Some people think it was easy to get on the project, but actually it was hard because
it was, you know, we got a stipend for coming down here.
It was something that we had to do as a part of, for most of us, as a part of college.
It was 1970, which we, as we remember, was the first year of a birthday.
And it was very much as a consciousness of everybody about the importance of the environment.
This 60s crowd, although it was 1970, but it was still the 60s in Atlanta, Georgia.
We thought we were going to save the world.
I'm from New York, I'm a city girl.
I mean, it was, but having explained to us, you were very well prepared for what was going to happen.
It's just visually you were not prepared.
And spiritually you weren't prepared.
They told you about the bugs, they told you about the snakes, they told you about all the dangers.
They were warning you about stuff.
But you weren't prepared for how you were going to fall in love with the place.
Within the first three days, the bugs had gotten to us tremendously because it affected our ability to sleep.
You're swatting bugs on you all night long and in the dawn, they're already there all around you.
And by about three days we kind of got short on temper.
I think we got acclimated to it.
The cold water showers, having to prepare our own food and all that, it was so much offset by just the environment we were in that we just all took it in stride.
Beauty.
It was just a new way of living, but it was a great way of living.
I think one of the unexpected things was just the effect of being in nature for so long a period of time.
I love nature before it came here, but I never lived for any kind of extended period.
And it definitely affects you and it changes you and you really understand what it means to be connected to it.
That's part of ecology too.
If you can't connect with nature, you're not going to care about it.
I don't remember us having any real leaders, we just all worked together.
We did have meetings that said we needed to organize because at first it was a little chaotic because nobody knew who was going to do what.
With the different duties and disciplines that we were doing on the island, and it's some of that rotated where some people spend time in the kitchen, other spends time in the garden.
I told somebody that I knew how to build something and I really didn't. I just had ideas in my head and picked a site and a nice spot out there at the edge of the marsh and decided that we'd build a building.
And I think I only got to sleep in it one or at most two nights before we left the island.
So you're leaving it for the next crew?
That's part of what we were here for.
We were here to establish an ongoing project and all our work was going to be for posterity.
If we did any butchering, it was under Roger's supervision, so when we butchered a hog, and I hate to tell you how many hogs we butchered, it was full of babies.
Wow, you didn't have to tell us that now.
We cut, prepared the meat, put it in the freezer up here and then that was our supply.
Every week somebody went in town to go buy staple. They went to Kmart and they came back and they said, it was scary.
There were these purples and these yellows and all these bright colors and I thought going back.
When I went into a supermarket, I went, wow, look at all this food. It's so organized and I can just take it.
It was remarkable how well we got along for a bunch of strangers being thrown in together and relying on each other for daily living.
We haven't talked much about Sandy, so how often did you interact with her? What were your impressions?
She's wonderful. She's instrumental, I think, in all of our lives.
I don't remember her ever coming to Middle Place.
We came to her.
It was a treat to go up to the Big House. Sandy really thought that us being here was doing something beneficial for the island as well.
Who else was there besides the West?
If we had any guest lecturers who came in, Dr. Kellelogger or the Haney, Greer. You have to separate the difference between what somebody did when they came down on Saturday and gave us a lecture.
Like a Bob Haney.
And then when he came back at Midnight to take you on a jeep ride across the marshes.
Half a dozen of us would jump in the back of the jeep and spend two hours going down the causeway and looking at the fireflies and stare at the stars.
It was a spiritual experience.
It was equally as educational. One was certainly valued as highly as the left was going out on those jeep rides. That's what's implanted in our souls.
There was a full moon and we all went out on a beach.
And on that night, all the couples formed.
They did it. Everybody peered up.
And after that, there was never, as far as I knew, there was never any fight about it.
We had a ceremony last night at Middle Place to remember Russ Price. He'd always bring back a bottle or a couple of bottles of Matus wine from Portugal.
I don't remember those.
And we were all of drinking age. We'd go out and eat and meet out at his little hut out in the cabbage palms.
And we'd sit around and eat gouda cheese and drink Matus wine and eat olives.
And we did that last night in his honor and Missy Greer's honor.
And those Matus bottles also ended up with candles in the Nining's area.
The trouble was that on the local press of the mainland, they were writing stories about just Senate decadence.
So we were very concerned that we were going to ruin the reputation of the island.
We were very well behaved, as well behaved as we could be as being 19-year-olds or whatever we were.
Do you remember when the Forestry Commission came in with that film? We were in it.
We were afraid.
We didn't want them.
Well, I don't know. Now we're very grateful they did it.
It's because people didn't have the big picture.
We worked so hard all day long.
We woke up with the sun and we were dependent upon each other for survival.
Cutting up a little bit was the only way you could survive.
We were here for a reason. That was to be part of an ecological movement.
And we knew that what we were doing here was in the process of trying to save Asaba Island from development.
There were people that are out there across that sound that would probably still like to develop Asaba Island today if they could do it,
although I think the heritage preserve here now keeps that from happening.
And I saw a preliminary drawing that he said was by a Corps of Engineers or somebody that linked the causeway.
All the way down through the Golden Isles down out into Jacksonville area.
And all of them were going to be linked and developed if they had their chance to do that.
I wanted to come and have a great time and everything.
And then it turned out that we were here on a mission that wasn't really well defined.
That was the beauty of it.
And we knew that the island could be taxed out from under them or seized or whatever.
Somehow we were there trying to save this thing. We were instrumental somehow.
Living on Asaba Island in the summer of 1970 informed the rest of my life and is continuing to.
And I was so sad when we left Asaba.
One of you said, well, this ends one cycle, but a new cycle begins.
And I didn't like that when it was said.
But I recognized it. I knew it was a deep truth.
And being here again on the island, I'm very aware of the living entity that she is.
This was from Bob Haney.
Listen to the land.
Hear it sing.
Make Genesis a testimony to life.
Living during a time when the war, the Vietnam War, was the biggest thing going on for males.
If you didn't have a critical skills deferment, you were going off to war.
Went to Georgia Tech.
When I got out of Georgia Tech, I taught high school for a year.
And that was probably worse than going to Vietnam.
Really, it was like being in war every day.
We got here and all of a sudden I woke up in the morning and I just started laughing.
It was this uncontrollable laughter and it went on just for a really long time.
And it was something about being, I don't know if you can say it was here, just the relaxed nature of the thing.
I didn't feel that there was anything missing from my life.
Nothing.
And so you can say, well, how does it affect your life after that?
I have no idea.
But I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be the same person had I not encountered it.
And hopefully me being here helped the island some way, I don't know if it did or not.
Oh, yes, I'm going to meet a country girl again.
Living old, down, dog, and a big corn porch and rabbits in the bay.
And I tell you, all the lights on Broadway don't amount to an acre of green.
And I'm going to meet a country girl again.
