Excerpts from What the Trees Said by Steve Diamond:

As I pass the Lowell exit, I think of Kerouac, now two weeks fresh in the ground. It is the end of the road for him, and in a way it is the end of the road for all of us, his children. We have chosen a home, a place and we have decided to make camp. We have elected to leave the American cities of the latter half of what Henry Luce so aptly called “the American Century” and to seek out a new life, to hold actual land and to create a home for our homeless, nationless, tribe.

I bring the car to a slow stop in front of the farmhouse. I get out of the Wildebeest and as I do so Cathy comes out of the front of the red, two story farmhouse in which we have lived, all ten of us, for the past year and some months. Her beautiful face is very white, her eyes are red. She throws her arms around me, sobbing, “Marshall is dead,” she blurts out, “Marshall is dead.”

Marshall Bloom, head of this tribe, prince of players, tormented and demonic genius, manipulator of men and women, and a very lonely kid, was dead at twenty five. As John Wilton said that day in the kitchen, tears streaming down his face, “He sure kicked up a lot of shit in his time.”

Marshall had envisioned a town, a community of several farms like our own, from our first days on the land. At the time of his death, a year later, it had all happened. Our town, not on any map for it exists only in the hearts and minds of its inhabitants, but real land to go hand in hand with this fantasy. A year later there are seven groups within a 25 mile radius; four or five are really tight, dependent on each other like the old settlers in the middle of nowhere, not only for physical assistance but dependent on each other for emotional and moral support in the slow and deliberate lifelong process of establishing a new society. (end of excerpt)

 

Reflections  at the Memorial May 6^th , From Charles Light

Well, I don’t know about a whole new society. We gave it a good shot. And many things have changed for the better. Those small communities that began in 1968 have mushroomed into our own happy valley – sort of the land that time forgot. A little oasis in a surrounding tempest.

This specific community – the Montague farm, Wendell, and Packers Corners – had a special place in Stevie’s heart. For him, like many of us, the time spent here was a life forming experience. Those bonds, forged in the furnace of communal life, have persisted throughout our lifetimes. Not always easily and sometimes with dramatic ruptures. And like the ties that bind a family together, even when brothers and sisters can barely speak to each other, these are ties that are not easily broken.

And even though we are a community essentially of anarchic values and individual paths (and nobody exemplified that better than Steve), we are able to pull it together when (to use a militaristic metaphor) push comes to shove. When our ethic was self sufficiency, we became, at least by our own poor standards, somewhat credible farmers. When the nuke came calling, we became decent organizers and activists. When the farm was to be torn asunder by our own poor judgments, we found a compromise that enabled it to go on in something of the same spirit.

Steve believed deeply in the community that we have formed. He always stayed in touch both by phone and later through the internet. He came home for multi-year residencies at his chair at the Bloom Institute. He initiated lots of things, even if he could not always stay put to see them through. He came up with a million ideas, and some of them were real gems. He could be exasperating in his persistence, but he was the King of Hearts. His life was entwined with ours in ways we do not understand.

Now we get to see, again, that death does not sever those ties. Steve strongly believed in the survival of the soul after death, and god knows, it is easy to feel his presence in our own places of the heart – here at the barn and at bims, or just last week at the top of the hillside at May Day at Packers Corners. After his death, I got a rush of blank emails with no sender and no subject. It has since subsided, but I did have the thought that it was my old friend trying to break the boundaries of the ether through the Ethernet. But no content survived, except for the thought that it was him saying “I am. We are.”