The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  The cellar tasting room was attended by a middle-aged man and his young apprentice, a local boy happy to have landed a job that didn’t require operating tractors or chain saws. I will resist the temptation to lapse into vino-patois about nose and texture and a finish with hints of blackberry, and simply state that the reds and whites we sampled were quite good. We settled on a blended white (called a “Chardonel”) and a blended red (cabernet-merlot-syrah, labeled “Meriwether Lewis” and bottled in 2009 to mark the bicentennial of his death).

  As for our wedding anniversary, I’d made it a practice to present Leslie with a dozen yellow roses each year—part of my effort to ensure that my third marriage would be my last. There being no florist in the vicinity, I stopped at the roadside on our way back to the campground and plucked a bunch of black-eyed Susans, which brought a smile and a kiss.

  * * *

  Bud Runyon remembers the day, four decades ago, when the caravan of school buses passed through the town of Columbia, Tennessee. He’d just finished his shift at the Phelps Dodge aluminum plant, where he worked in the coiling (pronounced cawlin) department, which milled thirty-foot aluminum bars into wire (pronounced wor). He pulled out of the parking lot and drove to an intersection, where a red light and a city policeman had stopped traffic.

  “Man, I tell you what, we were hot and sweaty and ready to go home,” he recollected. “And there we were, settin’ at that red light, and here they come, all in a line, seventy, eighty school buses all painted in funny colors, with stovepipes stickin’ out the winders, and we wondered, What in the world? We didn’t know what was goin’ on. We thought somebody was invadin’ us.”

  It wasn’t an invasion. Bud was witnessing, that afternoon in 1971, the end of a cross-country odyssey of 320 hippies disillusioned with the self-indulgent scene in San Francisco. Led by Stephen Gaskin, a balding, bearded ex-marine who preached a fusion of Christianity and Eastern religions, the pilgrims had searched the nation for a place to establish a settlement based on the principles of nonviolence, respect for the earth, and communal living. They’d found it in Lewis County, Tennessee, purchasing eighteen hundred acres of woodland for seventy dollars an acre. They named their property “the Farm” and soon went to work turning it into one.

  Lewis County was, and is, perhaps more tolerant than others of nonmainstream ideas and ways of life; Mennonites and Amish have made homes there, alongside conventional families whose roots go back to the days of Andrew Jackson and Davy Crockett. Not that residents rolled out the welcome wagon when Gaskin’s tie-dyed followers arrived. As Bud Runyon remembers it, there was “talk about runnin’ them off with guns,” but the general reaction was bewilderment mixed with wariness. “When we heard the caravan was hippies, we didn’t know if to think the worst or what. People were wonderin’, Are they gonna be enemies or friends?” (pronounced frinz).

  Those who thought the worst imagined freaks on acid and free-love orgies. It turned out that most of the commune’s values were traditional, even conservative—with one exception. Alcohol, tobacco, and psychedelic drugs were prohibited; likewise sex outside of marriage, artificial birth control, and abortion. The exception was smoking marijuana, considered a sacred ritual. In 1974, Gaskin was arrested for growing weed. Otherwise, there was no trouble. The Farm came to be accepted by its neighbors, and in Runyon’s words “for forty years they’ve been friends.”

  The Farm is like an amalgam of an American small town, an Israeli kibbutz, and the Oneida Community. It’s said to be the oldest hippie commune in the United States, but that isn’t quite accurate; it’s no longer a commune in the pure sense of the term. Members aren’t required to take vows of poverty and surrender their personal property, as in the beginning. They form an intentional community, meaning one where everyone lives together with common purposes. Those are written in a lengthy statement of “Basic Beliefs and Agreements,” a kind of charter. (“We agree to be respectful of the forests, fields, and wildlife under our care … We believe in nonviolence and pacifism … We believe that vegetarianism is the most ecologically sound and humane lifestyle for the planet.”)

  The Farm generates electricity with solar panels and has its own water supply. Its residents, now numbering 175 (some are grandchildren of the founders), own homes and small businesses, provide midwife services, grow crops for personal consumption as well as for sale. They trade and barter with neighbors. Pregnant Amish women, who choose not to go to hospitals, use its midwife clinic; in exchange, the Farm obtains Amish timber and wood products. It’s about as self-sufficient as any community can be in this century. If ever the American economy goes over the cliff, the commune may have to arm itself against desperate hordes trying to get in.

  Bill Roper, our font of local lore, had said that we had to visit the Farm.

  Tennessee Route 20 brought us there. Amish and Mennonite farms lent the countryside a quaint charm, but the pastoral landscape was deceptive: in the distance, a paper-company clear-cut looked like a bombing range, littered with stumps and slash piles and felled trees. No hippie-dippy funny stuff about the sacred earth up there, the chain saws ripping into the raw material for all those useless catalogs that pile up every Christmas season.

  At the entrance to the Farm, we met a band of conservationists preparing a sortie to document endangered species (like the snaketail dragonfly). The loggers, they said, weren’t reforesting but selling off the cleared land to developers. I wondered if there was one square mile of America, outside national and state parks, that was safe from Yankee Doodle rapacity.

  The Farm appeared to be. A narrow road wound past vegetable gardens and pastures, silos and cottages painted in recall of the psychedelic artwork of Haight-Ashbury. People waved and called out hellos. I confess I didn’t know how to react to such friendliness. We stopped off at the general store, crammed with organic condiments; also lots of tofu, soy, and rice milk. The clerk, Kathleen, a soft-spoken fifty-year-old with teeth as straight as a CNN anchorwoman’s, was another Sunshine State refugee and a new resident. Her sister, a commune member since 1975, owned the store. “There are three generations living here, and I love it for the sense of community,” said Kathleen, who had waitressed in Daytona for thirty years.

  Leslie stocked up on vegan commodities, albeit the least healthful she could find, then had a look at books stacked up beside a railing outside. They were there for the taking, an eclectic assortment: Strumpet City; Alternative Dispute Resolution in Business; The First Wives Club; Healing AIDS Naturally.

  The Dome, a kind of community center next to the store, was a lofty hexagon of parabolic arches built from scrap I-beams meeting at the apex. That’s where we ran into two third-generation Farmites, Noah (“like the Ark,” he said) and Cedar (“like the tree”), respectively eighteen and nineteen. Both were college students home for summer vacation. Noah wore a faint beard and a tie-dyed baseball cap flipped backward, with Grateful Dead wings pinned to the back, Cedar a long braid and khaki shorts and a black T-shirt so perforated with tiny holes I would have thought it had been used for shotgun practice if guns were allowed on the Farm, which they most certainly are not. In our travels thus far, we’d observed that the Land of the Free is becoming the Land of the Flabby and that the obesity epidemic is most severe among the great republic’s youth, not a surprising development: TV, computer games, and Facebook bind them to their chairs; their supersize-me diets ensure massive ingestion of empty calories. Noah and Cedar, both six-footers and lifeguards at the Farm’s riverine swimming hole, looked the way young American males used to look: lean as saplings, doubtless because junk food and fatty meats are forbidden fare and because life on the commune involves planting and harvesting, hauling and splitting wood.

  Noah was the talkative one, speaking in a voice edged with irony; Cedar was quieter but occasionally tossed out a wry comment. A music major at Middle Tennessee State University in nearby Murfreesboro, he said that he had a backup plan. “I’m thinking of minoring in philosophy so I’ll be employa
ble.”

  Noah was enrolled at a community college in Eugene, Oregon—“to get some outside perspective,” he said. “Murfreesboro is too close.”

  “Yeah, but Murfreesboro is a lot different than here,” Cedar interjected. “It’s dirty, it’s filthy, there’s crime and only one or two parks, and forty thousand college students into drinking and electronica.”

  Their roots in the “intentional community” are deep. Cedar grew up there from infancy; his grandfather Rob had arrived on the caravan; his mother was in the first class to graduate from the Farm’s high school. Noah’s uncle was also an original settler, but Noah’s immediate family arrived more recently. His parents, both PhDs from the heartland of the counterculture, the University of California at Berkeley, had moved to New Jersey, where they “stuck out like sore thumbs.”

  “When I went to public school, I wasn’t a normal kid. I got made fun of a lot. My dad worked for the New York City school system. He was the science director in District Two. When No Child Left Behind got pushed through, he saw everything he’d worked for obliterated by that seemingly useless piece of legislation, and we moved here, in 2003.”

  And how did he find it? Wasn’t it a bit insular and claustrophobic?

  He shook his head. “I love it here. You feel safe, knowing that all these people are there for you. That’s what community is all about. There are no age distinctions. I can hang around with twelve-year-olds in the day and party with my parents at night. As a whole, we’re greater than the sum of our parts. It’s what I loved about growing up here—you’re not locked into your own mind.”

  He said he intended to come back and start a family of his own when he finished college.

  “Me, too,” Cedar said. “Not right now, but that’s my American dream.”

  I couldn’t recall meeting teenage boys who actually liked living with their families. I wondered if Noah and Cedar were painting an idealized picture for a stranger. It didn’t seem so.

  They laughed at the myths outsiders once had about the Farm: that its residents swam naked in the swimming hole, that they grew fields of pot, that they didn’t know the first thing about real farming. Noah recalled meeting Lincoln Davis, their congressional representative.

  “He said, ‘So you’re from that farm? Okay, what’s the one thing a potato has got to have before you plant it in the ground to grow?’ And I said, ‘An eye.’ And he said, ‘Okay! You’re good by me.’”

  Noah and Cedar were about to leave when a man who looked like a bearded Benjamin Franklin and spoke in a hill-country twang showed up. This was James “Bud” Runyon, the same who’d watched the school buses roll in forty years earlier. Bud could not have known it then, but he was looking at his future employers. He lost his job in 1982, when the Phelps Dodge plant shut down. Soon afterward, he was working at the Farm, first as a woodcutter, later as supervisor of the water company. Now, at sixty-four, he had a contract to haul trash.

  Bud is a natural-born storyteller, a man who harks back to a time when the oral narrative was an art form. His tale about the caravan’s arrival, which I abridged considerably, rambled on for about twenty minutes. When I remarked on his luxuriant beard, he asked, “You know why that beard’s there?” and proceeded to answer with another long tale. The condensed version: he’d had a heart attack the previous New Year’s Eve, received stents in two coronary arteries, and was put on blood thinners, his doctor advising him not to put a razor to his face. So he stopped shaving.

  I then popped the question I’d been asking almost everyone we met.

  Noah’s response: “I think it’s greed and the quest for material possessions that holds the country together. What our leaders want is us to be good little consumers and keep buying, buying, buying.”

  Cedar’s: “One of the big things is complacency … We’re used to it this way, the quote free market unquote. What people need to do is wake up and say, ‘As a nation we’re not happy. We don’t love each other.’”

  Bud disagreed. “I know there’s a lotta violence in this country, but I believe it’s gotta be love holds us together, and our faith, and wantin’ to get along with people all over the world. There’s people all over the world I never met, but I love ’em, and I pray for ’em.”

  In Arizona, the Yaqui Indians believe there are two kinds of people in the world, those with magic in their hearts and those with disturbances in their hearts. Bud Runyon belonged to the former tribe. In all the miles we traveled, we wouldn’t meet anyone with a better heart or more generous spirit. Not that he was unaware of the other tribe. As we parted company, he said, “Y’all be careful. Lotta crazy people out on that road.”

  14.

  We’d been on the road for three weeks and had settled into a routine. I woke up first, usually while it was still dark, made coffee, walked the dogs for about twenty minutes, then did calisthenics and stretching exercises outside the trailer for another twenty. Occasionally, I threw in a headstand. Leslie made breakfast and took care of the dogs the rest of the day when we were in camp. On the road, while I drove, she worked in her virtual, mobile office, muttering expletives when her 4G connection or Magic Droid entered gaps in coverage (three bars on the screen prompted her to whoop like a gambler hitting a winner at the slots). Setting up and breaking camp was a joint effort, though it was mostly my responsibility, and it was sweaty, dirty work in that equatorial weather.

  At night, one of us cooked, but not always. We often opened a can or two and concocted some peculiar cold dinners. “How about beets, brown bread, and canned peaches?” Leslie would say. “Fine,” I’d answer. And, mirabile dictu, it would be fine—or fine enough. These meals reminded Leslie-the-WASP of family dinners when she was growing up. (Her mother—this is true—has praised hospital fare.) When we did cook, it was usually the three S’s: spaghetti, sausage, and sauce, washed down with cheap wine in our plastic crystalware. Whoever didn’t cook was the dishwasher. These domestic assignments weren’t as formalized as the household chores at home. If something needed doing, one of us did it without asking, “Isn’t it your turn to…?”

  There was, too, a certain separateness to our lives back in Connecticut. Leslie commuted to her office, I went to my writing studio behind the house, each of us in different worlds until evening. On the road, we were together all the time, and we pulled together to accomplish each day’s simple, shared mission: to start at Point A and arrive at Point B. We’d been married for twenty-three years and lovers for longer than that; now we were closer than ever, an intentional community of two. We’d become road buddies.

  On the morning of June 6, I was up at a quarter to six. Walking Sage and Sky along Swan Creek, I watched a turtle making slow progress toward an egg-laying spot and heard wild turkeys clucking in the twilit woods. The temperature had fallen to a frigid seventy-five, and I was hoping that the heat wave had finally crested.

  Hopes thwarted. It was back into the nineties by the time we were hitched up and rolling westward on U.S. 412.

  We stopped at a veterinary clinic in Hohenwald for tick meds for the dogs—they were peppered with those loathsome things. Spotting the Airstream through a window, the vet asked where we were going. “Did you get lost?” he said after I told him. “Alaska!” the receptionist exclaimed. Then, in a wistful voice: “I’ve always wanted to go there. Can I stow away with you?”

  We’d heard words like those from family and friends before we set out. Take me with you. The longing to be somewhere other than where you are, to just go, is as American as the World Series. Or at any rate used to be. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck records this exchange with a Connecticut store owner who’d asked him the same question the vet asked us.

  STEINBECK: All over.

  STORE OWNER: Lord! I wish I could go.

  STEINBECK: Don’t you like it here?

  STORE OWNER: Sure. It’s all right, but I wish I could go.

  STEINBECK: You don’t even know where I’m going.

  STORE OWNER: I don’t c
are. I’d like to go anywhere.

  Writing more than a century earlier, in The Oregon Trail (which may be considered the first American road book), Francis Parkman observed that not all the emigrants were making the hard, dangerous trek west to better their prospects. He was amazed to find a man of seventy-one leading a train of government provision wagons. The old man couldn’t explain why, at his age, he was chasing the sunset across the Great Plains. Parkman concluded that “some restless American devil had driven him into the wilderness at a time of life when he should have been seated at the fireside with his grandchildren on his knees.”

  Back on 412, with Leslie busy editing an article on bottled water, I fell into idle reflections, asking myself if Parkman’s restless American devil was easing into retirement. Considering all the travelers filling up trailer parks, even in these times of economic woe and high gas prices, it would seem not. But most were either retirees or families on vacation. I was looking for but not finding a different breed of wanderer: the college kid taking the summer off to thumb across the country; the young adventurer driven to see what lies beyond the beyond; the rebel nomad with a wayward wind blowing in his soul—Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, delirious with white-line fever; Tod Stiles and Buz Murdock, blasting down Route 66 in their Corvette convertible.1

  I was looking for a reincarnation of myself as I was half a century ago, a college dropout under Kerouac’s spell. I’d landed a job as a railroad brakeman. Later, with the money earned, I hitchhiked, hopped freights, and rode buses from Chicago to southern Mexico and back—eight thousand miles in four months. Compared to the hobos set loose in the Great Depression, the high-iron riders of whom Woody Guthrie sang, I was a middle-class, dilettante bum, but I wouldn’t trade those four months for anything. I can still summon up images from a mental photo album: hitchhiking to Laredo through the chalky mesquite plains in south Texas and eating roadhouse eggs with two cowboys; the Milky Way spilling across the skies of Sonora; the Mexican truck driver who’d given me a ride—and nips from his mescal jug—declaring, “Tu y mi, somos amigos de la carretera” (You and me, we are friends of the highway).