When the owner appeared, he looked exactly as she would’ve imagined if she’d thought that far ahead. Tousled brown hair that was sun bleached at the ragged tips. Skin that had sustained a damaging shade of tan for dozens of years. If he’d been a lean surfer dude in his youth, he’d thickened up now. Too many beers and burgers, she guessed. But he still had that golden beach-child look about him.
“Welcome to Riverfall!” he called as soon as he looked up from the coffeepot he was setting carefully on a sideboard. His greeting felt a thousand times more genuine than the girl’s had been last night. “Care for coffee?”
“Thank you.” She suddenly had enough adrenaline to power a small town, but she’d never say no to coffee. He poured a cup and tipped his head at the pastries. “Help yourself to as many as you want. I’ve got quiche in the kitchen. Bacon and Swiss or fire-roasted veggie. Or one of each, if you like.”
Unsure about putting something heavy into her stomach, Hannah chose the veggie option and turned down a glass of orange juice. When he disappeared to the kitchen, the couple rose and said their goodbyes to Hannah, then disappeared as well.
Once she was alone, she sipped her coffee and looked around the room with curiosity. The walls were pale gray and hung with artsy prints of cliffs and redwoods. The floor looked old though, the dark, wide planks scattered with scars. She felt dizzy looking at them, imagining her sisters playing on that surface, crawling around or huddled in the corner, serving tea to dolls.
She jumped in surprise when the owner reappeared, plate in hand.
Hannah introduced herself.
“I remember! I’m Tucker. We exchanged emails. You’re in cabin three, right?”
“Yes. It’s beautiful. How long have the cabins been here?”
“Two years.” His voice sang with pride. “I bought this place seven years ago, but the cabins are a recent addition.”
“They were here, though? When you bought the place?”
He winced. “So to speak. They were basically falling down. We stripped them to the foundations and started over.”
Nothing left of the originals. Nothing for her to see. “And the inn itself?”
“We preserved what we could. The floors. The exterior walls. But we needed to add private baths to each bedroom, so we lost a lot of the original layout.”
“And before that? Do you know who owned this place?”
“Some guy from San Jose who wanted a piece of Big Sur. He was an awful B-and-B manager, though. Not hands-on at all. This place really went to hell.”
“Well, it’s beautiful now.”
His chest puffed up and she saw her chance. He liked talking about his property. If she let some of her guard down, she could get all the information she wanted from him.
“I’m in the area researching some family history. I-I think my family may have lived here a really long time ago. The Smiths?”
“I don’t know any Smiths around here, but I’m not native to the area. Not that many are. Were they settlers here? It feels isolated now, but it used to be nearly unreachable. Some of the state parks have some great information on the ranchers and loggers who used to live here.”
“No, it wasn’t that long ago. Not that I know of anyway. More like the ’60s.”
“The ’60s?” His eyebrows flew nearly to his hairline. A laugh burst from his throat. “You’re not talking about the commune?”
“The what?”
He waved a dismissive hand. “Just a rumor. I’m sure it had nothing to do with your family.”
“Wait. Are you saying there was a commune here?”
He grinned with delight. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Here on the property or just here in Big Sur?”
“Right where we’re standing. They say that’s what the cabins were. Housing for hippies.”
Her lips parted, but she couldn’t make a sound.
Tucker, on the other hand, was warming to the topic. “Free love. Peace. Communal living. The whole shebang. They came down from San Francisco or something. That big meadow on the way to the cabins was supposedly used to farm vegetables. I’m sure it’s all an exaggeration, but it’s a fun story. It’s pretty boring here during the winter. People like to talk and there’s not much to talk about.”
“I . . .” Her throat clicked when she tried to swallow. She grabbed her coffee and downed a gulp. “I don’t think my family was involved in that.” They couldn’t have been.
He shook his head. “I’m sure they weren’t. This was all late ’60s, early ’70s. Summer of love and all that. It didn’t last long.”
Early ’70s. A commune. Free love. Whether he realized it or not, he was talking about the Smiths. He was talking about Hannah. “That’s crazy,” she whispered.
“I know, right? I’ve never checked it out. It’s more fun to think it’s true than to find out it was a just some guy running a campground.”
A campground. It could have been a campground. Not as romantic, but definitely more likely. “Do you think that was all it was?”
He shrugged. “That would be my best guess. Cabins and a clearing for campers and tents. There weren’t a lot of motels around back then. But I’m sure there were hippies passing through, staying here, and a campground isn’t nearly as interesting as a commune. Gossip twists things.”
Her brain was only working in fits and starts. Because he was wrong. A campground wasn’t the best guess at all. Pregnant girls didn’t hang around campgrounds for nine months, did they? Or had she only returned to have the baby? “Do you have property records?”
“I don’t think so. I could dig out the contracts from the purchase, but I can’t imagine that jackass gave me anything he didn’t have to. Shouldn’t be hard to find, though. The county seat is up in Salinas.”
She nodded. She’d passed a sign for Salinas on her way down.
“If you find any documents, I’d love to get copies. Never thought much about it, but I guess I could really spice up the website with some background stuff.”
She looked up to see his wide grin, and for a split second, Hannah hated him. Hated the way his eyes creased with delight at the idea of spicing things up. She wanted to toss her coffee in his face and then slap his burned cheek. But the flash of rage passed like heat lightning. She settled for pushing the quiche away, untouched.
“Thanks for the information.”
When she emerged from the house, she looked around with new eyes. Now she pictured hippie girls with braided hair hurrying up the dirt road, long sundresses flaring around their legs. Young men with dirty shirts and dirtier beards gathered around a fire pit, playing guitar and bongo. And her father standing among them with his clean, barber-cut hair, wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and comfortable slacks.
It was absurd. Unimaginable. And the only thing that made sense.
Somehow her steady, conservative parents had started their married life in a hippie commune. Somehow her father, a deacon in his church and a man who wore socks with his sandals, had been a practitioner of free love. And his wife, who listened to Judy Garland and had maintained until 1988 that pants “just weren’t ladylike,” had lived a bohemian lifestyle in the middle of the woods and let her husband have sex with other women.
And from that era of love, drugs, and communal gardening had sprung Hannah.
She walked slowly back to her cabin, so stunned it felt like a contact high, as if the walls of the inn were still leaching ’60s pot smoke into the atmosphere.
The commune story made perfect sense . . . aside from the fact that she knew her parents. She couldn’t picture them as part of an antiestablishment movement, but maybe that was why they’d never told a soul. People in Iowa wouldn’t understand. Hannah didn’t understand.
And both of them must have been lost souls back then. Both parentless. God only knew what Dorothy had experienced in an old-fashioned orphanage as a young girl. And her dad had been supporting himself from an early age. Hannah could imagine how they’d
both been swept up into a counterculture for a few years.
Except she honestly couldn’t.
She reached the clearing Tucker had mentioned. The dirt road curved to avoid a meadow that hadn’t caught her eye on the drive in. In the evening it must have been only a darkening space, but in the late-morning sun, the long grass shone emerald green, a startling jewel in the midst of redwood shade. A few tiny trees had begun to shoot up at the edges of the grass, softening what must have once been a rectangle of cleared land.
We had almost two acres of garden.
Hannah’s knees went weak.
We all helped each other.
She sank slowly into the waves of grass as her mother’s own words confirmed the truth. Dorothy had been speaking of this place. Of working together, all the women and children, tending this soil, feeding a community. And then they’d left, and Hannah’s mother had stayed.
A smile trembled on her lips even as her vision swam beneath tears. She couldn’t picture the Smiths here. She couldn’t picture that at all. But she could see her real mother in clear detail. Her tanned arms bared to the sun. Long black hair sliding across her back as she bent to tug a weed free from the stubborn ground. Flowy skirt knotted above her knees to keep it out of the way while she worked. The woman tossed her head back in laughter and joy, the sun catching the line of her cheek. But Hannah couldn’t quite see her face. Not yet.
Hannah had been born in this wild place to that woman. She’d been conceived out of love or lust or a need to make a better, newer world. Her mother had been a woman who’d wanted something more than what she’d been raised for. Just as Hannah had. Maybe she’d been running from something, but she’d found a place and an idea, at least for a moment.
And now Hannah had done the same thing. If she’d been running from the boring cruelty of watching Dorothy Smith die, she’d at least found this.
It had been right to come here, no matter what her sisters thought.
She clutched at the grass for a moment, closed her eyes, felt the earth beneath her knees. Even if this experimental Shangri-la had failed, it felt right to know she’d come from it. So much more right than living in Coswell, Iowa, had ever made her feel. Kneeling there, Hannah felt like she’d shed the stiff, uncomfortable suit she’d been wearing her whole life, and now she was naked in her own skin for the first time.
Her hippie mother would love that, surely.
Telling herself the time to run naked through the meadow would come later, if at all, Hannah stood and walked through the grass until she reached the middle. She looked up at the sky, where the sun shone lazily between thick clouds. She dragged her shoes along the ground around her, checking to see if there were still garden furrows here. But the ground was smooth.
Smaller trees made up a far line of forest, and when Hannah noticed the even spacing of the trunks, she headed that way. Sure enough, when she got close, the toe of her shoe caught a soggy, ancient apple. Fruit trees had marked this boundary of the garden.
If the Smith family hadn’t moved to Iowa, this would have been Hannah’s life. Working under this sun in this garden, gathering apples for lunch, discussing social justice and inequality. Sneaking off to splash naked in the river on hot days.
Then again, she wasn’t exactly an earth-mother type. Maybe Big Sur would have been just as stifling as Coswell. There weren’t any numbers to crunch here, there were definitely no punk concerts, and she’d seen no evidence that an ocean view would bring out her nurturing side any more effectively than corn fritters had.
Still. There was the possibility that she would have fit in. Or at the very least had a mother who understood her.
Had her awkwardness in her own family been the source of all her failings in life? Was that why she had so much trouble connecting? Hannah had never felt that Dorothy didn’t love her, but there must have been some hesitance there. Some resentment that Hannah had sensed even as a small child. No woman could take in her husband’s bastard without at least a little resentment. Hannah had picked up on something.
She just . . . couldn’t seem to lock into relationships. There was never a definitive click to let her know she’d finally made something solid and lasting. It always felt more like grasping something that was too hot and seeing how long she could stand to hold on.
Had her birth mother been the same? Hannah needed to find out if the woman was still here or if she’d drifted away with the tides long ago.
As she turned to walk back across the meadow, her eye caught on a shade of brown that stood out from the rest of the forest. She moved toward the northwestern corner of the meadow and narrowed her eyes, trying to make an image from the puzzle of shifting shadows and crossing branches. Beyond the fruit trees, nestled beneath the canopy of the redwoods, an angle of gray led her gaze to the remains of a wooden wall.
Hannah parted the branches of the apple trees on either side of her and hunched over to pick her way closer. It was definitely an old building. Between two parted boards, she caught the glint of something white. A sink, maybe.
“That’s poison oak,” a gravelly voice said from behind her.
Hannah spun around and nearly poked out an eye on a branch. Squinting protectively, she looked for the man past her eyelashes. “What?”
“You’re about to step into a whole patch of poison oak.” His words were weary, as if he’d explained this to stupid tourists a hundred times already this week.
She clawed her way out of the apple-tree branches and lurched into the open meadow again. The man’s grizzled, worn face matched his voice. He didn’t have to protect himself from branches, but his eyes were as tightly squinted as hers had been. A gray beard hid any other sign of expression.
“Sorry. And thanks. I was just trying to see what that old building was.”
“Bathhouse,” he explained, then added, “The toilet. You’ve probably seen plenty of those. Not worth getting a rash over.”
“Was it from before?”
He lifted the shovel he held and poked it impatiently against the ground at his feet. “Before what?”
“Before this place was a bed and breakfast.”
“Well, it’s definitely from before something.” He turned and started to walk away.
“Do you work here?” she called to his narrow back.
“Yep.”
“Do you know anything about the commune?”
He stopped moving for a second, pausing midstep. But he didn’t look back. “Nope,” he finally said, the word faint on the breeze. His legs shushed through the long grass as he resumed his path.
Hannah couldn’t tell if that nope had meant he knew nothing or everything.
She glanced toward the bathhouse, now invisible in the trees, and when she looked back toward the old man, he was nearly at the dirt road. “Sir!” she called, finally deciding he was the best hope she had for immediate information. “Have you lived around here your whole life?”
He kept walking as she tried to high-step it through the meadow toward him. She heard the crunch of his feet on gravel as he disappeared beyond the bushes at the edge of the trees. Just as Hannah reached the road herself, an engine growled to life. An ancient all-terrain vehicle roared from the side of the road and disappeared around a curve, carrying her bearded stranger away.
She forced herself not to chase after him like a lunatic. After all, the man worked here. Even if he was a close-mouthed recluse, she’d see him again.
Hannah picked a few burrs off her pant legs and headed toward her cabin to wet her suddenly dry mouth. These woods weren’t going to whisper their secrets to her no matter how long she lurked, but Google would. She had a starting point now, even if it was the last thing she’d expected.
A goddamn hippie commune.
A reckless thrill shot through her at the thought of telling her sisters about this. It was pure meanness on her part, she knew that, but it was better than the bone-deep sorrow she’d been feeling.
She wouldn’t call them yet,
though. She needed more details or they’d just deny the possibility, tell her it was a mistake. Anyway, maybe she’d wait until she got back home so she could watch their faces go slack with shock.
“You’re the worst,” she muttered to herself as she unlocked her cabin and grabbed her laptop. No point sitting inside when the day was so nice. Hannah plopped down in a patio chair and logged in to the hotel’s Wi-Fi. Thank God the place catered to eco-geeks and not real hippies, or she would’ve had to drive for miles to find a hotspot.
Her previous attempts at searching for information online had been too broad, but now she could narrow it down to hippie communes in Big Sur. Surely there hadn’t been that many.
Okay. There had been a lot. Hannah’s jaw dropped within two seconds of starting the search. A few clicks later, she was whispering several choice curse words to herself.
Big Sur had seemingly been some sort of wilderness retreat for hippies trying to escape the crowds in San Francisco. They’d camped out in the woods and in public parks and even bought their own land to found mini utopias. In fact, there was still a hippie commune going strong just a few miles up the highway from the Riverfall Inn.
No wonder Tucker had never bothered doing much research. Every landowner around probably had a similar story.
The place that was still operating didn’t seem to be much of a commune anymore. It had drifted solidly into New Agey self-help retreat status, but she imagined it was still worth a visit. There could be people working there who’d remember the communes that had disappeared.
As for those . . . she tried several different searches, but she couldn’t find anything specific. Nobody had spent time blogging back then, and the newspapers didn’t seem to consider hippies to be newsworthy, except as a public nuisance. The most promising link was about a lawsuit against the town of Carmel, and that only because it referenced the “filthy hippie communes” near Big Sur.
Half Past: A Novel Page 9
