The Ash Family

The Ash Family by Molly Dektar

      I am the type of person who thinks for themselves. Sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I’m not but it’s my wrong and my right. Never, ever have I understood how someone can be brainwashed, convinced so completely to give up. And so, people who become members of cults have left me in a quandry. The Ash family is a cult.

      Berie is a young woman at a crossroads, trying to figure out how to live her own life and not the one prescribed by her mother and on again/off again boyfriend. Apparently this makes her an easy target when she is spotted by Bay, the cult’s recruiter, at a bus stop. I don’t know how the recruiters know an easy prey but they do. They wouldn’t find one in me so I don’t understand why anyone would watch their suitcase leave in the hold of the bus and go off with this stranger. But that’s what Berie does.

     Bay takes her deep into the hills of North Carolina’s mountains and introduces her to the community, the Ash family, led by a man named Dice. Berie is given a new name, Harmony, and told she will stay three days or forever, that there is nothing she will have to do if she doesn’t want to, there is complete freedom here in the family, freedom to be free of the outside where everything is fake.

     Harmony stays longer than three days. She finds wearing other people’s clothes strange, sleeping in an unassigned bed different, the smells of each other off putting until she smells the same. The food is foraged, grown, butchered, milked, cheesed. And she is happy living with nature and following its dictates, she truly does.

     But there are rules and Dice and Bay and the group do tell you to do things you don’t want to do and treat you differently until you do them. And if you are like Berie you want so to be accepted by these people you will do anything. You believe this is a family even when some tell you it isn’t.

And when the people she has come to care about the most start disappearing with no clear explanation, she begins to question that she is still searching even after she thought she found her answers.

     I watched Berie become a member, listened to her reason and try to figure out her life and she really believed what she was seeing and doing yet she also never felt her place secure within the family, that they never really trusted her. She strove even harder to prove herself to them, especially Dice and Bay, who continually played with her mind.

     I found The Ash Family fascinating. I found Berie’s story fascinating, but personally, I still don’t understand that kind of giving up my brain to someone else.