We finally arrived in Husum, Washington where my best friend, Amber, had just had her first child named Harvest. Amber had been with me for the birth of my first child, and now I wanted to be there for her. She was living in an old farmhouse on the side of Mount Adams with a beautiful view of the mountains. Her daughter was beautiful, of course. Her relationship with Harvest’s dad was not so beautiful, and he was mostly absent, leaving Amber to take care of everything by herself. Unfortunately, at that time, Paul and I were not the best house guests. There was no indoor plumbing, and Paul really didn’t know how to deal with that, so he made quite a few mistakes that added to the tension already in the house. In addition, we needed to settle somewhere, so he went looking for work. He finally found a job at Timberline Lodge, a ski resort on Mount Hood that had been built by the WPA during the Great Depression. FDR wanted to give artists and artisans employment, so he put them to work building this spectacular lodge. There are murals, wood carvings, tile work, stone work and much more. It is a beautiful work of art. There is snow on the mountain all year round, so it’s a popular place for skiing, even the Olympic teams have trained there. In order to get to work every day, he had to live there in the employee housing. However, he couldn’t bring his family, so Jessie and I stayed behind seeing him only on weekends. We had a wonderful leave taking the night before he left for the lodge. At one point, I warned him that there might end up being another baby on the way. We both decided that would be fine and not much later, I was absolutely sure. In all of my pregnancies, I never got morning sickness. I always felt healthier than ever before. This one was no different. I would occasionally feel a tiny upset, but it was never very uncomfortable and didn't last long. However, my emotions were raw. Here I was living in a very stressful environment with a 3-year old and expecting another baby. We didn’t have our own home yet, and my husband was living on another mountain. Sometimes I would drive to visit him on a weekend and very rarely, he would come to Husum. Neither of us wanted to be there any longer, and we weren’t really welcome anymore either. Eventually, we moved into a motel at the base of Mount Hood. We had two rooms and a bathroom for a weekly rate. There were other people living there, too. Finally, Paul found us a tiny cabin in the village of Zig Zag. This cabin also had two rooms and a bath but was even smaller than the motel rooms. But at least here, Jessie and I could walk to the Post Office and the little health food store for some socialization. Hippies that we were, we loved knowing that our address was Zig Zag, Oregon. But that was the extent of the perks. I was very lonely and becoming more depressed every day. There were no neighbors, and I had no friends here. After a short while, Paul lost the job at the lodge and had to go looking for work in Portland. On one hand, I was relieved. I was going to be having a baby and had decided to have a home birth after the fiasco of my first hospital birth, and the clock was ticking. I needed to find a midwife. We hoped that we could move to the city soon. Our car had broken down, and we had no money to fix it, so Paul spent the next few months hitchhiking to and from Portland for his job. He would leave at 4 am and get home late at night. Once again, the time we had together, which was very little, was spent fighting. And I wasn’t the best mother to Jessie at that time. I became so depressed, it was difficult to get out of bed. I had to force myself to read to her and play games, but I made sure that we went for our walk every day to and from the Post Office and up and down the little road we lived on. I forced myself to put on a good face, but she could tell that things were not the same. We finally met a couple who lived on our road, only two cabins away. They invited us for dinner one night where I ate tofu for the first time. They cooked it in spaghetti sauce. They had friends visiting who were living in Portland and looking for a place on the mountain near their friends. How synchronistic! We were looking for a place in Portland. We were each paying $350/month rent and decided to just trade houses. Each of the landlords were pleased, so we moved to 10605 East Burnside Avenue when I was almost seven months pregnant. In addition to all of the other stressors, Amber and I were not speaking, and I missed my friend. Luckily, enough time had gone by from when we had dropped off Debbie and Steve after our nightmare of a trip, that we reconnected with them and started a new life in the city. The new house was wonderful. We didn’t have access to the back rooms with the washer and dryer, but we now had two good sized bedrooms, a large living room and eat-in kitchen and a huge backyard. The house was set back off the main road on a little dirt cut away with another house on either side of us. Our neighbors were great with kids of their own, so we ended up taking down the fences between our yards giving all of the kids free rein of a lot of land. We were right on a main bus line making it easy to get anywhere we wanted. We were ecstatic! We were ready for this next phase in our nomadic life.
0 Comments
One of the friends I had while living in Connecticut was a woman with the same name. That wasn’t unusual. In fact, Debbie was such a common name, I had multiple friends named Deborah or Debbie for short. This particular friend was looking for a change. She had recently broken up with her boyfriend who had fallen in love with someone else and moved away to be with her instead. When I told Debbie that we were planning to move back to the west coast, she asked if she could join us. She was one of the few people around whom we felt comfortable having our child, and we realized that it would be good to have another driver with their contribution to the fuel expense, so we said okay. A few days before we were due to leave, her ex-boyfriend decided that he had made a mistake and wanted her back. She begged us to let him join us. After much back and forth, we finally agreed. I was worried about the fact that he had broken her heart which was still feeling raw, and we were going to be trapped in a car with them. Then there was the fact that there were now four adults and a small child, with all of the belongings we could manage to fit, in a Plymouth Valiant. Paul, always the optimist, assured me that all would be well. Boy, was he wrong. The trip was stressful even before we started on the road. We had a couple of meetings during which Debbie and Steve argued. We finally told them that one of the conditions of continuing on with us was that they agree not to argue in the car. So, they often took it outside. The car was packed so full that even the floor in the back was packed right up to the seat, so whoever was in the back had to sit cross-legged. Jessie was in the back with two adults, and I hoped that whoever was back there would help keep her occupied. That didn’t work out the way I’d hoped. Steve decided to bring along his comic book collection. They were all encased in plastic sleeves and worth a lot of money, so he didn’t want anyone but himself touching them. Tell that to a two-year old. Not only was there constant tension between him and Debbie, who didn't actually fight inside the car, as per our agreement, now he fought with our two-year old in the car over his comics during the entire trip. He also ate sardines on the road, stinking up the car, making everyone nauseous, and there was no reasoning with him. I wanted to drop them off somewhere and let them find their own way, but Paul was insistent that we needed their monetary contributions and their driving abilities. When we got to Ohio, they wanted to stay for a few days and visit with a friend of theirs. We wanted to keep moving and had a friend in Kansas City, Kansas that we wanted to visit. We dropped them off in Ohio and drove to Kansas. The plan was for them to hitchhike and meet us in Kansas City by a certain date or we would go on without them. I hoped that they would decide not to come or would come too late and we’d be freed from this burden. Just as I started to breathe a sight of relief, because the rides had been in their favor, they showed up right at the last minute, so we had a full compliment once again. Paul and I wanted to get to Washington State, where Amber was waiting for us, as quickly as possible, but Debbie and Steve really wanted to see the Grand Tetons. We were traveling in May, and I knew from past experience that there was often still snow in May, but there was no deterring them, so off we went to Wyoming. We hit a snowstorm and ended up spending the night in a motel, an expense that we hadn’t expected or prepared for, but it turned out to be a good thing since Jessie had picked up some stomach bug and vomited all night long. By the time we reached our destination, I had a constant headache and was running on fumes from lack of sleep. We had a lot of grand adventures during that trip including a trip to Wind River Canyon where Jessie was picked up by the wind and carried off, causing her dad and I to chase after her, finally grabbing her foot as she went sailing through the air. We connected with old friends along the way and finally made it to Husum, Washington where Amber had just had her first child. That was the most stressful trip we made, including one to come a few years later that, although it was stressful, there were lots of fun elements that kept us going. This one didn’t have a lot of fun. Even Paul, who was very easy going with friends, had enough by that time, and was starting to fight with Steve. Once during the trip, I thought they would actually physically fight but thankfully, we were able to avoid that. We did manage to stay friends with Debbie and Steve, after a little time went by, and grew to really treasure that friendship. They were both a big part of my first two children's lives. I'm so glad to know them. I’ve been taking these blog posts, expanding upon them, adding details and more stories and turning them into chapters for a book. I’ve been wanting to write a book for a long time and just felt overwhelmed by it. Where do I start? What do I write about? Now I figure I’ll write different themed books. One will be about my travels, maybe about my childhood, teaching, who knows. This first one will be “Recollections of a Hippie Mama.” I only have a few photos from that time, but I will include some of those as well. When we arrived in Connecticut, after finishing up my parents’ vacation with them in New Hampshire, we immediately hit up the local bar for a gig. It was a huge success with all of our friends showing up to support us. Of course, we were convinced that this was our big start, so we set up housekeeping in Connecticut. My parents were thrilled. They would have their only grandchild close by. Now, you have to understand that my parents hated my husband. He was not who they had envisioned for me. He was a long-haired hippie who had been on the road since he was 14 and had whisked me away hitchhiking across the country. But at least he had married me when I got pregnant and provided for us, so they began talking to him on our return.
That doesn’t mean that things weren’t still tense. My parents were very conservative Republican, and my dad was quite influential in town. They knew that we smoked pot, which was a very big deal at that time. They also knew that we were very radical politically, and that was an even bigger deal. As a result, my daughter (Jessie) spent a lot of time with them by herself. Unfortunately, my sister was 16 years younger than me and became jealous of this interloper. She had been close to me before I left. Now I came back with a baby. How could I abandon her like that? At that time, they were both young enough that it was manageable, though that changed years later. Also, my mom still had a young child at home and wasn't available as often as I had hoped she would be. Meanwhile, I took Jessie on walks around the neighborhood every day. We visited the firehouse which was only a block away and walked to the library. There was the park where I had gone to school with swings and slides. We also walked to the nearby vacant lot every morning. She called it the meadow. We would run and play, picking wildflowers and watching the butterflies. After a few rainy days, when we were unable to visit the meadow, we noticed that our apartment was vibrating - a lot! The dishes were rattling, and things were falling off the shelves. We finally got a sunny day and walked over to the meadow only to find that it had been transformed into a rock crushing operation. I looked at Jessie, worried at what her reaction would be. She looked up at me with awe and said, “Look Mommy! Now we can go to the mountains!” And we did, every morning. Luckily for us, they only worked in the afternoons and evenings. None of our friends had children yet, so it was difficult for us to acclimate into our old group of friends. Many of them were wonderful, but we just couldn’t go out on the town every night as we had in the past. We did have a babysitter that lived in our building and hired her until we discovered that she was stealing our pot and getting way too high while watching our child. Jessie was not in school, and we didn’t go to a church, so it felt impossible to meet other young parents. We also struggled with finding other musicians to play with. In California, we'd had a full exciting life where we'd grown up a lot and changed our views on many things. Now, we were back in a conservative environment where many of our friends had not changed at all, still living the high life with no responsibilities. We were quickly becoming dissatisfied with our current environment. In addition to those struggles, making a living in Connecticut was just as hard as it had been when we left. The cost of living was high, and we were unskilled workers. Our friends, who had come out en masse to support our music soon tired of it and went their own way. Paul worked two jobs while I tried my hand at different jobs … a school crossing guard and a school bus driver. Ugh! Although I could bring Jessie with me to both of these jobs, they both turned out to be horrible. As a crossing guard, I was often the target of curses and had to jump out of the way of cars trying to run me down, sometimes while the kids were still crossing. Even with my little sign and vest, there was just no respect for that during rush hours. The school bus job was just as bad. I drove a short bus, bringing Jessie along for the ride. There were still no seat belts back then, and I was refused an aide. I had one girl who removed every item of clothing one at a time, throwing them out the bus window as I drove. Jessie soon learned to do that, too. By the time I reached my destination, I would have two naked girls. I had another girl who tried to run out of the bus every time I stopped to let someone on or off. I would open the door and lunge for her, holding her while she kicked and flailed at me and whoever was getting on or off. Once she got away and I had to flag down a passerby to chase her down and bring her back because I couldn’t leave the bus unattended. It was a zoo! Time and time again I requested back-up, but no help came. For a short while, the mom of a boy on crutches rode with me in the mornings. But that was short lived as he only needed the ride until he was off crutches. I finally gave up the bus driving job because they got tired of me complaining about the lack of an aide and decided to put me into the bus that drove to the projects. The woman who had driven that route before me had been attacked by the students and ended up in the hospital, so there was a vacancy. They assured me that I shouldn’t worry because they had now installed a radio, so I could call for help if needed. Although I enjoyed driving the buses, and mostly enjoyed the kids, that was the end of my bus driving career. Meanwhile, Paul was working nights at a high-rise private club as a chef and daytimes as a school cafeteria cook and manager. He had Sundays off and slept most of the day. Life had gotten very stressful there. We fought for much of the time he was awake, and my mother was once again starting to try to run my life, which was one of the reasons I had left originally. We realized that we needed to get out of there … again … so we started to plan the next move. Continuing with my recollections of my daughter’s early childhood …
During our time in California, she was exposed to tons of music. There were always street musicians downtown, and we had music playing at home constantly. Her favorite song at that time was “Jesse” by Janis Ian. Every time the lyric “Hey, Jesse” came on, which was the start of each verse, she would look up and smile or coo. She also went to numerous concerts both in utero and as a baby. On New Year's Eve in 1975, when she was 4 months old, we went to the Keystone in Berkeley for a concert with The Jerry Garcia Band. Because it was a small indoor venue, I decided it was too loud for her little ears, so we went to a back room where the volume was much less but I could still peek through the windowed door and see the show. Nicky Hopkins, who had played with The Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Quicksilver Messenger Service and too many more to name, was playing keyboards at this show. At intermission, he came out for a breather to this back room and hung out with us, eventually asking if he could hold my baby. Of course, I said yes, and was thrilled as she cooed and smiled at this awesome musician. When Jessie Lea was 8 months old, her dad (Paul) and I decided that we wanted to move to Oregon and try to get work in the orchards. In order to make that happen, Paul quit his job and hitchhiked north. Meanwhile, I moved out of our apartment, putting all of our possessions in storage, and lived in the park with our friend, Amber. She had a VW bus that we slept in and lived out of, but we spent most of our time outdoors. We had agreed that he would make phone calls to the pay phone outside of a nearby café, The Broken Egg Omelet House, every few days to let me know any progress he’d made and where to go when it was time for us to join him. This was well before the age of cellphones, so we set a day and time for the first call and planned the next each time we talked. I settled into an easy routine with Amber and Jessie, thoroughly enjoying our gypsy lifestyle. Amber had planned a visit to Connecticut to visit family, and Jessie and I were going to travel with her, coming west again in a few weeks to meet up with Paul, hopefully giving him enough time to settle before we reunited. To see all of our grand plans to fruition, these scheduled calls and the timing in general were crucial. When Paul missed a phone call a few days before we were due to leave, I started to panic. What should we do? The calls were scheduled one at a time. We hadn’t thought about what to do if we missed one. I stayed close to the pay phone all that day and the next day. I wasn’t willing to live in the park with my baby alone and without any vehicle to sleep in but was worried about leaving on a cross-country trip without checking in with Paul first. How would I find him again when we returned? We were hanging out in the park, the day before we were supposed to leave, when a waitress came running up asking if I was Debbie Cavanaugh. Thankfully, Paul was calling. The pay phone was out of order, so he had finally called the café. He let me know that he’d been unable to find work and was on his way back to Santa Cruz. We waited for him and all left two days later in Amber’s VW bus for the long ride back home to Connecticut. We decided to take a southern route since all three of us had arrived in California via the northern routes and wanted to see new sights. This was also before the days of seatbelts and car seats, so we set up a tiny play area on the floor in the back for Jessie. She actually took her first steps while we were driving down the highway. She could toddle back and forth in the moving vehicle but not on solid land, and I could see how confusing that was for her. I learned a lot during that trip about how to travel effectively with a young child. We made that whirlwind trip in three days, taking turns driving and sleeping, driving all night long, living on coffee. I drew the short straw and ended up with the middle of the night shift, so for three days, I drove at night and catnapped during the day between reading and playing with our young daughter. We only had one dangerous situation to handle during that trip but Jessie, who had been safe in the bus with Amber at the time, never had any notion of danger. We arrived in Connecticut only to find out that my parents were on vacation in New Hampshire. Ugh! It didn’t take me very long to get an address for the house they’d rented, and off we went to find them. When we got to the vacation house, no one was home. “Oh, no! What do we do now?” I suggested that we park the bus out of sight, behind the bushes and break into the house, surprising them when they came home. Looking back on it now, like so many other things, I realize how stupid that was. It’s amazing that my parents didn’t faint or have a heart attack or something. But, they didn’t. My mom screamed, then cried. My dad shook his head in disbelief then laughed. We had a wonderful visit and went back to our hometown with them. Paul and I got a gig at a local bar, had a great turnout and, in our youthful enthusiasm, decided that this must have been our “big break.” We decided to stay and left poor Amber to make the long drive back alone. My family were thrilled and helped us set up housekeeping, providing us with furniture and household goods, all the things that were locked up in a storage locker back in Santa Cruz, which we paid on for years to come. So far, in her first nine months, my daughter had hung out with many different people, lived in an apartment, in a city park and in a VW bus. She had learned to walk while crossing the country in a moving vehicle and was now settling close to her grandparents, who she barely knew, and moved into a very different environment. Luckily, she was raised to be flexible and was still quite young. At not yet a year old, she had already had more experiences than many adults have in a lifetime. Although I know she doesn’t remember these things, they helped mold who she would become. Stay tuned for the next installment, “A Year in Connecticut.” I was talking to my daughter this morning, bemoaning the fact that I’ve been struggling to come up with blog topics. She mentioned that one of the things that enriched her life the most and has made one of the most long-lasting effects was her exposure to alternative people and lifestyles. For some reason, that had never occurred to me until today, but it started me thinking about her childhood. She was born on the west coast after her dad and I had hitchhiked across the country. We weren’t really ready to settle down, as we had just started on our journey together, but we recognized the need to settle temporarily. We stayed in Santa Cruz, California for about a year and a half, long enough to acclimate to our new roles as parents. While there, we met all kinds of unique characters. There was a hippy couple with a baby girl very close in age to our daughter. Jewel and I became new mom companions. We were both young and newly settled there. She was 18 years old with long red hair. Her husband, Rain, was an older guy with long white hair, and their little girl was named Honey Tree. We thought of many alternative names for our daughter but decided that in 1975, we still didn’t know where we would go from there and wanted her to have a more traditional name. We all had long hair then. The women mostly wore long peasant skirts or patched jeans. Somewhere, I might still have a pair of old jeans from back then. Sometimes Jewel and I would meet in San Lorenzo Park with the two girls and just hang out watching the world go by. There was usually a lot to see because everybody used the park. The only homeless people that I had any real personal contact with were men. I don’t remember any homeless women, although I have a very vague memory of seeing a woman once out in the distance. A lot of people went missing in that area, so I assumed that the women stayed out of sight for their own safety. One of the regulars was a man who had at one time been a nuclear physicist and lost his mind. He had a steady, dependable income making a lot of money for that time. He had a loving family and was part of an active community. He woke up one day and realized what his job was actually doing in the world and just walked away from the whole scene. He now lived off the land, eating foods that were growing wild all around. He showed me rosemary growing wild in the park and in empty lots in town that I could use in my cooking. He was a very sad and brilliant man, eager to share his knowledge and his stories to have some personal connection, but he was tortured about his old life and couldn’t see past that sometimes. Then, there was “Moses”. I most often saw him in front of the Albertson’s grocery store. He was a very large man who would stand at the big windowed store front with his arms spread out above him, very loudly channeling the “Word of the Lord.” He’d go on for hours at a time, and no one could speak with him during those times. Sometimes little respectful crowds would gather. He was really interesting and cool to listen to. It always made the shopping experience unique to what I’d grown up with. I saw it as street art. When he was in the park, only a very few of us could actually talk with him at all. He was very peaceful and gentle-hearted but also withdrawn. He said it was exhausting having the word of God come through him. He told me that he lost control of his body at those times and was outside of himself not feeling any exhaustion in his arms until afterwards. He also usually lost his voice for a day or two after proselytizing. I think he spoke to me because I had a baby and was obviously safe. He mostly talked about spiritual things and first told me about the book Be Here Now by Ram Dass, formerly known as Richard Alpert (one of the pioneers of psychedelia). Downtown there was a pedestrian mall where you could find street musicians and artists. I found my favorite Bread Book in a free box in front of a funky bookstore there. I saw Arlo Guthrie playing on a street corner and turned another corner to be confronted by a street performer dressed in full combat gear. There was a lovely café that had a jazz band outdoors right in the front so that they were accessible to everyone walking by. I even sang “Summertime” with that band one time. And, I randomly ran into “Michael,” a homeless man we had picked up hitchhiking before our big adventure a year earlier, while we were still living in Connecticut. It was easy to meet people because everyone just hung out in these public places, sitting in little groups on the sidewalks, on park benches or strolling along. I learned things from all of the people I met there. Having grown up very shattered and sheltered, I was just starting to learn about life. There were activists, commune dwellers, musicians, artists, healers... In that short 18 or so months, I learned about wild foods, herbal healing, “health foods” and “whole grains”, motherhood, spiritual enlightenment, alternative politics, sexuality and so much more. My mind was not only expanding, it was exploding. I’m sure that it also had a profound effect on a newborn just discovering the world. In our lives were people of all shapes and sizes, all walks of life, all orientations, and that was before she turned one year. I wonder what she still holds with her from that specific time. There are other eventful and colorful times, but this was her earliest. She obviously doesn’t remember details, but the overall vibe of that time and place has helped mold her as it has me. I still grow rosemary because it doesn’t grow wild around here, and I’ve been used to having fresh rosemary since 1975. I practice spirituality rather than an organized religion and still own my copy of Be Here Now. I am comfortable with all people regardless of how they choose to live, and I have an amazing sense of danger when needed. I think I’ll think about each “era” individually. They are so rich! They deserve separate posts, so I guess this will be a series of posts as I wade through my past travels and think about the life my daughter was surrounded by. So, stay tuned. 😉 Thanks, Jes. |
Archives
January 2024
Categories
All
|