Visiting East Wind was like going back to college for a week—but without any exams or annoying career counselors. There was good music, delicious organic vegetables, communal dining, lots of cold beer, a beautiful "campus," and plenty of friendly folks who seemed to enjoy nothing more than hanging out and blathering about everything from the mundane to the meaning of life. (My kind of place.) Just like college, ample opportunity existed for personal reinvention; whoever you had been prior to arrival at the commune was not necessarily who you had to be. The intoxicating high that comes from keeping your options open—from the work you do every day to the personal relationships you maintain to the beliefs you hold dear (for now)—was ever present. And there was also a sense of hope: Despite all the world's problems, it was reassuring to visit 70-plus people who still insist the System is badly broken but who still are trying to figure out a better way to live.
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They haven't figured out a better way to live. In fact, East Winders are muddling along with their problems—individual and communal ones—just like the rest of us. Yet despite all their self-admitted flaws, the community still manages to deliver to outsiders a scathing critique—unspoken, sure, but clear as day and sometimes uncomfortably close to the mark: Hey you! Loser! Don't you know you're part of the System, and the System stinks? You're a tiny cog in the capitalist machine that's destroying the planet—and your own soul. Why can't you see how painfully (pick one or more) materialistic, corrupt, exploitative, bourgeois, vapid, alienated, and spiritually vacuous your life truly is? How does it feel to willingly submit to all those evil forces in "Babylon" against which you once so passionately rebelled? What happened to the counter-culture's glorious "revolution in consciousness"? More important, why have you given up? (And if you say, "I'm working to change the System from within," well then, excuse us while we erupt in laughter.)
Ouch!
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Pepper is a commune member who swears that East Wind saved her life. Born in a women's prison in Missouri, she got pregnant at 14, married at 17, and was almost killed at 27 when her second husband—a member of a notoriously violent motorcycle gang—stabbed her nine times. She flat-lined on the way to the hospital, where she spent a week in a coma. Three months later she recovered. On August 28, 2001, she moved to East Wind, where she got married for the third time, went through detox, and now is a voice of sobriety in a community that likes to drink.
"I prayed to God to get me away from the bikers," she says, "and East Wind was his humorous answer."
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