“If you read fairy tales, you will observe
that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that
peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which
is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton
********
A
few years ago, I hiked in to an old hippy compound in far northern
California. Up an old logging road becoming lost to second-growth Coast Redwood and Douglas Fir to a half-dozen long-abandoned geodesic dome houses. Home-made
furniture rotted inside, where in one I found a disintegrating copy of The Whole Earth Catalog, Steal This Book, paperback editions of The Limits of Growth, Thinking About the Unthinkable and Report from Iron Mountain. The back to the land movement of the love and peace era had died long ago, leaving only echoes of Buckminster Fuller, Ludditism, idealism and anti-...well, anti pretty much everything.
The man I was with was dismissive of it all. He’d bought the land and
was going to build his own homestead for his trad family (once he found a
trad wife) far from the madding crowd. He planned to construct his own log
cabin from trees he’d cut down with his axe. Dig a well, plant a garden, have a cow and a goat, some chickens and ducks, a good dog, and let the rest of the world go by
When I suggested he was the modern-day version of a hippy, he rejected the idea. He was nothing like them. I asked if he played the guitar, banjo or the flute. He said he played the guitar and the pan flute and was planning to get a banjo. That night around the campfire as an owl couple hooted back and forth and the moon rose through the trees and stars he sang "500 Miles" and I thought about becoming a trad wife.
Some days I wish I had.
********
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed
affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast
practical joke ― though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns ― and more
than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.”
― Herman Melville
