When I was a year and a half, my parents loaded everything we owned, which wasn’t much, into a green 1952 Chevy truck and moved across the country to Washington State. My dad had built a miniature house on the back of the truck, and into this they packed our meager possessions, our two dogs and our goat Polly. (After a great deal of arguing my dad finally convinced my mom that there wasn’t room for her beloved chickens.) This picking up’ and moving across the country was a trend that was to continue throughout my young girlhood-a family tradition, of sorts.
Moving is easy when you own almost nothing, and even easier if the things you own are so battered that they become impervious to damage. Everything we possessed had been made by one of my parents or bought secondhand from Goodwill. When I wanted something we couldn’t afford (which was most of the time), my parents would do their best to build or sew it. I lusted after pinstriped jeans in third grade, and my mom valiantly sewed me stiff, ill-fitting pink denim jeans (which proceeded to fall off during a ferocious game of Red Rover). The year that Care Bears were in vogue, my brother and I received the homemade version. My mom was at a loss, luckily, when Cabbage Patch dolls hit the scene. My brother and I wanted bunk beds, and my dad promptly built them. My first bike was a hot pink number with a banana boat seat purchased at the local flea market. We got our first TV from a junk shop when I was twelve. It took me a long time to figure out that we were one step removed from the ‘normal’ consumer chain-and that it was both a financial necessity and a conscious ideological choice for my parents.
We lived my parents’ hippie dream in various New Age communities in Washington ’s Skagit Valley and, later, in Sedona, Arizona. When I was six, we traveled across the country again, this time to Ithaca, New York, in a red Dodge van. Yet again my dad had masterminded his version of a hippie U-Haul camper and built a wooden sleeping platform in the back of the van. We spent our nights snuggled together on the platform under our one goose-down sleeping bag, looking at the stars out the van window and reading The Chronicles ofNarnia over and over again.
Life progressed in a similar fashion-traveling cross-country, sleeping with my parents, being naked much of the time. In Ithaca we lived in another cabin in the woods with no running water. I played in the creek, dodged the mice in our cabin, and passed countless hours melting crayons onto our wood stove. When I entered school in Ithaca, I went to an ‘alternative’ one called Hickory Hollow three bus rides away from our home. My parents subscribed to a theory of education that did not involve being forced to learn things that I wasn’t ‘ready’ to learn-an interesting, if at times impractical, concept. When I expressed my aversion to math to my first-grade teacher, she replied that I didn’t have to do my math homework if I didn’t want to-instead, why didn’t I go play in the corner in the fake tepee? Years later my seventh-grade teacher would wonder why I still didn’t know my multiplication tables.
Being a hippie kid always marked me as different. My family’s food choices were no exception. I was on the bus to Hickory Hollow with the kids from the local high school when it happened: my first public embarrassment over hippie food. My lunch box collapsed and out exploded oh-horrible-hippie-world-nonfat-plain-organic-goat’s-milk yogurt, covering the aisle of the bus, splashing onto the seats and me. And as I stood there, in my puffy green Goodwill coat and holey tights and little patchwork skirt, yogurt all over my shoes, the faces of horrified high schoolers gaped at me like I was an exotic bug. Perhaps other kids didn’t get yogurt in their lunch boxes-and if they did, it came in neat little plastic containers with cute foil lids and fruit on the bottom. This is the first time I can recall being conscious of my differences from other kids-and the moment when the protective bubble surrounding my idealized hippie kid existence first burst. I had been living in a sort of Utopian reality, with total, guileless freedom from worry about what other people thought of me. I realized in that moment that mine was not to be a mainstream existence.
My isolation blossomed to epic proportions when we moved to Beantown, Wisconsin. My parents had two folk musician friends there-and they wanted to start a band. We drove into Beantown in 1979 in a rusty blue Datsun wagon with, yes, duct tape holding on one of the fenders. We parked it in front of our friends’ house and camped out with them for some time. It seemed like months to my seven-year-old mind, and perhaps it was. However long, it was enough to bring the Beantown police to the door of the house, asking about the strange, vagrant car parked on the street. That visit from the police is cemented in my memory as my family’s initiation into our brand new identity as the town freaks. Did ‘normal’ people have the police coming to their door because their car looked so dilapidated? Somehow, I didn’t think so.
The vortex of the small-town Midwest sucked us in and held us captive for thirteen long years. There in the vortex, all the things about us that hadn’t seemed that strange before took on a whole new meaning. We were a complete anomaly to the residents of this tiny town. The people of Beantown must have been vaguely aware that the hippie culture existed, but it rarely, if ever, infiltrated their stable community. Other than my parents’ band mates, we stood alone on an island of hippie weirdness, or at least so it seemed to me at that young age when every difference is magnified. We were almost the only vegetarians in town. My parents were folk musicians, a virtually unheard of and severely misunderstood profession. My mom still made most of our clothes, and a wood stove was still our only source of heat. My mom wore colorful ethnic fabrics and knee-high leather boots instead of polyester pantsuits and flats. My dad bought all his clothes at the local Salvation Army, including the series of corduroy and leather vests that he remained strangely attached to even into the mid-eighties, much to my dismay. My parents weren’t Christians-they were pagans, and our ‘bible’ was a combination of the l-Ching, Tarot cards and the channelings of Seth. We drove a succession of rusty cars that always looked as if they couldn’t make it another mile, including one of our more embarrassing vehicles, a 1965 red Plymouth Valiant. The Valiant would swing into the school parking lot to pick me up after school, looking grossly out of place next to the Ford Escorts and minivans. When viewed through the lens of mainstream culture, our hippie ways were incomprehensible. Obscure lifestyles, or any sort of difference, can seem threatening in a small town-and we were misjudged accordingly. People saw my parents and immediately assumed (incorrectly) that they did drugs. I was taunted in eighth grade, asked if my parents had seen all of the Cheech and Chong movies. There was a vaguely dangerous mystique surrounding our difference.