I read the story. it is indeed a beautiful tale but I have to admit- the part of birthing their own child and then having it taken away? Um… I understand that they are keeping a certain tone in this tale, but to be blunt, they didn’t need a good attorney as much as they needed to be forthright about exactly what circumstances brought about a court taking away all legal rights.
That is not about camping out in the woods or being snuggled in a tent with Mom and Dad. There must be a serious reason behind it and they glossed over it in the extreme. Otherwise, I must say I admire the way they are living their life, and what they do for others.
And the “what happened to the BikeBus” part of the story seriously wrecks a lot of the feel-goodness of the tale as well, or at least it did for me. Between that and the “kid taken away” part it was a downer for me.
Well, it looks like they’ve exceded their data transfer limit. Now my noseyness is killing me. How long do I have to wait to find out all about the fate of the bus & the child they lost custody of. It’s so frustrating.
I wish I could agree with you that there must have been a “reason” she was taken away. But I personally know three good, loving hippie homes where children were taken away or the parent’s rights were curtailed because of their parents’ lifestlyes (religions, specifically - no drugs or abuse). The most recent was the Indianapolis couple whose story was featured in the Pit last summer. I can only imagine it was even worse 30 years ago.
There may have been a good reason, or it may have been a social services person who didn’t like the fact that they had no house and no plans to send her to school. Not enough info to know.
The child was adopted to a Californian family who did not allow them any contact. A couple of years ago, they were reunited with her and are attempting to rebuild some sort of relationship.
I agree with the whole ambiguity about the baby being taken away. There has to be more to it than that and I wish the reunion part. Who knows, it could have been the fact they were just hippies/nudists and vagabonds and the world was a different place then. It could be something a whole lot more. We will probably never know.
It would have been nice to have the reunion story fleshed out.
The site reset and I just read through all the site pages. Not another word about the kids that got taken away is mentioned after the first page.
Given the cryptic nature of the discussion re the loss of the kids, as a WAG I’d guess the authorities probably perceived the kids as living in unsantiary and dangerous conditions and if the parents were caught with drugs onboard (which is not a stretch given the lifestyle context) it might have caused the loss of the kids, but who knows. It’s odd (I mean really odd) that they wouldn’t be fighting tooth and nail to get their kids back) so one can only assume some fairly heavy stuff went down.
I still haven’t been able to read the story because of the bandwidth, but the only thing I wanted to add to the discussion at this point was that I’ve been riding a bike a lot lately, and riding as many miles as he says they have would be damn near impossible hopped up on ANYTHING but life.
Other than that…shrug I don’t trust what anybody says anymore, so maybe they lie!
Since the bandwidth is so flaky and/or limited for this site I merged all 7 site pages (without pics) into one off site html text file for reading. It’s pretty small at about 150K. It really needs the pics for context, but it does give you a flavor of their adventures.
hmm, right you are, I see that on the link you gave. Looks like I missed a whole page before. The pages I read only referred to Sandy.
Doing some more research, I’ve discovered that they had three children together, and at least two of them were taken away because RomTom’s wife (known as Ellie or Owl) was “unstable”. Opinions vary, of course, on how unstable she was and if RomTom was in a position to care for his children and his wife. It appears as though she did not speak English well, which may have exacerbated the situation.
RomTom says, of course:
This page reviews an autobiographical CD by RomTom which seems to tell more of the story:
The release of the ebook motivated two of his daughters to contact him, it says.
