An Alternative Education, Part 2

(Off the Rochester Road [Kentucky Highway 70] a few miles southwest of Morgantown)

Kent stayed on with us at The Lonesome Pine for at least a month. I remember delivering coal to families in the country who couldn’t afford it, so they could keep their houses heated. We helped folks with the paperwork for filing income tax forms or applying for food stamps and Medicaid. Sometimes we’d just pay visits to people. One old guy that we sometimes visited had sold his house in Boston and acquired land deep in the woods, as far off the grid as one could get. We had to walk a half mile on a trail through thick woodland to reach his shack. He was a cantankerous old coot who had forsaken the modern world, a recluse who insisted on giving us packs (even cartons) of non-filtered Lucky Strikes as we were preparing to leave. I took to smoking them and didn’t really quit until I got married. 

I enjoyed driving around the countryside. Walt would rig up some hooptie for us to borrow. Once we’d had to switch off a bad tire on an old blue Dodge Coronet. I guess I didn’t tighten the lug nuts properly, because the wheel came off about a mile down the road, just went rolling right past us. I wouldn’t call the landscape beautiful but it had character, even the abandoned strip mines being stubbornly reclaimed by vegetation, even the unauthorized garbage dumps located in wooded ravines off the road. The people were the same way – not classically pleasing to the eye but feisty, full of character. When we’d get up to end a visit, folks would say to us, “Now, y’all stay a spell.” It took me a while to learn that was just their way of saying good-bye.

Kent also introduced us to his friend Roger Givens. Roger was not Catholic, but he lived next door to the church. He was divorced, had two children and a reliable supply of pot. We became good friends. We got to know Allen and Pat Berkowetz, a young hippie couple from New York trying to get back to the land. We would have parties out at The Lonesome Pine. Walt and Betty would show up, Roger and whatever woman he was with at the time, Allen and Pat, various other folks. The Glenmary clergy were not invited. There’d be considerable drinking and wild dancing. We would open up a room that we did not otherwise use or heat. The sloping floor would undulate like a funhouse when we danced in there. We must’ve had a copy of Sly and the Family Stone’s album Stand! because I can remember grooving to “Sing a Simple Song” and getting down to ”I Want To Take You Higher.”

A friend of Kent’s from Hudson, Sandy [Ian] Frazier, stopped by on his way from Florida to Ohio and bore witness to one of these parties. He wrote about it in a New Yorker piece entitled “Out of Ohio” (Jan. 10, 2005). I’ll let him tell the story:

In late afternoon, I arrived at the slant-floored mountain shack Kent had rented, and I was so tired that I immediately lay down and fell asleep on a bed in a side room. It happened that Kent was having a party for the entire community that night. As the guests came in, they piled their coats on top of the bed, on top of me. At the party’s height a man and a woman entered the room and closed the door and, not knowing I was there, lay down on the coats and began to talk about the extramarital affair they were having. I emerged from sleep to the sound of the French-movie-type dialogue: “Oh, Roger, I’ve felt like crying for the last three days!” “Oh, Arliss [mumble, mumble, mumble].” Then suddenly the door opened, and from it, like a superloud PA system, the voice of the outraged husband: “Get out of that fuckin’ bed, Roger!” The two men adjourned outside for a fistfight while the woman stayed on the coats, sobbing. I began to stir, poking part of my head out from under. The sobbing stopped, silence; then, in complete bafflement, “Who’s he?”

His account of the scene is mostly right: “Mountain shack” was an exaggeration.

Eventually, Kent went on with his life. Bill also decided to return to Akron by the end of March. His explanation for leaving early was that he was homesick; after all, he had a girlfriend back in Akron. He might have been a bit freaked out by our living situation. A feral cat would sometimes crawl under the house in the middle of the night and yowl. Bill thought it sounded like a baby crying, which it did, but Kent and I built that up into a story about a dead baby haunting the house, inspired by all the ghost stories that we’d hear thereabouts. We even found a chest of baby clothes in the attic crawl space to confirm our story. Bill also might have been frustrated by the lack of focus of our work, which didn’t bother me much because I was just having too good a time living this life so different from the suburban middle-class world I’d known. In any case, by April I was on my own. I decided to plant long rows of sweet corn, green beans, and tomatoes in the garden space between the house and a tobacco barn. And it was about this time that Roger and I began to make plans to open a teen center in Morgantown. Other than the one pool hall, there was nothing for teens to do in town, so they would drive the 25 miles down to Bowling Green, buy a twelve-pack of beer, and then drink it while driving the fairly basic loop around town. Lots of DUIs and car accidents would ensue.