I was normal. I really was. I lived at home in a nice little suburban neighborhood, complete with picket fences, cul de sacs, and crosswalk guards. My younger sister and I walked to school together, our hair in pig tails with little matching outfits. Both our parents worked, but Mom was always home by the time we got back from school and dinner was always on the table a few minutes after Dad arrived. We did our homework, watched half an hour of tele, then went skipping off to bed. This had been my whole life. Everything up to my first year in college was a blur of pastel colors, braided hair, and Americana. Then things got weird. Or maybe the plastic normalcy I had experienced was about to be replaced by sincere naturalism. Oh well. I'll let you decide what was real and what was false. And how the two fit together.
When my sister and I went off to college, we braced for the most foreign experiences of our lives. Conservative households spend a lifetime just preparing and installing a sense of dread for the liberal revolutionaries of the contemporary college campus. I was nineteen; nine and a half months older than my sister, so I was supposed to defend our way of life, should she ever decide to tip toe the line. Our parents were only twenty minutes away, so if ever an emergency came up I could call them in for reinforcements. My sister and I had been very close growing up. We shared everything. We started at school the same year and were never apart from that first moment. Clothes were traded, gossip swapped, and homework copied.
But college would change that. From the first quarter on campus I knew that things wouldn't be the same. Tammy (Tamarin) stopped dressing up and doing her hair. She began to hang out with "alternative" lifestyle people. Left over hippie kids. She started to leave the bras and home and eventually burned them all. Soon it seemed as if I were the antithesis to what she believed in. Whenever Mom and Dad visited she would disappear to some important review or study session. Often she would come back smelling of weed, conveniently after they had given up and headed home. It wasn't bad at first. We still talked about stuff. She kept me involved in her life. But after one particularly ugly run in I had with some friends of hers, I really became the enemy. From then on we shared nothing. Just an empty excuse for a home and the occasional glare.
I wanted so bad for things to be normal again. I really wanted to reconnect with her. But I didn't know how. I tried listening to her music and dressing down a little more. I stopped using aerosol products and things which posed a threat to her beloved mother earth. My biggest surrender was to attend a sustainability commune concert on the Pacific coast of Canada with her. She had jumped on board when one of her friends had persuaded her that sustainability was the key to saving the environment. And I, trying to please, agreed to go along with the little get together described on the green biodegradable handout.
This is right about where my experience seems to go strange. I'll try to keep everything to what I know, if possible, but at points I may be incapable of separating perception from reality. We left on a rainy Thursday before spring break- a bus load of feminist hippies and me, in my newly purchased brand name cargo pants. It became very clear that I wouldn't fit in very well on this trip. Apparently "alternative lifestyle" meant more than just weed and recyclables. Most of the women were gay or bisexual or queer or whatever. My sister seemed to be involved with the one girl who had started the whole trip. And she seemed even more determined to flaunt it in front of me here. I can't tell you how many times I had to sit next to them in the last row of the van as they communed with each other. I tried focusing on the rolling waves of grain, the sun swept plains, the towering Rockies; but it is a little tough with your sister using you for leverage to push back onto the exploring fingers of her partner. Not to mention the less then subtle gasps, sighs, moans, groans, and occasional howl. At one point they even performed oral sex on each other with me only one seat ahead. I quickly learned that sexual restraints such as propriety and modesty were just as evil as environmental destruction. I will probably remember the sounds and smells more than the sights. By the time we reached our destination in the newly protected forests in western B.C. I was eager to spend the night on the ground in a tent woven from naturally grown materials. It sounded like true liberation.
But I was very very wrong. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire. Every single woman (and they were all women) was entirely nude at the eco site. Some of them were tastefully covered in tons of body hair, but for the most part they were entirely naked. Now the weather was great for BC but it never really gets warm enough up there to go entirely naked (at least not in my cultured mind). So here I found myself, amidst a swarming throng of nude, nipping women, accepting hugs from girls with names like Rayne and Sunn and probably even a Cloude or two. You better believe that I spent the next three hours setting up my tent as close to the camp perimeter as possible. I skipped the opening ceremonies of song and dance and sharing only to be drug from my tent by my enthusiastic and now very naked sister. By that point I had shed my clothing down to my undies. I had seen a few other girls in them so I figured I wouldn't be too out of place. Course theirs were very plain Jane and mine were lacy Victoria Secret hipsters (why had I worn those?!?) and support bra. Any stranger catching an eyeful of my sister clinging to my arm and dragging me to hippie central would have seen the similarities between the two of us, despite our lifestyle choices. Both of us are tall and slim, with long brunette hair and amber eyes that go well with the locks. Our bodies were soft and distinctly feminine and with curves that were definitely there; just not over the top. We used to be so proud of the looks we had in high school. We had it all then. Now perhaps our looks are all we share.
Dinner was an odd assortment of organically grown roots, nuts, and vegetation, which could apparently be gathered from the natural growth around us. I was impressed by the robust taste that it carried for something so simplistic. A certain type of root, which I am unclear on to this day, was my favorite. It had a rich earthy taste that just addicted you. The texture of the exposed center was equally appetizing and I found myself ignoring the rest of the treats on my plate for second helpings of that root.