IN THE FALL we put a “For Sale” sign on Dove and drove up to Stanford University, just south of San Francisco. It must be one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. We had grown so used to tropical vegetation that we’d forgotten what autumn colors looked like. We’d forgotten the smell of woodsmoke.
Our car was no longer looking Detroit-new because when I was learning to drive I had tried to apply the techniques of a rudder to the steering column and had had an argument with a gravel truck. We soon sold the patched-up car and invested in a retired mail van with about 100,000 miles on the clock. The old blue van better suited our personalities, and besides it could easily be converted into a camper in case we decided to escape.
On an estate not far from the campus we found a small cabin tucked away behind tall trees. The cabin had one room, with a big red brick hearth. We salvaged an iron bed from a junkyard across the tracks, put some of our Yasawa shells on the windowsill and settled Quimby on the floor with her favorite toy—the car keys.
Until Dove was sold we would have to live off my earnings from odd jobs around the campus. When I came home on the second day with a basketful of fruit and vegetables I did not at first tell Patti that I had found them in the trash bins behind the local supermarket. For the next four months we did not pay a cent for fruit and vegetables. The supermarket throw-outs were almost good enough for the White House—except for the beans. For some reason the beans were always stringy.
I vaguely planned on an engineering degree with architecture as the goal. There were several reasons why we saw through only one semester at Stanford. I should have guessed that having quit school at the age of sixteen I would have trouble returning to school at twenty-one. Actually I did take my work seriously, even though I’d forgotten how to spell algebra.
What surprised us most was how little we had in common with our peer group because most of them had grown up in a different world. I had had the advantage of experiences that most people don’t gain in a lifetime and I’d seen horizons far beyond the local ball park and movie theater. It was sad to see how some students straight from high school were ready to believe anything and were so easily duped by cynical professors, especially by one Maoist who was passionate about his bloody revolution. The students who applauded this professor loudest were the ones who owned the Porsches and the Jags.
We made some good friends among the faculty and the students. Most of the students genuinely wanted to see society changed for the better. Like Patti and me, they wanted to expose hypocrisy and they despised the brainwashing attempts to persuade my generation that the dollar buys the only important things in life.
It certainly wasn’t Stanford’s fault that Patti and I couldn’t fit into the campus life. It’s a great school and we knew how lucky we were to be there. But right from the start we had a feeling of claustrophobia. The walls of the classroom boxed me in so that I could hardly breathe. I began to fear that even if I saw through my years at the university I would be sucked into a life style which Patti and I were determined to avoid—the nine-to-five routine, membership in the country club and that sort of thing. That first semester at Stanford seemed as long as two years at sea.
After an especially frustrating day in which, among other things, I had had to listen to the Maoist professor talk about his new society (“Everyone will be equal and thieves will be treated in a hospital”), I returned to our cabin convinced that we were on the wrong track. We went to bed that night by firelight and talked into the small hours. At about three in the morning we decided it was time for us to move on.
We would go to some place where we could find the simple life we had so often dreamed of and talked about; some place where we could tame the land as our forebears had done and really prove our self-sufficiency.
“We’ll teach Quimby to love trees and grass and animals and mountains,” said Patti. “That’s the way we planned it, remember.”
“And we won’t have to listen to the kind of crap I heard today,” I said.
Patti’s head was on my shoulder. She said, “You mean where the bull is for real.”
I felt her laughing softly. The firelight darted tongues of amber across the cabin ceiling.
A couple of days later we packed everything into the postal van and chugged back to Los Angeles to finalize the sale of Dove. This and other business took longer than we expected and once again fate seemed to play the cards. Or was it fate?
We had no fixed idea of where to go—just somewhere where the air was clean, where there were mountains, water, trees and, most importantly, where people didn’t live on top of each other. We looked at the map of Canada and made inquiries about homesteading, but we didn’t really want to lose our American citizenship. For better or for worse this was our country and so we circled the states where the towns were widely spaced and the roads were thin. Montana fitted our picture.
The most important thing that happened to us during our brief return to Los Angeles is really hard to put into words. One Sunday evening my cousin David took us to a new kind of church attended by five thousand people of all ages. It was the first time we had been to any sort of religious meeting in as long as we could remember. Patti and I were on guard.
We didn’t have any sudden conversion or anything like that, but we were fascinated by the sincerity and the obvious happiness of the people alongside us and by those who spoke. We sensed something exciting was happening, something which we hadn’t even guessed at. It was like seeing the beginning of a renaissance in which the real values were being recognized again.
This meeting was so different from my fixed ideas about church. It was a non-denominational service and the people around us seemed to be of every race and background. The people who spoke talked about God and Jesus as if they were real and contemporary and living, and not just stained glass images. We didn’t at first want to believe anything because we feared that religion would complicate our lives. But the young people, especially, seemed to have a faith and a hope and a love that we envied.
That night when we went to bed we took out the Bible I had bought in New Guinea, the one I had covered with a detective story jacket. We read aloud to each other. The Bible began to make sense. In fact it really turned us on. There were ideas here which filled an empty place in our thinking.
When we had stopped reading we began to talk about the things that had happened to us in the previous five years. We had put these all down to fate—like the times I’d come pretty close to death and my meeting up with Patti in the Fijis.
Patti asked, “Do you think fate is really God?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Someone was sure looking after me.”
“I think someone helped us to meet as we did,” said Patti.
We remembered the letter we had received from the missionary in Taiwan, and Patti took it out of the box of correspondence we’d filed away. We reread the letter and we were especially interested in the last paragraph. The missionary had said, “Your story will help others to find the right way for their lives.”
Our finding a belief in God—becoming Christians—was a slow thing. We felt our way forward very carefully. Before that evening, if anyone had mentioned God or Jesus we would have walked the other way and been careful to avoid that person in the future. But now we wanted to meet people who would help us understand more about what we read in the Bible. We wanted to learn how to work out our lives in the way God intended us to. In reading the Bible together we were fascinated by the prophecies made two thousand years and more ago, prophecies which seemed to be coming true, like the Jews returning to their own country.
We have no idea where these new thoughts and ideas and practices will take us and no desire at this point to join a structured church society. But we are open to whatever direction God will give us. Our belief is simple. It is the belief that so many of our own generation are discovering—a belief that God isn’t dead as some of the older generation have told us. In a world that seems to be going crazy we are learning that Jesus showed men the only way they should live—the way we were meant to live.
When the sale of Dove was fixed up, we packed all our possessions into the mail van and headed north. We felt sure now that we would know where to go. It was a spring morning and our last view of Los Angeles was of a huge factory pouring so much stink and poison into the air that it blotted out the sun. That evening we traveled through the desert country and it looked marvelous. When darkness came some small wild animals were caught in our headlights. We took turns driving and when we hit the snow we had some trouble. But people came and helped us, and one old man knelt in the snow and helped me change a wheel. Even the people were different.
Two days later the mail van carried us into Montana. The hills and the mountains rose up ahead and the trees came down to meet us. We knew we were near the land we were seeking. We traveled slowly, just looking about, getting the feel of the mountains and lakes and smelling the pine-scented air. It was fantastic! In the next week we spent a lot of time with realtors—the good ones and the bad ones. With Quimby in my arms, we tramped over hundreds of acres and then, halfway up a mountain, we found a spot overlooking a lake.
There wasn’t another building in sight. It seemed like the most beautiful place we had ever seen. Sunlight poured through the trees and the first spring flowers were pushing up the earth. We knew this was the place where we would build our home.
The money from the sale of Dove allowed us to buy 160 acres. Our nearest neighbors were three miles away. We followed the fresh spoor of deer, elk and moose into the forest.
We didn’t kid ourselves that there wasn’t plenty of hard work ahead. I started at once to build a temporary lean-to cabin from timber left at a disbanded lumber mill. We began to clear an area of forest to allow us to plant vegetables and flowers and fruit trees.
In the next six weeks we stayed in the village while I took a course in logging, learning the different trees, how to fell them and measure their board feet. In winter we would be snowed in and it would be a time to test our skills, our faith and our courage in creating a new and simple life style. With the help of a correspondence course we plan to educate Quimby ourselves. She will go at her own pace and she will learn to love the earth and to protect it.
We don’t think of ourselves as running away from civilization but as apprentices learning to enjoy the natural world. We believe that God will help us to understand how we are meant to live.
We have made friends with our neighbors, even though they live so far away. In this country people need each other. One day we returned to the lean-to and found a hamper of food at the door. One of the neighbors had called and left us homemade cheese, homebrewed wine and other things. After exploring the gifts, Patti looked at me and said, “And now, Robin, when are you going to provide the meat?”
The idea sent her into a gale of laughter. Holding Quimby by the hand, she said, “I’m thinking what would make great last lines to the first part of our life story.”
“Yes?”
“Well,” said Patti, “I can see you coming down that trail with an elk over your shoulder, and Quimby and I will be standing just like this in front of our new log cabin.”
“Go on,” I said.
“And then I’ll quote those words you found on the grave of Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa. Remember them?”
“Sure,” I said, laughing too.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.