 I came to Tacoma, Oregon in the early 70s. I had been living in the Bay Area in California in San Francisco. There was a massive march in Golden Gate Park to try and stop the war in Vietnam. And there were over a million people and it was an amazing demonstration. And as a result, nothing happened. Nothing changed. The war was endless. It went on and on. It was immoral. People were being killed on all sides. And I decided I had had enough. Even though I had been born and raised in California, I decided I wanted to leave the country. So I started hitchhiking at first and then I got an older pickup from my grandfather. And I started going north and came to the California, Oregon border. And there was a bearded hippie hitchhiking and I stopped and picked him up. And as we talked along the way, he said there's this great little community in Southern Oregon. You should really, not only can you drop me off there, but you might enjoy visiting that place on your way to Canada. So I said okay, well that sounds interesting. And so we went to Cave Junction and then went west from there out the Caves Highway onto a little side road towards Tacoma. And the last few miles of the road were not paved. It was a dirt road. We came to this little tiny community. It was more of a farming community. And there was a general store there and a gas pump. And I let my hitchhiking friend off there. And then I went down onto the riverbed and camped out along there. There was a whole community of people, probably I'm guessing about 200 people, of folks who had come from all over the Pacific Northwest and beyond. And there was a large swimming hole there and people sort of congregated there. And there was this whole little strip of cabins that the person who owned the land allowed anyone to live. You could purchase the cabin or you could, some were handed down from friend to friend. So they were fairly close together and they were not elaborate but they were very unique. Each one had character. And at some point I bought my little cabin for $800 and decided to spend the winter there because it was getting late in the year to travel onto Canada. Soon after that a lot of people in the community started getting really sick. We started turning yellow. Our skin got jaundiced and our pee got dark and people felt terrible. And we knew something was going on. So I went to the local Grants Pass Josephine County Health Department to get medical care. At that time in Cave Junction there were signs in the windows of many of the businesses that said we do not solicit hippie patronage. And you were not, if you were a hippie, usually self-identified or you look different than the general population, people assumed you were a hippie and we could not go into those stores. So when I went to get health care at the county the physician there was not very welcoming and said, you're already sick. There's nothing I can do for you. So I didn't really know what to do. At that point I went back to the community and a number of us were being refused treatment. It became clear that we must have something called hepatitis A which was communicable hepatitis that we had gotten from drinking river water without boiling it. In those days people didn't have water filters and we didn't have the knowledge that so many of us have now about safe camping practices. So we didn't boil our water and we got really sick. At that point when there were over a hundred cases of hepatitis A, the state epidemiologist from Portland came down to visit Tekelma in a mobile van and he and a health care outreach worker went door-to-door and gave us printed information about what's safe, how to drink water from streams and how to boil your water and where to put your outhouses so that they didn't leech into the river. All of that information was new to us and we didn't know. And so that was really helpful. And then he also provided gamma globulin shots for people who had been exposed. And that was very helpful. When he left and went back to Portland, this is where your part comes in from how you got to Tekelma. He was working with Jim at a clinic there and told him about Tekelma and what was happening there. Well, I didn't come from an urban environment originally. I was a farming community girl, but it was just a different time then. When we went camping, we drank from the stream and we didn't boil water. It's hard to imagine now that so much has changed, but there's just much more information available for people who are camping. I think when you drop out and there's no internet then, you're off the grid. You're on your own. You're figuring it out on your own. You're not sure who to trust. And so I think a lot of things that society has figured out over the years about how you build things, how you keep yourself safe in terms of preventing infectious diseases, etc. Those things are a bit suspended for the community for a while. I think you need to put in context the fact that we can pretty readily go to some resource and say, oh, that's how you do it. But as a community, I think we wanted to figure it out for ourselves because we really weren't trusting the authorities. As Heidi said, people were screaming, this war is unjust and nothing was changing. And you could look at everybody's little piece of the world that they came from with that same basic feeling of I'm dropping out. I'm going to figure this out on my own and mistakes were made. And I read two of the impacts, and this was new to me, the impact that something like the Whole Earth Catalog and I'm missing it now, the Firestone Fire. What is it? Firestein Theater? No. The Firefox. That wasn't so big in our area. The Whole Earth Catalog was the merc manual, the merc veterinary animal veterinary stuff was really popular. We didn't trust the powers that be. They hadn't steered us in a good direction. So as I was into Kilma, I was surrounded by people who had given up on our country, given up on the politicians. And as Jim said, didn't know who to trust. So we decided we'll create our own society based on love and peace and harmony. And perhaps a little naive, but we felt like we couldn't mess it up more than it had already been messed up. And our parents ascribed in many ways to those beliefs, not to the beliefs that we had, but to the beliefs of the government. And there was a huge rift between parents and children then. So a lot of the adult children that were into Kilma had somewhat separated from their parents. And they were out to establish their own social mores. As a result of the sickness that had happened into Kilma, we decided we needed to educate ourselves about how to take care of our bodies and how to prevent illness. So we started having community meetings and talking about how can, since we can't get medical care in town, how are we going to care for ourselves? And about that time, we indirectly interfaced with Jim via the state epidemiologist. And he came down to Kilma for a community meeting with us. And do you want to talk about how it was from your perspective? Any time. Okay, go ahead. That's okay. It was a psychiatry internship. So my journey was upper middle class, east coast. I kind of had my life all figured out as going to be a psychiatrist. And I eventually ended up on the west coast because it seemed more loose and relaxed and exciting than what I was used to. I was also very frustrated with the war. I was a conscientious objector. Well, I was repeatedly deferred and eventually became, you know, got my CO. But also, I was prepared to do whatever, go to Canada, whatever I had to do to not be a participant in the war. And I probably hadn't ingratiated myself to any of my professors in medical school. I was finding traditional medicine had a lot of flaws and didn't seem to have a direction that I was comfortable with. At any rate, I took a year off, kind of suspended my career, came to Portland and was doing odd medical jobs and kind of finding myself. So one of those jobs was working at the sexually transmitted disease clinic in Multnomah County in Portland. And one of the people I worked with had just come back from this visit to Kilma. And he said, you know, you keep talking about how healthcare ought to be different. This community wants to create, you know, its own clinic. You've got some free time. You ought to go down and check them out, which I did. Came down with Mike Garnier who was a medic in the Green Berets in Vietnam who now was working at a free clinic in Portland along with me. I was also working at that clinic. And so the two of us came down to check it out. We met with Heidi and others in a big circle into Kilma and they kind of, you know, we kind of talked about what they wanted, which was an appropriate part of the self-sufficiency movement, right? It's like, we're going to drop out. We're going to build our own houses. We're going to create a, you know, society for ourselves. Where's healthcare? You know, what are we going to do for healthcare? So it sounded exciting to me. You know, there's a huge amount of hubris on my part really that, you know, sort of marginally trained future psychiatrist. But I said I'd come down and if they could get a building and find some, you know, volunteers. And a place for you to live. And a place for me to live. I'd come down and, you know, for the months remaining between early spring and when I started my residency in June. No, no. It was February that you came and you were going to go in the fall. Okay. February to fall. It was a short term. Sure, a period of time. Six months maybe. Yeah. And so in fact, got an old farmhouse on the main road. A bunch of nurses and x-ray techs and lab techs and just general people volunteered to get this clinic going. Some docs in the community, you know, donated their exam tables. And, you know, one of the things that was happening, we're talking 1973, right? The war is still going on. That sense that something's really rotten here was pretty permeated a lot of people. I mean, not everybody dropped out. But a lot of the medical folks that I interfaced with kind of, you know, had a kind of a grudging respect for people that chose a different path. So one of the things they could do is give us stuff. So we got, you know, medications. We got equipment. You know, we got a lot of stuff was not useful, but some of it was. Enough was useful. Found ourselves with a microscope and some lab equipment. And we discovered there were people in the community that knew how to use it. What became clear immediately is that there was a lot of healthcare, there was a lot of people with healthcare needs who were doing the best they could, which turned out to be extremely inadequate. So women were having babies with whomever they could gather that would provide, you know, some additional expertise. At the time, hospitals didn't have birthing rooms. There was only one mode of delivering your baby. They shaved every woman her partner wasn't allowed in. It was very sterile and... On your back, knees up. Yeah. So women said, no, we're not going to do that. Yeah, we're not going to do that. Right. And so I'm walking and having seen a handful of births in medical school, you know, to, oh my gosh, wow, you know, look what's happening here. It was really trial by fire, you know, deliveries without any prenatal care, you know, big lacerations that people were cutting themselves with chainsaws and, you know, people really, really sick. I mean, it's hard to imagine now because most people will just go to the... First of all, we have the Affordable Care Act. You know, most people are covered. And back then, if you didn't have private insurance, which nobody had, it meant you weren't covered, you know. Few people were, but most people weren't. And so, aside from the fact that you don't really trust the healthcare system, you really have no way to pay for your healthcare. When people did come, they were pretty sick. So here we are with this ragtag clinic of, you know, folks that are kind of building it while we're flying it with whatever equipment we happen to have. And we're seeing, you know, serious medical situations. And we also, as a community, wanted to learn about how our bodies worked. So what we did was we started with the assumption that smart people who are altruistic can learn a tremendous amount, right? And that licensing is nice. But, you know, if that's not what you don't... If that's what you don't have, then perhaps we should train ourselves up. It's kind of like the concept of the barefoot doctors in China, which turn out to not be entirely as we believed it to be. But the concept was that the local people are trained to the best of their ability to take care of themselves and their neighbors. We worked on that principle. So we did a lot of education. We would meet after every clinic and talk about what we saw. We'd have community classes every week and talk about organ systems. What is the heart and how does it work? What are the lungs? You know, some people could be, you know, kind of informed about how their bodies work. It became pretty clear that a man who was moderately trained is probably not the best person to do women's health care. And so we took the expertise we had. We had Sudha, who had done births out of hospital birth. Everybody who lived at Duda had Da as their last name. So this was Sudha. There was Lu Da and Dug Da. Anyway, so Sudha, you know, had been a lay midwife in Santa Barbara. And so immediately she was the expertise that I was looking for. And you know, I knew how to start an IV. I knew about medications. I had access to medical books. I had access to consultants. And Sue had the actual, you know, in-the-weeds experience. And then we found other women like Heidi and others who wanted to learn these skills and be a part. So we fairly quickly developed a midwifery team and eventually ended up with a number of midwifery teams comprised of an experienced midwife, one or two training midwives, and myself to the extent that I needed to participate. And that's how we did our prenatal visits going forward and that's how we did our births. Eventually we got a birthmobile, which was this. Were there a lot of babies? A lot of babies. A lot of babies. What does that mean? What does that mean? Well, first of all, once we established the clinic in Tekelma, Tekelma was just one of many communities, right? You got people in Wolf Creek and Selma and Sunny Ridge. And the Meadows. And not to mention other, you know, all over the place. So now we have a counterculture clinic which is saying you pay what you can. You can be participatory in your healthcare. You know, we don't really care if you're nursing your babies in the waiting room. You know, so people came to us and it became pretty clear that the phenomena we saw in Tekelma was happening all over southern Oregon for sure. And so we found ourselves traveling around the region. So we had, and that's the reason we had created multiple midwife teams. Because midwife team A, with all of its equipment, could be at a birth down by the river. And then somebody in Selma is now going into labor. And we need a midwife team B, right? And then we decide which one seems to be the furthest away from the hospital with the highest risk. And that's the one that gets the birthmobile. And then I'm kind of going back and forth as needed, right? We got radios. No cell phones then. We didn't have individual phones. We had a party line for a clinic. It was called a ring down. We had one of the few phones in town. It was a ring down. And so you'd get a specialized ring and pick it up. And once I answered, and it was this man saying, my partner's having a baby. We're in the woods and there's this big bubble coming out. And I don't know what to do. And so I tried to instruct. Probably somebody else in the party line said, well, here's what I think. So that experience is what brought us to having regular prenatal visits. We had a prenatal clinic that met every Wednesday. And people from the whole region would come for prenatal care. We also started interfacing with the farming community there. Some of the older people who couldn't get medical care started coming. We had many pretty sick patients who couldn't get care other places. It was not just, it very quickly was not just a hippie clinic. I mean, if you can imagine, first of all, there was very little health care. I mean, between Crescent City and Grant's Pass, a 90-mile stretch, there was one other health care provider who'd been there forever. And he eventually retired as well. So there wasn't a lot of health care available. We charged people what they could afford, which was often a chicken or eggs. Got a lot of eggs. Nothing. So yes, so we saw a lot of local people. And so it was a real interesting place to mingle in the waiting room with hippies from far and wide and just the folks that had grew up and were living in Cape Junction. Right, right. It was a real bridging experience. So the births. We had a radio in the birthmobile. All of the midwives had radios. I had a radio. And so the way we worked it is somebody always was at the clinic. We created what we called an on-call system. And you can think of it as a prepaid health plan, okay? So you're living at the Kilmer with your family. And one night a month, you come to the clinic at the end of business hours and you wash all the dishes, you clean the floors. You keep the wood stove going and you answer the phone. And you stay sober. And you are the communication hub for the whole community for that night. And then if somebody calls and says, or comes to the clinic, you can radio me if it's a medical situation that I'm going to have to deal with or me and the midwives or whatever if there's a birth. But it must have been more than just health care at that point because you created a structure, an organization, a communication mechanism. It was more than just health care. The clinic became the community center. Right, so if there was a meeting, something was happening, we all needed to come together. We would come together in the waiting room of the clinic. That's right. There was a tree planting collective green side up. They would have their meetings there. There was a community, Tequila Community Association, that we bought an old house. After the clinic had been going for about a year or two, one of the old farmhouses in the community came up for sale and we were able to buy it by pooling all our money. So the clinic started working out. Then we built onto it an example of the integration of the clinic. There was an ongoing friction between the establishment of the county and the hippies, as you might imagine. Sanitation rules and housing. So housing was a big one. People wanted to build their own houses. They weren't planning to sell it or rent it, but they also weren't planning to get a building permit and get a septic tank and blah, blah, blah. That was a source of friction with the folks who were responsible for that, the building departments. If a group of unrelated people wanted to live on a piece of property, there's no zoning for that. So a commune, by definition, is a zoning violation. So those issues kept kind of coming up, but no individual had the clout really to take on city government. So the clinic... County government. County government. So the clinic built this addition and we purposely did not... We built it to code, but we did not ask... We did not get the permits to do it. So the county then came in and red-tagged the clinic, which is this important resource for more than just Tacoma for the whole southern part of the county. So we were pretty sure they weren't going to shut us down, but we used kind of that phenomenon as a way to kind of make a statement, which phase could it just back off? And start a conversation about reasonable ways to interface with people rather than adversarial, coming to meet us and have a discussion about what the codes were and how we could comply with them rather than a really strict punitive... It really changed the tenor of the conversations that we had with county government. So we could use the fact that the clinic was important and that we were all connected to it as a way to foster those connections. So to your point, the clinic was more than just a clinic in that respect. You keep down... We're introduced in February. Right. And it must have been kind of like an explosive. Intellectually and emotionally explosive. It wasn't yet. It wasn't yet. It was an interesting phenomenon. Oh, I'll do this. I had no real roots at that moment in time. I was rootless, you know, fortuitously. And so it was easy to come down. And then I started living in the clinic. So one of the waiting rooms was like my bedroom. And so I was always there, always present, always on call. And, you know, kind of segue to how that changed. But it wasn't until I had to make a decision. Months into this, I had to decide, am I going to go back, get back on the train, back on the track, I can see where it's going. That's all nice and comfortable. I have a vision of myself, you know, as a psychiatrist in Portland, living in the hills, you know, tweed jacket, you know, a little leather on the elbows. You know, my parents will be happy, I'm happy. When I get off that train, I have no clue what's happening. Get off the train, become a general practitioner, rural, continue to do this. It was ego-dissentonic. It was not anything that I was prepared for. And it was a little crazy-making for a while. And I have absolutely no regrets about having made that decision. But it was scary. It was jumping off the deep end. It was, you know, it was trusting that this is going to turn out okay. And so a question you asked at the very beginning was, you know, was it lasting? You know, the lessons learned from that lifestyle? That was probably, that was the most consequential thing I feel as if I had done in my life up to that point. And the consequences of that decision were absolutely lasting in terms of kind of how I viewed other decisions in my life. Well, both of us started our conversations about the war. And I feel as if when something is so wrong, it kind of frees you up. It's like ripping babies from their mothers at the border. It's like you go, this is so fundamentally wrong. You know, some woman hikes up the Statue of Liberty to protest. I mean, anyway, my point is that... We weren't the only ones doing this. It was what we later discovered is there was a national movement. Hippies were one sign of it, but we weren't the only ones saying, this has gone too far. We can't live with this system the way it is. And it frees you up to try to make something different. But you sort of have to remove yourself from the main culture to figure out what you want to be different. So that kind of segues into the commune, which is... So Heidi was living on the riverbed in a collection of cabins. I'm living in the clinic. And what became pretty clear to me is that some of the movers and shakers of this community were all living in a place called Magic Forest Farm. And Magic Forest Farm people wanted the clinic to be successful and started coming and showing up and being integral to the formation of the clinic. They were in the beginning. And then Heidi and I met each other at this very first birth in a school bus. You know, my first day on the job, so to speak. And so, you know, she started hanging around the clinic. We kind of circled each other and, you know, we became a couple. And then it really, you know, living at your place was okay, but living at the clinic wasn't going to work. And so we started to stay at Magic Forest Farm, which was a commune that at that point was about five years old, had a lot of strong personalities. And kind of looking back, now we're getting to the beyond us part, looking back at other communes, it seems like they had personalities based upon what brought them together. You know, the funky egg, you know, where Robert was was one kind of way of doing it. Duda was another. And Magic Forest Farm was a, this is my perception and you see what you think, but it seemed more politically purposeful. That is, we have some political beliefs, you know, kind of a socialist fundamental view of how the world ought to be. And we kind of set ourselves up where we're sharing almost everything, right? You got a cubby that's about this big where your personal stuff goes and the rest is ours, you know, and people would come to the farm and if they weren't willing to work hard, be collective, you know, look out for others, follow the rules, you know, you would move on. And it wasn't for everybody, but it was a group of well educated or not. But folks, I would say the principles of what made the farm work was working hard for the common good and kind of buying into the basic, you know, collectivist kind of principles. What about finances? How do people know that it was time for them to go that they didn't fit in? Those are all very easy questions. So this also kind of relates to your point about freedom. Hard to be free if you don't have any money. I had the freedom to do what I wanted to do because my parents had enough money that I wasn't sandal with phenomenal debt when I left medical school. Thank you very much, Mom and Dad, right? And so we had at least one person living at the farm when we got there who had a, I don't know, a legacy stipend of some sort, some money that freed her up and she gave that money to the farm. So we had that money. We had jobs people did. We lived on very little. I mean, we had a huge garden and we had cows and we had goats. I mean, we had goats and we had cows. You know, we had chickens and we tried our best to repair our vehicles when they broke. We built our own houses. So, you know, you got, you got nails and bruges and molasses and, you know, you don't. So that money stood us in good stead for a while. And then at some point the clinic became like this, this job that many people, most people at the farm actually were employed in. And although we paid ourselves almost nothing, we didn't need much. There were thinning contracts with the BLM. There were tree planting contracts. I think I made the most money per hour at $10 an hour planting trees. I felt incredibly rich. So, yeah, people did different sorts of jobs. But we tried not to be gone from the farm for extended periods of time because we had a huge organic garden. We grew most of our own food and did a lot of canning and preserving food. And we had animals. And so it was not an easy lifestyle. You had to work really hard. But it was joyous because there were other people like you surrounding you and you were working together. Give you an example. So here's what a woodrun would be like. So you have to have firewood. And back in those days, you could just go off into the BLM or forest service and find standing dead trees and go up and cut them down. They marked regions where you could go. Yeah, regions where you could go. But they didn't mark the trees. Well, sometimes they did, but yeah. I don't remember tree, Markle. No, that's a different story. I'm talking about firewood. So, anyway, a bunch of us would pile into this old flatbed truck. A couple people in the cab, three or four people in the back, chainsaws, malls. And we just drive down in the road off into California somewhere and spotting them. We'd find a dead tree and we'd go up in the woods and we'd cut it down, buck it up. We'd throw it repeatedly down the hill and somebody would be splitting it up. And we have this, what's the word I'm looking for? Henry Ford. What did he do? He had a... Machine line? Yes, assembly line. And this assembly line of... So the work all got done. We'd put it together, big pile of wood in the back of the truck. And then as we drove back, you know, we'd be singing songs together in a cappella. And then we got back to the main house, back the truck in, and folks had already been making dinner and baking bread and then put, you know, Bob Marley on the tape recorder and playing it while everybody kind of throws the wood, one person or the stacks it up. And we did a lot of stuff that way. Very gratifying, solidifying. And those people that we lived with and worked with are still our primary friends, many of them moved here. And they're the people we see. And we'd go to parties with them. Became our family. Were there ever fights? Oh, no. We always got along. No, there were always fights. There were some actual fights. I mean, throwing fists and knocking people down. Yeah, there were fights. Looking back on some of those fights, I think some of them were like, you know, kind of archetypal, you know, who's the dominant male kind of fights and who's the dominant female kind of fights. And, you know, those dynamics are like inevitable. They just really are, you know. And so, you know, in terms of sometimes people would leave because it's like, I can't handle Joe. You know, I'm just tired of Joe telling me what he thinks I ought to be doing. I'm out of here. Or, you know, I mean, in my case, yes, that's who Joe was, but we had some mutual respect, you know. He worked at the clinic and he was willing to have me tell him what I thought he ought to do when he was at the clinic and when it came to, you know, sharpening a chainsaw, Joe knew, you know, maybe I didn't like to have somebody else tell me how to sharpen a chainsaw, but I'd swallow my pride and did it anyway. There were lots of dynamics and people would come and go and there'd be fights and arguments. And frankly, living in a commune, I'll speak for myself. I was young. I felt like I was a bit of a feral child. I don't feel like I had a lot of guidance. And I, you know, I think I needed some help in learning the ways of the world. And the commune was very helpful to see how other people behaved and interacted and raised children. Oh, that's how you raise children. Maybe I could do that someday. And learning life skills. My gosh, you know, I mean, I feel pretty comfortable now. I can build things. I know how to deal with my car. I, you know, I didn't have that growing up. But my point is that at some point, feeling like I had to ask permission of a group of people whether or not to take the truck. And somebody else was going to kind of judge whether it was a valid use of the truck. You know, it's like, well, you know, you're just going down the street, you know. You could take a car. I know that all the cars are gone, but I don't know that's good use for the truck. It's like, at some point you go, you know, enough's enough. I think I want to be more independent than that. Well, that happened over a period of years. Years. We were there for like 17 years. But those are the kinds of issues that you have to deal with. And, you know, in the early days, the economy was fairly rigid. It's like, this is how we do it. This is how we've always done it. And then, you know, gosh, the moment we stopped boiling our coffee and using molasses and goat's milk as a way to make it taste better, it's like, whoa, you mean we can dance? There we go. Perk coffee. Anyway, because we've done it like that, you know, that's how we do it. That's how you do coffee. So what drew me to the farm was different than for Jim. I remember, I was checking into the library in Cape Junction, and this van stopped and it was full of people from Magic Forest Farm. And they were all from the East Coast. They all had on plaid shirts. They looked dressed similarly. And they were very intelligent and well-read. And I was like, wow, this is great. I'm going to the library. These people, they have a lot of books in their space. And they invited me to come up and look at books if I wanted to. I could borrow books from them. They were just a whole different kind of people than I had grown up with. And I was really attracted to that. It was a very intellectual community. And each commune in the area was different. It had different kinds of people pursuing different kinds of ideas and structure. And I was drawn to that particular one. As an example of intentionality, every week there were, not every week, but every six months or so, there were what was called criticized meetings, where one person would be it and people, it would go around in a circle and people would talk about what was difficult for them with that person. And one person would take notes and you weren't allowed to say anything in your defense. You just had to listen and accept what was being said. I found that so incredibly helpful to my personal growth to understand how other people saw me and things that some things were painful. But it really created for me personally a lot of growth. So lots of different things happened over the course of 17 years and the structures changed. There was a whole women's movement and sort of a women's revolt. So women at one point, we decided we wanted to do a building project at the clinic, so we remade one of the rooms to be what was called the women's room and the remodel and the carpentry was done totally by women because it was very different for women who had learned carpentry skills from men to try and figure out how they wanted to approach, how we wanted to approach a project. And it was a lot of fun. It also became very near to making the commune split because the women wanted to change roles and yet it was really difficult because the men were so entrenched in their roles. It was a pretty chauvinistic time, really. I think people forget that. We married the greater society. So there was a women's lib movement. There was a back-to-the-land movement first, then into the war, then social justice and women's liberation. All the movements that happened nationally happened on the commune. I just want to mention that the way we did women's health care had some real political overtones to it. It really was women's work. I was the licensed person there, but the speculating exam and the mirror to see what your service is, the education, these exams go an hour and a half. A women's health care exam could include all of your friends and a lot of education. It was primarily done by the women to help other women, and the birthing was like that as well, where there's a lot of touching and talking and soothing, and that was trained women, helping other women to be empowered in that process. It became really clear when I was pregnant and nursing a child that what I could do in terms of taking care of my child was really different. I'm happy to say that now those strict, definite role stereotypes are really being challenged. I see more and more men carrying babies in front carriers, men staying home with their children. It's challenging to do it when you're breastfeeding, but you can save milk and milk banks and freezing milk, and dads can be just as involved as moms can be in mirroring children. But that was a long time coming, and for us, there was a lot of intellectual reflection on how can we make this more equal? Why do women have to be designated to stay at home and clean the house and take care of the children? Why can't women do more of the men's work? Why can't women do wood runs? When we did. I was just thinking about some of the things that we take for granted philosophically now we're sort of incubating then, but I'm thinking about the way we brought men into the birthing experience. So men were, you know, the ones that wanted to be, were often very involved in the prenatal care, were very involved in the birth itself, and so kind of fostered a sense of belonging to that. I have no idea what they did after we left them, but that probably helped create more of a merging or certainly around childcare. I can give you a personal answer and then I can tell you what I think is happening, but personally, what I've discovered is that as I go out in the world and I assume responsibilities and do different jobs, I am always looking around to figure out, you know, who has ideas that are really going to be important for us to make this decision. And I think that that's been really helpful for me. Is that collaborative style is appreciated by some and not appreciated by others? Kind of slows things down sometimes, but it's a part of the work I do. It's, you know, you take it or leave it if you want to, if you want me to participate in some task, you can be fairly certain that's how I'm going to do it. And so that's a lasting legacy of having both lived communally and really practiced medicine communally. And there's a lot of stuff now that people are going, hey, you know, let's have a huddle in the morning to plan out how we're going to do the day and let's get together at the end and see how we did. Duh, yeah. Or why don't we integrate behavioral health and why don't you empower your medical assistant more? So you can be, it's like, that was how we did it. And so I see it reflected in where I think responsible medicine's headed, but it's also just kind of a part of my work style. I grew up as a very private person and quiet and I'm a slow thinker, not a fast-speeding one. But I learned a different way of interacting with people by living communally. I learned that there are many different ways to approach a problem and approach the world. And even after I no longer live communally, in the work that I do, I manage homeless shelters here in Ashland, when I came to that idea, I started that process by saying, I know there are people in the community, if we all work together, I'm sure we can provide this service as volunteers. As our government is more and more dysfunctional, it really requires individuals to band together to provide some of the basic needs of a community. And I feel like that's a lasting value that I got from living communally and going through the process of building the clinic and the communes and the community. And it's something, once you've done that, you carry with you every place you go afterwards. And it's of great value because even in medical emergencies, now I know you need to act quickly, but I think it's really important to bring the patient and the family into the process to try and understand what's happening. And I just see that approach happens more in medicine, certainly. And hopefully, I wish it would happen more in politics. Next month is the commune's 50th anniversary. It's still there. Every 10 years we have a reunion. This will be the 50th. People coming from all over the country, all over the world actually, just to reconnect, people who've spent some period of time. Because if you think about it, some people were there for six months and they changed their lives. Some people were there for 40 years and changed their lives. And so it's a phenomenon, this cauldron. A living changing organism. Yeah, and it's different than it was. But it's still there. It's a beautiful piece of land. Some people have just beautiful houses. It's got an incredible garden. And there are other communes in the area that are also still there. And they've also transformed. Well, for one thing, we have a daughter who did not grow up on the farm. Our two older children spent their early childhood living communally and our two younger children did not. But she is now currently at our house, the house we built, the log house in Tekelman. She's currently there and she's doing her PhD thesis work. But she feels resonant with the community. It speaks to her. She, you know, feels simpatico with the people that she's meeting. And there were a lot of young people. I mean, the school, the community school, the dome school. We didn't talk about that at all. Oh, there's so many things we didn't talk about. But, you know, the community building that we all participated in building and the school is growing. It's bigger than ever. It's got more grades than ever. It's got more participation than ever. And young people who look very much like we looked, you know, they're just they're idealistic and they're healthy and, you know, they want to do it their way and they're confident and confident. And so I feel like the torch has been passed, so to speak. And I mean, society isn't talking about a back to the earth movement or a communal living movement anymore. It feels like maybe we've moved on, but for a lot of people, not at all. There's a farm to table movement. The words are slightly different. The appearances are slightly different, but some of the concepts are the same. It would not be healthy for it just to be, you know, the children of the hippies who never left home. There's definitely a rejuvenation happening. And, you know, we're pretty far removed from it. We just kind of, you know, dip our toe in from time to time. But there was a celebration for the Dome School. Were you aware of this? It was about three, four months ago because they just built this addition. And one of the things I did, so a sideline for me has been to take photographs of those years. And so what I did was I blew up a lot of pictures, black and whites from the old days. Enlarged. Enlarged, is a word. Didn't explode them. I enlarged them. And we put them all up around the Dome School. What was so neat to see was the parents of the children who go to the Dome School. Two things impressed me, how many of them there were. And the other was how much they seemed to really want to know about the history. You know, like I felt a respect for the elders, which in our society is sort of, you know, you become more and more invisible as you get older in general. And these were people wanting to, you know, I want to understand the story. How'd that happen? You know, who are you? And it's like, wow, that was pretty cool.