-
Passing It Down
- West Virginia University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
244 9 Passing it Down A lthough most of the back-to-the-land migration happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s, its impact was still evident in the 1980s. Stories of the work parties,the social gatherings,and the community spirit became lore and were passed down to folks half a generation younger. These young adults were not old enough to fight in the Vietnam War or to participate in the protests against it, but they watched both on television. They weren’t necessarily children of Depression-era parents, but they read Mad magazine and saw The Graduate lampooning their parents’ mindset all the same. These hippie-wannabe adolescents didn’t work in big cities, but they felt the crush of urbanization vicariously when others complained of it. Glenn Singer – Performer One artisan, Glenn Singer, came to the Mountain State ten years later than most, but spiritually he says he feels at one with those he followed. I never heard Glenn speak in the first few years I knew him, but he communicated eloquently with his expressions and actions. He was performing as a white-faced mime in the Marcel Marceau tradition at the Mountain State Art & Craft Fair, where he strolled the grounds juggling and clowning. Today, over lunch at his log home in Lewisburg, he’s full of conversation, telling me how a friend’s yarns of her life in West Virginia caused him to come in 1980 to see for himself. He and Mikki Burrows had lived in the same apartment complex in Glenn’s hometown, Newark, Delaware. Yet Glenn was looking for something he hadn’t found in the 245 Passing it Down rolling Andrew Wyeth countryside around Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River Valley. He was entranced by Mikki’s tales of West Virginia’s natural beauty, the laid back lifestyle among the homesteaders she had known there, and the possibility of getting back to the land to live cheaply. When she returned to the state, Glenn came to visit her and then moved to West Virginia a few months later. It took a few tries before he found what he was looking for. First, he stopped in Hinton, where he parked his car in front of the high school, took out his camp stove, and made his dinner. He hoped someone would come by who could tell him about the town, to help him decide if it was for him. No one came. Next, he went to Renick in Greenbrier County, where his friend lived, but stopped along the way when he saw a real estate sign. He called the broker, and she told him of a farmhouse in nearby Friar’s Hill, which he subsequently rented for the next four years. There he found a whole community of people who had arrived in the 1970s, and he felt at home. Because Glenn had saved two thousand dollars working as a cook before he arrived, and had a car, he was free to just settle in to decide what he wanted to do with his life. Now he tells his own stories of the work parties , the gardening, the communally built houses, and the social life that echo those of his predecessors. Earlier settlers Bob Zacher, Carli Mareneck, and others are still friends from those halcyon days. The son of a rocket scientist and a Catholic church administrator, he knew he didn’t want to be either of those things. Instead, he wanted to be a performer, to become a mime. When he told people that and they asked how he planned to do it in West Virginia, he said he didn’t know, but would figure it out. And figure it out he did.“I wasn’t here for two or three months until I heard that just three hours north of me in Elkins was the International Mime Festival,” he recalls. “The entire world of stuff I cared about was in West Virginia. They were all coming from all over the world to West Virginia, where I had run away to, to be close to nature, so I went.” Later that year, he returned to Elkins to attend dance classes during the Augusta Heritage Festival and studied there for the next two years. And he practiced.“I lived on this beautiful fifty-acre farm in Friar’s Hill,”he recalls. “Across this field, about a football field away from me was a big stand of [44.193.11.123] Project MUSE (2024-03...