Then follow several comic scenes: Junior attempts to coax a stubborn donkey to go into its stall, Heather tries to milk a cow, and Sergeant Moody, suffering, as it turns out, from PTSD after being shot at by several members of his own platoon, dives under the chicken coop the first time Grandpa Stoner rings the dinner bell, only to emerge covered with white feathers.
And why did Grandpa Stoner think renting out his whole farm to an expanding bunch of strangers was a good idea? He asks this very question in an amusing monologue conducted in the farm’s outhouse, where he has gone to rethink his offer, debating the pluses and minuses of the situation while turning the pages of a Whole Earth Catalog he found in the back of the VW bus. In the end, just as he’s about to tell everyone he’s made a huge mistake, Judy walks out of the kitchen with a batch of her famous hash brownies. Later, a hilarious discussion ensues on how to achieve world peace, with suggestions ranging from Sergeant Moody’s “to kill anyone who isn’t peaceful” to Heather’s heartfelt speech that “if we all just love one another, things will work out the way they are meant to.”
In the end they decide that while achieving peace for the entire world is a near impossibility, if a person, or a group of people, for that matter, can find peace in his or her own life, that might well serve as a model for the rest of mankind. They decide to call their place (unsurprisingly, because it is the name of the show) “Mellow Valley.” Finally Grandpa Stoner declares, “If you five can make it, then maybe anyone can.”
Mud baths! Yes! Once he was grown Viktor made it a point to visit his local spa at least once a month, sometimes more, for a good mud bath, where, lying enclosed in a garment of sulfur-smelling clay, with only his eyes and lips uncoated, he could imagine that he was invisible, that nobody could see him, and nobody could hurt him, and nobody could make fun of his hands because they were now hidden in mud, pressed against his thighs like the swellings on the trunk of some kind of a tree or another.
Except that — wait! — come to think of it, since he arrived at the Burrow he hasn’t had even one mud bath, probably because he’s been busy making money hand over fist. Big hand over big fist.
In Heather’s dream, she’s a bird of some sort, but also — you know — Heather, and flying across the country with a big flock of other birds, looking for a place to land, to get a little snack, and rest. Hour after hour they fly, and her arms are getting sore, but because she’s at the very back of the flock there’s no one she can tell this to, nor does she have any idea where she’s headed. A follower, she thinks, that’s all I’ll ever be. But whoa! Now everyone ahead of her is dropping down to a place that looks pretty nice. There is water and duckweed and she can see other ducks already there, but just as the leaders are about to land, something goes wrong. The leaders start falling out of the sky! Pull up, Heather! she tells herself, and she does, just in time, but her arms are aching even more, and who knows when she’ll ever find a place to land?
For Madeline, the oddest thing about the Burrow is all the mirrors. Whoever decorated the place — if you could call it decoration — must have thought that in a building without windows, mirrors would make up for the complete lack of any view, or sources of external light, whatsoever. The result being that mirrors are everywhere, not only in the places you’d expect — like the bathrooms, at the ends of halls, and in living rooms, and the one above her bed, of course — but also on the backs of doors and in the kitchen, where there’s a big one behind the burners of the stove. It’s a special pain to keep clean because of all the grease that splatters on it.
So everything reflects everything else, like living in a fun house, she thinks, but honestly, whether all these mirrors do any good at all is anyone’s guess, because while it’s true, they do reflect the light, they also multiply the dark. Even so, she’s mostly used to them by now. That is: Madeline hardly thinks of mirrors at all except when Jeffery, in one of his lame efforts to be funny, pretends the mirrors are two-way, and starts talking to whoever’s on the other side.
Ha ha.
In the second episode of Mellow Valley, the commune’s very first crop of marijuana is threatened by the same drought that is also killing the corn, alfalfa, and soybeans on the surrounding farms. “It looks as if your little experiment is going to come to an end as rapidly as it started,” Grandpa Stoner tells everyone, in a group meeting he calls after returning from an inspection of the dying plants one dusty afternoon.
And all does seem lost, until the newcomers pool their knowledge in an attempt to find a way to solve their problem. First, Sergeant Moody recalls an obscure method of rice irrigation used by South Vietnamese farmers, many of whom he killed for no reason at all. In places where there wasn’t sufficient water to make an actual rice paddy, he said, the wily farmers — no doubt sympathetic to the Viet Cong — used a system of interconnecting bamboo tubes to carry water to each individual plant. Then Junior sacrifices the tubing on his hookah to make a prototype of the system Sergeant Moody is describing to help them visualize the concept. Norm, with the help of the elderly town librarian, Mrs. Bachhaus, researches which varieties of cannabis use the least amount of water, and Judy, pretending that she is creating a piece of installation art, goes to the local hardware store and orders about a quarter mile of plastic tubing, pumps, and connectors. Working together, the members of the commune rip out most of the dying pot plants, save what few parched leaves they can find, and use them to get high as they wait for the equipment to arrive.
When everything is delivered, Heather, Judy, and Junior plant the new, drought-resistant plants, bought from a fellow peacenik in the dry, southwestern part of the United States, as Grandpa Stoner works alongside Sergeant Moody and Norm to assemble the new irrigation method. “You may be city slickers — no offense, Heather,” he says, “but I have to admit there’s a half chance that this crazy idea just might work.”
The new crop flourishes.
So in the way that sometimes very different cities, such as Lima, Ohio, and Lima, Peru, share the same name, we now have two Heathers here. One is the Heather who acted in Mellow Valley and the other is a different Heather, who by coincidence has the same name, Heather, but who now lives in the Burrow. And although they are not the same person, it is a little confusing because the Heather who is in the Burrow thought she would be an actress one day, that is, that she would be the world-famous Heather, and the Heather who acted in Mellow Valley would be, well. . a nobody.
How could she believe this? Well, because of a single moment: After Heather-who-is-in-the-Burrow’s memory of that kindergarten specialness (thanks to Mrs. Charles, so her name, Heather = a fresh breeze) more or less evaporated with every ascending grade level, it was a sad and beaten-down Heather who one day walked into Mr. Kaminsky’s Theater Arts class in high school. And there, almost as if by magic, the minute she had to introduce herself (“Hello, my name is Heather”) she could start to feel that old specialness come back, as if she were important, and she found herself occupying a platform slightly higher than everyone else that she hadn’t even known she’d stepped onto.