Siesta Lane Read online

  A towering, quick-grinning guy with buoyant blue eyes and strong, weathered hands, Quin, Siesta Lane’s Wizard of Oz, still appears at whim on the property, magically fixing a broken shower, adjusting a crooked drape, dropping off salvaged firewood.

  Stained glass windows, wood carvings, and other artistic touches express Quin’s aesthetic vision. The main house pantry with four refrigerators, a bathroom with a stall, a line of knobs for towels, a large message board, and a separate telephone room reflect his penchant for efficiency and hope for community.

  Mick takes me to see the one available cabin, explaining that “the cabins have electricity but no water. You need an invitation to go to someone’s cabin. Everyone’s independent, but sometimes we eat together during the mandatory weekly house meeting. It’s all wood heat and you have to chop your own; the stack is by the front door. The phone is shared. Notes for each other can be left on the message board. Kind of like having eight roommates, but spread out across the property. Well, here it is.”

  We reach the cabin and I have stopped listening. A demure window-speckled wooden house snuggled under the arm of an oak seems to wink at me. I stop walking, stunned with love. Mick, maybe sensing this, ambles off. “Take your time. I’ll be in the kitchen.” Bright, clean, cozy. A skylight over the bed loft. This ten-square-foot cabin in its copse of oaks bewitches. I sit alone there awhile, watching leaf shadows animate the wood floor, absorbing the silence into every pore. Beginning, already, a romance with this place.

  We stay until noon and meet the rest of the community. I shake hands on it and we ramble back to Eugene, mellow with fresh air, scenery, and success, where I treat an appeased Gabriel and Sophia to lunch at a chic café.

  Migration

  Like a bird honing in on its nesting ground, I searched the map for someplace far enough from traffic, but close to Eugene where I still had friends and work. Why did I feel compelled to live out of town? There’s mystery in my motives, but a couple are discernible to me: recovery and renewal.

  Recovery: My college sweetheart (now a jet-set architect) and I (a hopeless bumpkin) have finally decided to give up our dream of a life together. I couldn’t live in motels and Alex, raised in Hong Kong, developed his image of rural living from the film Deliverance. The country mouse and the city mouse. We still like each other better than most anyone else on the planet, which is why it took us over ten years of a mostly long-distance relationship to face the obvious, and why I am now walking around like a ghost that misplaced the body it was borrowing.

  And this is my attempt to wriggle freer from a consumer lifestyle that I know to be harmful to nature and to our nature. Granted I was raised Catholic and prone to guilt, but what are we here for, if not to live ethically and to care for what we love? It has become harder for me to blithely get in a car and spew toxins into one of the elements that make life possible. To mindlessly turn on the house lights and imagine salmon stopped by hydroelectric dams, lost in the confusion of waters behind them—or to throw away plastic packaging and recall rainforests ravaged for petroleum and of the unique cultures destroyed in the bulldozers’ wake. Not that I feel this way often, but often enough to give pause.

  Renewal: I am beckoned to renew a childhood connection with soil and sky that once offered me solace. I grew up outside Chicago, in an area with large yards and immense trees, where the variable Midwest weather enamored me. As a quiet middle child in a boisterous family, I’d climb our willow tree with a book and a blanket for whole afternoons, squeezed and wrung out by big-shouldered clouds. Or spend afternoons lying on the grass in our yard beneath a willow tree, watching clouds pass overhead and filling with bliss and a gratitude for this “secret,” this capacity to let nature open me to joy.

  It was a kind of soul sustenance for which I’ve felt hungry for the past few years. So I’ve come to Siesta Lane to at least put my ear to the ground and listen for what is wanted by and from me, and to begin to respond.

  Willow

  From the first time

  one beckoned I was taken

  by the tree people

  into their fold.

  Scraped, dizzy, bruised

  but given over

  up and up

  I knew my real home

  was here.

  Where wind curled branches

  birds built forts and no one

  on Earth could find me.

  Gramma held

  her veined hands beneath

  a floured apron called

  and called to me.

  Vagrant girl pressed against bark

  caressed by yellow fingers

  catkins in hair

  heart of sky.

  Entrance

  The nine of us have arrived separately to these eight acres on Siesta Lane in Rainbow Valley and squirreled our extra belongings away into the barn. We each have a rustic cabin and share the main house. Mick is a botanist who thrives outside; Sara a grad student with few possessions; Raul and Luke printmakers who like the low rent; Jack and Rita social workers here for the sweet setting; and Paul and his daughter Natalie are happy for a country place to grow food. Our secondary reasons are more subtle: artistic inspiration, intimacy with nature, a more basic lifestyle, human community. Living here will be an exercise in simplicity. The largest cabin, or rather, round wooden yurt, is sixteen feet in diameter and it’s a long way to the storage barn, especially in Oregon’s rain. We will learn to get by on less, and to both curse and welcome the sparseness. The asceticism will leave us open to watch for grouse and grosbeak, I hope, and as the human world shrinks, the natural world will pick up its bags and move to the front of the line.

  Sara, in shorts and a sweatband on her way to ultimate Frisbee practice and whom I had at first sight recognized as friend potential, comes out to help me move my red satin armchair up the hill. “Wish I could help more, but I’m already late.” Her cropped golden hair swishes her shoulders as she speeds off. This flusters me and I bump the chair against the doorframe fitting it in. I had been romanticizing the folks here as enlightened souls, sitting around all day meditating on the dandelions. So maybe this place isn’t a magic charm after all and everyone here is even busier because they have to drive twenty minutes to their other lives? I will need to be diligent about idleness, I think, and sit down hard on my worn armchair as it releases a wheezy sigh.

  It has occurred to me that I rush through the days with my arms full of projects—usually on my way to pick up another. Carrying my weight, proving my worth. I have been out in the world doing my life. But not being it. This is what happens when you go to the woods to observe. Time stops long enough for thought and feeling to catch up. A friend did the same without going into the woods. He stayed home for three days and did nothing. Just sat. In the dark. Alone. Just to see what would happen, what it would be like.

  Such a call to introspection sinks me like an anchor into a deep lake that is at once seductive and terrifying. Feelings catch up to me when I slow down—my pact with mortality for one, but also the deep riches of solitude. I become humbled and grounded, the way a pond clears when the water settles. I crave this clarity and depth, to be shaken and then stilled. But first, shaken.

  A lonely howl echoes through inner chambers and for a few minutes I consider bagging it. I haven’t signed anything yet and Quin could find someone else. Part of me knows that it would be easy to go back to my busy familiar life where I am marginally successful and known to others.

  But not to myself.

  I will stay.

  And then will my time here be a ripening, or a kind of dying? Will I, like Rip Van Winkle, fall into a stupor, or will I deepen my current from gathering in, listening and watching, watching.

  I get up for another load as the sun ignites the oak leaves against my cabin window and realize there is no lock on my door.

  Community

  When a cabin opens up at Siesta Lane, the owner finds a new tenant with the current tenants’ approval. Over the past two y
ears, Quin had assembled our particular collection of eccentrics with me as the lucky last taker. “Just try to get people that are halfway normal,” Mick, one of the early renters, had told him. And Quin had. But fortunately, only halfway.

  In the coming weeks, we’ll learn that Paul needs to sing loudly when he cooks; Mick’s plant specimens are growing on the window ledge; Raul, a Shoshone Indian, wants to keep the deer brains in the freezer, which he uses to cure his drum leather.

  When you live with eight other people miles from town you learn to accept your differences. The surrounding countryside has a way of putting people in relief against it. You recognize yourselves as the same species. And stick together. Although mostly independent, sharing the main house makes us interact daily. We have to divvy up chores and utility costs. We all go into “the world” to work and play, but most nights folks choose to hang out at Siesta Lane. Sometimes we cook together or have an event. One night a month we have a gathering that we call Art’s Night Out. We make cookies and present pieces from our art or work. Somehow through cracks in the walls of our separate egos, we come to know something of each other.

  Jack and Rita are newly married and covetous of their privacy, going to all lengths to be alone in the main house at mealtime. Because of our erratic schedules, this causes them no small stress. Unpredictably between 5:30 a.m. and midnight, Siestans will pop into the main house for a snack or cup of tea while Jack and Rita are trying to sneak in a romantic meal together.

  We suspect Jack of trying to live up to Garrison Keillor’s description of a Minnesotan. “Has he said anything today?” “Nope.” “Well, write it down if he does.” The only thing we really know about Jack is his extreme patience.

  We know this because his new bride, Rita, talented and restless, keeps uprooting their lives. She wants to be a nature educator so they move to Boston to go to the best school. Before finishing, she decides she really wants to be a Waldorf school teacher so they move to Eugene, but she wants to be out of town so they move in with us but since then she has decided that the best place to learn her craft would be England, so they’re going there next year.

  Jack, who works as a contractor, finds work wherever they go. He puts a hand on Rita’s knee, eats pancakes, and reads the paper.

  Mick is a stalk of wheat. Moppy blond hair blowing around his blade of a frame. He’s quiet, responsible as a patrol guard, and has the distinction in our household of only taking up one quarter of one shelf in one of the four refrigerators. We think Mick exists on peanut butter and jelly and expect that he’s secretly involved in a study for the FDA on just what that diet does to a person.

  If we need to know what any plant is, we ask Mick. One night he gives us lucid descriptions and titles of the parts of grass, which I promptly forget. We gather around the table, heads bent as in worship, sporting headlamps and hand lenses, peering down at bits of scattered native grass. The task is to decide if the ligules at the base of the leaf sheath are hairy or membranous (if there at all) and whether the appendage-like auricles below them (if there at all) are short and stubby or resembled claws. Of course, this is after we determine whether the seedhead is a spike or a panicle.

  Sara, at twenty-four, is the baby and the angel of the group: golden-haired, blue-eyed, with skin like a peach. She likes to bake and knit, but also plays soccer like a Viking and gives lectures to graduate anthropology classes at the university. We’ll be sitting around shelling beans from the garden and Sara will timidly startle us with some revelation from her past, which we had imagined culminated in the high school prom. “That happened when I was studying Barucan weaving in a remote Indian village in Costa Rica.” Or, when asked if she’d read Meridel Le Seuer, “Oh, yes, my mother is a good friend of hers and is writing her biography.”

  We trip over ourselves to get Sara to smile (which isn’t hard) because she has such nice teeth. We perform embarrassing antics just to hear her bright laugh, quick as a splatter of rain.

  Raul, who is maybe five feet, five inches tall, has extraordinary long black hair that he keeps impeccably clean and tightly braided. He has the smooth brown skin of his heritage and a temper even as an ironing board. The mysterious paintings he makes of spirit plants, life under the soil, and eagle people stun and silence us. We believe we are in the presence of a great artist and sage. Only when he tells us that his wife put all his belongings outside his house (which is the Shoshone style of divorce); when his parents call asking for “Ralph,” which is his given name; or when he mentions his son in a sad voice do we concede that Raul, though immensely talented, is human, searching like all of us for some reconciliation within himself on this particular quilt patch of land we call Siesta Lane.

  And there’s Luke, whose last name means “eagle” in Spanish, coming to us from the pizzazz of Los Angeles. Luke makes elaborate colorful prints and thick espresso coffee, and wears silk shirts. His girlfriend, Yoko, is from Japan and comes to about Luke’s navel. She, too, is an artist. “Excuse me, Amy. May I photograph your boots?” I realize she is referring to the boots that have been left shamefully outside my door through monsoon weather and now have a spider web in them. I guess she’s never seen boots like those in Japan. “Okay,” I say sheepishly, “only please don’t put my name in the title.”

  Luke, who has curly black hair and is at least eleven feet tall, has the softest voice I have ever heard. He could get a job lulling children to sleep. He stands out in our household for knowing exactly how to cook a perfectly fried egg, which he has for breakfast every morning. He is the one we turn to when we need something written in exquisite, artsy handwriting.

  Although his daughter goes to school in Eugene, Paul, who hails from farm stock, requires country living and has been at Siesta Lane the longest. Paul has a deep voice and a leathered face but an elfin grin. He knows how to fix anything in the house and how to farm a parking lot. The sprouts he keeps on the windowsill never rot or dry out. His daughter shines with his good care. Pre-teen Natalie has the lithe, sturdy quality of a foal, and walnut eyes that pulse with delight and ferocity. She knits, grows beans, builds fires. Paul works and works, worries about rent, and ages fast. They are an inseparable enigma, a cameo of pioneer survival that makes the rest of us feel as if we are playing at life.

  And that leaves me. A single woman with ninety-eight part-time jobs trying to figure out how she connects to the greater forces of the universe and to the tiny earwigs that hide in the curled-up seed heads of Queen Anne’s lace.

  Incubation

  Nearly hidden in the thick foliage, a long grey nest of duff and dead grass hangs like an old sock in a clump of hawthorn shrubs along Siesta Lane. Good trick the bushtit has, hiding her home amid thorns. Determined to make a study of the nature here, I wait near it all morning with my notepad and sketchbook, watching for signs of life.

  Male bushtits, small acrobatic birds with long tails and feisty attitudes, will build several decoy nests near their occupied one to attract mates and to deter predators. I’m patient, hoping this one is the real thing.

  One summer I shared a house with an environmental artist who designed “dwellings” from found material on the land. Our backyard was decorated with shelters that ranged from miniature to tent-sized. A circle of stones marked a meditation spot, branches made a tee-pee for afternoon naps, and grapevines grew around ropes creating what Carolyn referred to as a “menstrual hut” where we were to rest and reflect during our periods. Our neighbor, watching Carolyn gather dead grass for mats, remarked in a quiet voice, “Maybe she needs a mate.” But I interpret Carolyn’s art as a gesture toward making a home in the world. For Carolyn, a dwelling is a green place that smells like dirt; for me, a small cabin on an oak-studded hill; for the bushtit it’s a tenuous tube on a thin branch.

  Suddenly the sock begins to quake and a flurry of tiny brown birds flies out from the nearly invisible hole in the front. Nerves tingling, I note their presence as a good omen on this current spiritual quest—my new attempt at creatin
g a home on the land, hoping one day I too will release such exuberance.

  July Moss soft on the oak limbs that dance outside the window, ripe plum on the sill. To sit with myself, a pen, and time is a triangle of apprehension. I let the feeling be. I keep the pen in hand. The oaks darken. We begin.

  Freaks

  I explain to my conservative mother that I am living in a “community,” not a “commune.”

  She is familiar with Moonies, orange-clad Rajneeshies from central Oregon, and Patty Hearst, and is not easily mollified.

  “Honey, it’s not one of those cults is it?”

  “No, Mom. Everyone’s really nice.”

  “They’re always nice in the beginning. That’s how they suck you in.”

  “Really, Mom. We hardly even see each other.”

  “Just don’t let them brainwash you.”

  It gives folks pause when they learn that none of our cabins have bathrooms or kitchens or water at all. Walking a hundred yards outside in total darkness to the bathroom strikes them as barbaric.

  When my brother visits he’s initially shocked by our occasional use of outdoor plumbing, but ends up appreciating the excuse to get outside and see the stars.

  We play it up when he comes, knowing he’s skeptical, and maybe even enlisted as a spy by my family to see if I am living in some drugged-out hippie commune or New Age cult center.