields of tawny wildflowers.
There is a child, too, she sees now, in the grass close to the women. Naked. Rolling. A dog in its arms. No. Something smaller. Pink. The child is laughing. It’s a pig. A little naked pig in a naked child’s arms.
My God, Deb thinks. She falls down on her knees. Her legs are so tired. She starts to laugh. Though maybe it’s a cry. A pig in that child’s arms. She thinks of Zina in Vitebsk. I have arrived.