T. Boyle - Drop City

You couldn't have everything, she told herself. Nobody could.

Reba and Merry were working alongside her, in the garden they'd fertilized with goat pellets and fish heads, the garden Norm had told them to forget about because the growing season up here was maybe a hundred days max and thirty of those days were in June, already dead and gone. But what they thought-the women, all the women together-was why not give it a try? Maybe they'd get lucky. Maybe there'd be a late frost this year, maybe the round-the-clock sunlight would magically accelerate the whole process of sprouting, maturing, fruiting. They worked like lunatics to get a patch of ground cleared and planted by the tenth of July, concentrating on cool season vegetables-turnips, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts-but also laying in potatoes, sugar snap peas, zucchini and pumpkin. And pot, of course. The pot plants were already two feet high and rising up so fast you could almost see them growing, and even if they didn't have a chance to bud there'd at least be the leaves and stems.

What they were doing at the moment was unrolling the big sheets of black plastic Lydia and Harmony had gone into Fairbanks for and Ronnie had brought upriver in the speedboat. The stuff came in rolls a foot in diameter and two and a half feet long, and it was perforated every couple of feet so you could rip off a sheet and use it to line your trash can out in the garage of your split-level home on your quarter-acre plot in a tree-lined suburb. But they didn't have trash cans out here-or they did, but they were strictly for storing things like lentils, rice and oats out of reach of the mice that seemed to be everywhere-and they were using long carpets of the plastic to insulate the ground around their plants, a trick they'd picked up from Pamela Harder.

And that was something totally unexpected-Pamela. She and Star couldn't have been more different-she was older, born and raised in Alaska, she didn't do drugs, or not yet, anyway, and she'd never heard of The Band or Crosby, Stills and Nash, let alone Abbie Hoffman or Gloria Steinem, the Fillmore East, roach clips, mellow yellow, Keith Richards or Mick Jagger even-and yet when Star took a canoe downriver for a visit, she felt as if she were sitting with one of her own sisters, it was that relaxed. They settled in with a pot of tea at the picnic table out by the river while Sess split wood or fed the dogs or went off someplace with his gun, and they just talked, and that was nice, because Pamela was starved for the company, and for Star it was a break from the routine, from the same faces and the same little tics and grievances and the gossip and rumors she'd heard a hundred times already.

“I don't want you to get the impression that I'm not happy here,” Pamela told her the first time she'd taken the canoe out just to get a little breathing space and then seen the smoke and heard the dogs and thought she might just stop in and say hello, because why not, they were both women, weren't they? They'd already finished a cup of tea each, and Pamela, nudging a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies across the table, paused to measure out two cups more. “Because I am. I'm the happiest woman in the world. It's just that Sess-well, he's used to being alone out here and sometimes he gets into a yes and no mode, and no matter what I say he just nods his head and gauges whether yes or no or sometimes maybe is what I want to hear. You know what I'm saying?”

The tea was like fuel, so sweet and strong it made your teeth ache. Star gazed off across the river to where the sun illuminated the trunks of the trees like slats in a fence, the dark shapes of birds swarming there like insects, everything placid but for the sharp intermittent rap of Sess's hammer from somewhere behind the cabin. “Sure,” Star said, coming back to her, to her tanned face and chipped nails and big work-hardened hands stroking the cup, to her eyes that were like rooms you could live in, “and that's what I mean about Drop City, about having your own brothers and sisters around all the time-especially sisters.”

“Never a dull moment, huh?”

Star opened up her million-kilowatt smile. “Oh, no, never.”

“You don't get on each other's nerves?”

“We do, of course we do. That's part of it. Norm says the biggest lesson is in just learning to think alike, to anticipate, to _give,__ you know what I mean? And the flow. That's important too. To feel the flow and know you're not just a me anymore.”

“Is that it, then? Is that what you're trying to accomplish-kill off your ego?”

The question had taken her by surprise. She'd never really thought in terms of a clear-cut goal you could reduce to a single phrase or really even explain to anybody-she was drifting, like anybody else, hoping to break on through if she was lucky. She set down the cup and spun a globe out of her hands. “It's the earth, I guess,” she said. “Nature. You know, rejecting material things and living close to nature so you can feel the heartbeat of God-or whatever you want to call that force, Gaia, the oneness of being, nirvana. And my brothers and sisters are part of it-they're my support group and I'm theirs. I mean, just look at me-I'm sitting here by this out-of-sight river in this amazing place having a cup of tea with you, and that's something I never would have been able to do on my own.”

“But the hair,” Pamela said. “What about the hair and the weird clothes and all that? And the drugs? What does that have to do with getting back to nature?” She paused to light a cigarette, store-bought, out of the shiny cardboard box. Star watched her shake out the match and drop it to the dirt under the table. “You know what getting back to nature to me is? Just this, living day to day, working hard and taking what the land gives you, and that has nothing to do with face paint or LSD or bell-bottom pants…”

Star shrugged. “I don't know, it's hard to explain. It's just hip, that's all.”

Pamela worked the cup between her hands, and it was her turn to gaze out over the river. She sighed. “It takes all kinds, I guess.”

Star was going to agree, but she wasn't sure if the comment was a not-so-subtle dig, as in _It takes all kinds and you people are a bunch of greasy freaks and dopeheads who ought to pack up your beads and your sandals and head back to California before the going gets rough.__ And then she was going to say, _And what kind are you?__ but in that moment it dawned on her that Pamela was just like them. She wasn't buying into the plastic society, she wasn't going to live the nine-to-five life in a little pink house in the suburbs and find her meat all wrapped up in plastic for her at the supermarket. She'd done that-worked in an office in downtown Anchorage-and she'd dropped out just as surely as anybody at Drop City had. She was pretty, she was smart, she knew what she wanted-she was confident, that's what she was, confident in a way Star had never been, and that was something to aim for. The thought came to her: What if there were no Marco, no Norm, no Drop City? Would she be able to go out into the world and survive? Or was she just another _chick__ newly hatched from the egg, all fluffy and warm and helpless?

But here she was out under the open sky nailing down strips of black plastic to feed the heat of the sun to the garden, working just as hard as any _cat__ on the place, and you could hardly call that helpless. And when she was done with that she was going to haul buckets of water up from the river and dump them at the base of each plant, and when that was finished she was going to milk the goats, whip up a batch of fried rice and teriyaki salmon for lunch and pick a bucket of highbush cranberries and put them up in wax-sealed jars with a scoop of white cane sugar out of the ten-pound bag and two jiggers of brandy each, and when _that__ was done, well, she'd see what the rest of the day would bring.