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Mully: I had answered the phone, and I immediately said, “Yes!” I thought to myself, “I am not going to talk to anybody about this, we’re just saying yes.”

Of course Skip and I did talk later, but we were already going. So Skip and I came up here to visit at Thanksgiving.  There was nothing on that road except forest and one elementary school. The farm had a beautiful red barn, a small house and a smaller house tucked back behind the main house. Behind the twenty-six acres were more woods where some “artists” lived. They called it Fairyland.

So we decided to move but didn’t know how to pay for it. Back in California, I was working at the Blue Fairyland with this guy, Mark.  We were all volunteering actually.  We were making birdhouses for Christmas and I was making a wagon for Cere. It was an airplane wagon because she is a girl so she needed an airplane.

We were talking about money and somehow we started talking about one thousand dollars. He asked me, “What would you do with a thousand?” I said, “I would rent a U-Haul truck, move to this island farm, fix up my bus and have a little money to live on. We went on with our conversation and I never thought about it again.

A week later, he handed me an envelop with ten one hundred dollar bills in it. I was clueless and speechless. I hadn’t known how we were going to move to the island, I just knew we would, and so we did. We rented a moving truck, Robby had his pick up, I had the Volkswagen bus, that I had just rebuilt down on Batman street. We stuffed every vehicle with our things, Cere and the cat, and drove up in February.  Bob flew.

As soon as we reached the island, my Volkswagen died,  apparently I needed a little more knowledge and a few more skills. Skip and Robby were ahead of me. I saw a Shell gas station just up the hill from the ferry so I put the bus in neutral and pushed it into the station lot. I went inside and asked the old guy if I could leave it there, then hitchhiked the rest of the way to the house. There was snow on the ground, and it was cold, but I was happy when I saw people had come to help us unpack.

We were the new arrivals to this “alternative community;” formed of other “disaffected youth” that had arrived battle worn and weary from their struggles in the “main stream” of America.

That night we were invited for dinner in Fairyland!  The land was absolutely pristine. We walked back through all the snow. There were no footprints or anything. The pond was frozen. There was moonlight on the snow.  I had to pinch myself to believe this was REAL, and I was really here, and so lucky!

We went back through the twenty-six acres, through this little gate, through the forest of tall dark conifers, out into this little meadow where there was this darling little cabin lit with candles and kerosene lamps.  Inside was an old fashioned cook stove providing warmth for the room and heat for the lasagne that Iris and her little cherub daughter, Luna, had made for dinner. We had arrived in Fairyland. I was just like, “Wow!”

We got up the next morning, Skip and I made love, and we conceived our son, Oliver. It was my twenty-seventh birthday. That was the day, February 7th, 1972. I had arrived on the island, my Saturn was returning, and life was beginning again, as the wheel turns.

My whole focus was to go back to the country, figure out my spirituality, and to figure out how to support women. Like I said, I didn’t think it was men’s fault. I wasn’t one of those kinds of feminists that thought children were bad and marriage was oppressive, it was not that simple.

Still I had these beliefs of how I wanted to support women and they really began to manifest once I got to the island.

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