Drop City

between the logs gave way to handsome long horizontal stripes of ochre mud, hardening in the sun, and yes, Virginia, this was going to keep the _wind__ out all winter. The roof poles--a whole forest of them, white spruce stripped and glistening and as straight as nature and a little planing could make them--were handed up brigade-style to Marco and Tom Krishna and then set in place against the roof beams, no nails, no ligatures or sheet metal couplings needed, thank you very much, because the weight of the sod--big peaty chunks of it two feet thick and with every sort of grass, flower and weed sprouting like hair from the surface of it--would hold them in place. Or that was the theory, anyway.
    Star helped Dunphy and Erika make up sixty peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, a fruit salad--two kinds of berries, Del Monte peaches fresh from the can and apple wedges with the bruised skin still intact--and five gallons of cherry Kool-Aid, mildly laced with acid, just to give the occasion the right sort of send-off, and Tom Krishna saw to the music situation, setting up a little portable Sears Roebuck stereo to run off a car battery that had to be used _sparingly,__ people, because there was no way to charge it up again. The music--so unexpected, so disorienting, so immediate and all-absorbing--put them over the top. People broke free to link elbows and do-si-do a step or two and then went right back to slinging mud, and then they had a sandwich and a cup of Kool-Aid, and through it all the steady wet thump of the Grateful Dead slinging drumbeats and converting steel strings to a rain of broken glass, _A friend of the devil is a friend of mine.__ Star found herself hugging everybody, and she'd forgotten all about the goats, about Ronnie, who'd crawled off to crash in his tent, and she would have forgotten about Joe Bosky too--creep extraordinaire--if he wasn't right there in her face every time she turned around, helping himself to the Kool-Aid and sandwiches, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as if he were balancing on a pole, blowing her kisses, juggling a hatchet and a pair of kitchen knives in a dumb show that just went on and on.
    But nothing could dampen her spirit. This was like a barn raising, was what it was, like something out of the history books, and here they were living it, doing it, making it happen in modern times because it was never so modern you couldn't take a step back. “This is like an old-fashioned barn raising,” Star said aloud, to no one in particular, and she liked the notion of it so much she said it again, and then again, but nobody really paid any attention to her because by then they were all into their own trips, the chinking trip, the roofing trip, the take-two-steps-and-swing-your-partner trip, and the only one who responded was Joe Bosky, right there at her elbow, tossing his hatchet and his knives, and what he said was, “It sure is, sweetheart, and I'd raise a barn with you anytime.”
    It was late in the afternoon, the meeting house chinked inside and out, the roof in place and buried in sod so that it looked as if a whole meadow had been transposed from the earth to the air, just floating there like a magic carpet strewn with flowers--and that was a trip, it was, everybody agreed--before anybody gave a thought to Verbie. Dinner was cooking--salmon fillets rubbed with dill and roasted over the open fire, with brown rice, stewed cranberries and a pot of communal mustard on the side--and all of Drop City was feeling relaxed and confident. They'd done it. They'd come all the way up here and built a place from scratch, with the materials at hand--free materials, provided by nature--and if they could do that they could build the cabins too, and why stop at three? Why not four or five or six of them? Why not make a whole camp of the place, like Camp Minewa, where there were four girls to a cabin, bunk beds up against the wall and plenty of space for everybody? Marco was talking about a smokehouse and Norm was pushing for a sauna and maybe even a hot tub, and at lunch he went into a long, acid-fueled oration on the Swedes and hot rocks and hotter water, on Chippewa sweathouses and purification rites, until he talked himself hoarse. Sure, people said. Yeah, sure, why not? Because there wasn't anything they couldn't do, and if anybody still doubted it, all they had to do was take a look at the meeting hall standing there tall and proud where before there'd been nothing but