|
|
 Wild Blue Yonder :
An Intentional Community in
Rural Twiggs County
by Chris Horne
Photographs by Maryann Bates
Click Here To View ALL The Photos From The Yonder Farm
From the road, Yonder Family Farm looks like the set of a Rob Zombie horror film: rusted tools and equipment hanging in and around lean-to shacks assembled from building scraps while free-range chickens dart in and around the aging trucks and vans parked on the sandy front lawn dotted with trash. And of course, there’s a naked, contorted baby doll on the ground, too.
Four kids cloud in from the margins holding an infant. Each has a lion’s mane of blond dreadlocks and could pass as the other’s identical twin except for the obvious age differences. A 62-year-old man with crystal blue eyes and wild, stringy, white hair surfaces from the shadowy insides of a dilapidated single-wide trailer. He says nothing and moves slowly. Barefoot, he steps into the light, which reveals fading streaks of purple-pink in his hair and beard. He’s wearing a shirt from a long-forgotten Halloween and a pair of imitation Tommy Hilfiger denim shorts. His name is Abe Yonder. This is his land, and there are 100 acres more of it to see.
In a soft, disarmingly harmless voice, coated with innocence and simplicity, its tender notes rising up from the back of his throat, Yonder asks, “Well, ready for a tour?”
“Cry aloud, spare not. Lift up your voice like a trumpet.
Tell My people of their transgression…” – Isaiah 58:1
Six, winding, tree-lined miles from Exit 18, a wooden Smokey the Bear leans on a warning of the day’s fire hazard. Between it and the mammoth, brick courthouse in the heart of town, a tilting placard announces the yet-to-be-started shopping center that’s obviously going up in response to the 250 jobs Academy Sports promises to bring with its distribution warehouse. Small, economically-depressed Jeffersonville, Georgia, is on the brink of a boon. Just past the marker for the Elmer Anthony Dennard Highway, Yonder is experiencing a separate success.
“My walk with the Lord is pretty good. He’s dumped on me quite a bit,” Yonder says. He points out The Sabbath Tree, where members of the community gather on Saturdays to worship, and continues, “I’ve been having a hard time just distributing the blessings that come to us.”
Walking down a muddy, clay path through the backend of what appears to be an inhabited junkyard, the word “blessing” isn’t the first that comes to mind.
 Yonder explains, “Well, we have more than we can eat. We have more land than we can handle. We have more equipment than we can use. We have more cars than we can drive. We have more clothes than we can wear. And we don’t make any money. We don’t go out and do any jobs. When somebody requests our help, we go out and do it. We do it mostly for contributions. The blessings keep pouring in, and my job, I guess, is to pass them on. Receive them and hand them out.”
Letting this soak in is the first step into understanding what girds the Yonder Family. And accepting it means possibly believing in it, buying into it—if only momentarily, like those times when hiking the Appalachian Trail or giving everything to the poor sounds like a good idea. Actually, if there’s a happy medium between these two, then that’s where the Yonder Family lives.
They are what you’d call an “intentional community”, which simply means these folks meant to live together as opposed to, say, a gated community, subdivision or suburbs, where people congregate but remain apart. Though Yonder himself tosses the word “hippie” around often, there is a major difference between the intentional community at Yonder Family Farms and a commune, which they are sometimes mistaken for.
There is no overarching philosophy, theology or ideology guiding the Yonder Family. They are not forcibly united by any schema. Everyone there is free—and encouraged—to believe as they see fit. Yonder may be steadfastly Christian, but it isn’t required of anyone else. As such, the benefits and even the purpose of the community seem to change depending on the person or circumstance.
Yonder lovingly remarks on how the family “picks up strays”, taking in the homeless, the mentally ill and the abandoned, which is, by all accounts, one of the greater aspects of life in the Yonder Family. But Spirit—a wiry, thin man with a huge grey beard, the wide-open eyes of a cartoon and the energy to match—focuses elsewhere.
“There are three things that are important to the community,” he says, standing between his propane generator and solar panel-charged battery blocks, “One is surviving peak oil, which is about having enough oil to run our economy. Two is mass extinction, where over half of the animal species disappear. And the third is global warming and stopping catastrophic climate change.”
Likewise, another resident named Todd talks like he may be one of the Family’s misfortunate souls. He’d moved around a bit, in Georgia and Florida mostly, then “things didn’t go so well.” He says, “If it weren’t for Yonder, I wouldn’t have nowhere to go.” Even with Yonder’s help, Todd has had a tough row to hoe. He woke up one morning with four snakes on the floor of his lean-to—neither hurting nor chasing them off because they eat the rats—and then was in his van during the recent tornados, which took down several large trees on the farm.
Picking up his black toy poodle, Mr. Buddy Hobo, Todd says, “I just told Jesus if he was looking for me, ‘I’m right here. I’m ready.’ Twenty-two minutes later, it was over. That’s a long time to wait.”
 “Is this not the fast that I have chosen: To loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out? When you see the naked, that you cover him,
and not hide yourself from your own flesh?” – Isaiah 58:6-7
Years before he was Abe Yonder, he was David Breedlove, a young man raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist attending seminary at Columbia Union College just north of Washington, DC.
“You could say I went a few steps beyond that,” he says now, adding, “I got into some historical research and found out that there’s a lot about our Christian religion that’s carried over from paganism. So, I began doing some serious study and debating these things in class.” In short order, he found himself on the outside of the church and the school. “Not exactly disfellowshipped. Put on church censor, they called it. I left the church and stepped out on my own.”
He quickly found a job teaching algebra in an Adventist school when “I got a greeting from Uncle Sam.” This was in 1967. When he left college, he lost the protection from the draft that it provided. His father, who fought during World War II and been stationed in Macon at the Cochran Airfield, was so worried that David would be sent to Vietnam—“for nothing, not even high and mighty aspirations like protecting the country”—that he spent three straight days in prayer. On the third day, his father said an angel appeared and said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s been handled.”
On that third day, David was let out on R&R before being shipped to Seattle. He went to the docks to earn a little money. He met a man who paid him $15 to unload a truck of grapefruits. When David finished, the man offered to get him a ride anywhere he wanted to go. “Well, I said ‘I wanna go to Boston,’” Yonder recalls, “Because it was close to Canada.” And Canada was freedom for a would-be draft dodger.
“That’s when I ran into Family,” he says, noting he never made it to Canada, going underground in the US instead. “Gypsies as they’re called. Or a Rainbow. Or a hippie. Or whatever you want to call it. It was a way of escape.”
“I raised a Family while on Interstate flight to avoid prosecution. So I stayed underground. So I’m well acquainted with underground family. I became an initiate and progressed through the ranks until I became a padrone, which is a patron. Someone who cares for more than their own family. Padrones wear a gold ring in their left ear. But now I’m a Godfather. I have children of my own and I have children that belong to other people. It’s called the biggest disorganization in the world because there’s no one in charge, no one in charge.”
Kansas City induction center
Military officer in WWII
The Great Awakening—still study “all these wondrous things, trying to figure out why we’re on this planet instead of up in Heaven like we expected. The Adventists believe that Jesus was going to come real soon, but it didn’t happen. So either we’re wrong or something else is wrong.”
Wayne, also known as Whistling Bear. And there’s Creature. And Jimbo, who the kids call Butthole because he, according to Horse, “Sits around all day spraying us with the water hose.” Yonder adds, “Jimbo doesn’t have a personality that is conducive to children.”
Touring his hand-built home, which is remarkably tidy,
How do most people tend to find the Yonder Family?
“God sends them, I guess. People come and go. This is a stopping point for most families.”
“First, they’d dig a shitter, and they’d build their camp. And from there, it’s however they want to expand.”
“We had an old Travel Coach with a scroll above the driver’s window where they’d put the name of the city you were headed to. Well, we just put the word ‘Yonder’ up there. And it went on from there. People got on the bus. We did farm and forest labor to help our way down the road. Fifty-percent of what everybody made went to the ride, and the other 50 percent went to their own personal use.”
1993 fed 400 people and had a 35-pound pumpkin pie
Darryl Stone, Twiggs County Sheriff’s candidate Greg Stone’s father and former sheriff, used to put drunks in Yonder Family care instead of locking them up. To hear Abe tell it, several other organizations have done the same. “I’m trying to avoid politics, but the thing I prefer about the Stone family instead of the one that’s in office now is that guy is making a business out of law enforcement. It’s the biggest money making thing in the county now. It’s unfortunate for the citizens being taken advantage of. I’ve been in jail. I’ve seen it all. They made a raid out here. Charged me with possession, but I don’t even smoke. I had to get a hair follicle test to prove I don’t smoke.”
We'll have guided discussions on:
Isaiah 58
Fasting that Pleases God
1 “Cry aloud, spare not;
Lift up your voice like a trumpet;
Tell My people their transgression,
And the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek Me daily,
And delight to know My ways,
As a nation that did righteousness,
And did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
They ask of Me the ordinances of justice;
They take delight in approaching God.
3 ‘ Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and You have not seen?
Why have we afflicted our souls, and You take no notice?’
“ In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure,
And exploit all your laborers.
4 Indeed you fast for strife and debate,
And to strike with the fist of wickedness.
You will not fast as you do this day,
To make your voice heard on high.
5 Is it a fast that I have chosen,
A day for a man to afflict his soul?
Is it to bow down his head like a bulrush,
And to spread out sackcloth and ashes?
Would you call this a fast,
And an acceptable day to the LORD?
6 “ Is this not the fast that I have chosen:
To loose the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the heavy burdens,
To let the oppressed go free,
And that you break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;
When you see the naked, that you cover him,
And not hide yourself from your own flesh?
8 Then your light shall break forth like the morning,
Your healing shall spring forth speedily,
And your righteousness shall go before you;
The glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
9 Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
You shall cry, and He will say, ‘Here I am.’
“ If you take away the yoke from your midst,
The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
10 If you extend your soul to the hungry
And satisfy the afflicted soul,
Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,
And your darkness shall be as the noonday.
11 The LORD will guide you continually,
And satisfy your soul in drought,
And strengthen your bones;
You shall be like a watered garden,
And like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.
12 Those from among you
Shall build the old waste places;
You shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
And you shall be called the Repairer of the Breach,
The Restorer of Streets to Dwell In.
13 “ If you turn away your foot from the Sabbath,
From doing your pleasure on My holy day,
And call the Sabbath a delight,
The holy day of the LORD honorable,
And shall honor Him, not doing your own ways,
Nor finding your own pleasure,
Nor speaking your own words,
14 Then you shall delight yourself in the LORD;
And I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth,
And feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
The mouth of the LORD has spoken.”
|
|
|
|
.JPG)
