Chapter Nine

May 1974
In the afternoon there was more settling in, George chopping wood for the kitchen stove –in the clearing with his shirt off and hair tied back because he ‘didn’t want to cut anything off’ – and me making soap in a small witch’s cauldron I had got from Ellen for Christmas. I put up the jars of herbs I had brought on makeshift brick and board shelving in the kitchen and hung up a bunch of thyme with a purple ribbon on the door. He squinted at me through the pale sunshine.
‘Are you advertising?’
‘Mm?’
He grinned. ‘A bunch of thyme.’ It bespoke of virginity, lost!
‘…Oh.’ I laughed. ‘No. Shall I change it?’
‘No.’ He gave over his wood chopping and gathered up the small bits he had made for our stove. ‘Open please,’ he said of the door, and as he passed kissed me airily. He was cold, and I noticed had the bright red spots of genuine chill.

‘You should put a jumper on,’ I said. ‘Not that I don’t like you half-naked, but you’re freezing.’
‘I know a way to warm up,’ he said cheerfully.’ A hot bath will fix anything.’
‘It’s an hour or so till the soap is cold.’
‘We still have some…. Excuse me, darling, I really need to put this down!’ He went inside and inaugurated our little bathtub in the kitchen before the toasty range.

On the Wednesday evening we went to the community meeting, where concerns were raised over the managing of cars in town during the tourist season, an update was given on the ploughing of private roads in winter, the progress of the children’s wall in front of the school, and we were introduced. Half the people there had seen us in town or at Mosey’s, but it was nice to be formally known. We got about a dozen invitations to dinner, and one to the Episcopal Church, which made George laugh. At the singsong he played Rosemary and Thyme, and when I was asked to play, he asked me to play a James Taylor song, which he sang for me, in front of God and everybody, in his beautiful baritone:

There's something in the way she moves,
Or looks my way, or calls my name,
That seems to leave this troubled world behind.
If I'm feeling down and blue,
Or troubled by some foolish game,
She always seems to make me change my mind.

And I feel fine anytime shes around me now,
She's around me now
Almost all the time.
And if I'm well you can tell that she's been with me now,
And she's been with me now
Quite a long, long time
And I feel fine.

Every now and then the things I lean on lose their meaning,
And I find myself careening
Into places where I should not let me go.
she has the power to go where no one else can find me,
Yes, and to silently remind me
Of the happiness and good times that I know, you know.

Well I said I just got to know that:
It isn't what she's got to say
Or how she thinks or where shes been.
To me, the words are nice, the way they sound.
I like to hear them best that way -
It doesnt much matter what they mean,
Well she says them mostly just to calm me down.

I know why he did it, but that didn’t matter at all. It was a very public love song that said everything about how he was. All the women in the room were in a swoon, and I looked over at Maggie Wheeler and she had tears in her eyes. ‘This is the way it was meant to be.’ We played The Rambling Rover then, to cheer everybody up from their soulful mood.

Oh there's sober men & plenty
And drunkards barely twenty
There are men of over ninety
That have never yet kissed a girl.
But give me a rambling rover
Frae Orkney down to Dover
We will roam the country over
And together we'll face the world.

‘I've roamed through all the nations
Ta'en delight in all creation
And I've tried a wee sensation
Where the company did prove kind.
When parting was no pleasure
I've drunk another measure
To the good friends that we treasure
For they always are in our mind.

‘There's many that feign enjoyment
From merciless employment
Their ambition was this deployment
From the minute they left the school
And they save and scrape and ponder,
While the rest go out and squander
See the world and rove and wander -
And they're happier as a rule.

The weather quickly warmed up as May progressed, and in that time we built a composting privy, with the help of James and some other of the lads. James laughed when he came out and asked why we didn’t want an indoor toilet, as we could have a septic tank, and George drawlingly said that it would make us lazy. It took a couple of days to get the knack of the thing - throwing some sawdust in the bucket beneath on use- but we had outdoor plumbing, compost for our garden, and no smells! Our water indoors came from a well about twenty yards from the house which, we were reliably informed, had been doused in the ‘20s. We had the garden planted then too – basic foodstuffs and such flowers as would grow in limited sunlight. We needed no compost yet, for the soil was loamy and rich. It was hard work, but good work, and to relax in the evenings there was always music, and our working our way through the entire collected works of Shakespeare.

One of our first dinner-dates was with Joe and Maggie Wheeler. Their house was on the other side of town, to which we walked, and it was a cabin like ours only much larger, with five rooms to house their six kids and menagerie of animals. Joe showed us his painting shed, where he painted in his expressionistic style for himself and in a modern folk style for the tourist trade. Maggie, for her part, did macrame and beautiful quilts and beadwork. I asked her if there was a shop in town in which I could sell my wares on consignment, and she said Yes. Hers. I saw why Shirley the waitress had told us to talk with her husband. She smiled and told me to bring some things along when I felt I was settled in enough, and that there was a quilting bee on Tuesday nights in the Zen temple.

When their kids were asleep, we sat around the fire and Joe got out his stash and pipe to go with the bottle of wine. He offered it round, and I looked at George, wondering what he would do. Soho was before us in his mind. Would he be off this gentle mind-altering substance in this gentle environment? I remembered too his firm edict against 'free love'. So I was very interested when he very casually and naturally took his turn at the pipe (he had evidently had some practise!) and passed it along to me. His eyes were very dark, but he only smiled.

Wherever Joe got his stash, it was very good, and hit one like a warm blanket on a cold night, which it was, making thought pleasantly fuzzy about the edges. I looked up at him. He was regarding me with curiosity.
'Nice,' I said.
'Thanks. I grow it myself. I wasn't sure y'all'd go for it,' he said frankly. 'For all your appearance, the two of you seem kind of square. No offence!' He laughed and so did George.
'I can't help it,' he said merrily. Oh he was high as a kite! 'My father was clergyman.'
'Really?' Maggie said, taking the pipe.
"Yeah,' George said. 'Church five times a week – twice on Sunday and Wednesdays and Saturday vespers. By the time I went to University I was convinced I was an atheist.'
'Are you now?' Maggie asked.
George shook his head. 'No. Call me a Taoist if anything.' He drew a breath. 'I did est in London and that really did a number on my head. I realised that maybe the old man wasn't so far off it after all. But I couldn't handle all that mumbo jumbo in the C of E, It was all so ritualised, not real.' He smiled at me. 'I went to Findhorn and found it, whatever It is. Anyway, I prefer meditation and being in nature to all the rules and regs of men. God is everywhere, not just in buildings.'
Joe was smiling. 'Right on, brother. Right on.' There was a pleasant lulling silence. I really was proud of George, telling it like it was without apologies. I was actually rather shocked at Joe thinking we were square. I wondered: was it because George made such a point of the legal marriage? Was he right?

After some pleasant conversation meandering here and there on philosophy, Maggie shivered, and Joe said, 'looks like it's time to fire up the sauna. Will you join us?'
Well, here it was, pagan orgy time. I looked at George. He shrugged. 'Sure.' I smiled to cover my astonishment, but Maggie caught it, and murmured to me as we scuttled down the hall in our towels to the back door where the sauna hut lurked,
'He thinks we're swingers, doesn't he?'
I couldn’t help but laugh.
'Jeez-us!' Maggie whispered, 'we've got six kids! We don't have the energy to swing.'
This I found hopelessly funny and laughed until the men asked what was going on.
'Nothing,' I said, 'just too high and silly.' But I glanced at George and rolled my eyes. He got it.

It was about 30 degrees outside, so the sauna was a pleasant contrast and brought up the high again to a nice level. The conversation on Heidegger and morality continued, eventually all agreeing that based on personal experiences of the supraconsciousness that atheism, and certainly nihilism, were impossible to defend. Joe brought up Huxley and his radical shift in ideas once he had stumbled on LSD, and George held up a hand.
'Wait a moment,' he said smiling. 'I have some experience of this, and would prefer to have this conversation when I have a few more brains collected. I really want to! Can we postpone it until teatime?'
'Sure thing,' Joe agreed.' But, are you saying that it changed your mind about a nihilistic theory?'

'Changed my mind?' George laughed, hooted. 'Hell, it altered my mind! Real or not, a personal encounter with the Immense Eternal Is cannot be denied. It made nihilism sound like a whiny schoolboy rant against the master of form....' He looked at me. 'Do they know what I mean?'
'I think so,' I said, nodding at Joe, who nodded also.
"I'm not always sure,' George admitted. 'I've had some terrible gaffes with you Yanks. ' He ran his hand though his wet hair and smiled. 'Ask Claire.'

So our first foray into the real life of the community began. We walked home in the wee hours, a bit dazed, happy and snug together.
'I'm glad we have our ordinary little life,' he said to me when we were in bed. 'Real Hippieville is a nice place to visit, but Findhorn taught me that there are better ways to live...' He was thoughtful a while. 'Though when we invite them here it should be BYO. We don't want them to feel heavy. But no hard stuff. My God, if you could have seen the heroin addicts in Soho... I don't mean that, sweetheart. You should never see them. But they are about as far away from all this as it is humanly possible to be. And I don't know but I could be again, if I was around it. I scares me cold.'
'But we're here now,' I said, 'and we can live as we choose. '
'Yes, we can.' He agreed.