Life - Part Two
Chapter 3: Utopia
One utopia failed, so as to give another one birth.
Robert Kingsley's version ended when he was exiled from the experiment that been born, a bad child, from his own head. Amy went with him, of course.
It happened like this:
There was a court battle over his ownership of the land. He had refused to give over title of it to the collective, fearing that they would take it in directions not in keeping with the truths he had gathered in a lifetime of experience with such matters.
"You kids" - he let that one slip - "don't know anything. Yet you think you know everything. What if people come in here talking all nicely about their cooperative ideals, buy in and then decide to sell out at a huge profit? So the only people able to buy in, then, are the executives from Calgary. Do want them as neighbors? Summer visitors from the big city corporations?"
No, was the obvious response. But Harold had a more reasoned objection to Robert's case: "We could provide for that eventuality in our by-laws. We could require that a house be sold for no more than the original cost of materials."
What about inflation? What about labor costs? What about the market prices in the valley? These questions arose like a flock of startled ducks. "Hey, hey," Harold cooled them down with his hands as well. "These are details. The point is, we could do this under collective ownership. It's a separate issue."
"Okay," Robert conceded. "I'll tell you what's really worrying me. What if all of you - the whole 'collective,' as you put it, decided one day, sitting around smoking your joints - "
Christie piped up: "That's unfair - I object to this kind of inuendo."
"Objection sustained," Robert said with a lordly smile. But listen. What if, in all seriousness, the bunch of you decided to sell out the whole works - to some developer, say. Or - no, wait, let me finish - say it was to some friendly farmer, who after a couple of years of discovering he - all right, or she - couldn't scratch a decent profit out of it, decided to sell at a good price to a developer - or, okay, to take another scenario, suppose the bank ended up with it, because someone's mortgage folded. Who would they sell to? The goddamned highest bidder, right? Okay, so that's what I'm looking at."
"What about you," Sybil said quietly, right under Robert's nose.
"Huh?" Robert was taken aback. "What do you mean?"
"What if you decided one day, after a few nips of brandy, say, that you were tired of the whole mess and we 'kids' could all go to hell. You could sell out just like that and then where would we be?"
"That's preposterous," Robert shot back. "There's no comparison. You're throwing together apples and oranges. In the first place, I've spent my entire adult life in the pursuit of communitarian ideals and practices. It's hardly conceivable that I'd have a change of heart at this late date. On the other hand, you are inexperienced in these matters. You have arrived here starry-eyed, if with good intentions. You have no concept of what it takes to make a venture of this kind work over the long term. For me to - "
"I move that we take our case to court," Harold said.
Robert kept speaking, louder.
"Seconded," Sybil said.
"All in favor - "
"Just a minute! I'm not finished! Let me f - "
"Against?"
"This is outrageous. You can't steamroller this thing; we work by consensus, do we not?"
"'Whenever possible,' Harold quoted from the working rules of procedure which Robert had drafted in his own hand. "The motion is carried. I'll go see the lawyer in town tomorrow. Meeting adjourned."
"I'm the chairman!" Robert hollered.
Amy stood at his side, tring to calm him with an arm around his waist. "'Chairperson, dear,'" she said. "Or just 'chair.' You always forget your own rules when you get excited."
It was a clear case in court. The judge chastised Robert for his hypocrisy and patronising attitude. Robert bristled under the 'artificial' authority of this figure in his black robes but took it all with the required dignity necessary to keep him from contempt charges. I felt he was touched with some actual personal humility, in the process. He and Amy shuffled away when it was over, Amy stoic as always, Robert a broken man.
After that the victors had a wild party, or at least tried to. But the legal effort was taxing, in terms of energy, time, and money, and they were all more subdued than they wanted to be. Maybe, too, it was a little apprehension for the future in their own hands, that dampened the enthusiasm, diluted the strength of the alcohol and dope with which they attempted to put the past behind them.
And it all kind of unravelled from there on.
At first spirits were high - as they were for Charlie's father and his buddies, perhaps, as they mustered for their bombing runs over Germany. They would change the world, beginning in their own backyards. They would live clean, pure lives, setting examples for the masses who hadn't yet seen the light. They would live simply, aspiring toward self-sufficiency. They would open their doors to all comers, while reserving some final right of say for new residents. But they didn't really expect much turnover from then on; new people would be visitors only. The Coop would house them in a new dormitory, put them to work in vast and fertile common gardens. Now meetings would flourish away from Robert's tired old procedures; the residents would institute a more anarchistic way of operating, making more room for the spontaneous expression of wisdom, of heart-speech. Their personal lives would similarly open from conditioned rigidities; they would freely love and love would in turn free them. And freed in these ways from past frustrations, they'd be able to use newly released energy to finish some backlogged work: erecting a barn by the common garden, laying waterline to all the house sites, building a sauna and fish pond.
Charlie walked through the darkening woods to the homesite at the other end of the land, in the lower corner by the road. His destination was an old cabin there, perhaps left by one of the original prospectors in the area; a trapper; or a simply vagrant passing this way for a while before departing back to the whirl of the outside world. At any rate it was still habitable; Charlie knew this from his walks through the land to get acquainted with all its possibilities.
And now he knew that it had a new inhabitant, a fresh young woman from the cities, who came here with her little dog looking for "something new." Charlie was smitten with her right away. Jan knew it, of course. But they had a revised agreement to go on: to let each other have relationships beside their own, as long as they respected the primacy of their commitment to each other. The marriage was undertaken in that same spirit. They recognized, from reading and workshops they'd taken together, that this was the way to keep a contemporary marriage alive, when so many were foundering. The key was honesty. Of course there were some rocky times to get through, like the little adventure with Beth and Kabbir. But that was to be expected: they'd been raised in a monogamous society.
When Jan asked, as she had to even after that first meeting, Charlie admitted that yes, he found Lila extremely attractive.
The fact was, from that first meeting he was entranced, enchanted, and very soon obsessed. When Lila came to work on the waterline with her little black and white dog wagging its tail behind her, Charlie made sure he got to work his shovel just beside her, or opposite, if only to hear the sound of her voice, to feel the rhythm of her breathing and study the grace of her movements. She wore moccasins of thin, soft leather, decorated with fine beadwork. Her silky black hair was tied back for the work. She wore a loose, plain cotton blouse and light shorts. Her legs were lithe and charming. Her laughter was easy; yet also nervous. Was she also feeling something for him, and excited in his presence?
This evening Charlie meant to find out.
He left Jan at home reading a book, smirking at him as he combed his hair before leaving, adjusting the tuck of his shirt for neatness.
"Don't wait up for me," Charlie told Jan.
"Don't worry. I might even find something else to do, myself." She flashed an enigmatic, teasing smile at him.
So what? That was her business. Charlie's heart was racing. He went out the door of Ken's house, where they were staying while he was away.
The trees passed, neither menacing nor friendly, but standing above him with mocking aloofness, almost laughing. Charlie strode on, nearly running, yet careful not to take the wrong turn in the trail, or to trip over a root and take an embarassing fall. Finally he saw a glimmer of light ahead through the branches. A dog barked.
He came to the door, rapped on it gently.
"Come in," a voice said.
Lila was in, entertaining another visitor, Christie. They were drinking tea. Both smiled at Charlie. "Come in, come in," Lila repeated. "We won't bite. We were just talking about you."
"Oh really?"
"Have a seat." She motioned to a tattered armchair near the couch they occupied. "Do you want some tea?"
"Sure." Lila started to get up. "No, sit down, I can get a cup." Charlie reached for one dangling from a hook under a nearby shelf and poured a steaming red liquid from the pot.
"So, what's this? What have I done? Or is it something I'm supposed to do?"
The two women giggled girlishly. "Actually," Christie told me, "we were talking about people's attitudes toward marriage. I heard Jan and you had kind of an arrangement . . ." she waited for Charlie to elaborate.
"My, word does get around. Yeah, we do have kind of an understanding. Of free association, with other people. We believe it's healthier for a relationship if it's not, you know, too enclosed, too exclusive."
"Yeah," Christie said, "tell me about it. The guy I was married to didn't want me to go out of the house - not even to go shopping - without him."
Charlie looked admiringly at Christie's face, her body which wasn't diminished at all by the loose coveralls she wore, and he thought he could understand the husband's concern.
"So you got out," he said. "Right. That's what happens. Anyhow, it's worked out okay so far for us, trying to be a little more open."
There was a silence; the women looked at each other, and then at their tea.
"Not that we've necessarily acted on anything yet. We haven't even been married that long. But it was a kind of understanding - you might almost say a condition - of our getting married in the first place." Charlie was thinking of Jan's holding out for her freedom, room for her fantasies to stay alive. Like him, she hadn't actually (as far as Charlie knew) had any other lovers since they'd been together, some two and a half years. The couple in the Mississippi campground were the unfortunate exception.
The two women looked at one another, and back at Charlie. He had the distinct impression that they were plotting something involving him. He found Christie appealing as well as Lila, but without that special charge of excitement he'd felt for the new arrival. Charlie couldn't very well make a move here and now to court Lila; he'd have to wait and let one of them make the first move.
Christie finished her tea and stood up, stretching languidly. Charlie almost imagined her going off to lie down in the little raised loft on the other side of the cabin; and something in her manner caused him to imagine her wanting to share that bed with Lila, not with him.
"I'd better be going," she said. "I've had enough tea and I'll be up peeing all night as it is."
"Lila held out a hand to her. Christie took it affectionately and then let it drop. "I'll see you tomorrow - both of you, I guess, on the waterline, eh?"
Charlie nodded, smiling at her. He didn't get up, though he'd long ago been instructed to stand when a woman stood. He was staying.
There was a full and not entirely uncomfortable silence settling upon the room when Christie left. Lila motioned to the spot vacated on the couch beside her. "Care to move from that horrible old chair?" she inquired innocently.
"Oh - well, sure, thanks." Charlie moved next to her, his body at first rigid, then meltingly hot. Lila shifted to face him, her shorts riding high up the inside of her thighs as she crossed her legs.
"So - you just came by for a visit? Out for a walk?"
"I guess so. I've been wanting to - get to know a little more about you. Working beside you, around all those people; I don't know, it just isn't quite enough. I wanted to know more of you than the waterline small talk."
"Oh, like what?" Her smile inflamed him even further.
"I don't know. Like what you two were talking about. Relationships, real things. How do you feel about it?"
"About sleeping around? Well, I've done my share of it, I guess." She looked down a little shyly. "I guess it's obvious I haven't wanted to be tied down, at least not yet."
"You're young. That sounds like a smart attitude."
"I don't know about smart. It's just what's happened, or not happened. Just how things have gone, or maybe how I am."
Funny, Charlie wanted to talk her into the possibility of changing - wanting to be with him. Yet here he was contradicting fidelity in that very wish. It all depended on whom was involved. With Jan, it somehow seemed right to be open to other affairs. With Lila, he could imagine hibernating from the rest of the world forever, right in this little cabin . . .
She interrupted his revery:
"So you say you haven't, um, taken advantage or your arrangement with Jan. It's just, then, theoretical, or what?"
Was she challenging me? She folded her hands provocatively behind her head, waiting for my response.
"No," I finally said, "it's not just theoretical. I guess I'd put it like you did: it just hasn't happened yet." I figured the double-switch business with the Arab and his girlfriend didn't count.
"Only I was talking about the opposite, a committed relationship."
"True. Anyway, the same answer seems to apply. Maybe it's 'how I am.' Maybe having the option is all that's needed."
Why was he saying this? It wasn't what Charlie wanted. Lila frowned. Here they were talking like old friends, having just barely met. The dog came up to her, licked her hand. She got up and put some dog food in its dish, and took up her seat again as before: the same pose, waiting for his move.
It was too early to leave yet; but the mood had changed. What could he do to get it back?
"I appreciate your openness," Lila said to him.
"I appreciate yours, too," Charlie told her. He was enough emboldened to inch closer to her on the couch.
She was able now to reach out and touch his knee. "I think you're a very sensitive person," she told him.
Now Charlie blushed, and was speechless.
"Come here." She reached out to him, and Charlie settled into her arms, leaning all of himself to her tender, yielding newness. The dog paused in its slurping to look over at them, and seemed for a happy instant to smile, before returning to its meal.
Charlie managed to make it back by starlight in the middle of the night. Jan was not there. He didn't care. If the marriage itself broke up over this, he didn't care. He'd had my taste of heaven. And who knew what might follow?
At ten o'clock the next morning Charlie awoke to find the house still empty. He prepared breakfast for himself, operating as in some cloud, some dreaming state of suspension. It was a workday, however, and he was motivated by the chance to see Lila again, in case she made it. To hell with Jan, he thought. I don't care where she's been.
Charlie didn't even ask her, when he saw her there working beside Christie. She looked different, somehow. Like a person who didn't even know him, or didn't want to. She spoke with Christie and no one else for the rest of the morning. Lila was not there and Charlie was left to his own thoughts, uninterested in the usual small talk which, however, was strangely sparse this morning.
At lunch break he sat next to Jan, who'd already sat down on the grass next to Christie. "Can I bum a sandwich from you?" he said. "I forgot to make lunch." She tore hers in half to hand him some, her face blank. "Thanks."
There was a strained silence all around. Some of the others finally began to talk, turning away from the trio, and Charlie felt comfortable enough to ask Jan in a low voice, "You weren't home when I came in last night."
"Christie invited me over there, and I ended up staying," Jan told him, her words muffled by sandwich.
"Hmmh." Now Charlie didn't know what to think. Christie glanced at him quickly, with a trace of a smile, and just as quickly looked away, at the view over the lake.
"Did you have a good visit with Lila?" Jan asked. He saw hurt in her eyes.
"Yes. Quite good, in fact." Charlie took a deep breath, hardly able to eat. Did anything more need to be said about it? "What about you? You guys have a good talk?"
"Sort of."
"Hmmh. What about, may I ask?"
She glared at him. "Do you need to know everything I do, everything I talk about with anyone else? Do I ask you the details of your little tete-a-tete with that - girl?"
"Okay - " So it's like that, Charlie thought. But this won't be the end of it.
That afternoon Christie went away leaving Jan to Charlie. Lila never showed. Jan and Charlie walked home together, not talking. Neither bothered to make supper - but just sank into chairs in Ken's living room staring at the walls.
"You want to say anything more about your time with Christie?" By this time Charlie's suspicions had become concrete, even though he scarecely believed his own paranoid conclusions.
"All right," Jan at length answered in a lifeless voice. "We slept together."
Charlie felt some of the life draining, too, out of his own body, leaving him cold and alien in this room with this person he had so suddenly ceased knowing. Still, there was something to hold onto: "You slept together. That's - charming. Like schoolgirls, so to speak."
"No." Her delivery was brutal and decisive now. "We made love. Love as I've never experienced before. Not with you or anyone."
A deep, despairing sigh did nothing to help him now.
"I think - I think it became clear to me that I'm a lesbian."
"You think." Charlie looked at her critically now. She shrank back into her chair, her eyes taking refuge on the floor. "You think it's clear to you. Well, it would help me to know if it's clear to you or not. Because if it is - "
Could he say it?
After Lila, he could say it: "There's really no more point - "
"I knew you'd say that," she hissed at him.
"What do you expect me to say!"
"I thought we had agreed - "
"Agreed, bullshit! For you to become a fucking lesbian? Where does that leave me?"
"Free to sleep with Lila, as you did, anyway."
"Fine. But what about us?"
"I would have thought - I don't know; this is pretty new. But if you're married to someone, you make a commitment to love them no matter what, right?"
"Oh, God. Okay, so I still love you. But what's the point, if you'd rather sleep with lesbians?"
"Christie's not a lesbian."
"She's not? What was she doing, then, play-acting?"
"She's bisexual. She told me she found you quite attractive, in fact."
That caught him off guard. Charlie found himself wondering suddenly, could he fuck a woman who'd 'fucked' his wife? Do women indeed 'fuck' one another, or what? What was going on, here? Anything seemed possible. Everything seemed impossible.
"I can get this place working in two weeks' time," Jason told Charlie the first day they met. Charlie's first thought was, he must be American. He had long, golden locks that fell backward from his head, a large, wrinkled forehead that moved into bald territory. A long, Fumanchu mustache, braided on each side, a little pointed goatee underneath. He wore baggy, tattered jeans, sandals with rubber-tire soles, a woven cord for a belt, no shirt.
"How are you gonna do that? - And you mean, after you're a member, right?"
"Naw, look, I've already read your rules. It's a three-month waiting period, then you're in, right?"
"Not always. Depends on whether it works out, if everyone agrees - "
"Okay, so no problem. Why waste time? Might as well get something done in the meantime. This waterline project you guys have been diddling around with for four years - I'd have it finished in two weeks."
"By yourself, you mean, or putting all the rest of us to work?"
He looked at me suspiciously. "Whatever. Look, what do you do for a living, anyhow?"
It was an uncomfortable question for me. "I, ah, a bit of everything, I guess. I've still got some savings from being a teacher. I'm learning lots, anyway, about living on the land. . . ."
"Living on the land, sheeit. You guys are city folks on a picnic. All you people here, y'ever catch a squirrel with a snare, break its neck with your bare hands, eat it raw?"
"Ah, me? No, not that I can recall."
He gave Charlie that narrow-eyed look again. Charlie thought he heard Jason mutter "wise guy" under his breath. Jason's sandal struck out at a rock and sent it skittering across Charlie's path. "Y'ever sleep out under the stars at twenty below? Make fire with a stick or flint and steel? Tan a deerhide with its brains and your piss?"
"No," Charlie said. The implication was that Jason had done all these things; Charlie didn't bother to make sure. What did it matter? "By the way, what kind of work do you do?"
"Me?" Jason seemed offended, his voice shrill.
Charlie let the question stand.
"Whatever it takes, man. Whatever it takes." And Jason glared through Charlie's eyes. Charlie couldn't help but feel some unique kind of respect for him. He wondered if maybe Jason would be an asset to the group, offering some strength none of the rest of them had. But would it be worth it?
"You have a family, partner, anybody . . .?"
"Naw, man, no time for that. Gotta keep it down to the basics, know what I mean? There's tough times comin, let me tell ya, and the women and children are gonna go first. Well, I'm ready now. The rest of you'll find out, I guess, in your own sweet time."
Incredibly, Jason seemed to strike a responsive chord in the others. Jan didn't relate to him at all, hardly spoke to him. The others found that Jason was experienced in some sort of group therapy or counseling, an animalistic sort of huffing and grunting and jumping around and slapping each other on the back and shoulders and arms and chest, following by long sessions of gutteral moaning and high-pitched keening. Full moons were the occasion of full-blown rituals around the campfire, attended by a few of the wilder and curious youths from Galena and presided over by Jason wearing body paint, feathers, quills, and bits of leather, and dancing vigorously with a painted gourd rattle. Charlie thought back to last summer, when he and Jan had camped at this very spot alone, with a little fire to ward off mosquitoes, and singing Bruce Cockburn songs with Jan strumming lightly on her guitar. Just one year ago.
Charlie thought of this, standing watching with Jan beside him, and he knew that even though neither of them were participating in this strange rite unfolding before them, they could also never go back to those nights of innocence. Some of the women in the circle began spontaneously to strip off their clothes. The men, taking notice even in their dancing frenzy, did likewise. Jan bit her lip and scratched her arms. To Charlie it looked kind of like fun all of a sudden. He felt like a stick in the mud standing next to Jan like that. He pulled off his shirt and pants and jumped into the whirling frenzy, howling. Next time he looked, Jan was gone.
In the end there was too much of this coming and going. People starting and ending trial periods all the time. People joining one week, quitting the next. Twenty residents one year, two the next (Charlie was one of the two). Some left and came back again. So when the homesite-membership arrived at the magic number of twelve again, a meeting called around that time passed a resolution freezing the total homesite allowance at that level. All the various huts and shanties and tents and tipis still standing on the rest of the Co-op were to be dismantled, sold or recycled, or burned. No trial periods were allowed unless there was a homesite vacancy, and then only one at a time. Taxes were to be levied on residents for required expenses in common, like waterline debts, road improvements, clearing projects and provincial land taxes. New residence fees had to be paid in full in advance, and would be refunded in full upon resigning, except for a non-refundable portion designed to deter thoughtless joiners.
Charlie was tired of life in the tipi: huddling up next to the stove, breathing smoky kerosene (which the cat almost knocked over on her way after a huge wood rat); surviving the canvas catching fire twice, the water freezing every winter . . . the rain dripping on his bed.
He needed more money for building a decent house to live in. So Charlie became a treeplanter. That meant joining the broken-down crummies charging up the muddy cliff-hugging logging roads at dawn - then loading up with several hundred seedlings at a time and plodding up the steep, devastated landscape of charred death to stuff them, one by one, into the ground and stomp the soil shut around their doomed roots. It was good money, at a hundred a day to start; and when you got the knack of working an area (or vying for the "creamy" ground with a line of competing planters) you could rake in two or three times that.
But it was no fun coming up soaked and filthy at the end of the day to shower from the coil of black plastic pipe that had sat in the cool grass under the cloudy sky all day; to heat up his solitary beans and rice and carrots or whatever and huddle up next to the stove; to wonder what in hell he was doing there.
He'd come with a dream of an idyllic life with Jan. It hadn't worked out - for her, especially - and so that left Charlie on his own. Now what? It wasn't so idyllic, and with the membership now frozen at eight couples, a lesbian pair and three single men including Charlie, the prospects weren't idyllic either.
What about Galena? Could he hope to entice one of the "townies" to come share a bed with me here? Unlikely. Maybe he should venture into their territory: attend the bingo or the bowling, the church service, or the barbecues . . . no, it might have to be Henslow, or as a last resort, Vancouver. Even - why the hell not? - old Baltimore: he could retire there with his season ticket to Oriole games, living on crabmeat and beer . . . in the summertime. The winters would be deadly. Maybe, then, Charlie mused, he could unfold his Edgar Allan Poe persona, and become a writer of tall tales in a wintry garret.
And so, for that matter, could he hole up there in his virtual wilderness, telling tall tales, or true stories of his botched life.
But maybe it wasn't botched after all, Charlie told himself with a kind of circular logic. Not everybody was cut out for domestic life. Maybe Jason had a point. The appropriate mission now was survival. Charlie felt he had some integrity left as an individual person. His sense of worth did not depend on Jan, or on the presence of any woman, or children. Maybe his destiny had more to do with communicating something of life to the world, through the written word. He would give it a try, at least - when treeplanting season was over.
When treeplanting season was over, Charlie had a nice little nest egg of a few thousand dollars. It wasn't enough for a life of opulence, but it would do for the cash essentials, if the cash essentials were minimized. That meant a reasonable garden, to save on grocery bills. It meant getting started immediately on the digging, planting, weeding, watering . . .
Charlie didn't start writing that summer, not for real. But he did start a journal, and that kept him company in the absence of any more endearing partnership or means of self-fulfillment. The summer soon passed into September, and he thought it best to have a foundation for the house in before winter. That, along with his modest garden harvest, took care of most of the remaining time till snow. The foundation was funky but complete.
During that time he saw Jan once on the street in Henslow. "I'd like to have a visit with you sometime," she told him. She looked good. She seemed to realize this and to flaunt it. Charlie wondered if she had someone else by now. Man or woman? - it didn't really matter, did it. "Could you make it for supper tonight?"
Charlie said that he could. He almost backed out at the last minute, his fingers on the key of the Dodge in town at five o'clock. But with the thought of nothing to lose, he thought he'd see what she wanted to talk about.
"How do you like my place?" she purred. It was a cute little basement suite, complete with kitchen area, woodstove, bedroom and bath, neatly remodeled and tastefully, if sparsely furnished.
As she took his jacket to hang it up, Charlie had the distinct impression she was trying to draw him in; he'd been through the whole show before. But he played along, to see what she was really up to.
"Nice, nice," he said. "You liking your job here?" She taught drama, art and music at the elementary school.
"I love it," and Charlie could see from the way that she positively beamed that she meant it.
"You live here alone?" It was an idle question; but Charlie almost regretted asking it as soon as he'd said it, because of the look she gave him: half accusing, half triumphant.
She hesitated - somewhat coyly, Charlie thought - before answering, as she swept into the kitchen to tend a pot simmering on the stove. "No, as a matter of fact. Are you surprised?"
"I don't know. I guess it could go either way."
"What do you mean by that?" But she smiled as she said this, making a joke rather than taking offense. She had changed a little, for the better. Had she learned from her experiences, Charlie wondered, and was now ready to move back into a mature relationship - with him?
He thought it time to put the banter aside and play it straight. "So how are you doing? Living alone . . ."
"I told you, I'm doing fine." Now she seemed defensive. "Ow! Fuck me!" she rattled a hot casserole back onto an oven shelf and thrust her hand under the cold tap.
So, Charlie thought. What about me? Where do I stand? Am I ready for this? Not really.
I don't know what got into Charlie that night. I suppose he wanted to prove something, to somebody, to himself: certainly he knew that he wasn't going to discover anything new, about Jan, about Jan and Charlie. He pulled out before dawn while she was still sleeping. Or so he thought. Her parting word as Charlie padded out of the bedroom with his pile of clothes in hand was "Bastard." He was sure there was a smile on her face as she said it. Charlie chose not to comment and that was the last he saw or heard of her.
The next summer, his fourth on the Co-op, Charlie planted trees again and followed that, in a hot July and August, with a couple of weeks of fighting forest fires. The helicopter would pick up a local crew of half a dozen to a dozen recruits from Galena, fly them to a makeshift camp or to a rough smoky clearing, drop them off with supplies, and they'd go to work hosing, digging, damping - mopping up, in most cases, after the water bombers were done. All day in the grime, vying for a turn with the one or two hoses to relieve the boredom; grubbing around in the charred roots of tree skeletons; watching for danger snags and calling the faller on the radio; listening for directions to the newest hot spot and hiking to it with piss-cans on the back to squirt it out in a smoldering hiss of smoky steam. The meals were good, if you liked steaks and canned pudding. But after a week of it you were ready for swimming in Galena Lake.
Nothing in the world could match the long transcendental crawl out toward the middle of the lake, surrounded by mountains and sky, floating above hundreds of feet of depth, matching the reach of the sky above. Kicking spray up into the air, and savoring the warmth of the surface, four weeks in the making in a mid-summer hot spell. With the bathers all pink-skinned and unclothed on the distant beach, and kids playing on log-boats . . . you'd float, held up upon the wide breast of the waters, buoyant as a human feather, under the rippling sun, the depths and breadth of it so vast that you could feel the connection to all earth mass and rock. The clear view stretched all the way to the horizon southward, and ended in the glaciers to the north. Birds circled overhead, waiting for you to turn into a small fish.
On the sandy beach one day Charlie spotted Harold, wearing only his wire-rimmed glasses, reading some yellowed pamphlet. They got to talking about utopia, naturally enough. And about poor Kingsley. Now that he was gone from their lives, everyone left on the Co-op referred to him as "poor Kingsley." Maybe they shared some empathy for the man after all, the man with the broken dreams.
"Kingsley's visions," Harold told Charlie, "stemmed from his days in the old Marxist cells of the thirties, and his later work with the C.C.F. He had this dream for a long time, see. You can read about in in the original letters he sent out to interest people in investing on this piece of land. But somehow this band of unruly children that ended up living here with him didn't exacltly conform to that vision."
"Why's that?"
"Workers of the world, that about says it. No one here wants to work as hard as they did in the thirties - anyone who was lucky enough to have a job, that is. We're all privileged hippies from universities and middle class homes who never had to work hard in our lives and aren't about to start."
"But what about the gardens, the houses everyone's building by themselves, the clearing of trees . . ."
"Oh, sure, it takes a lot of work to start a life here, that's true. But it's a different kind of work than what Kingsley had in mind. On our own time, in our own style. Breaks whenever you want to smoke a joint, or meditate, or write a treatise on something or other, or go swimming at the nude beach."
Jane and Sue strolled by; one petite and flat-chested, the other rolling in fat. They smiled at Harold and Charlie like any bathing beauties on any Atlantic coast beach. No matter that they were lesbians: they didn't care and neither did the men who watched them pass.
"See what I mean? Robert's idea was that we all band together in some Chinese-style agricultural commune, or handicrafts shop, producing, producing, eight hours a day, five days a week. Those were sacred numbers, very humane, to his generation; not to ours."
His clear blue eyes behind the wire-rims looked directly into Charlie's. They understood each other. They were of the same generation.
What was more, by Harold's analysis, they were of the same class: "Educated, middle or upper-middle class: bourgeois." That was why, he said, those of our own generation on the other side of the lake, in the town of Galena, did not come to bathe here - despite the obvious attractions. They were "working class": beer-drinkers and softball players. Not bad people: Charlie had just worked side by side with a number of them fighting fires. Just different.
"It's always been tricky," Harold said, "coexisting with Galena folks, ever since the first hippies arrived here. To them, the Kingsleys, with their Saab, their professorial long hair and polite, articulate speech, were part of it, the beginning of the end. They saw it coming and tried to block the sale of the land we live on now. But there was nothing they could do. A few rowdies came and let the air of the Saab's tires, stole the battery out of it once, dumped a bunch of beer cans on the housesite, that sort of thing. But they mostly stayed apart. Once we had a softball game with them. That was a hoot. These mill workers and loggers, against the treeplanters and dope growers. Pretty funny. But we had some good ballplayers, too. We lost 12-ll, when they rallied in the last inning. But they never wanted to play us again. We taught them something. We and they have kept out of each other's way pretty much since then."
Harold looked at the sun, at the chatting people wading in the shallow water, and back to his pamphlet.
The sun was circling overhead, and it was time for Charlie to return to his humble home, to pick salad greens for supper, and to plan the next stage of building his dream house.
