A retirement home for hippies
Stephen Gaskin is the founder of the hippie commune The Farm and the adjacent retirement home Rocinante.
It is four o'clock in the afternoon, heavy clouds are hanging over the forest, it will rain soon, and Gayla smells like hash. She is 51, wearing a purple blouse and jeans, her long gray hair tied to a braid. She has just checked her e-mails.
stands in front of her tiny cabin in the middle of the forest in Tennessee, southwest of Nashville. There is no mailbox, but internet. The rain regularly turns the forest floor into a slide. The people live in small wooden huts, six of them so far, and this wood-shed village in the middle of the forest is their retirement home. It's called Rocinante, after the stubborn horse of Don Quixote. A commune for aging hippies.
Donnie is Gayla's neighbor, sometimes he works naked in his garden. Melissa, who lives on in the house, loves the little garden that Donnie created for her. And Rick, Gayla's ex-husband, has also settled here. He spends many of his nights catching raccoons that want to rip his chickens and shooting them with the rifle.
Gayla got up early this morning when no sunbeam penetrated the forest, but the first birds were chirping. She made herself a breakfast she calls "cave diet," nuts and berries, no fruit, no sugar, and sits outside the cabin. Sometimes Gayla does not get up until nine in the morning, sometimes around noon, sometimes she prefers listening to Mozart for hours rather than having breakfast. Sometimes she works through the nights, she then edits books. The last, about ethanol as a gasoline substitute, has just appeared. But there are also days when she does not work at all.
Gayla Groom, 51, is actually too young for the hippie retirement home. But she suffers from multiple sclerosis. "Rocinante is a place of peace for me," she says.
She sometimes advises her neighbors on whether it makes sense to send another e-mail to Ted Turner or Bob Dylan to solicit financial support for the expansion of Rocinante, and sometimes she criticizes the American war economy over a cup for an afternoon Soymilk coffee or discussed basic questions about the free development of animals. And sometimes she just solves crossword puzzles all day long. Calm down crossword puzzles.
"Rocinante is a place of peace for me," says Gayla, "there is a place for me to live here, meaningful living here."
Gayla is in his early 50s much too young for this kind of hippie retirement home. But she suffers from multiple sclerosis. So she was faced with the question of where there is a place that is made for someone like her, an interface between self-development and care, between irrepressible individualism and the nest heat of a community.
"I just do not have the feeling of having a steam engine in the rear that wants to force me back into the company."
Big plans: only a few individual wooden huts are scattered in the forest. Soon there will be a communal kitchen and a concert stage
Rocinante is not an ordinary retirement home. It has no nursing staff and no wake-up calls, no common room and no car service. Soon it will expand, so the inhabitants are safe. Electricity is already laid for 25 houses, there should be a communal garden, a communal kitchen and a small concert stage, namely, when other hippies reach the age that they used to dread.
In Rocinante, people should also live in old age, as they have always lived - and thus the project is not alone in the US There are now retirement homes for homosexuals, for vegetarians, for Jews and conservative Catholics, there is one for anarchist New - Pagans and north of Los Angeles one for retired pilots who houses a runway and a hangar on the property. According to statistics from the New York Times, about 8,000 Americans reach the age of 60 every day. 8,000 people who do not want to be kept, instead of living. Rocinante is part of the hippie community The Farm, founded 36 years ago by a trek of homeless hippies from California. They had made their way through the country in retired school buses in the summer of 1971, so they stayed here because a farmer offered them his land.
Marilyn Harris runs a bed and breakfast and decorates her garden with Buddhas and towels.
The former teachers, doctors and physicists started to plant potatoes, soybeans, corn, apple trees, they learned to handle chainsaws, laid 26 kilometers of water pipes and continued to practice free love and services of self-enlightenment. Their salary they gave to the community, no one wore a purse on the farm.But life in school buses and tents was cumbersome, and so the ideals of equality and modesty increasingly collided with reality. Of the 1200 hippies who came, 200 were left. Meanwhile, it is a loose group of 50 small houses that lie modestly in the nature on an area of almost seven square kilometers, under trees, between hedges, as if they were just visiting. 15 minutes walk is The Farm of Rocinante. No one lives in a school bus anymore.
Stephen Gaskin is the founder of the farm and also the retirement home Rocinante. At one point, Gaskin, the cowboy son, the Korea veteran, former teacher, prison inmate, and allegedly close friend of former presidential candidate Ralph Nader, suddenly realized that more and more ailing hippies were leaving the community because old age forced them back into the society against which they were always were.
Gaskin is a lean, tall man, seventy-two years old, his thin white hair still falling halfway down his back, and he's straight-faced, wearing orange sunglasses and a scarf in a 1973 sports car and riding across the grounds. Wide, undulating meadows and old, tall trees, most residents ride bicycles, all greet each other. It is quiet, the loudest croaking the frogs. Stephen Gaskin shows the farm's soymilk production, shiitake mushroom cultivation for the mail order business, which used to be a potato barn. The hippies have long since given up farming and growing fruit, instead they have founded a school with a solar roof, a farm shop, a self-publisher for esoteric books and a midwife center.
Rocinante is right next to the farm. The state grants the old special conditions. The land could buy them cheap. "Anyone who can finance a new lodge can live here, but when it dies, it becomes joint ownership and can be rented for $ 75 a month," explains Stephen Gaskin.
"And here people can just rest and do not have to keep the community afloat." Mühsam was the beginning, but meanwhile Gaskin gets requests from all over the country. Only he himself can not live on Rocinante, as the founder of the community he may not favor himself, the tax office has explained.
The Hippie-Kommune also has a small farm shop.
Gaskin stops on a hill in the middle of the forest, his sports car stuttering. "This is where the community house is supposed to stand, it's so sunny here, and right here," I'm planning an amphitheater, I want to have huts here for another hundred of them in five years. " Hippies, of course, who can walk naked through the forest, who have dedicated themselves to individuality and yet are there for each other. Help each other and - yes, that too: love each other. Gayla has lived for three years in her small brown hut among tall pine trees, surrounded by the vast fields of southern Tennessee.
Before that, she lived most of the time, as she says, "free, self-chosen life". "I never shaved my shoulders, never used hairspray, just bought my clothes secondhand." She enjoyed free love, used purple light bulbs, smoked marijuana. She was poor, all her life, she wanted it that way. Her family, middle-class Illinois officials, has outlawed her. She also believed hippies were funded by the Chinese state bank. In fact, after dropping out, Gayla had accepted a job as a secretary in a law firm in the progressive city of Portland, Oregon.
There she got to know her first husband, her second, she had three children, in the meantime she lived in a hippie community in California, then again in Oregon, she started to work as an editor, and then the problems started. It started with fatigue, forgetfulness. Things fell off her, people started to look at her crookedly, Gayla noticed. She broke up with her husband Rick, with whom she's now friends again, or he separated from her and why, she does not remember. Once she forgot to edit a third of a book. She tried again as a secretary in Virginia, but because she sometimes did not work for days, "I was no longer acceptable as a worker". For a long time, she did not receive a medical diagnosis or help because she has no health insurance.
When she tells her story, it sounds like Gayla talking about another person. She sits in front of her hut in concentration, the dogs Marino and LJ paint around her legs, she serves tea and often laughs, especially about herself. She looks like a healthy person, "as healthy as it has been since I live here, since I have my pace ".
"Mom is so much happier since she's here," says her daughter Molly, 17. She's moved here with Gayla and attends the public school of the farm. "In the past few years, I have often been in foster care, but now I am back with my mother, in nature, I love it," says Molly. The love for nature and the community connects the hippies to Rocinante.
Donnie Rainbow - what a name for a hippie! The 64-year-old has built his house by hand - from cork oak and cow dung.
Gayla's neighbor Melissa calls Donnie every morning to tell him she's still alive. Donnie Rainbow, he's a name for a hippie, 64, former foreman at General Motors, three quarters of his stomach are gone, he broke his cervical spine trying to free Gayla's roof of pine needles. The ladder tipped over, a rescue helicopter took him out of the forest.
Melissa Dorlain, 50, lives only 30 meters away from his house, which he built himself by hand using a Norwegian construction technique of cork oak and cow dung. A charming little house with tall windows that overlook the garden, Donnie's centerpiece.
He is something like Melissa's caregiver. In a way, maybe her husband, he says. He massages her, the former massage therapist from Nashville, who allegedly included the famous entertainer Bob Hope among her clients, evening after night, even though Melissa does not even notice much of it. She has Huntington's disease, a nervous disease, she will die from it. Until recently, Donnie drove her to go shopping, but the car has given up his mind, and he has no money for a new one.
Melissa (left) calls Donnie every morning to tell him she's still alive. The former massage therapist is suffering from an incurable disease. Neighbor Donnie takes care of her.
"Melissa, I would also wipe my ass off when it comes to that, I'm not looking forward to it, but I would do it." Donnie is short and thin, has a long braid, and sits on the tailgate of his broken, red pickup truck, talking about the others in Rocinante. Rick, the former manager, the two lesbians from Orlando and Linda, who imagines she has a stalker and therefore does not talk to anyone.
"Life here is not just sugar," he says. "But being part of the community, helping out, going to the farm and shopping or helping others in the garden," he says after a pause, "is worth it, where else would I live - for $ 75 I could not live anywhere else, I'm a hippie, I just want it - hey, Melissa ... "
Melissa suddenly stands there in a yellow spotted T-shirt with a big sun hat on her head. She sits down on the hatch beside Donnie and hugs him. Butterflies and bumblebees fly around them and through their garden, over the lilies, potatoes and tomatoes. Donnie has set up a small corner for Melissa where she can water the plants. She forgets that in her own garden.
An engine starts, Gayla comes down to Donnie's house, she wants to go shopping in the next town, Columbia, 20 kilometers away. "Can I bring you something?" She calls, "Soap or toilet paper, next time I'll be driving in four weeks."
Gayla, Melissa, Donnie. Perhaps it is not bad to approach death in the middle of the forest, free and independent. They even have a small cemetery, which already houses Dawn, the former girlfriend of commune founder Stephen Gaskin. Melissa wants to be buried here, under a pine tree, only wrapped in a sheet, so that her body can quickly become earth. Donnie would rather be burned, and the ashes should be scattered over his lilies. Gayla does not think about dying. "I am grateful that I can still help make the world a bit friendlier." It points towards the farm, in the direction of an old shed. On the roof stands in rainbow colors: "Wake up and live!"
