I Would Never Have a Home, Part 1

Mr. Edmunds, founder of Emerson College, Sussex, England once told me that I would never have a home because I would always be at home everywhere. I was a little pissed off when he said that. It was at my exit interview. He was a little disappointed in me. "I thought you would have come around by now." he said. "What the fuck are you talking about?" I said.

Very productive conversation, by and large. I had had a horrible/wonderful year at Emerson. I felt too confined by England. Although Sussex is extremely beautiful, everything was too small for me. In the stores, they sold raisins in tiny little bags, for instance. I had been living in Oregon where you bought meat by the half cow, grains by the fifty pound bag, milk by the gallon. In Sussex, it took ten stores to get enough food for breakfast...the greengrocer, the dairy, the tea store and so on. Now this is how I love to shop. I hate big stores, but then I was in culture shock.

Actually it was a bad set up from the beginning. Patrick wanted to further his study of Anthroposophy. We had an almost two year old daughter. Emerson College wrote back when Patrick applied that it would probably be best if Patrick came and left me and Ariel in Oregon. The school didn't really want the bother of families. Well, this didn't fly with us or, as it turned out, with many other people. The year was 1972 or there about. In the USA we were coming down from raging hippie, antiwar protests, the health food revolution, and were collectively looking for something more, something spiritual, not produced by LSD and dope.

We had a plan for the summer before. We were going to go to Mexico and live in Cuernivaca with our dear friend Lee Perron and study with Ivan Illich. We would drive down in our 1966 Volkswagen Beattle and fly to England from Mexico.We took our little orange tent and our wok and headed down the west coast. We camped out each night on a different fabulous beach. I was sublimely happy. Everything was easy, beautiful, sunny (after 2 winters in Oregon!). I was very excited about the Mexico gig. P. was excited about the England thing.

When we got to the Mexico boarder ran into big trouble. There was a terrible epidemic of Equine Encephalitis and dead animals were floating down the rio Grande river. The boarder people told us that adult people were not getting very ill but that babies and little children were dying from this. We had little Ariel. Lee was already set up in Cuernivaca and waiting for us. We hung out at the boarder trying to figure out the risks. We read that eating beans with their vitamin B was a good preventative for mosquito bits. Finally, I couldn't do it. We turned around and went back to Oregon.