This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [57]
“You’re welcome to come,” Papa wrote back. “But you should know farming’s no picnic.”
The warning didn’t deter Kent, who decided to borrow his brother’s car and drive up to Maine during a winter break from school. He got stuck in a snowdrift on the hill just before the Nearings’ house, and the winter caretakers directed him up the path in the woods. At first he thought Keith and Jean’s was his destination.
Wow, this is so cool, he thought to himself, seeing bearded Keith carving up the squash through the window. A secret world of hippies in the woods. It was quite a contrast to his life at Springfield College, where he was a clean-cut student on the gymnastics team.
“This is Eliot’s daughter Melissa,” Keith said. “She can show you the way.”
Dusk was falling as I led him up the trodden snowy path, feeling highly self-important leading this enthusiastic visitor to my home. My feet knew the turns by memory as the darkness of the forest closed around us in silence. When we emerged into the campground, I turned to see Kent right behind me, eyes shining. I explained where the gardens lay under the snow as he followed me down the back road to the house, the windows glowing with lantern light.
Over dinner in wooden bowls, we drew Kent into our world—Mama’s vegetable soup, the warm cabin, Papa’s intellectual enthusiasm for gardening, Heidi toddling around, me showing off my dress-ups. After dinner, Papa took Kent out to the log cabin, where Susan and David happened to be staying for a short visit.
“More cool hippies!” Kent thought when David answered the door with his long beard and Susan welcomed him with her trilling laugh from the loft above. David set Kent up in a sleeping bag on the floor and returned to the loft, where he proceeded to read aloud to Susan from Moby-Dick in a sonorous, slightly nasal voice. As he drifted off to sleep, Kent thought he’d arrived in heaven.
The next day, David helped dig the VW out of the drift, and Kent went back to Springfield, hatching a plan to get out of summer gymnastics camp and return to become a hippie farm apprentice in the woods of Maine.
“It was a psychedelic trip without the drugs,” Kent told his friends at school.
“Yeowh! Yip. Werh!”
That was the sound Papa made when he jumped into the icy ocean below our friends Mary and Dick’s house. Papa’s pale body had steamed through the darkness, down the hill to the water, and disappeared into a hole in the ice before quickly popping back up yipping. He climbed from the dark water and onto the icy shore, grabbing for his towel, then ran up the steps to the deck with wet hair stuck to his head, bright eyes, and red skin.
“Yeowh,” he said, and tickled me just for fun. More people were coming out of the sauna onto the deck, and steaming naked bodies rose all around me. The sauna made us hot enough to stand outside in the winter with no clothes, and everyone was excited, running to dip in the ocean and coming alive from the heat and the cold water. Inside a wall of windows I could see Mama with Heidi and Mary and Dick’s grandchildren—my friend Nigel and his older sister Jennifer—sitting in the room next to the sauna. When we got cold, we went back into the sauna, where the air was warm and sweaty like a mitten and the cedar walls smelled of the trees on the path to our drinking spring. There were two rows of benches, the high one for hot-hot and the low one for medium-hot. Papa was on the hot one, talking in French to a petite woman with long brown hair. He spoke Spanish fluently but French not as well, and she was laughing at his accent, her breasts sweating in the dark heat.
Between Papa and the Frenchwoman, the heat, the thrill of so many people, and the kids to play with, it was hard for me to think. I wanted to watch everyone jump in the water, to stay in the sauna, to