Tania

“There must be a reason why you missed your bus,” she said. “Like, you meet someone interesting or special. Maybe it just had to happen, you know.” I nod.

She just came back from living in a tree house for a week. The house moved when the tree moved, she said. Feeling one with nature. Moving with the trees. Before that she stayed with a community of people that lived in the middle of nowhere in tipis. There was a whole bunch of tipi villages like that in Andalusia, she said.

“How do they take showers?” I asked. I couldn’t help it, that was just the first thing that popped up in my head. When I think about a bunch of hippies living in a community in the middle of fuckin’ nowhere, I only think about the smell. The holes in the ground that replace the toilet. I remember the smell of people at a pop festival after three days. That didn’t give much hope for a community of people that lived there for years. “There is a well close by that they use to wash themselves. Everybody is just swimming around naked there.”

“And how do they make money?” I asked naively.

“They built stuff, like drums.” Isn’t it weird, I thought, that neo-hippies decide to escape the rules and regulations of modern capitalist society and then always create exactly the same ‘alternative’ society? Why do they all make drums?

If I would start an ‘alternative’ society, I would walk around in bright purple suits and sell riddles to people. That would really teach those ‘normal’ bastards!

Maybe she saw the hopelessness too. She left after two weeks because it did not work out with the boy she actually came to visit. That’s all she said about that. After she left the tipi town, she went to work at an organic farm in another middle of nowhere in Andalusia. The farm was owned by a German. He allowed people to stay for (almost) free and in return they had to work on his farm. Besides the food they were growing, they also made drums. This is where she lived in a tree house that moved when the tree moved. Her neck hurt from making all those drums.

Only a few hours to go and she would be back in Germany. She said she longed for a good shower. We had a short moment of complete understanding. Then I had to leave to catch my bus.