This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [24]
Beyond the tiny township of Harborside, the road narrowed to the width of the VW truck. Up and down hills they went, and around sharp turns. When the view opened out to the sea again, the road took a sharp dip before leveling to overlook a beautiful cove with a rock island in the middle. Across from that cove was a large mailbox with “Nearing” painted on it and a wooden placard with the greeting, “Forest Farm, help us live the good life, visitors 3–5 or by appointment,” signed, “Helen & Scott.” A sandy driveway led up through the woods past a stone-walled garden to an old clapboarded farmhouse connected to a barn by a wooden arch that they passed under to find a stone patio and table set with wooden bowls for lunch.
“Hello, hello, hello-e-o,” came a lilting cheerio voice through the screen of the kitchen window. “Come in, come in, come in!”
Entering through the mudroom to a country kitchen with mottled pine floors and colorful cabinets, they found Helen standing over the stove, making soup. Small and energetic with short sandy hair, Helen possessed a hawklike quality in her face and movements, fierce, regal, and confident, but kindly, too. In her sixties, she wore a shapeless outfit over a trim figure, her age revealed only by a slight puffiness in the sun-weathered skin beneath her eyes and chin.
“Hello, hello,” she said again, automatically almost, not seeming a bit perturbed to have strangers standing in her kitchen. “Where are you kiddos from?”
As Papa told her of their quest for land, Mama took in the small house. The counter and sink looked through mullioned windows to the patio. Across the room was the living area, consisting of a solid table with chairs and bountiful bookshelves, above which a large plaque read, “There is no religion higher than truth.” They would later learn that this was the emblem of the Theosophical Society, and the quote was of the founder, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.
“Scott-o’s out in the garden,” Helen said to Papa. “Why don’t you tell him lunch’s ready?”
Mama stayed with Helen, finding her the sort of alternative woman she wished she had for a mother. Born to what was described as an “eclectic and intellectual upper-middle-class family,” Helen had grown up in the New York suburb of Ridgewood, New Jersey. The Knothes were Unitarians and members of the Theosophical Society, a nonsectarian group promoting the study of religion, philosophy, and science, and they were strict vegetarians, maintaining an organic garden on the property surrounding their rambling book-filled bungalow. Attractive, and wise for her youth, Helen practiced the violin, vegetarianism, and various alternative ideas promoted by the Theosophical Society, including reincarnation, palm reading, and dowsing with a rod to find water.
At age seventeen Helen first met Scott Nearing, twenty years her senior, but she was off to spend six years traveling and living abroad in Europe, India, Australia, and Amsterdam, where she met the Indian guru Krishnamurti, a spiritual leader recognized by the Theosophical Society. Krishnamurti felt an immediate connection to Helen and insisted she join the inner circle of people who traveled with him as he gave spiritual teachings. They maintained a mutually admiring, chaste relationship for a couple of years until a rumor that they were engaged to be married soured the relationship for the guru, who had taken vows of celibacy. Returning to the States without a clear path before her, Helen, now a self-possessed twenty-four-year-old, invited Scott to speak at a Unitarian church meeting. Separated from his first wife, Scott asked Helen a number of questions about her travels, then invited her to go for a drive in the country. He proved to be fun-loving, impulsive, and a believer in fairies.
“I thought, What kind of a guy is this?” Helen said. “I was going with four or five fellows at the time, but I was taken with his integrity, his purpose in life. Even those who disagreed with him responded to his warmth.”
Soon enough she fell in love.
Scott was in the stone-walled garden, hoeing the cabbage