Who Wants to Live on Women’s Land?

THE DYKES are expecting me. They are arranged in a loose circle on a grassy hill, a dozen or so elderly white lesbians perched on decrepit lawn chairs and frayed blankets. One woman is shirtless, and I try not to stare at her breasts, slung low against her milky stomach. 

“There you are!” Bethroot cries, as if I’ve just slipped out of the forest. She wraps me in a long hug. “Welcome to the Equinox.” At eighty-one, Bethroot is a tiny but spritely dyke, dressed in an oversized corduroy jacket and loose linen pants patched at the knees. She invited me to the fall Equinox celebration a few weeks ago, and so I drove up to Southern Oregon from the Bay Area early that morning, bleary-eyed with a thermos of coffee, winding up the I-5 for seven cursed hours, passing swathes of burnt mountainsides, riverbeds reduced to creeks, creeks to grassy meadows, religious billboards promising salvation and hellfire that seems to have already descended on the scorched landscape.