The goat ate datura and fell over dead
And other stories of a childhood on a commune
CN: drugs, brief mention of self harm, accidental injury
If you were a child who lived in a house, you knew you weren’t to go in The Folly. The Folly children lived in house buses and trucks and tents. Sometimes they were there and sometimes they were not. It was like the shadowlands of The Farm. The place where travellers and addicts and former prisoners lived, because it cost almost nothing in rent, and because there weren’t many other places that would welcome them. The Farm was an intentional community half an hour’s drive from the nearest small town, and it had an official name no one used.
A road on the Farm. Picture from early 2021 when I did a drive-through out of curiosity. It was unsettling and I left pretty quick.
The Farm children lived in wooden houses that were built by their parents, or by the families that lived there before. The Farm children ran through orchards planted by people they knew, plucking crisp apples as they went by, and if that apple wasn’t perfect they flung it at the roots of the tree to decompose and picked another off the next tree, tangy juice squirting from beneath gapped teeth. You could help yourself to creamy fresh milk from a shiny silver pail, still warm if you walked to the dairy shed early enough. If you were a child who lived in a house you were welcome at all the houses. Dinner was often eaten at whatever house the children were closest to at dinnertime and it was usually made up largely of vegetables from the shared gardens. Parents assumed that if children needed anything they'd come home, or their needs would be taken care of by whichever adult was nearby, so they didn't bother worrying.
Part of our section on the Farm, looking towards the hills, with the chicken coop centre left.
The gardens weren’t shared with people from The Folly. They weren’t there long enough to plant and weed and harvest, to go out in the dark with a spray bottle of diluted vinegar and spray the slugs, who would fall off the lettuce and shrivel into death. Mum and her friends would sometimes garden topless, which I found mortifying, but at least they weren’t fully naked.
Sometimes there were children in The Folly but not often. There was a girl with a ginger kitten in a housebus, so of course I visited, but I felt strange and didn’t go back. They left a week later. I worried about the kitten when they went back on the road again. I’d always been told that if you move you have to keep cats inside for two weeks, so how did that work if they only parked up for a week at a time? Could the kitten find its way home to the truck from everywhere they went?
Once a man fell off a high balcony in The Folly and he was paralysed. Or he broke a leg. Or his head was split open. He was high on meth, or drunk, or just stoned. The details were hazy so I don’t know if the accident really happened, or if it was a poorly constructed warning to stay away from meth. Or mushrooms. Or alcohol. Or just marijuana. Or to stay away from The Folly.
There was a goat who ate datura and stumbled in loose circles until it fell over and died. Again, unverified, but we were told to stay away from the datura bush despite not knowing where it was in the first place. The Farm children were well versed in what plants were edible. We picked up incidental “woo-woo” knowledge, like the dangers of eating unfamiliar leaves or berries, the plants we could eat, the phases of the moon, how to preserve food, the importance of respecting other people’s tarot decks, which injuries required adult help and which we could handle ourselves, the different energies of jasper and rose quartz, that quickly resolving conflict meant we didn't have to sit through a mediation, how to weave kete, the best way to build a fire…
The thing is, fear isn’t a deterrent when you are young. Inexperience feels more like immortality than risk. (It’s amazing so many of us survive.) Neither the broken man or the dead goat factored into my decision making when I got stoned for the first time at age twelve. I did it occasionally but it was no more or less interesting to me than reading the Clan of the Cave Bear series again or eating an entire avocado from the vine on our deck. It was just another thing to do depending on the company I was in.
I tried to take up cigarettes when I was about thirteen. Kaya was sixteen and she had a baby and she smoked, both of which meant she was very grown up. I wanted to have a baby (not right then, just in general) and be grown up (so that I could leave home) so I tried to smoke. (Logic is not a strength of adolescence.) I did my best to get hooked (because having a vice makes you more interesting and because my Mum disapproved) but cigarettes aren’t as nice as babies and there is no connection between the two anyway, especially for a thirteen year old virgin. So I stopped. I don’t even know where I got cigarettes from; I probably stole some tobacco from somewhere. There was plenty of it around but I certainly didn’t have any money.
I bought my first packet of tailor-made cigarettes in 2017 at thirty years old because I was deeply depressed and self-destructing and smoking was less visible than cutting myself or sabotaging my life. I took a packet of smokes to the villa in Mangaweka during a New Year’s holiday. I was preparing dinner, waiting for the others to arrive, and when Elena walked in and saw them on the table she said “whose are those?”
“They’re mine,” I replied.
“Oh!” She was astonished. “I was going to apologise to you for just seeing those! I thought they must have been left by the previous booking. I felt all protective!”
I seem rather more wholesome to others than I imagine myself to be.
Months later most of that packet of cigarettes was still in a red polka dot purse in my closet. Partly I kept them in case the urge to hurt myself returned (mercifully it didn’t), because they are still better than knives, and partly because they cost money and I hate to waste money. When my son was younger he used to walk past people smoking on the street and pointedly say, “I hope they don’t have kids.” If he saw someone smoking near kids he wouldn’t say anything but he would look at them with all the disapproval a small child with green eyes and blond curls could muster and hold his breath, cheeks conspicuously puffed. Eventually I gave the cigarettes to a friend. I don’t know if they were stale or anything at that point; I don’t know much about smoking.
Our house on The Farm. Our bathroom was in a greenhouse so I always wore togs in the shower in case anyone came by.
One time I had a sleepover at Kaya’s. She had a small cabin near her family’s house. It gave her the autonomy she needed as a mother, and the support she needed as a teenage girl. I got up in the night to pee, but I couldn’t unlock the door. Indoor toilets were a rarity on the Farm, mostly we just peed on the ground outside behind a bush and trekked to longdrops to poop. We had a composting toilet which was sort-of outside but there was at least a covered deck between the toilet and the house for when it was raining. When we moved from that house to what was essentially a large shed, we had a longdrop out in a field. It wasn’t a big deal except when the ground was hard with frost and you couldn’t find your gumboots. That night I couldn’t find a latch on the door, or keys, and I didn’t want to wake Kaya to let me out, though I had a new empathy for cats meowing at the door with increasing mournfulness the longer they are ignored. Kaya had a baby, and babies and their mothers need their sleep at all costs; I knew this even in my early teens.
The cost that night was me peeing into an empty ice cream container in desperation, trapped with a sore bladder and slightly dampened underwear in a house with no bathroom. I poured the urine down the kitchen sink, because it was the only sink. I ran hot water, I swished dishwashing liquid around in the hot basin. The next morning, I took the container when I left.
Perhaps this is TMI, but it’s the kind of reality you don’t necessarily think about in the cottagecore version of living off the grid. It’s easy to romanticise that kind of life if you haven’t lived it. Of course not all country living is like this; we were poor. But a lot of it is - then and now.
This building was called The Workshop, and it was next door to The Farm but not on The Farm. It had a longdrop, and was adapted rather than built for habitation. We lived there for a few years. That campervan was my bedroom for a time.
Rural life is great for introverts and nature lovers and young children, and I was none of those. I tried to keep myself entertained but pretending to be Greek goddesses only lasts for so long. (My mother has a photo of me standing in a field in the moonlight holding a bow and arrow during my Artemis phase. I don’t know what I was doing with a bow and arrow: I was a vegetarian. Just posing, I suppose.)
Every night I listened to Love Songs ‘til Midnight with Gael Ludlow, which featured a lot of Mariah Carey and Savage Garden. I’d lie in the darkness listening to these stories of intense love and romance with my fluffy white cat draped across my chest. She was called Winter, because duh, she was white and I was 14.
Teenage me meeting tiny kitten Winter.
Sunday afternoons were spent in front of the stereo with a cassette tape recording my favourite songs from the Top 40. There was a skill in pressing record at the exact moment when the DJ stopped talking, before the song started. Mis-timing and getting talking at the beginning of a song was irritating enough on playback to make me stop the recording and rewind the tape, inevitably missing half the song I was trying to record in the first place. They didn’t play all of the Top 40 songs each week, so if I missed recording one I might not get the opportunity until the following week, if ever. I paid careful attention.
We did have an old beast of a television, but Mum hated ads, and the TV didn’t have a remote, so my brother and I improvised with a broom. We’d reach over to the television and knock the volume slider down. The trick was in trying to turn the volume back up at the end of the ad break. Controlling the torque of the broom in order to gently push the slider back up required strength and precision and because we were children it was rarely successful. Generally ad breaks ended with us arguing over whose turn it was to stand up, or whinging at Mum that we know ads are manipulative, ok? It’s so annoying to turn them down. We can just not listen. (She was unmoved.) Remember how you’d go to the toilet or get a snack and race back to the couch before your show came back on at the end of an ad break? If it was stormy or someone bumped the rabbit ears, it would take fine tuning to get a clear picture and sound again. This was the early 2000s; more modern TVs existed, we just didn’t have one.
Hippies do things differently. I know this because when I talk about my childhood people are usually surprised, envious, or horrified, depending on which story I tell.
If you’re interested in more stories like this, please let me know!