And in that atmosphere, she strove to be good. She stopped smoking, stopped drinking, kept celibate, ate only whole grains, seeds and vegetables, and scrubbed herself in the shower till her skin was raw. Sadness, she felt, was a by-product of baggage—material wealth, family, lovers, all of which were physical reminders of the past and instigators of unnecessary regret and desire. The simpler she kept her existence, she felt, the easier it would be to chase away unhappiness. It helped that the colony permitted neither televisions nor radios, and only the elders kept luxuries such as fridges and space-heaters. Life was uncomfortable, medieval even, but it had meaning because everything, from brushing her teeth to boiling water, posed a challenge. She stopped taking things for granted, especially tampons. She rose at five and went to bed at midnight. The nights without electricity, she sat by lumpy tapers and just listened—owls, crickets, the rustling of leaves in the wind.

Gradually, the sadness went away, overtaken by the cold, the damp, fleas and general anxieties about her health. When she cried her endless tears, it was from sheer exhaustion. And exhaustion heightened all amazement. The mute beauty of a sunset, the elaborate fretwork on an acorn, the clear taste of stream water, all of it was more pronounced than ever before. If this was mystical ecstasy then she had found it, through cuts, bruises, scabs, blisters and painful wood splinters too tiny to be extracted by candlelight.

Three years into Humboldt County, there came a letter from her father. It was, inevitably, about Bobby. After the shooting of war protesters on campus, Bobby had decided to drop out of Kent State and enlist in the army. He wanted to go to Vietnam and “kick some ass.” Daddy was beside himself. Even though he considered himself an old-fashioned patriot, he didn’t want his only son going over to fight a war on a side that wasn’t winning. He asked for Mary-Sue to call home collect and help talk her brother out of it. To speed her up, he’d enclosed a check for $500.

Mary-Sue was reluctant to break her calm of the past three years and let the world back into her life, with its Pandora’s box of chaos, anger and grief. She needed her father’s money but she’d learned from experience that anything to do with Bobby was poison. Once she picked up the phone, the orderly life she’d made for herself would be no more. She could not do it. She could not sacrifice her peace.

But she acted honorably. Because she didn’t call home, she never cashed the check.