Embraced by our tribe, we looped each other through an infinity sign.
Epilogue
IN SEPTEMBER 2007, SWAN married the man who’d fathered her third child. Soon after, Arol suffered a nervous breakdown. With Swan at the Farm’s helm, monogamy became the norm. More Zendiks got married. Years after shying away from the sexy painter at Woodstock, Karma met her future husband while selling a Phish concert. Cayta married Taridon. Zar married a young woman who’d moved to the Farm in 2003, at seventeen.
In 2011, Arol’s cancer recurred. She died, at seventy-three, on June 6, 2012.
By the time Arol died, Zendik comprised a dozen adults and a half-dozen children. After her death, hopes rose for a power shift. When Swan and her spouse dashed those hopes, half the adults left with their kids. Before long, the other four adults departed, and Swan put the Farm up for sale.
I count a number of ex-Zendiks among my dearest friends.
Vining through the ruins, human ties remain.
Gratitude
TO GERTRUDE GUNSET FOR “The Poison Tree,” tears and silence, and the chance to apprentice to the craft of building sentences.
To Rebecca Faery for casting writing as a process of discovery.
To Nina Kang for writing exquisitely, showing me “The Summer Day,” and being there for over twenty years.
To the Dudley Co-op for a taste of belonging.
To Nancy Mitchnick for urging me toward the Gardner.
To the Gardner family for funds to launch my quest.
To my mother for succor, constancy, and always saying yes when I called collect.
To my sisters for keeping vigil and setting bold examples.
To my brother for holding the thread and smoothing my return.
To Gabriel and Celena Zacchai for reaching out and piercing my doom-cloud.
To Kyra Gordon for speeding my release.
To Steven Hassan for revealing the cult pattern.
To my early readers for turning the pages and telling me about them.
To my ex-Zendik comrades for turning the pile.
To Gary Bruder for the Vaio.
To Nancy Rawlinson for throwing me to the revision monster with the tools to take it on.
To Heather Sellers for Chapter After Chapter.
To Margaret Hollenbach for Lost and Found: My Life in a Group Marriage Commune.
To Katherine Burger, the Woodstock Guild, and my fellow residents, for four generative stays at Byrdcliffe.
To Dan Gilmore for preserving parts of my Zendik self.
To Verdant Nolan for lending me his archive.
To Jeanne Nolan for sharing her Zendik books and memories.
To Charles Eisenstein for thoughts on the nature of miracles and the power of stories.
To Louise DeSalvo for teaching me well and blessing my exit.
To Allison Hunter for asking, what’s your book about?
To Lauren Frankel for buddying up with me and letting me peek behind the scenes.
To Medicine Wheel and Earthaven for abundant social nourishment.
To my 138 Kickstarter backers for helping provide my book-being with a body and a home.
To Michael Bluejay, Thomas McGuire, David Zukowski, Jerry Zukowski, Linda Zukowski, Edith P. Newman, and Gregg Zuman for Kickstarter superstardom.
To Brooke Warner, Cait Levin, Julie Metz, Annie Tucker, and the rest of the team at She Writes Press for partnering with me to produce a book I’m proud of.
To Gregg, my love, for our journey together and a nook of my own.
About the Author
HELEN ZUMAN is a tree-hugging dirt worshipper devoted to turning waste into food and the stinky guck of experience into fertile, fragrant prose. She holds a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and a Half-FA in memoir from Hunter College. Raised in Brooklyn, she lives with her husband in Beacon, NY and Black Mountain, NC. For more on life at and after Zendik, visit www.helenzuman.com.
Author photo © Gregg Zuman
SELECTED TITLES FROM SHE WRITES PRESS
She Writes Press is an independent publishing company founded to serve women writers everywhere. Visit us at www.shewritespress.com.
Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing, and Survival by Leslie Johansen Nack. $16.95, 978-1-63152-941-2. A coming-of-age adventure story about a young girl who comes into her own power, fights back against abuse, becomes an accomplished sailor, and falls in love with the ocean and the natural world.
Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home by Leah Lax. $16.95, 978-1-63152-995-5. Drawn in by offers of refuge from her troubled family and promises of eternal love, Leah Lax becomes a Hasidic Jew—but ultimately, as a forty-something woman, comes to reject everything she has lived for three decades in order to be who she truly is.
Learning to Eat Along the Way by Margaret Bendet. $16.95, 978-1-63152-997-9. After interviewing an Indian holy man, newspaper reporter Margaret Bendet follows him in pursuit of enlightenment and ends up facing demons that were inside her all along.
Catching Homelessness: A Nurse’s Story of Falling Through the Safety Net by Josephine Ensign. $16.95, 978-1-63152-117-1. The compelling true story of a nurse’s work with—and passage through—homelessness.
The Coconut Latitudes: Secrets, Storms, and Survival in the Caribbean by Rita Gardner. $16.95, 978-1-63152-901-6. A haunting, lyrical memoir about a dysfunctional family’s experiences in a reality far from the envisioned Eden—and the terrible cost of keeping secrets.
Pieces of Me: Rescuing My Kidnapped Daughters by Lizbeth Meredith. 978-1-63152-834-7. When her daughters are kidnapped and taken to Greece by their non-custodial father, single mom Lizbeth Meredith vows to bring them home—and give them a better childhood than her own.
Praise for Mating in Captivity:
“Zendik Farm has long been both mysterious and intriguing. Helen Zuman has given us her wrenchingly personal and deeply insightful story of her time in this most unusual of communes. Others might see the group and their own experience differently, but few will provide a better-written or more probing account of Zendik.”
“How timely, how telling this story of an inexperienced young woman who fell prey to a cult because of the abuse to which she’d been subjected by male strangers. Only within the fold, where there were rules protecting the women, did she feel safe enough to explore her sexuality and learn to love. So she surrendered her possessions, her will, her youth. Read Mating in Captivity as a cautionary tale, one I hope will spark a desire to create a better world for our daughters.”
“Helen Zuman was a believer. She believed in the perfectibility of community, in the ability of young dreamers to transform traditional sexual norms by getting back to the land. That Zendik Farm was ultimately exposed as a tyranny built on lies does not destroy the idealism of Zuman’s original impulses; she holds up her youthful self alongside her wiser older self, without useless moralizing, and thereby shows respect for the young people drawn to this cult, while shedding light on the long history of American pastoral communal experiments. She does all this with restraint and wit, and a deft instinct for entertaining incident and character. A page-turner, with purpose!”