The Littlest Hippie: A True Believer
Everybody at Starflower Farm loved Juniper Skye. That was never the problem.
The problem was the sky.
Starflower Farm sat at the end of a long dirt road in the high desert of northern New Mexico, a scattering of adobe huts and painted school buses and one enormous geodesic dome, surrounded by sagebrush and piñon pines and more sky than any one person could ever look at. Forty-three people lived there in the summer of 1971. They grew beans and corn and squash in the river bottom. They kept goats, and bees, and an extremely bad-tempered llama named Gandhi. They made pottery and candles and sold them at the market in Taos on Saturdays. And every one of them, from old Papa Bear with his long white beard to the youngest baby on the farm, adored Juniper Skye.
It was hard not to. She was twenty-two years old, and she stood exactly four feet eleven inches tall in her bare feet. She had finally hit four-eleven that spring, after years of hovering at four-ten and three-quarters, and had made Papa Bear measure her against the doorframe of the dome three separate times to be sure. She had a sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks like cinnamon on toast. She wore her hair long and wild and dyed a brilliant, impossible blue, which she did herself every month with a powder she bought from a man in Santa Fe and refused to discuss. She wore a studded red leather headband, and a little silver ring in her nose, and gold cuffs on her ears that jingled when she walked. And she wore, every single day, a pair of round orange-tinted glasses with thick red frames that made her look, as Rainbow in the kitchen dome said fondly, like a very small, very cheerful owl.
She could fix any engine on the farm. She could calm any goat. She sang while she weeded, in a voice like wind chimes. She knew every child on the farm by name, and their birthdays, and their favorite color, and which ones were afraid of the dark. When anyone was sick, Juniper sat with them. When anyone was sad, Juniper made them tea from her own garden of mint and chamomile and talked to them until they laughed. She was, everyone agreed, the heart of Starflower Farm.
She also believed, with every inch of her four-foot-eleven body, in flying saucers.
Not in a vague, wouldn’t-it-be-nice sort of way. Completely. Utterly. With total, unshakable certainty.
“They’re out there,” she would say, sitting cross-legged on the roof of the old yellow school bus at night, gazing up at the blazing desert stars through her orange glasses. “The universe is way too big for us to be the only ones. They’re out there, and they’re watching, and one of these nights, they’re going to come.”
And the people of Starflower Farm, who loved her dearly, would smile, and pat her on the head, which she hated, and say, “Sure, Junie.”
Nobody believed her. Not one of them. Not even the people who believed in astrology and crystal healing and talking to plants. Papa Bear, who had been a physics professor in Berkeley before he grew the beard and moved to the desert, explained to her very gently, many times, about the speed of light and the vast distances between stars. Dusty, who played guitar by the campfire every night, wrote a song about her called Little Junie and the Little Green Men that everybody sang along to, Juniper included, because it was very catchy. Rainbow, who ran the kitchen dome and mothered everyone, worried privately that Junie spent too much time alone on the bus roof at night.
Juniper did not mind. She knew what she knew.
She kept notebooks. Seventeen of them, by that summer, stacked in a crate beside her bed in the little silver Airstream trailer she lived in at the edge of the farm. Every night, she climbed up onto the roof of the yellow bus with a thermos of mint tea and a flashlight and a pencil, and she watched the sky until she fell asleep, and she wrote down everything. Every shooting star. Every satellite. Every strange flicker of light on the horizon. She had seen four hundred and twelve shooting stars. She had seen eleven things she could not explain. She had drawn every one of them, carefully, in colored pencil.
And out in the meadow beyond the corn, on a flat stretch of open ground where nothing grew but sage, she had built a landing circle.
It had taken her three years. It was made of stones she had gathered from the arroyo, hundreds of them, each one about the size of a loaf of bread, each one painted by hand in bright colors. Orange and turquoise and pink and gold and green. She had laid them out in a great ring, thirty feet across, with a spiral of smaller stones winding into the center like a snail shell. In the very middle, she had placed one big flat stone painted silver, with a crescent moon on it.
“So they’ll know where to land,” she had explained, the day she finished it. “And so they’ll know they’re welcome.”
The whole farm had come out to see it. They had all agreed it was very beautiful. And on their way back to supper, they had all looked at each other with fond, sad, kindly smiles, and said nothing at all.
Only one person on the farm ever came out to the circle with her. That was Moss, Rainbow’s little boy, who was six, and who thought Juniper was the most wonderful person in the entire universe. He would sit beside her in the middle of the painted stones at night, wrapped in a blanket, and ask her a thousand questions. What would they look like? Would they be nice? Would they have pets? Would they like peanut butter?
“I don’t know, Moss,” Juniper would say, every time, with her head tipped back and her eyes on the stars. “But I bet they’ll be wonderful.”
“Why do you think they’ll come here?” Moss asked her once. “Out of everywhere?”
Juniper thought about it for a long time.
“Because somebody here is waiting for them,” she said finally. “I think that matters. I think when you really, truly believe in something, with your whole heart, it’s like… leaving a porch light on. It helps them find their way.”
Moss accepted this completely. He was after all six. Things just made sense at that age.
The summer went on. The corn grew tall. Gandhi the llama bit three tourists at the Taos market. Juniper filled her eighteenth notebook. And on the night of the twelfth of August, a hot, still, windless night with no moon at all and the Milky Way spilled across the sky like sugar, she climbed up onto the roof of the yellow bus with her thermos and her flashlight and her pencil, just like always.
And at 11:47, by her wristwatch, every dog on Starflower Farm began to howl at once.
Then the goats started bleating. Then the chickens. Gandhi the llama, who had never in his life been afraid of anything, let out a long, high, astonished honk and lay down flat in his pen.
And Juniper, on the roof of the yellow bus, looked up.
A star was moving.
Not falling. Not drifting like a satellite. Coming down. Slowly. Straight down out of the Milky Way, growing larger and brighter as it came, until it was not a star at all but a great round shape of soft, glowing light, wider than the dome, hanging silent in the sky above the meadow.
It was not silver. It was not metal. It was not like anything in any magazine. It seemed to be made of light itself, shifting and shimmering, the way the inside of a seashell shimmers. Its colors kept changing, slowly, like breathing. Orange. Turquoise. Pink. Gold. Green.
The same colors as the painted stones in her landing circle.
Juniper’s pencil fell out of her hand and rolled off the roof of the bus.
One by one, the doors of Starflower Farm banged open. People came stumbling out into the warm night in their nightshirts and their bare feet, rubbing their eyes, holding their children, staring up. Forty-three people. Every single one. Rainbow came out of the kitchen dome with a ladle still in her hand and Moss clinging to her leg. Dusty came out of his bus with his guitar, which he had grabbed without thinking, and then nearly dropped it, because all six of its strings had begun to hum on their own, softly, in a chord he had never heard before. And Papa Bear came out of his hut last of all, tall and white-bearded, in a striped nightshirt and one sock, and stopped dead in the middle of the yard, and stared up at the glowing thing in the sky with his mouth open and his pipe falling out of it.
“That,” said the former professor of physics, very faintly, “is not possible.”
The glowing shape drifted slowly across the farm. Over the dome. Over the corn. And it came to rest, hovering silently about thirty feet above the ground, directly over Juniper Skye’s circle of painted stones.
And the stones began to glow too.
Every one of them. Orange and turquoise and pink and gold and green, lighting up one after another, all the way around the great ring, and then winding inward along the spiral, faster and faster, until at last, in the very center, the big flat silver stone with the crescent moon on it blazed so bright that everyone had to shade their eyes.
In the stunned silence, a small voice piped up from somewhere around Rainbow’s knees.
“JUNIE TOLD YOU!” shrieked Moss. “SHE TOLD ALL OF YOU!”
Nobody argued.
Juniper climbed down off the roof of the bus. Her knees were shaking. Her heart was going like a hummingbird’s. She walked, barefoot, through the yard, past all of them, past Rainbow and Dusty and Papa Bear, all of them staring at her now. Through the rows of tall corn, rustling in the light. Out into the meadow. And into the circle of glowing stones.
“Junie!” Rainbow called after her, frightened. “Junie, honey, come back!”
Juniper turned around in the center of the circle. In the shifting light, her blue hair blazed like the sky, and her orange glasses glowed like two little suns.
“It’s okay,” she said. Her voice was perfectly calm. “They came for me. I’ve been leaving the light on.”
And a beam of soft golden light came down from the glowing shape above her, gentle as sunlight through a window, and lifted Juniper Skye up off the silver stone, slowly, as if she weighed nothing at all. She rose into the air with her hair floating around her face and her toes pointed, and she looked back down at all of them, at the whole farm standing in the meadow with their mouths open, and she smiled, and waved.
Then she was gone.
She would tell the story many times, in the years afterward. And she always told it the same way.
The inside was not cold, or metal, or full of machines. It was warm, and soft, and full of light, and it smelled like rain on the desert, and growing things. It felt, she said, like being inside a garden at dawn.
And they were there, waiting for her.
There were six of them. They were small. That was the first thing she noticed, and she laughed out loud with surprise and delight when she did. They were small, all close to her height. Every one of them. For the first time in her whole life, Juniper Skye stood in a room and looked straight into the eyes of everyone in it.
And their eyes were beautiful. Very large, and very dark, and very gentle, like a deer’s, full of soft starlight. Their skin shimmered faintly, like the inside of an abalone shell, pink and blue and silver. They did not speak with mouths. They spoke with color. Ripples of light moved across their skin when they talked, soft waves of rose and gold and violet, and somehow, Juniper could understand every word. It was the strangest feeling in the world. It was like being able to hear music for the first time.
They told her they were travelers. That they had been traveling between the stars for longer than her world had had people on it. That there were a great many worlds out there, and a great many people on them, and that most of the people on most of the worlds never looked up.
But every so often, they said, on some world somewhere, there was someone who did. Someone who looked up every night, and wondered, and believed. Someone who left the light on.
And those people, they said, shone. From very, very far away. Like little lighthouses, scattered across the dark.
“We have been watching your light for a long time, Juniper Skye,” they said, in a ripple of soft gold. “It is one of the brightest we have ever seen.”
They showed her the Earth.
The glowing ship rose, so smoothly she never felt it move, and the floor beneath her feet turned clear as glass. Below her, Starflower Farm shrank to a tiny cluster of lights, and then to a speck, and then the whole desert spread out beneath her, and the mountains, and then the curve of the world itself, enormous and blue and silver and turning slowly in the dark, with the sun just beginning to rise along its edge in a thin line of fire. It was so beautiful it hurt. She stood there with her hands pressed against the clear floor and tears running down behind her orange glasses, and she could not say a single word.
It was, she noticed, almost exactly the same blue as her hair.
When it was time, they asked her if she would like to come with them.
Across the stars. To all the other worlds. To see everything there was to see. And for one long, breathless moment, Juniper Skye wanted it more than she had ever wanted anything in her entire life.
Then she thought of Moss, sitting beside her in the circle wrapped in his blanket, asking if they would like peanut butter. She thought of Rainbow’s chamomile tea. Of Papa Bear measuring her against the doorframe three times. Of Dusty’s ridiculous song. Of the goats, and the corn, and even Gandhi the llama. Of forty-three people standing in a meadow in their nightshirts, who loved her.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not this time. Somebody has to stay and keep the light on.”
The travelers rippled with soft, warm gold. It looked, she thought, very much like smiling.
Before she left, the smallest of them came forward and fastened something to the leather choker she always wore around her neck. A tiny crescent moon, made of a metal she had never seen, warm to the touch and faintly glowing, exactly like the moon she had painted on the silver stone at the heart of her circle.
“So you will know,” it said, in a ripple of rose, “that it was real. And so that we can find you again.”
She came down at dawn.
The whole of Starflower Farm was still standing in the meadow. Every one of them. They had not gone back to bed. They had waited all night, wrapped in blankets, around the edge of the glowing circle of stones, staring up at the sky. When the golden beam came down out of the pink morning light and set Juniper Skye gently back on the silver stone in the center, with her blue hair wild and her cheeks wet and her glasses crooked and a little crescent moon glowing at her throat, nobody said a word for a very long time.
Then Papa Bear walked into the circle.
He was six foot four. He had always had to bend down a long way to talk to her. This time, the old professor got down slowly on both knees in the dirt in front of her, so that his eyes were exactly level with hers.
“Juniper,” he said, and his deep voice was shaking. “I owe you an apology. We all do.” He swallowed. “What did you see?”
And Juniper Skye, the littlest person on Starflower Farm, threw her arms around his neck, and laughed, and cried, and told them everything.
They never did tell anyone outside the farm. They talked about it, and decided together, around the campfire, that nobody would believe them anyway. Papa Bear did mail a single tiny scraping from the edge of the crescent moon to an old colleague at his university in Berkeley. The colleague mailed back a very short, very nervous letter asking where on earth he had gotten it. Papa Bear never answered.
Dusty rewrote his song. It was now called Little Junie Was Right. It was even catchier than the first one. Everyone sang it.
And every clear night after that, when Juniper climbed up onto the roof of the old yellow school bus with her thermos and her flashlight and her pencil, she was not alone anymore. Moss came, with a notebook of his own. Rainbow came, with extra blankets. Dusty came with his guitar. Papa Bear came, grumbling about his knees, with a telescope he had ordered from a catalog. Before long, half the farm was up there on the roofs of the buses every night, watching the stars. They named it Sky Watch. Nobody ever missed it.
And every year after that, on the night of the twelfth of August, a little after a quarter to midnight, a single glowing light would come drifting slowly across the sky above Starflower Farm. It shimmered orange and turquoise and pink and gold and green. It never landed again. It just passed overhead, slow and low and silent, and paused for a moment above the circle of painted stones in the meadow, and blinked three times.
And down below, forty-three people would stand on the roofs of their school buses in the warm desert night, and wave.
The smallest of them, a four-foot-eleven woman with blue hair, orange glasses, and a little glowing moon at her throat, always waved the hardest.
She was still the littlest hippie on Starflower Farm. She always would be.
But she was never again the only one who believed.
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