Looks Like the Island of the RedHood website is Down
Someone found my site for some stories I wrote about my days at the Island of the Red Hood. Those were times of peanut butter by the spoonful out of the jar. In fact, I learned that style right there in a circle of intelligent creative people. I would never call any of the people living on that scrapple land Hippies. In fact, I was a high achieving person with real artistic skills who chose to languish among the relaxed as an experiment in rural living community.
Richard Chalfin was following Maryhelen there because his penis directed him there. I did not have a penis pointing at or into me the whole time I lived in a closet off the Kitchen. My favorite memories are about the tin tub carried into the kitchen for an old western style bath. Wish I had a special drink while I soaked in twice used warm water. Did I ever get to be the first in the bath water? I guess, since I came with big handfuls of real cash, from my teaching job at Girls High in Philadelphia and the Parkway program, they acquiesced to my primary bathing position so that I would go along to the store and pay for the coffee and such.
What a time that was. People had direct contact with Owsley acid and seemed to float near the tips of the endless fields of green grass. I got letters from around the world because I was included in a Genius group. Imagine getting the amazing stories about mind reading in a 8 x 11 heavy brown envelope! What a treat. Though the whole thing was right out of a comic book, I took it all in stride. The real artists made pottery and the famous porcelain buttons. I have in the bottom of my sewing basket a paper card with a few white with green triangles handmade buttons. Did Mary Clair Richards make these buttons?
She was the real sophisticate in the circle. Wherever she was, she became the timber of the place. In the subways of NY City she seemed the upper east side and in the mountain folds of Hinton West Virginia she was a total mountain girl.
There was a nanu second when I looked around for a stone smith to learn how to shape the local stone so I could build a house that the big bad wolf would not blow down. But when some mountain men threatened my life if I wanted to learn their sacred mountain skills I thouoght twice and remembered that there were houses already built in the cradle of liberty that I called home before I took that first class red velvet train ride.
Going to the bathroom meant wrapping up and walking a while to the outhouse whose door was complete with a gibbous moon cut out. Grand vistas of clear crystal sparkling icy bold stars dusted the space every night. There was some important comet; I forget the name that fired across the night sky for several nights in a row. I am sure if someone was interested in knowing just which comet I saw the dates could be overlaid with the comet history. I do not have the time or interest I would lay on the grass wrapped in my heavy wool blankets and just look up. Serious, the most beautiful star was my favorite companion during the dreary uncoupled nights.
Whoever did the search for Island of the Red Hood did me a wondrous favor. Floods of stories have come splashing in my consciousness so there will be more scribbles. Would you please contact me since I would love to talk about the place and those times. Poets, painters and many sorts in between came and went in fashionable mint Saab convertibles as well as other more mountain worthy vehicles. I was so naive that I actually thought I was part of the group but found out rather quickly I did not have the right stuff. To this day I am marginalized by those still in semi contact with me!
on July 28, 2009 on 4:27 pm
I grew up not far from Hinton in Bluefield, which you may have heard of in your time on the “island.” I caught the tail end of the sixties, graduating high school in ‘69 and going off to a large state school in the Midwest where I abandoned God (a mistake) and everything my Dad ever told me (a correct choice).
From the looks of me I became a hippie and lived in semi-communal arrangements for a time that were actually a condition of homelessness more than anything. Yes, I figured out a way to kill Nixon and get away with it, tripped on acid to a point where it got kind of boring, smoked acres of pot in my time, and devolved to barbituates and amphetamines that should have killed me and almost did on two occasions. John Lennon also became my leader and also the one who pointed me to the fact that this, whatever this was, wasn’t getting it, and there had to be something else. The smugness of being hip and different and tuned in and turned on etc. was largely a load of crap.
Trips home to West Virginia brought me into contact with old friends who had embraced the waning counter-culture movement at the time. Fiddle conventions brought us together to smoke dope and ogle hippie chicks bathing nude in lakes and ponds.
It was on those trips that I heard about the Island of the Red Hood. (I’d love to know how it came to be named that.)
As a native West Virginian it fit into the life that most people, blinded by stereotypes out of “Deliverance,” don’t know is there: Volvo-wagon driving earth mothers and cleaned up hippies usually from D.C., but also points east as well.
Ok, it all went away. The McGovern volunteer who seriously contemplated throwing a brick through the nearest bank window on election night voted for Reagan the second time he ran; the runt who ingested incredible amounts of anything he could find felt a little silly tripping at age 27 and today at 57 can’t tolerate a Contac cold capsule; and John Lennon, for a time in his life as I later learned, had a serious heroin addiction.
Did all that and did the Island make you and me what we are? I can only speak for myself, of course. I wouldn’t trade any of it.
on July 28, 2009 on 7:33 pm
this note takes me back. It is lovely to see the trails I circumnavigated since birth.
on August 5, 2009 on 5:09 pm
How strange.
In a conversation I was having today about an aquaintance whose name I could not remember but knew her from the Island of the Red Hood.
With the touch of a key I find this blog. Of course it does not help me remember the name of the artist but it was still fun to find.