It’s the summer of 1975 and I’m a city kid at heart with no idea what the hell I’m doing. But I’ve been smart enough to pick a spot where that doesn’t matter. The weather is moderate and no animals or insects concern me. People are either friendly or indifferent, and I’m clueless to the raging gossip about who I am and what I’m doing. They could have just asked.

My tipi is pitched high on a hill on Orcas Island: overlooking the town of Olga, Buck Bay, Shaw Island, and the distant Olympic Mountains far to the south. Morning light shimmers to me in greens and yellows I’ve never seen as if whispering anything is possible. The opening of the tipi faces east with possibilities like the rising sun. It also faces Philadelphia where my childhood was spent. In those days I could not have imagined this moment in a million years. A radical move might have been to the far suburbs.

I’m acting out a quintessential hippie fantasy: looking to the universe for answers. It had been kind during a life transition fueled by Woodstock, a hippie commune, and twenty-five thousand miles of hitchhiking. But deep down I’m still the city kid that grew up not knowing which direction my house faced.

You’d think that looking to nature for answers would require having some sort of relationship with it. I'm working on that and we are in the infatuation stage. Why not shoot for the sky? I feel ready for a career change. If I trust enough, maybe the trees or the breeze will tell me what to do. We make a deal. I will stay here until I have insight. But there is more to what I’m doing.

Colleen and I met because I was a bad tenant and because of Pooch who was the best dog ever. He and I hitched all over the country together. I’d point to a spot when we got a ride and he’d jump to it. He was an elkhound puppy when I got him and I didn’t think our landlord’s no pets policy was serious. It was, and four roommates and I scattered to the wind after being evicted. One day my former roommate Julee asked her new roommate Colleen if she wanted to go for a walk to meet her friend Harvey.

I lived in a ramshackle house in Bellingham, WA and was immediately attracted to Colleen. She had long light brown hair in a braid, jeans, a peasant blouse, and scuffed light brown desert boots. Her blue eyes were a deep pool that I wanted to dive into. They told me she wasn’t a lightweight. But I was a go-with-the-flow hippie. A date seemed too bourgeois. So I had to settle for becoming part of the same crowd.

Once we went to a party with Felipe, from France. I bought a bottle of whiskey and the three of us walked across town drinking from a paper bag. We were pretty looped by the time we found the party. Both Colleen and I thought we might go home together. But I lost her in the crowd and wandered outside with no idea where I lived. I meandered to the corner and followed the more familiar sounding street on the sign to the next crossroad, where I did the same. After repeating this many times along a convoluted route I somehow made it home. That process made more sense than some of the other decision-making strategies in my past.

I had always lived in square and rectangular structures. My life had been ruled by similar linear logic. The tipi was a different paradigm. My thoughts were less boxlike, living in a structure without corners. I was prepared to listen to this new geometry.

The tipi’s twenty-foot diameter feels huge. I grew up thinking bigger is better. That's why I choose it over the more manageable sixteen-foot version. Smoke drafts up from the central fire pit and escapes between crossed poles topped with Tibetan Prayer Flags. My bed is a foam pad with an East Indian quilt on top. Nearby are plywood bookshelves with bricks that serve to make them have two levels. On top is an altar made of guru photos as well as rocks and shells from a nearby beach. A few hippie and East Indian books keep the shelves from feeling too empty. Across the fire from the bed, are two mismatched chairs and a wobbly table on uneven ground. They are my attempt at creating a living room.

Filling a round space is disquieting. I want to define sections that don’t exist. I’m a square peg and the tipi is a round hole. Outside, the Rube Goldberg like kitchen is nearby. Askew logs and salvaged wood make asymmetrical and leaning shelves. Plastic gallon milk bottles full of water sit in its stable areas and a few second-hand dishes and mismatched silverware are on the more tentative parts. Glass jars full of rice, millet, and cold cereal sit slightly askew on a makeshift half-shelf.

In a nearby cedar grove the simple latrine is hidden from view to the north. A small firewood pile of branches and logs are fifteen feet west. Ten feet east a worn green sweatshirt floats on the laundry line as if to give a nod to normalcy. Twenty feet further east is a small dirt road where my white ’63 Chevy Wagon sits out of view to the south. Every few days a car may drive past it on its way to the cemetery a hundred feet further uphill or to a neighbor's property above or to check me out.

I’ve been enmeshed in Native American culture for two years. I taught fifth grade for a year on The Yakama Indian Reservation and was the only teacher living on the Reservation. Being the only white guy at Thursday night drumming sessions near my small house was awkward. I felt a responsibility to try to learn the culture and incorporate some of it in my lessons.

Many of the native people appreciated my openness. But participating in traditional drumming understandably struck some negative cords. I could never really get it and perhaps had no right to try. While some tired eyes supported me, others shot darts my way. I tried to keep my focus on learning but it would never be easy. This epitomized the complicated set of circumstances that defined trying to help those whose culture had been decimated by my people.

Once, my Native American aide (Mrs. Ambrose) told me she used to go to the hills to dig herbs that could cure anything. I asked her why she stopped. “It’s a lot easier to get white man’s magic pills,” she answered. The school administration interceded when I tried to have her teach my students about the old days. My presence was defined by contradiction.

In the end, the mixed messages were too much and I took the easy path and left after one school year. In retrospect I know that my replacement may very well have had less empathy than me, but who knows if they were a better or worse teacher.

I went on to become a tutor/counselor for Lummi Indian kids in Bellingham. My new principal and I quickly had a shouting match in the hallway when I tried getting Native American families more involved in school decisions. He yelled, “They don’t care!” I was coming to realize that bridging the gap between cultures was bigger than me. And the last thing I wanted to be was an agent of change toward the life that had been forced upon these people.

I was an outsider to the their culture but was also an outsider to the culture we hippies were rebelling against, a man without a country. I read about Native American warriors on painted horses racing to battle screaming, “It’s a good day to die!” This Jewish suburban kid decided to embrace this concept in a different way.

Perhaps if I pitch a tipi on a quiet island and ask for answers the ancestors will have pity on me and talk to me. Maybe my old life will die and morph into something new and unexpected. Why not try?

Two years before that, in the spring of 1973, someone said The San Juan’s are magical, which caught my attention because being a dishwasher wasn’t. Spring break was coming; why not hitch over there?

Twenty-hour workweeks at $1.66 an hour in a college cafeteria supported my dog Pooch and myself while I looked for a more fulfilling job, having just received a teaching certificate.

On my first ferry ride to Orcas Island I was mesmerized by the landscape that drifted by like a pop-out children’s book. The hills and trees had unimaginable sharpness, as if they were from a new dimension. The lack of pollution was startling. It was love at first sight.

Hitching was a way of life on the islands and a good way to meet people. I immediately wanted to be one of them. “How do you live here?” I asked. “Oh, I’ve got two or three part-time jobs,” was the generic answer.

When I returned from my exploratory hitching jaunt to the San Juan’s I felt a sudden and unexpected urge to get a car, after two years without one. My parents wired $200 and I immediately found the perfect white ’63 Chevy Wagon.

I was certain that I was supposed to live in the San Juan’s. I went directly to the college career education office. I asked about a teaching position in the San Juan’s for next fall.

“A job just came in today,” the counselor said. 
“For the fall?” I asked. 
“No, for right now,” she replied. Calling the school she held her hand over the receiver as she asked, “Can you drive thirty miles for an interview today?” “Yes,” I replied.

I nailed the interview, packed everything in my car, took a friend to replace me as dishwasher, and headed to magical Orcas.

My job is officially to be a teacher at a private school. In reality it is tutoring two brothers whose parents are Tacoma doctors. They are disciples of a guru of sorts called Louis (of the Louis Foundation). He had been one of the Spanky and Our Gang kids on TV. He’s late forties and quite overweight. His aloof floating essence makes me mildly uncomfortable. Star Farrish is his opposite and runs the place day to day. He’s loose and relaxed with bright orange hair, and a ruddy complexion. Any practical problem, ask Star. Existential dilemma? Ask Louis.

Effie is the baker, a forty something devotee of Louis who is rotund just like him. Her face is pink and very welcoming. Her world includes visitors from different dimensions or worlds.

It’s my first breakfast at the school. Effie says, “A visitor came to me last night and told me to beware!” She leaves with no further explanation.

The next day I ask her a carefully framed question about that visit and find that the visitor wasn’t in the flesh or giving her a warning about me.

I’m starting to piece together the patchwork group of devotees that buzz around Louis. They mostly have odd yet endearing demeanors. I can’t figure out Louis and keep my distance. I don’t accept or deny his pronouncements.

I’d hitched west with a copy of Be Here Now, by Ram Das, taking up a third of my backpack. Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda has recently been added to my bookshelf. Each school day starts with Louis, Star, Effie, a few others and myself having a silent meditation in a large, darkened back room. Louis talks inspirationally.

We close our eyes in silence. The air vibrates and buzzes. I don’t know what’s going on but it’s comforting and resonates with my Eastern readings and feels a lot better than the morning news.

The teacher preceding me had been a Jewish guy from the east coast who apparently looked a little like me. He left them high and dry with a few months left in the school year. They later confided to me that they had a hesitancy to hire me when they saw our similarity.

No one at Louis Foundation tells me anything about a curriculum. I meet the kids and create a program on the fly; including daily jogging and canoeing to a nearby small island. I’d never been in a canoe before.

Occasionally I look out the classroom window and see Louis looking up toward us. I sense that he’s checking out our aura and apparently things look okay.

After school I walk a mile to North Beach. It has ten to thirty feet of beach (depending on the tide) made of small rocks and shells. Some of them became part of an altar in my room along with my spiritual books. I use them to counter anything that may feel negative in my confusion of trying to sort out The Louis Foundation.

Sucia, Matia and Waldron Islands and the distant mainland with white-capped mountains are a stunning backdrop. Herons float by, harbor seals drift by, and airplanes occasionally take off and land at the nearby airport. Other wanderers to this same beach become my friends.

Louis foundation has plans to build a new school and expand the student body. I decide to return but their plan doesn’t work out. Star wants to teach me real estate so I can stay with them. I feel a calling to teach, which overrides my attraction to Orcas and keeps me from having to sort out my mixed feelings about Louis Foundation.

It’s two and a half years later and I’m five miles from The Louis foundation on Orcas. The circular tipi overwhelms me in its simplicity. My eyes follow it round and round. Tibetan prayer flags flap on the tops of the poles. I’m starting to learn that less can be more as I experience life off the grid for the first time.

I want to get beyond linear logic and have a relationship with nature. My head whizzes with possibilities. I was taught to not take chances. Certainty was a core value. As a child I sometimes pondered how I could break from tradition. I fantasized that my Jewish wife and I would move my dental practice to the far suburbs of Philadelphia.

The future is just out of reach. I am trying to not plan for it. But how do I find it? Maybe it will find me.

The islands are different. Mile high glaciers scoured them ten to eighteen thousand years ago and subsequent wind and water polished them like a gem. Those same glaciers gouged out Puget Sound. Louis claimed that the ancient civilization of Lemuria (contemporary with Atlantis) is buried not far below Orcas.

Geologists call the San Juan’s a terrain, a much older continent crashing under the newbie mainland an inch and a half per year, same speed that the moon is moving away from us.

The word Orcas is a shortening of the name Horcasitas, one of the eight names of a Spanish Viceroy to Mexico. It has nothing to do with orca whales, though orca whales frequent the waters. Orcas Island looks like a whale from Bellingham. Morning sun reflects off a large window that looks like a whale's eye.

Orcas residents have an unusual profile. Some are on spiritual quests. Others are running from something or not sure where else to go. Some want the immediacy of nature and some were born there and never felt compelled to leave. A magazine article described winter. “The old folks argue at PTA meetings and the young folks switch partners.” Everyone feels the island’s magic to some degree. To an outsider like myself it is both a place of expanded consciousness and of endless possibility while also being the smallest of small towns.

When I left Louis Foundation, Star laughed at the hours I spent cleaning and polishing the ol’ Chevy before leaving. I had invited four friends on a road trip to my friend Liza’s wedding in New Jersey. Only Colleen accepted. That first date has lasted over forty years.

I picked her up in Seattle and in Boise we decided to skip the east coast and go to Mexico. Once there we picked up an incoherent, slobbering hitchhiker who lead us to a tiny beach town where everyone seemed stoned. Someone gave us a hut on the ocean where I slept great and Colleen not at all.

In Mazatlan we camped on the beach, watched Pooch square-off with rats under a restaurant, and killed time playing cards before watching sunsets shoulder deep in the ocean. Soon we had to choose between continuing south or being responsible and coming north to find a job. I wanted to keep going south but practicality won.

Colleen returned to college in Bellingham and I landed a fifth grade teaching position on The Yakama Indian Reservation in the small town of White Swan.

Wild horses roamed free and the kids were just as wild and free spirited. The first day of school we recited the pledge of allegiance, “One nation under God with liberty and justice for all.” The irony overwhelmed me and we never said it again. I wasn’t sure if they wanted me back when the school year ended but Principal Ted Filer surprised me when I quit by asking where my next job was.

“I don’t have one,” I replied.

“Why don’t you keep this position in case you don’t find something?” he countered. He went on, “We can always find someone at the last minute if you find something else.”

I was flattered but still quit, moved in with Colleen in Bellingham and found a job tutoring Lummi Indian kids the next year. By the end of that year I felt like I’d played out my teaching career, but didn’t have a clue what to do next. I had a strong feeling that I would make a mistake if I jumped into something. There must be a different way...  

I decide to be crazy and pitch a tipi on Orcas. Maybe solitude will offer answers. This could be the perfect melding of my hippie and Native American experiences. I feel flush with a few hundred dollars saved and my parents are a safety net I can count on. And it’s also a good time to sort out how I feel about Colleen.

She and I are like the shirt that fits perfectly the first time you try it on. But isn’t life more like The Odyssey. Shouldn’t there be more drama?

The tipi is our summer apart, so we can figure things out. But we’re not that far apart. She’s on nearby San Juan Island, living in a shack for free, without water or electricity. But a kind neighbor runs her an electrical cord.

My twenty-five foot high tipi poles were cut and stripped while Colleen and I lived in a large house in the woods outside Bellingham where there were more dogs than people.

The bathtub’s wooden wall had many large orange, white, and yellow fungi growing on it. No one cared. Someone loaned me a drawknife and showed me how to use it to strip poles. Instead of cutting light saplings that would be easy to move, I cut old heavy stunted trees. But I’m a Taurus and bulled ahead. I assumed that the landlord didn’t care that I took the trees.

I ordered a Nomadic Tipi from Montana, and read The Indian Tipi, its History, Construction, and Use by Reginald & Gladys Laubin (Copyright 1957). I look at it now and see yellow pages full of circles, underlines and stars that are insights into my younger mind.

Inside the front cover is a stick-on grape cluster and under it a handwritten note saying Happy Birthday Harvey, Love Julee. Julee is the friend who brought Colleen to my house when we first met. She also put a stick-on dog that is running and biting a red musical chord surrounding him onto page two and the back page.

Julee started calling my dog Gandhi Pooch. Everyone else, including myself followed suit. I started calling Julee, Jules and everyone else followed suit. I once told her about a teaching position she checked out and she taught there for over thirty years.

I have the poles, have ordered the fabric of the tipi, and my bible is The Indian Tipi book. I just need somewhere to pitch it. I go on an exploratory trip to Orcas Island to try to find that place. I meet a guy on the ferry whose mom has the perfect spot.

He thinks she’ll be Ok with me using it. We drive to her house and she offers it to me for free.

Colleen meets someone on a ferry to nearby San Juan Island who knows someone who has a cabin. It’s offered to her for free. If you’re chosen, the islands open their arms.

The Indian Tipi book says, “To pitch the tipi, select the three heaviest poles for a tripod. Lay aside one other heavy pole for the lifting pole – the one to which the cover will be tied.”

Colleen is visiting and we’re not strong enough to get the tripod poles to stand up. We drive to the nearby Doe Bay Restaurant. The owner lives in a tipi.

“Any chance you can help me get the poles for my tipi up?” I ask. “Sure,” he replies and hands Colleen the menu.

“The food is pretty basic, you won’t have any problems,” he tells her. 
 Without another word he and I head off to put up the poles, leaving her in charge of the restaurant.
The Indian Tipi book says to Carry the rope outside the framework, starting at the pole S and walk to the left, clockwise, or as the Indians say, “with the sun.” Continue around the framework, whipping or snapping the rope into place...four times. This is the sacred, or lucky number in Indian figures, but is also practical, as it gives one leverage for drawing the rope tight.

We put up the poles in no time and he helps me attach the skin, which is complicated. It all takes an hour and a half. I am awestruck by the magnificence of the structure, which shines in the sun like a soft beacon. I look over the nearby bay to Shaw Island and the distant snow topped Olympic Mountains with a surreal feeling, as if I’m writing my life’s script that wasn’t meant to be or maybe I'm dreaming.

I feel a new version of alone during my first night. I have an urge to flee. There is nowhere to go. I realize that wooden walls are a security blanket and a blockade. I feel profoundly part of my surroundings. This is both reassuring and disturbing. A gust of wind billows the canvas. It feels odd and disorienting.

I wonder if my discomfort is from the newness. Then I realize the source is up the hill, the nearby cemetery. Many of its moss-covered stones are tilted by time and wind. I reach deep inside myself to acknowledge my neighbors, the souls resting there. I feel an immediate, comforting shift. I don’t feel warmth, but I feel acceptance.

The dedication in The Indian Tipi follows: Dedicated to the Plains Indians 
in the hope that their young people
 will recapture a pride of race, a love of color and beauty,
 and an appreciation of the good things in their own great heritage – 
today the heritage of all Americans.

The first sentence in the book says: The Sioux word tipi means “for living in.”

The woman who’s land I am living on, asks me to go to the local hardware store, buy some insecticide on her tab, and wipe out a huge hornet’s nest that I hadn’t noticed fifty yards from the tipi. I stand in front of the nest for a long time, early in the morning as instructed. I don’t feel right about killing and am scared to death, having no experience with hornets.

Once as a teen I was afraid to jump off the high dive for the first time so I stood there frozen for a long time. I envisioned the distance to the pool shrinking. Without thought and completely impulsively, I dove instead of jumping.

I stand by the hornet’s nest for a long time, in a long sleeve shirt that would barely have helped if things went badly. I’ve been told to spray into the hole in the bottom of the hive and stay there until the can is spent. My instinct is to spray a bit and run like hell. But I force myself to stay and spray the can empty before running to my car and driving quickly away, heart racing.

There is only beauty behind me. Only beauty is before me!

- Cree Song (The Indian Tipi).

Colleen and I see each other a lot. Her tiny black and white TV is connected to the neighbor’s electricity and we watch the rest of the world chugging along as if we have a crystal ball. It feels like a different universe. Colleen and the islands seem very real and certain. I have no idea if we’re supposed to stay together. How does one make that decision?

I write her a letter saying I want to spend some significant time apart, to explore how that feels, but get to her cabin before the letter and read it to her.

I’m going for a walk one day and happen upon an office that says Chiropractic Life Center. I walk in. I know that it’s new because I’ve never noticed it. There is a smell of fresh paint.

“What is this place?” I ask the receptionist. 
 “Go in the back to see the chiropractor, he’ll explain,” she replies. 
 He tells me about chiropractic and offers a free treatment, which feels like scratching an itch I don’t know I have.
“How do you learn to do this?” I ask...


I soon bump into Allyn, visiting Orcas on her way to chiropractic school. Colleen independently chances upon her also. Allyn will become my classmate and our neighbor six months later when I start school.

After six quarters she will disappear to the Polarity Institute, which will take over the nearby town of Doe Bay, where the restaurant owner helped put up my tipi poles. Life can be circular, like a tipi.

It’s decision time about my relationship with Colleen, but we don’t decide anything. We take the next step and do what comes natural, go on another road trip.

Winter’s coming and I have the vague idea of pursuing chiropractic school, being far from certain that is the right choice. When I mention the idea to my dad he says, “Are you sure that you don’t want to be a podiatrist?” I send in an application and we pull up stakes to go east for the winter.

I’m feeling sad but mostly excited when we take down the tipi poles. Four months on the land feels long enough. Some neighbors let me store my poles in the loft of their barn. I would never have dreamed that I’d never see them again.

A cool breeze from the south whispers winter. I’m feeling reflective. I’ve proven that I can live on little. I’ve learned the beauty of solitude and feel ready to reemerge to the foreign world of the mainland. My possible career path feels new and enticing, like the tipi was.

But it’s practicality and linear nature makes me wonder if I've learned intuition. Or am I falling back on something practical.

Island fever is real and I want to drive across country. Road trips are what Colleen and I do best. Would she and I have gotten back together if we’d gone separate ways that summer?

I suspect that we would have. But life has a funny way of going in mysterious directions and who knows which pathways we would have followed. I’m glad to have taken a break but also feel ready to start life anew.

We go to a friend’s wedding in Connecticut. The friend’s mom asks if we’re going to get married. We both say no.

Two months later we’re married on Leap Year Day, having realized the unusual date midway through our one-week engagement.

We plan the wedding the night before, invite a few friends and no family. We can’t imagine our parents in the same room because they are so different. Years later they become good friends and go on road trips together. We’ve been married over forty years.  

What I learned in the tipi is part of a bigger question. How much of me is my childhood self? And how much has experience altered that?

Some people seem to have a makeup that leads them toward what their parents might have envisioned. And some of us have one that needs to forge a new path.

 

Or is this thinking too small? Maybe it’s karma. Maybe a force bigger than genes and parents program us toward whom we become.

Once I was hitching in the Yukon and our panel truck veered out of control to be saved from plunging a hundred feet into the Yukon River by a random sapling that was just strong enough to stop us from going three more feet to the precipice. I learned a lot about appreciation from that experience.

The tipi was a stopping point for me. I had been programmed to be a dentist in Philadelphia. That was clearly not the path for me. I then found myself being a teacher – which also did not feel right. I had no idea what to do next and instinctively knew that I would make a mistake if I jumped into something.

I look back on my life and try to make sense of it. I don’t know how many people are able to stop their lives to be still for a time and see if answers come to them. 

My tipi experience was an exercise in trust. It helped me find answers through intuition. I know that desire can cloud such a search. Having time with nature may have sharpened my instinct to the point that when I saw the golden ring passing, I reached out for it.  

EPILOGUE: It’s six years later and I have a crazy busy chiropractic practice in North Idaho. Colleen is pregnant with our older son Jerome, due any day. She’s working part time in the practice and we need to find a replacement for her. I have a strong feeling that it will be a new patient. It’s way past time to start advertising.

Joan Roberge is that new patient. She has shaky grammar, not much education, and is a quintessential cowgirl.

“Are you interested in a job?” I ask.

Joan becomes the heart of the clinic, a bridge between cultures. She never learns to pronounce chiropractic correctly. She says “choir practice”.

Its a few years later and I have a dozen employees. I’ve had no training in running a practice and have been learning on the fly. Employees whiz by.

Joan says, “Aren’t you ever scared that the practice will slow down and you’ll be stuck with all this overhead?”

“I can always go back to the tipi,” I reply. “That wasn’t so bad.”