A Hippie Comes Home
By Suzanna Leigh
The end of my sojourn with the Pilgrims Christian Commune in Hawaii came when a man from the home church on the mainland came to speak to us. Along with some possibly prejudiced prophecies about the coming end of the world, he told us that Ken, the head of Pilgrims, was an apostle, and that we should obey him like we would obey the apostles in the Bible.
That didn’t sound right to me, from my reading of the Bible.
I pondered his words as I walked on the beach afterwards. The setting sun touched on a cowrie shell, and I picked it up. As I admired its cream and brown pattern, a seabird’s cry reminded me of the seagulls on the Vashon beaches, and the cowrie shell seemed to turn into a clam shell in my hand. It was time to go home.
James and I arrived on Vashon in January of 1975, after almost a year in Hawaii. I was dressed in a long muumuu and carried in my heart the teachings from my time with the Pilgrims. I felt like I had been sheltered in the protected environment of the commune like a plant in a greenhouse. I reasoned that if the teachings were true, they would hold true out in the real world. It was time to test them.
My parents welcomed me home, and I stayed with them while I figured out my next step. My first need was transportation. Ladybug, my sweet little black Karmann Ghia, which I sold to Davey Powers when I left for Hawaii, had been wrecked, resurrected with a 55 gallon drum for its front, and painted blue. Even if I wanted to buy her back, she was in Arizona, in service of Davey and his brother Boone’s prospecting venture.
Craig’s List to the rescue, or more likely it was the classified ads in The Beachcomber.
The Cows of Gladness, my 18-foot open sailboat was waiting for me in Joe Furbush’s yard, so I advertised that I wanted to trade it for a vehicle. That’s how a 1967 VW van, with all the lessons it had to teach me, came into my life.
Now that I had a vehicle, it was time explore the question, “Who am I now?”
Art called me back to herself. In spite of having spent a year at the Advertising Art Institute in Portland, Oregon years ago, and recording much of my life in sketches since then, I had done almost no art in Hawaii. Time to change that. I joined my mom in weekly portrait painting sessions at a friend’s studio. Sometimes I drew and sometimes I modeled for a life drawing class. I learned to make stained glass windows in the old Odd Fellows Hall which was now Vashon Center for the Arts. All very soul-nourishing, but what about money for rent, etc.?
I trained as a bus driver for the Vashon schools. Ideally, this would give me time to work on my art between bus runs, while James was in school. Only one thing stopped me. Kids are noisy. I don’t function well in a noisy environment. I had to let that opportunity go.
Then Davey came back from Arizona, all fired up about making his fortune in gemstones. He and Boone planned to mine their own stones, cut them, polish them, and sell them or make them into jewelry. Davey wanted me to be part of that dream. At first I told him “No,” but he persisted and my thirst for adventure kicked in. I agreed to visit his fire opal claim in Oatman, Arizona.
Davey built a bed in my VW van and put together a traveling kitchen consisting of a cooler, a camp stove, and a wooden box for storing cookware and utensils. I baked granola and a batch of nutritious oatmeal cookies for the road trip. We bought vegetables and yogurt to put into the cooler and a few staples to store in the box with the cookware. I arranged for James to stay with my parents, and in mid-April, we left the green forests of Vashon for the desert cactus of Arizona.
