A fregment of the dissolution

THE CABBAGE PATCH
a story from Earthworks Commune in Franklin Vermont

The garden was large, several acres of worked dry dirt, full of stones but fertile and well-situated. There were long frowns of feathery carrot plants, beets, potatoes, corn and beans. The garden occupied the top of a gentle slope above two streams which met behind the garden in a meandering swamp. Above the swamp and across the streams, the woodlands stood green and tall in the late afternoon sun.

At one end of the garden three people sat in the cabbage part of the garden. There were some 50 scraggly cabbages which were recently transplanted. They still had hot caps of newspaper over them. The people had come to the garden to uncover the plants to the evening cool. Halfway through the job, Jim sat down and crossed his legs. His back was hunched, his arms rested on his legs. Sitting there in the dirt on his ass-end, he said “I’m not going to do it anymore until I know why I’m doing it.” His voice trembled with trouble. His face was set. There was a cabbage plant in front of him.

Crow crumpled the newspaper from a cabbage between his hands and stood up slowly. He walked over to Jim and squatted near him, still not saying anything. His hands chose two small stones to hold and feel. His feet were bare, his whole body, face tinged brown with dirt.

I sat there around the cabbage plant, facing Jim & Crow, hugging my knees to my chest. It was getting cool as the sun lowered. I felt a fist of fear form in my abdomen. “What do you mean, Jim?”

“Look at us. We’re dirty, hungry. We haven’t even got clean water. We’re working our asses off on this farm and telling ourselves everything is groovy. Who do we think we’re kidding? We’re nothing, we can’t do anything right. I’m not leaving this spot until I know what I’m doing and why I should do it. Without make-believe. I’m not going to stay here and pretend to not be miserable anymore when I feel terrible.”

“We came here to build a life that didn’t depend on anyone but us, to do things better than GE, the Grand Union, City Water Supply. So we cut out the electricity and spend hours doing the things that electricity did for us. We can’t get it together to grow a good garden for the food we need. Here are these fucking cabbages dying under this paper that’s been on too long because we haven’t gotten it together to take off the paper. And there are 3 of us out here working now. Where’s everyone else?”

I try to give some perspective – “but, Jim, we have to give ourselves time. We’ve only been here six months and we’ve got so much to learn, yet.”

“Fuck that – most of the people here aren’t even interested in learning what we need to survive or in developing the skills to meet those needs. It’s hard work, damned hard.”

I took a breath and continued this endless circular dialogue. “That’s not true Jim. Sure, some tire faster than others and some are so inexperienced that their work almost counts for nothing. And also people define priorities differently. I may work very hard on the house and taking care of the garden, while Peter thinks of the trucks and their horses. But everyone works hard on some things.”

Jim didn’t respond immediately.

Crow’s hands were busy. He was driving a stone from one hand against a stone held in the other hand. The sounds of the stones striking were small explosions in the quiet. Jim looked up, disturbed. “I guess I don’t believe those words about those people anymore. I don’t feel like they care or try. They don’t care about me, or each other, or about what we’re trying to do together. I’ve tried to believe in the dream, but it just isn’t true. Hold up the mirror – the mirror doesn’t lie.”

“And you’ve got the mirror, huh, Jim? You and your friend, Peter Nu?” queried Crow.

“I guess it’s the mirror for me. My feelings are dead bottom. I can’t stay here feeling this way. I have to see my mirror as it shows,” Jim replied. And the air there was full of the bleak grayness of his aura. It was hard for me to keep alive my embers of belief in the farm and our work there, much less share and shed that light, through the darkness of Jim’s mood. But we had to keep trying to lighten the fog with shafts of words. It was important for us to have Jim stay with us. And it was important that we vindicate our own belief in the collective farm by bringing Jim to feel the weight of that belief and be swayed by it.

Only tonight, in the sparse light of evening, it was hard to find the belief to sing “I’ve got the spirit” with any conviction. So Crow was angry & impatient, though also perplexed by the question of how to get through to Jim. Was it possible, really possible, that Jim, “the rock, would leave?”

Everyone had spent the day together this day, not working, trying to play together, some 15 adults and 4 kids. It had been a disastrous day. We couldn’t even walk down the driveway in harmony together. And somehow everything we did together was heavy, loaded with portent and triple meanings. There was almost no lightness of laughter. Then the house was an abomination, the area around the house bare and dusty. We were all dirty but there wasn’t enough water to spare for baths. There had been good moments in the day but there were very brief flashes. To believe in the farm was to believe those brief flashes would become longer in the future, until we were in harmony most of the time except for brief flashes of conflict and distrust. Jim had come down in the conflict and distrust and had stopped there “I’m not getting up from here until I know why I should.”

I don’t remember how we left the cabbage patch that night but we did finally chased by mosquitoes, dark and our evening hunger. Most of us returned other days to weed and tend the crops. The cabbages grew large and we harvested nearly all we had transplanted. Jim didn’t return. He left the farm within a week.

-- End of Barbara’s Narrative –
JIM’S STORY OF CABBAGE PATCH * PART 1

I awoke to see a bright but hazy sun rising over the ridge opposite my tent. The cows were mooing impatiently to be milked and already the flies were buzzing in the warm humid air. I pulled on my levis and a tee shirt and a pair of suede desert boots that once were green but now were shiny and wet earth, grease and cowshit colored. As I walked down to the barn to do the morning chores, I saw the haw wagons covered with black plastic tarps parked in the barnyard. The tractor had broken down bringing the last load of hay in and we hadn’t gotten into the yard until after ten the night before. The yard was a busy parking lot of activity with a number of unknown visitors – including a family in their Winnebago motor home. I had been so exhausted that I had helped cover the hay and walked out to my tent to fall asleep without supper. Now I was ravenously hungry.

I stopped in the green clapboard house to pick up the milk buckets. Last night’s diner and dirty dished were spread over all available counters – and the milk buckets were sticky and sour, having been left unwashed the night before. I rinsed out the buckets and went to the barn. Ever since we had moved to the farm in February, I had loved the barn, and often sought out the solitude and the warm smells of animals when I couldn’t tolerate the communal scene in the main house. I loved milking and I loved working with the horses – even just touching them, caressing them or curry combing their backs and lets.

Charlie and I had done the morning chores every day while we were working at the University of Vermont, getting up before six to complete the tasks, then driving the 50 odd miles into Burlington to assume our roles as radical associate professors. The morning work and rides to and from town built a strong bond between us, though we still had our difference. But the chores before going to the University only contributed to the growing schizophrenia that we felt. It was so difficult to live part of the week on the commune and part of the week at the University. The contrasts between the two lives were difficult to resolve. Now at least it was summer and we didn’t have to go back and forth during the week, but we did have to face the fact that the fall semester would be beginning again in 5 to 6 weeks.

I fed the horses, and the cows, emptied the bucket of garbage that I had brought from the kitchen into the trough in the pig pen. There was practically no water in the cistern. We had been bringing our water from town. I divided what water was there among the animals as best I could. We had recently gotten rid or one cow who had mastitis frequently, so were down to reliable Sophie, a red jersey with a gentle disposition, so milking wasn’t much of a chore. I was sitting on the milking stool, with my head leaning on her velvety side, the milk hissing in the bucket when Charlie walked into the barn and started to shove out the barn. Then I led Sophie out the barn door to the pasture. Then I went back in the barn and watched Charlie finish clearing the gutter by the cow’s side.

“It sure was a drag to be out so late with the hay, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “But I’m glad we went over and helped with our neighbor Sartwell’s hay last week. It really was far out when they cam over with their tractor and pulled us to the house. I don’t know what we would have done otherwise.”

“Maybe when you get done, we can go to the house and get some help unloading the wagon”, I said. “Was anybody up when you got up?”

“No,” said Charlie, “but it think the kids were starting to get up that that will get others up before long.”

“Where did you sleep last night, brother?” I asked.

“Oh, I found that the bed in the room next to the woodshed was empty, but I had to hang around until after midnight until everybody made up their minds who they were going to sleep with. Sometimes it’s real hard to believe all the negotiations that go on around here.”

“Do you remember, Char, that we used to be afraid we were going to be in a privileged position because we were working at the “U” and bringing in the bread?”

“Yeah, that certainly didn’t turn out to be anything we had to worry about.”
I remember that we both realized it on the night we ended up sleeping on the living room floor because the guests were all bedded down in our beds.

I guess it’s probably counter-revolutionary,” I said, “but sometimes this collectivity bit sucks!”

“Let’s get out of here. It’s getting too ironic for me,” said Charlie, laughing.

At the house we found the kids crawling all over the kitchen crying for food and Barbara and Mary Pat trying to make some breakfast, clean up last night’s litter and feed the kids. I took over the dishes and washed all but the worst pots which were left soaking. Charlie, meanwhile, helped feed the kids oatmeal and yoghurt with bananas, which mostly ended upon their faces and hands and the floor, or at least, so it seemed.

We all ate then, and drank the first three of our usual ten cups of strong coffee mixed with fresh milk and maple syrup. We all went out on the small front porch and sat, drinking our coffee and smoking cigarettes rolled from a can of Bugler tobacco and Zigzag papers.

A few more people got up and wandered through the house. Charlie, Barbara, Mary Pat and I took the _ ton pickup and moved the hay wagon down to the barn. I threw the bales up into the hay mow where the others caught and stacked them inside. It felt good to work together. I liked unloading the bales, slipping into a relaxed, rhythmic style of work that was efficient and felt good. I had never been as in touch with my body, or felt as good about my body as I was that summer. We were all tanned and hard-muscled from the work at the farm, tangle-haired and streaked with dust from the earth work.

The unloading finished, we all returned to the front porch where we were to have a morning work meeting. People were sitting around already. Crow had been talking to the people who had driven in the night before in their Winnebago. He brought the driver over to the meeting – a man with blond thinning hair. He had been an executive in some business and he and his family had sold their home in Connecticut and pulled up stakes.

“I guess we’ll be leaving,” he said, looking around nervously. We talked it over, the wife and me, and we’ll just keep looking for a place we can be comfortable.” He got back in the Winnebago and bounced down the driveway. We read “Bridge over troubled waters” pained on the tail of the motor home as it vanished down the road.

“What did you say to him, Crow?” asked Barbara.

“Oh, I just told him what we were about here, about collectivity and smashing monogamy and the revolution and the necessity for armed self-defense, you know, the usual rap” he said.

“I think we should get this meeting started,” said Charlie. “It’s already quarter to eleven and we haven’t’ done anything yet today.”

The meeting began in a very desultory manned – it had the characteristics of most of the work meetings with most everybody either feeling strongly conflicting priorities about what work had to be done – or feeling at a loss to even enter into the discussion. The haying was about _ done, and the garden badly needed care. The diapers were an ever-present problem since we had little water and no electricity. They were washed by hand in the milk house. The summer kitchen was unfinished, and there were vegetables to be preserved. And what of housing for the next winter? Could all of us continue to live in the crowded green clapboard house? And what of way of supporting ourselves?

The meeting droned on. I became increasingly depressed at the prospect, and sat hunched over and not speaking. People laid out their plans to go off in 10 different directions at once, another display of the conflicting of egos, sometimes brilliantly obvious, other times slow and plodding and determined. I sat on the porch, filled with despair, tears making streaks in the dirt on my cheeks.

Soon people gathered around me – they picked me up and carried me to the grassy area by the side of the house. People hugged me, and kissed me and caressed me from all sides, tossing me in the air and rolling me between each other. My tears turned to laughter and then peals of laughter as I felt the warmth of love and caring wash over me, carrying away the despair of the morning.

Peter Nu danced up to me – “Open your mouth and close your eyes” he said, and placed a small, orange table of “sunshine” acid on my tongue. He quickly went around the group and offered the acid to everyone. “This is it,” said Peter Nu said, “this is the time it’s really going to happen.”

“Today”, said Crow, “we’ve got to do one thing. We’ll all stay together, no matter how hard it seems. We’ve never done it before. We’ve really got to do it today.”

Fred, thirteen, re-haired and freckled, walked over to me. He was holding Dylan in his arms. “I’ve just taken a little acid”, he said. “Let’s go down by the barn.”

We went to the barn and lay in the hay down by the animals. Dylan played quietly in the hay. Time passed. It was warm and dark and quiet in the barn. Then there was a noise and the door opened. We got up up to see what was happening. Peter McFarland walked in with two local men I had never seen before. Behind them there was a spotted cow.

“He, come take a look,” said Peter. “I’ve just bought a new cow to replace Bella.”

We had been undecided about the purchase of another cow, but Peter had taken it on himself to get the replacement. I walked over to see this new purchase. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The cow had bow legs, she was covered with fresh green cowshit. Her horns were dark and crumpled. This was the cow that Beanstalk Jack had traded for the 3 beans. I kind of wondered if maybe we could trade it back for 3 beans. The local men who sold us the cow seemed to be laughing to themselves.

Fred, Dylan and I walked our way out the end of the barn and down to the beaver brook. There we sat together quietly by the creek which flowed out of the swamp, reduced to the sluggish trickle in the late summer heat. The air was warm and thick, insects of all sizes and descriptions buzzed about us. The stagnant puddles shimmered in rainbow colors as the oily firm diffracted the light. We felt warm and close to each other as we dug our bard toes in the black sticky mud. Dylan was almost 2 _ , Fred was 13 and I was 29, and yet we felt a comradeship and equality with each other that made us like brothers.

“You know” said Fred, “I really love you and Dylan, and I feel really happy and comfortable here right now with you, but I think about all the rest of the people in our family and all the hassles and I guess I think they are probably having a hard time staying together.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Fred” I said. “do you think we should go back up there and help them out?”

“Yeah, I guess so” he said. “I mean, if we’re going to do what Crow said, stay together today, we should go back there and help out.”

The three of us joined hands and walked slowly off the field away from the swamp. The garden on our left was lush but the vegetables were having a hard time with the weeks. We had given up on some of the crops which like New Zealand spinach were less tasty and redundant because of other wild or cultivated plants which filled their niches. We passed the potato patch and could almost hear the potato beetles chewing away on the plants. Just days before we stood among the rows of potato plants and squashed the bugs between our fingers, or put them in the cups filled with kerosene. But there always seems there were more bugs tan we could squash, and unless we could get everyone together to do the job, it was practically impossible to stay ahead of the Bugs exponentially expanding population,

When we got back to the house, no one was around. We walked through the dooryard and saw people gathered around Barbara’s green tent in the maple bush. The three of us walked hand in hand through the sugar bush to the tent. It was shady and green and cool under the trees. As we approached the tent, I could see everyone gathered around outside the test, peering into it. Through the side window, I could make out Barbara, Crow, Peter and Shannon McFarland inside. The scene looked like an old print of the Nativity with expectant and wondering shepherds and townspeople craning their necks to get a look at this strange new boy-child. That image shattered as Shannon angrily tore open the door o the tent and walked off toward the main house.

“What’s happening” I asked Peter Hutcher.

“Crow and Barbara were trying to get Peter and Shannon to take acid, but they were holding out as usual” said Peter.

“Maybe I can talk to Shannon”, I said back over my shoulder as a vaulted over the stone fence and sprinted across the field. Breathless, I caught up to Shannon, who was standing with Peter Mac in front of the tool shed.

“Wait, Shanny, let’s talk”, I said, as I touched her shoulder.

“What to you want!” she snarled, as she turned around, her face a mask of anger dripping venomously. I felt as if I had met the Medusa and been turned to stone. My mind reeled and my body became rigid. The curls in Shannon’s brown hair writhed like snakes. I realized at that instant that all the talk about big people and little people, strong people and weak people, had been abstract for me before. I suddenly understood that everyone on this farm was incredibly powerful, and that anyone that could take control of the whole group by receiving the focus of all individual energies, would produce wonders. I looked around as people gathered in front of the tool shed and felt that we were all manifestations of cosmic energies, avatars of the Hindu pantheon walking on the earth, playing out eternal love affairs and battles on this obscure northern Vermont farm.


*** End of Part 1 of Jim’s story ***
CABBAGE PATCH
a story from the Earthworks Commune in Franklin, Vermont

Jim’s story Part 2

The phone call from our neighbors on the hill behind the Commune broke the building tension. Early in the morning, we had taken LSD together and resolved that we would all try to stay together. The chemical brought into focus the conflicts which were alternately tearing us apart and immobilizing us. Grace Spooner asked for our help to bring in the hay. Storm clouds were threatening. It was a welcome relief to leave the farm, which looked run-down and tawdry in the harsh clarity of the drug induced reality. Some of us went by truck – a roundabout way which seemed to take hours. Others walked up the trail past the swamp and up the hill through the woods to the Spooner’s adjoining fields.

I sat in the back of the truck racing down dirt roads and looked at Louly and Barbara, dark hair streaming, tanned, strong and beautiful, two sisters to the Vietnamese people. I felt like a soldier, a warrior with my sisters and brothers. Gone for the time was the growing anger I felt, the isolation, the alienation, the resistance to the pressure of the collective; resistance to keep from plummeting faster and faster into the abyss of fantasy.

For awhile in the truck, I felt exhilarated. I cried with the love I felt for the people I was with, and the feelings I had felt only minutes before faded. Just before the phone call, I had left the group. I sat in the field with Marcel, looking at the horses. I held Dylan in my arms, his toe cut and bleeding, unable to wash the cut because the spring was almost dry and we had run out of water. Peter Nu and Kathy followed us, and Marcel snapped angrily at Peter to leave him alone.

We looked up and a long string of people, hand in hand, marched across the fields, white and black and brown and pink bodies, wild-haired and wild-eyed, and formed a circle around us.
“Come and join us” they said.

“No!” I said, as strange feelings of opposition bristled in me. “I’m happy right where I am. Why should I move?”

Mixed feelings of anger and disappointment crackled through the air. People dropped their hands and stood looking at each other, moving and spreading out from each other live the waves generated by dropping a stone in a puddle. Shannon, who was in the house, called, “It’s Grace Spooner on the phone. They wondered if we would help them get in the hay.”

The truck bumped up the driveway to the Spooner’s farmhouse. The contrast with our farm was totally astounding. The place looked like a miniature Dutch farm, where everything had a toy-like quality. We were the tame barbarians, the brutes, the beasts from the woods. Charlie and Crow and I stacked the hay on the wagon pulled by a tiny tractor. We threw the bales of the wagon sometimes, they seemed light and insubstantial. We were buffoons. Ken Spooner, eyes twinkling, drove the tractor. The women and children sat on a large blanket with Grace and had a picnic watching us bring in the hay.
Everything seems light and frothy and dreamlike – it was like the land of Oz. The clouds darkened as we got the hay into the barn, and filled with raspberry Kool-Aid and Oreo Crème cookies we tumbled back into our truck and headed back.

The ride back to the farm was filled with apprehension and doubt. The contrast between the beauty, the order, the lightness of the Spooner’s farm with out scene of rusty vehicles and weed-filled garden and a littered house would be harder than ever to face. We all huddled together in the back of the truck as we bumped up the driveway. The truck rolled to a stop and we all looked painfully around us and turned to look at each other in dismay.

“Let’s take the hats off the cabbages” said Barbara. “At least maybe we can end the day by working together.” Mary Pat, Crow, Barbara, Louly, Charlie and I walked out to the cabbage patch through the garden. It was hard to separate the garden from the weeds which grew at a phenomenal rate. Some places we had weeded in a desultory manner and in other parts of the garden all attempts to keep down the weeds have been abandoned.

The sky was completely overcast and it began to rain. Just a gentle spattering of drops in the dust of the cabbage patch. The air was close and oppressive; the sun went down without a comment. Mosquitoes buzzed in swarms. I sat down in the dirt and began to uncover the cabbage plants which had been transferred from the cold frame. We had planted a hundred cabbage plants and made Yankee Doodle soldiers caps out of newspapers.

The Acid was being metabolized from my heard and now, many hours after peaking, I was feeling tired and depressed. I took the cap off one cabbage. The plant lay shriveled into the dirt. I removed another and saw the same thing. After taking off seven caps and finding seven dead plants, I stopped taking caps off the cabbages. All around we were finding the same results. People moved heavily and without joy through their task.

“This has sure been a shitty day,” said Louly.

“Well, we’re not exactly the most together group I’ve seen!” said Barbara.

“Listen” said Crow, gesturing with his arms. “I’m not going to get bummed out. We’ll just get organized.”

“This garden sure is a mess” Mary Pat spoke up. “We’ve got the rest of the hay to get in. And the rake is broken again. Peter didn’t tighten the bolts on the gear box and it fell out.”

“We’ve just got to do a wash. There’s dirty diapers piled up in the milk house higher than my head. And we’ve got to get the kid’s care day more together”, piped up Barbara.

“It’s so hard to do a wash when there isn’t any water,” said Louly. “I can’t believe how thirsty I have been lately.”

“Well, I still think that is basically the house that is our problem” said Crow. “We’ve just go it too easy. We don’t really feel the elements. We’re protected and removed and it keeps us apart. We don’t really have to struggle.”

I sat there and listened with a feeling of stiffness crawling up my back. Thoughts and images flashed through my head a million times a second. I could feel the pressure building in my head like a wave about to crash on a beach.

People were getting up preparing to walk back to the house and the dinner that Peter, Marcel and Shannon were preparing.

“No,” I cried out to them the feeling of resistance growing. “No! It can’t just keep on like this. We can’t just keep on keeping on, we’re really fucked up here and we just keep being too busy to talk about it because there is so much work to do.”

I looked around and all I could see was this trail of uncompleted projects. “There isn’t one thing that we’ve started since we came here that we’ve actually finished.”

Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me nervously.

“Come on, Jimmy, there’s no sense being negative about this. I am really not into being bummed out” Crow said.

“We just keep perpetuating the same trips” I said. “we can’t stop what we’re doing to figure out what we’re doing because we’re too busy – and yet look at this place! It’s got twice as much junked cars and buses and garbage lying all over as when we moved in.

“I think that you’re just being negative, and that’s not going to get us anywhere” said Barbara, bristling.

“Look, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got it figured out” I said. “Wave just got to have a moratorium, just stop everything that we’re doing here and figure it all out step by step. There isn’t anything that has to be done except to feed the animals who give us food and care for the kids who cannot take care of themselves. Nothing else has to be done. The hay can lie in the field and the garden can all rot. We just don’t have to harvest. We need to figure out what we’re doing here and why things are so far from our visions.”

Crow picked up two smooth round rocks and began clacking them together impatiently. “Well, I’ve got the ‘spirit’” said Crow. “We’ve just got to stop all this negative talk. We can’t get bummed out and brought down... I’ve got the energy to pull us together.”

He kept a regular cadence with the rocks and began to pace around, his eyes flashing.

“I just don’t see any reason to keep doing what we’ve been doing” I said, feeling the strength of inertia. “I’m not leaving the cabbage patch until we come up with a better way to deal with what we’ve been doing. This life we’ve been living is a fucking illusion”. I looked straight ahead of me and felt my body stiffen. I looked at people around me as if I were looking through the wrong end of the telescope. They got more distant and more flat as I felt the walls of isolation growing within me.

Louly leaned toward me, looking in my eyes, trying to break through the barriers. I looked at her and felt the nothingness blossom, the no-feeling, negation, emptiness. My face was a stone mask. The mosquitoes bit my back and arms relentlessly, and muscle in my legs and back and neck ached dully.

Crow clashed the stones together louder and louder, and paced like a caged animal. “You can’t do this!” he said. “This is definitely bringing us all down and not going to get us anywhere. I’ve got the spirit and we can all get it.” I could feel his growing impatience and sat defiantly. I felt like the unmovable aspect meeting Crow’s irresistible force.

Crow had pushed us all, painting pictures of vision ever-changing. We were Chinese peasants, we were gypsies, and we were a guerilla band. We would turn off the electricity and tear down the walls. I had felt like Crow had been the dreamer and I had been the implementer. I felt now only resistance. I remembered Mephisto in Faust saying – “I am the spirit who denies” and dug what power there was in negation, in saying “NO!” in resisting.

“Look” Barbara said, “It’s not being in the cabbage patch itself that is important, its’ dealing with this problem. I’m hungry and the mosquitoes are biting me and I think we should all meet at our tent one hour from now.”

The biting of the mosquitoes had almost driven me to distraction. I was trying to ignore them but it was difficult. I was afraid I would lose the group, but I couldn’t stand the mosquitoes any longer. “Okay” I said, and stood up. Charlie came over and put his head on my shoulder. We walked toward the fire, the huge pile of scorched meat that Peter and Marcel had cooked. The group began to scatter through the garden.

“We don’t even know how to walk together”, cried Mary Pat, angrily.