Chapter 3: Away from Home

I now lived with Celine and her husband Ben and their three children. Penny, the youngest, would be my responsibility. When we discussed pay, I said I was thinking about $10 (a week), and Celine said she had been thinking the same amount – per month!

After the first dinner of canned tomato soup and crackers, I began picking edible greens in the nearby forest for a salad, making a dressing of ketchup and mayonnaise.

I was plunged into small town church life, and it was an adjustment for both sides. I dressed like a hippie. The only clothes I owned were patched jeans and a few blouses from the used clothing store. After a week or so, Celine asked hesitantly if I were pregnant – apparently because of my recently acquired pounds. She made me a skirt out of an india-print bedspread, which I then wore constantly.

Women of the church invited me to join a women’s group, where I heard the Gaithers’ album “The King is Coming.” The beautiful picture of the Lord’s return thrilled me. I went to church picnics. Celine’s mother and father took me with them to a Bible study at someone’s home. Sometimes after church Celine’s sister, an overbearing widow with two children, invited me to her handsome Victorian house for lunch. She and Celine were jealous of one another and I was caught in the center.

Celine and her family were Pentecostal. This was new to me. They held worship times every evening; we sang hymns and prayed, sometimes in tongues. Penny delighted them all when she was slain in the Spirit. I wondered cynically if this were just the best way to get attention in this family. Celine applied pressure for me to speak in tongues. One day while taking a bath – the only opportunity for me to be alone in the crowded house – I did speak in tongues. I told Celine, who was overjoyed.

Once, Celine and Ben packed up the children and me, and we drove up to the Rising Son Ranch. I was excited to see everyone. Celine told me she saw a demon sitting on the shoulder of one of the Ranch guys. Suddenly the visit became uncomfortable. Celine was like that though – she would see demons jumping out in front of her car.

Celine took me to a Christian concert with Pat Boone performing, and to a Christian Businessmen’s conference in San Francisco. She and her family exposed me to many experiences that fed my spirit and caused my faith to grow. Yet I was always an oddity in that church and that community.

As an introvert, I looked for any opportunity to go out for walks and enjoy the nearby hills or the river bank. I would hike for hours, enjoying the Lord in my own way. My heart yearned for the mountains I loved. I longed to return to the Ranch. It never occurred to me to just tell Celine that I was quitting.

Then, surprisingly, Kathy, my friend from the Ranch, also moved to Miranda. She too cared for a small child. Her presence in the town brightened my exile. We would meet in our off hours to walk and talk. We walked under the ancient redwoods, in the eternal twilight of their shade. We picked salad greens together, or window shopped in the small town. Kathy developed a crush on a Christian dentist in town.

We saw the Ranch dwellers fairly often, when they would come to our church on Sundays. I heard that they were outfitting a bus and planned to take a road trip. I wanted desperately to go with them.

I don’t know how long I stayed in Miranda, but one day Celine said she had found someone else to watch Penny. At last I could return to the Ranch. John and Pat came to pick me up. Everyone was preparing for the coming trip, and I now learned the reason for it: the responsible couples at the Ranch were planning to leave, and they wanted the rest of us to know what our options were – where we might want to go. We already knew about the Lighthouse Ranch in Eureka, because we had attended their Deliverance Temple services, and we had visited their Ranch. But this trip would expose us to other groups of Christians in southern California.

I arrived back at the Ranch just in time. John had acquired a school bus and had been working hard to fix it up. He got the engine running, took out all the seats and filled the interior with big pillows. The exterior was painted in colorful swirling patterns and decorated with Jesus symbols and Scriptures. We were going on a road trip!