Return to Houkola – Part I

           When I was 29-30 years old, I was diagnosed (rightly or wrongly) as catatonic schizophrenic and spent a year in and out of mental institutions. At the end of that year, in the spring of 1975, I moved to a commune, deep in the mountains south of Ashland, Oregon, called Houkola, owned by a woman named Sasha. One of the couples on the commune, Eric and Miriam, had conceived their daughter, Sequoia, there. Last week I got a call from Miriam, who lives in Ashland but whom I hadn't seen since the days of Houkola, telling me she wanted to take her daughter to see the place where she and Eric had conceived her and did I want to join them?

         Yes!

         What it would be like to be at Houkola again I could only imagine.
        Miriam and I only had vague memories to help us find the land where the commune had been, situated in a remote part of the Siskiyou Mountains, but when we came to a particular hill on the road, memory kicked in. "This hill! I remember this hill!" I cried excitedly. "This is where – oh, what was her name? – slid off the road in the snow one winter," and Miriam said, with as much excitement, "I remember the railroad coming close to the road – see it there! – at the bottom of this hill." Pretty soon, with the help of a resident who was driving up the road and who could show us where Houkola had been, we were walking through a gate – a new gate; we had had no gates at Houkola – 

up the road to the commune again. We had walked that road a lot, in the days of Houkola, in the snows of winter and in the heat of summer. As we walked past a grove of small oaks next to the road, Miriam said suddenly, "I remember these trees!" We knew we were coming back.
        About half a mile up the road, we came to another gate, from which I could see the top of a house. We hesitated a split second (maybe it belonged to the new owner?), but we weren't about to stop now. Once through the gate, when I could see the house more clearly, I burst into a run. "That's it!" I cried. "That's our house! There's the porch. Sasha was weaving on the porch. I was sitting next to her. Two other women were weaving under these very oak trees."

            The memory was vivid. I had been so anxious, so unsure of myself that day, as always during those first few months out of the mental institution, when I was suffering a shattered personality and didn't know how to be myself any more. I remembered now what I had been thinking at that moment: "I have a loom. Shouldn't I be weaving, too?" I remembered how, on that day, sitting on that porch, I calmed my anxiety, saying to myself, "It's all right. What you're doing is watching the women weave. You don't have to be doing anything else." It was such an important moment for me, a lesson in "beingness" that took me one step closer to wholeness.

            Miriam also recognized the oak trees next to the porch. "I remember sitting under those trees making moccasins," she said. 

            I was beside myself with excitement. Everything was still there, albeit dilapidated – 

the house, the fence around the garden area, Sasha's cabin, the sauna, the barn on the side of which I had built a room. The room was now just a pile of broken boards, the reverse image of me: a pile of broken boards when I arrived at Houkola, now an intact, whole person. I had just been released from the mental institution then and was heavily drugged with anti-psychotics. Life was meaningless; everything I did was busy work. When I met the people in the commune, that first night at dinner, and told them Sasha had invited me to live in the tipi there, I explained my condition and said that I had lived in a commune before, so I knew how necessary it was for each person to carry his or her part of the work load, but that I knew I wasn't capable of doing that at that time.

            They just nodded in agreement. "That's all right," they said. "You will do what you can when you can." And that was all. From the first moment, I was given permission and freedom to focus on the healing process, to rediscover myself. 

          It wasn't always easy. When I moved to Houkola, I had to leave my son with his father, who had become my ex-spouse while I was in the mental institution. I knew I wasn't capable of taking care of my child, but it broke my heart to leave him. I loved the times when he came for week-long visits, visits I used for reconstructing our relationship. The memories of our time together are wonderful ones – Mariposa, the person I was closest to at Houkola, told me later how much she learned from me about raising her own boys – and if those memories were circumscribed with painful memories, well, that's the way things were.  The whole of my time at Houkola was important to me, so remembering it all was also important to me, now, at my return.

(Part 2 of "Return to Houkola" will be posted next week.)

Slip-n-Slide

            I am so sore! I have aches and pains, bruises and bumps, screaming stomach muscles. What was I thinking, playing with my granddaughter as though I were nine years old?

            It was so hot while I was visiting my family on Vashon Island that my granddaughter asked to play in the sprinkler. She ran through it, again and again, urging me to join her, but, really, I'm beyond the age of playing in sprinklers. Still, I was tempted just to get wet, so I went inside and put on my bathing suit. When I came back out, my son had spread a long sheet of black plastic down a steep slope on the lawn, with some rubber mats under it and the sprinkler at its top for a slip-n-slide. My granddaughter was already sliding joyously down the hill.

            "Come on, Amma Dee!" she yelled. "You try it. Come on."

            Well, I mean, how undignified could I get? Sliding down a hill at my age? No, no, I said. But I did sit at the top and tease her with pretend pushes as she tried to crawl up the plastic. "I'm coming up the black river," she would say, making her way up the slippery route, and then, within my reach: "Oh, no! It's the Amma-Dee squid!"  and I would lunge at her, and she would go sliding down with squeals and laughter.

            "Come on, Amma Dee. You do it." Then, when I wouldn't: "Bad Granny!"

            Bad Granny?! Bad Granny!? I am not Granny. I'm Amma Dee.

            That did it. Down I went, on my bum.

          She was delighted, and I had to admit, it was fun, so I went down again, but this time, I fell over a bit and slid down on my hip. I went really fast! And it was really, really fun.

           For the next three hours, she and I played on the slip-n-slide. We slid down the slope one after the other, convulsing in laughter at the bottom. I was getting plenty of speed by sliding on my hip, even flying past the end of the plastic, stopping only when I hit the grass. When I stood up, my legs were flecked with grass cuttings.

            Once, when I stood up after my slide, still on the plastic, my feet slipped out from under me, and I fell boom! on my bum. (It's a hard way to learn that I don't have osteoporosis, I thought ruefully.) Another time I slipped unexpectedly and crashed into my granddaughter, both of us tumbling down. Sometimes, when I veered off track in my uncontrollable slide, I hit the dry part of the plastic, which was very hot. I screeched the rest of the way down.

            Besides "Amma Dee Squid," we played "taxi": when we landed at the bottom, my granddaughter would start crawling back up the hill with me hanging on to her ankle. She was the taxi, pulling me up the hill, except, of course, she wasn't strong enough to pull me up, so really I was hanging onto her ankle and pulling myself up with my elbows and thighs. But the plastic was very slippery, and I really did need her nine-year-old's strength as well as all the strength I had to crawl on my stomach up a steep hill of wet plastic. We made incremental progress, slipping backward, then heaving forward again. I kept putting my head down to rest, saying, "I can't. I can't," and then gathering energy for another pull until finally, every time, we made it to the top, dissolving again into giggles.

            We screeched and yelled and laughed. We slid down, out of control. We pulled ourselves up again. It's no wonder I feel like I've beaten. Good Lord. I'm almost 73 years old. Don't I know better than to be throwing myself around like a nine-year-old?

            It was wonderful. It was imaginative and exhausting and free-spirited. My granddaughter loved it. I loved it. And when I left the house to catch the ferry, the beginning of the journey home, she came running from the house, threw her arms around me, and gave me another long, tight hug. Every bump, bruise, ache, and pain I have now was worth that moment.

College swimming class

            When I was at the University of Oregon for graduate school a few years ago, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to take swimming lessons, but for two years I was so intimidated by the thought of appearing in a bathing suit in my mid-60s in front of 20-year-olds that I shunned swimming class. Finally I told myself that that was ridiculous. If I wanted to swim, I should swim.

            But if I were going to swim, I would need a swim suit, since swimming in the nude is fine when I'm alone in the wilderness but not so appropriate in a college class. Just before the first term of my third year in graduate school, I swallowed my pride and marched into the swimming supply store close to campus to buy a swim suit.

            I was glad to see no other customers in the store. Skulking around the young salesgirl (probably a UO student and maybe even someone I would see in swimming class, too, I thought in panic) and then hiding behind the clothing racks, I looked for something appropriate. When I found a bathing suit I thought would do, I took it to the dressing room and wiggled into it. Then I took a deep breath and stepped in front of the mirror.

            I was horrified. I looked like every middle-age woman who ever poured herself into a bathing suit – the bulky figure, the rolls of fat. There was no way I was going to appear in a college swimming class looking like this. I flung off the swim suit, dropped it on the bench, and fled the store.

            It took me another year for the desire to swim to overcome the embarrassment of my figure and my age, but before fall term the next year I bought a swim suit in a department store in town, where other women my age and my look might be buying swim suits. When I got to campus, I signed up for swimming.

            I tried to look nonchalant as I entered the women's locker room the first day of class, but that part wasn't too bad. I could dress in a private cubicle, and students were dressing and undressing hurriedly, having to get to class, so no one was paying attention to anyone else. But then I had to walk through the door into the pool room, and then I had to walk in front of the cluster of students on the bleachers to find a seat. The students were all, of course, decades younger than I, and, of course, they were eyeing each other, those young men and young women. I felt completely out of place and conspicuous, but I WANTED TO SWIM, so I stubbornly reminded myself that I had every right to be there and that I was there to swim, not to socialize or impress anyone. It's the swimming that's important, I said to myself, tucking my hair inside my swim cap and slipping into the pool with the other students.

            Swim class was, in the end, one of the best things I did in grad school. My instructor, Dan, the erstwhile coach of UO's erstwhile swim team, enjoyed having me in class – because I was an unusual student and because we were, after all, the same age. After I gave him a copy of my book with the essay about swimming in Crater Lake, he liked to tease me about swimming in cold lakes. Most of the students ignored me, but to my surprise one or two every term were as friendly to me as to anyone else. They ignored my age and related to me as a fellow swimmer. It didn't take long before I was comfortable in class, bathing suit notwithstanding. I wasn't the worst swimmer, though I always swam in the slow lane. Many of the students had been on swim teams in high school. They didn't give me the time of day, but I didn't care. We were all there to swim and to learn something about swimming, both those who snubbed me and those who were friendly. I took swimming every term until I graduated and then all during the following year, when I had a post-doc for teaching at UO. I loved swim class.

            For obvious reasons, there are no photos to go with this post.