At the crest of the hill a scene of destruction assaults me. The white wooden bee boxes in our apiary have all been overturned, the frames of honeycomb scattered; confused bees swarm everywhere. I nearly sink to my knees.
It doesn’t take long to figure it out. The bear, or bears, attracted by the scent of honey, have located a pleasure ground.
Friday, before we left for town, Stacy and I had two chores to do only: write our articles for The Wild Currents and safeguard the hives by building log platforms to protect them from predators. The first chore got done. We both wrapped up our stories.
I wrote about the women’s role in the peace movement and used my new pen name, Trillium Stone. Stacy finished his piece on the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. We did our part for the movement but the beehives are gone.
I feel like crying. Instead I swear. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Why didn’t we build the platform before we left? We are such bunglers!”
“Shit!” echoes Mica.
Stacy loves to lie on his stomach in the tall grass, watching the bees bring in the fuzzy yellow pollen, and they were doing so well. Now the hives are ruined and the colonies destroyed. Mica swivels in his carrier, peering around at the devastation. “Shit!” he giggles again, knowing now that shit is a naughty word.
“Look at this, Mica. Stacy’s poor bee houses are all gone. It was the bear, I’m sure of it. No person would do this. For one thing, they’d be afraid of being stung.”
Aimlessly, I wander through the wreckage, picking up the broken honeycomb frames and dropping them again. Insects are buzzing over the bottom of the containers, too stunned to sting. Whether the queens are still alive it’s impossible to tell. When I step over the ruined hives, I feel the sticky stuff under my feet. When I wipe my eyes, I get honey on my face.
In the shadows, a branch snaps and I whip around, but it’s only a small animal rustling in the leaves. I’d better get back to the cabin before something big and hairy comes charging out of the woods. It would be hard to run fast with Mica on my back. The rest of the way home, I forgo singing. There’s no song for the frustration I feel. In an hour, the fire is crackling and the cabin is comfortable. Mica’s fed and asleep upstairs in his homemade bed. I feel bad for the bees but worse for Stacy. He will be so sad when he gets home.
“Well let’s do it,” I say outloud to the royal we. Back down in the kitchen, I unhook the Coleman from the beam and dress myself like a beekeeper, the way I’ve seen Stacy dress. I even get down his bee hat and veil, and then I march back to the orchard with a jar of maple syrup, on a mission, clanging a soup spoon on the side of the metal lantern to warn the bear I’m coming. Or bears, I remind myself. For some reason, I keep thinking there’s only one, but I don’t know that.
On the hill, nothing has changed. In the dim light, masses of bees, a disoriented mob, still mill around. Pieces of white wood shine in the lantern’s glow and my long shadow almost looks like a bear looming over the scene.
Stumbling through the debris, I discover four intact frames of honeycomb and arrange them in the two damaged boxes that I whack into shape. Finally, I sprinkle some maple syrup around. “Sorry, bees,” I say, offering the sweet liquid as an inducement to stay put.
I shake my head slowly and then, leaning back, my arms outstretched, shout into the night, “This means war, bears!”
It’s a ridiculous threat. We’ve no guns or traps or even poison. Am I going to meditate them away?
“I mean it!” I shout, as if that settles the matter and they’d better be afraid. I picture them lying in a nearby den, smugly licking their paws and laughing their heads off.
CHAPTER 11
Serfdom
Wild strawberries bloom at the edge of the forest. Fiddlehead ferns reach for the sun. Summer solstice came and went and I threw a few wildflowers into the river to celebrate. Everything’s so beautiful on the outside and so not right inside. First there was the bee fiasco. Now the Air Force base up the coast of Lake Superior is practicing bombing raids over the farm.
Day and night, the roar of their engines rips low through our wilderness paradise. First I hear the snarl from across the river and then the jet tears through our airspace, shocks the flowers, shocks the trees, shocks the little cabin in the woods and makes Mica cry.
Nixon has permanently suspended the Paris peace talks, so I guess the pilots need practice before they go back to Southeast Asia and bomb the crap out of everyone. Two days ago, I counted a dozen runs in twenty-four hours.
When we go into Duluth, a photo is plastered all over the papers and on TV. It shows a little Vietnamese girl, completely naked, her clothes torn off because of a napalm attack, crying in terror, with U.S. soldiers, carrying rifles, casually walking behind her.
Once I was a believer in the red, white, and blue. With the war in Vietnam, the assassination of the Kennedy brothers, and the shooting of Reverend King, Old Glory has faded. It hasn’t just faded; it’s been torn down. To top off everything, when I went up to the garden this morning, I discovered that rabbits had eaten our new cabbage.
“Do you think we should get a guard dog?” I ask Stacy while we eat lunch out in the meadow at our homemade picnic table. “He could watch over our crops, the cabin, and the beehives when we’re in town.” My lover looks at me as he slurps up the rest of his soup, then wipes his mustache with his hands.
“What would you do, tie him up? Leave him here by himself for days when we went into Duluth? Who would feed him? What would we feed him? We can’t afford dog food.”
“Maybe he could hunt,” I offer lamely. I obviously hadn’t considered the details.
“Doggie,” yells Mica, bashing his spoon on the table. “Doggie!” At least someone is on my side.
Recently we’ve even discussed purchasing a used vehicle so we could make shorter, more frequent trips to town, but we have no savings. To get that kind of cash, we’d have to move into Duluth, rent an apartment, and pay utilities. That would mean paying taxes for war as well as leaving the homestead vulnerable.
Our goal is to live lightly and sustainably on the earth, to take only what we need, to revere nature, to divorce ourselves from the military-industrialist empire; but I’m weary of living like medieval serfs. Worse than serfs. We don’t even have an animal to pull a cart. Come to think of it, we don’t have a cart.
Thief
A string of days, like lapis and jade on a golden cord. The dark blue Minnesota sky, the deep emerald fields of midsummer, the yellow goldenrod.
Dawn, and the sky is just turning white and I roll over in bed, spoon around my lover, ready to return to sleep, but the sound of distinct scratching on the front door arouses me. The first thing I think is, it’s some passing dog, although we’ve never seen a stray out this way before. I picture one of Rob’s canines and shuffle, barefoot in my birthday suit, to the window to look down. A black bear squats on our porch, gazing around in the pale morning light.
“Stacy!” I hiss. “We’ve got company!”
My lover hoists his head.
“Come over. Look!” Pointing down, I’m as excited as a kid at a zoo. The bear turns his black head as Stacy leans over me.
“Where?” my companion asks, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. I point straight down on the steps, where a mound of black fur now stands up on its hind legs, sniffing. “Shit! He must smell our food. He’s probably the thief that destroyed the beehives.” Stacy reaches into the toy box, grabs two of Mica’s big wooden blocks and starts clacking them. “Get out of here!” he bellows as he clumps down the stairs.
I follow him, nude, and we both stop and peer through the small window at the shaggy animal, his drooling mouth so close I can smell his foul breath through the crack in the door.
“We’ve got to get rid of him,” Stacy worries. “If he starts thinking this is his feeding station, we’re in trouble.”
The creature drops to four feet again and wags his head, none too swift to depart.
“Shoo!” I holler as I grab a metal soup spoon and pull a pot off its nail, banging them together. “Shoo!” The beast backs off the porch, glares at the window, then licks his chops. That ticks me off and I throw the door open, almost hitting him. “I mean it! Shoo! Get away from our cabin, you fucker! I’ve about had it with you! I told you this was war!”
I’m standing, naked, six feet from a huge black bear, banging on a saucepan. “Shooooooh!” I holler again. The bear ambles leisurely down the trail toward the spring and then stops and looks back, his or her round ears silhouetted in the golden morning dawn, each hair on fire.
Suddenly the animal appears friendly to me, gentle and curious, and I’m half-ashamed I called him fucker—I was only trying to shout something nasty . . . as if he’d be insulted, his feelings hurt. Then I remember the bees and the destruction of the hives and get mad again.
Pounding on my soup pot, I chase the bear down the path. “Get away from here. This is our den! Shoo . . . I mean it! I’m serious!” Stacy is standing on the porch, laughing his head off at this hippie version of I Love Lucy, sans clothes. He’s doubled over, he’s laughing so hard. Mica, in his blue footy pajamas, watches with big eyes as his wild, butt-naked mother chases a four-hundred-pound bear through the woods.
CHAPTER 12
Celebration
In the dim evening light, two Canada geese fly low overhead and land in our swimming hole, honking. “Hello, geese!” I call out. “On your way south? Where’s the rest of your gaggle?” Just the sound of the word gaggle amuses me.
“Hello, geese,” Mica echoes from his baby carrier on Stacy’s back.
We’re heading upriver, on our way to Duluth for the Full Moon Party at Chester Creek House. This August celebration is an important community event, a mark in the North Country calendar that says we made it through another year. The black trunks of maple and poplar are outlined against the fading lavender sky.
“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” Stacy says over his shoulder as we crunch through the woods. “When we saw Colin at the conference in Madison, he said he’s coming to Minnesota again. He’s bringing some friends, people he’s met in his travels. They’re interested in community.”
“A commune here?” I’m afraid to get my hopes up. Stacy and I have lived in four intentional communities in six years, the last one Chester Creek House. Like many hippies, we’re searching for utopia, me more than him. When Stacy puts his roots down, he’s hard to pull up.
“I don’t know about here. He just wants us to meet them.” We stand on the muddy bank, looking down at the Lester. After days of pounding rain, the river again spills over our log bridge. The far end is already submerged by twelve inches of water.
“What do you think?” Stacy questions. “If we go upstream, we can still get across at the shallow place.”
“Let’s do it!”
We skip and hop across Jacobsen’s field, dancing with our moon shadows, singing the Cat Stevens song, and the stars in Orion’s belt are lined up right because within twenty minutes a blue sedan pulls off in the gravel.
At Chester Creek House, the Full Moon Party is in high form. In the side yard, a huge bonfire leaps over the music. Shadows dance on the clapboard house walls and the air smells of cider and wood smoke.
Jody Innis, with baby Hawk, is there, but I don’t see Frog. Two women from my last childbirth class come over to greet me. One is the single woman who didn’t have a coach. Jody is going to help her. I rub my pregnant friends’ bellies and give them a hug for good luck, wishing I could do more, be there to guard them from harm, be there to encourage them.
There’s Patrick, bouncing a Bender child on each knee, wearing a red, white, and blue McGovern sweatshirt. Leila is dancing with Courtney, their hands raised over their heads like reeds and their long skirts swirling. Jerry and Joan Bender are passing a beer back and forth.
The full moon shines down on Lake Superior while Jimmy flails away on his guitar and everyone’s singing Bye, bye Miss American Pie . . . I look around at these good friends and wonder, if we wanted to come back, would there be room for us?
Visitors
Squash gone, tomatoes gone. “Goddammit!” Stacy leans on his hands and knees, breathing heavily. “Why didn’t we at least pick the green tomatoes before we went to Duluth? We could have put them in boxes in the window to ripen.” We stare around at the mushy orbs drooping from the blackened vines. “Or if we’d just brought in the summer squash . . . Shit! We should have known. We’re such screwups.”
Because of the Indian summer, for three days we lingered in town after we put out The Wild Currents. Aaron was able to get Stacy work at the docks, since he now has an in with one of the foremen, a Vietnam vet who Aaron interviewed for the paper. While Stacy worked unloading heavy crates, I boxed up our linen, town clothes, and books in our old basement room.
One of Jenny and Patrick’s friends, Sister Katherine, another teacher, is joining the community and they need the space. I started to roll up our worn oriental rug and then thought better of it. The cement floor looked so cold and bare.
Before we headed back to the farm, Patrick told us we could still crash upstairs in the living room whenever we need to . . . but it won’t be the same. The three of us, Mica, Stacy, and I, are on our own now, adrift, without community, without shelter from the storm.
My lover kicks a tomato stake, and the whole bush, withered red and green tomatoes and all, topples over. “We lost our first planting with the late frost in June and now our fall harvest is ruined by an early frost in August. Shit! We gotta get our priorities straight.”
“Shit,” yells Mica, and I flinch.
“It wasn’t the whole harvest.”
“Halloooo,” comes a voice from the other side of the clearing. Colin and four scruffy hippies come through the trees. Colin’s golden hair and beard shine in the sunlight and he flashes a wide smile. “Did you say ‘shit’?” he reaches for Mica, his favorite nephew. “I didn’t know you could swear!” Mica laughs at the joke, though he doesn’t know the word swear.
“Hey,” Stacy says, giving our friend a stiff hug, embarrassed that the others have heard him freaking out. I’m not so reserved. I throw my arms around Colin’s neck, squeezing hard. It is so good to see him. He’s dressed in the same pale blue denim work shirt that he always wears, tucked neatly into clean jeans, with white canvas sneakers.
We lead the newcomers down through the balsam grove and they gaze with amazement at our hand-built house. I admire the scene from their eyes, this tall sturdy log cabin in the middle of these sparkling woods. It’s a picture from a storybook, the flashing river tumbling below, the blue sky above, the wind showering the air with twirling gold leaves.
Colin introduces the guests. “How you doing.” “Nice place.” “Thanks for having us . . .”
There’s a short, bouncy all-American type with apple cheeks, Mara, from Iowa, green bandana knotted around her neck. And Kaitlin from Detroit, dark tan, white teeth, wearing an embroidered peasant shirt and jeans.
There’s Tristan, an intense Norseman from Indiana, over six feet four, with a shock of red hair and a beard to match, and another thin, quiet guy in a worn tie-dyed T-shirt. Tom, I think that’s his name.
“Stacy and Patsy are the most self-sufficient homesteaders I’ve met,” Colin tells the group after dinner as we lounge around the campfire up in the big clearing, our feet stretched out to the flames.
“What we’re doing here is experimenting with voluntary poverty,” Stacy explains. “We choose to live as two-thirds of the world’s poor live. We’re trying to answer the question: can we find a way to live sustainably? Not just us, but the generations that will come after us.” He lays his hand for a moment on Mica’s blond head to make his point.
“Industrialized countries are polluting the environment and using up the resources that belong to our children and their children. See, it’s all connected.”
“How does community fit in?” Tom asks.
Stacy takes a big breath, looks at me, and goes back to his carving.
“We’ve lived at four or five communes . . .” I take up the story he doesn’t want to tell. “But finding the right community is even harder than living sustainably. So far, at each place, we’ve made good friends, but the balance wasn’t right. We met Colin at the Committee for Non-Violent Action, but that was too scary to me.”
“Like what?” Mara asks.
“Like violence and the threat of violence. One night a bunch of drunks came down the gravel drive in pickups, hung around outside for hours in the dark, yelling ‘Go home commies!’ We crouched in the dark kitchen, not knowing what they would do. I thought we would die. In the end they fired shotguns into the windows and left.
“Another time, one of our guys was beat nearly senseless at a vigil at the nuclear-powered submarine base at Norwich. Ended up in intensive care. Almost didn’t make it. The cops don’t care. They figure if we protest, we’re on our own. A month later, the thugs tried to burn down our outbuildings. Very hostile territory. Too hostile for me.”
“You’re the rural arm of the revolution,” comforts Colin.
Maybe. If you can call an isolated farm in the middle of the Minnesota backwoods a revolution.
“It’s getting late. I’d better put Mica to bed.” I lean over Mara, holding out my hands for my little boy. “Come on, baby.” I’m surprised when Mara silently follows me down to the cabin. She pushes the heavy door open for me.
“You don’t have any sanitary pads do you?” she asks. I pull Mica’s red mittens off and throw them on the window seat. She’s putting the kettle on the cookstove. The question embarrasses me.
“Geez, no. I just use menstrual rags and wash them out. Saves on paper and trees.” I’m sure the woman will think I’m gross, but she responds without blinking. “Great. I’ll wash them down at the river and give them back clean.”
Arms Wide Open Page 7
