We Were Young
" A pioneer passes " We are strong No one can tell us we’re wrong Searchin’ our hearts for so long Both of us knowing —Pat Benatar We were young. We were stubborn and proud. We were so cravenly idealistic that we came together in rural squalor, trying to start a commune in a Tennessee forest amidst the peak of Nixon’s Vietnam debacle. I hiked there from the Appalachian Trail. She hitched in from the coast. Our stubborn pride would end our marriage 22 years later. Neither of us would give in to the other. Both were trying so hard to save the world in each of our own ways that we wanted—needed—the support neither of us was ready to sacrifice from our precious cause to give to the other. And so it ended. Not from a loss of love. We never lost that. My only wife, Cynthia Adele Winkler Bates, passed quietly at her home on June 23, 2026, surrounded by her family. She was 78 years old. She was living in the singles tent on Second Road when I arrived off the Trail. Whe...
