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CHAPTER 15 Hit The Road Again, Jack W ithin an hour or so, well after midnight, I was out of there, walking to midtown Manhattan to hitchhike out of town. I decided on the spur of the moment to head for East Lansing, where I expected I still had some friends, where I hadn’t been for four years, and where I believed, incorrectly, I still had a box of treasured goods in storage in someone’s basement. I was, needless to say, quite disoriented and despondent. I made it to East Lansing by the next afternoon, barely more than driving time, and started walking around town, assuming I would run into someone I knew before long. I did, indeed, find friends almost immediately, and before long I was installed as a stay-as-long-asyou -like guest in the home of two longtime friends. It was April 1972, and I thought it was the beginning of the rest of my life. I still have a letter I wrote to my mother shortly after I arrived in East Lansing, telling her the truth of why I had quickly canceled a plan to have dinner with her and my brother. Apparently I had asked for that meeting in order to press them to “invest” in Fort Hill’s anticipated purchase of the house next door to the existing one in New York. In my letter, I tell the story of my demotion and justify my sudden move (“This really seems like the right thing for now, even though my heart still belongs to Fort Hill and to Mel if he can ever use it again”) and give the details of the investment request, which I say “would be about the kindest thing you could do for me, and for everyone in the New York community.” That old fidelity dies hard. After a few days of getting used to where I was and paying for my friends’ hospitality by painting their kitchen for them, I started looking for work. I was quickly hired onto a crew that was framing a bunch of houses in Lansing, and borrowed money to buy a hammer and tape measure, the minimum tools I needed. Then came a phone call from my old friend and nemesis Eric, in New York, who had figured out where I probably was and had found me on the first attempt. He was authorized to invite me back to New York to get myself together and get ready to move to the community’s farm in Kansas. Was I interested? It was another of those moments. If I had been just a little bit more established in East Lansing, or if I had achieved just a little more understanding of the psychic dilemma I had been in for years, I might have turned him down. But I did not. I immediately accepted and headed for 128 | Chapter 15 the highway again. Back in New York, I got help from my family; my brother hired me to do some carpentry work to make traveling money, and my mother gave me an old car she no longer needed, a roadworthy Chevy sedan. I felt grateful for the chance to take “basic training” at the farm, to have an identity again. I spent a week or two getting ready, and then left for Kansas along with crazy Rita, Mel’s former lady who had lived in my house on Fort Hill. Considering the unlikely twosome we made, the trip was relatively uneventful, and our reception at the farm was warm. I remember clearly the all-American hominess of my first few days there, which made me believe, at last, the community had found a place where I could be comfortable and valued. Curiously, I have no memory of Rita after we arrived at the farm. My guess is she must have stayed only long enough to hitch a ride to one of the other “homes”; certainly she was not cut out for living in a place where one had to attend daily to the physical necessities of life. I felt good being received into the comparatively low-pressure environment of rural Kansas, albeit Fort Hill’s version of that. The few people at the farm were all familiar to me, to one degree or another, and the necessities of the moment were relatively achievable: make a home in this new place, employing simple, old-fashioned technologies as much as possible (for example, we removed an...

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