LUCK RAN OUT

Hippie family lived in trees, on old boats and on the kindness of strangers
until the law caught up. It was only marijuana, they say, but the Jarvises
are not out of the woods yet.

ELK LICK, W.Va. -- The six children of Ronald and Eileen Jarvis came of age
in treehouses over swamps and in a rickety 60-year-old boat.

For seven years they lived a real-life version of "Swiss Family Robinson."
No one knew where they were. And while they traveled from West Virginia to
Maryland to Florida, they never stepped into a classroom or visited a
doctor's office. They made money doing odd jobs and selling handmade wooden
carvings.

Then, in June, U.S. marshals caught up with them.

Ronald and Eileen Jarvis are back in West Virginia, in jail awaiting trial
on drug charges. Their children -- daughters in West Virginia, sons in
Florida raising money for their parents' defense -- are talking for the
first time about their life on the run. And they are longing for a return to
that life together.

The Jarvis parents are accused of growing marijuana. Eileen, 53, is charged
with one count of manufacturing marijuana and Ronald, also 53, is charged
with conspiracy, with 11 other growers, to manufacture marijuana from 1979
through 1992.

Federal agents who inspected their 138-acre West Virginia farm in 1992
valued the crop at more than $200,000. Next to the family's one-room,
ramshackle home, Deputy Sheriff Richard Bennett of Lewis County said his
officers found 500 pounds of marijuana.

The Jarvis children maintain the marijuana was for their father's recreation
- -- an explanation that doesn't impress law enforcement officials. "Five
hundred pounds of marijuana," said Bennett, "is an awful lot of recreation."

Ronald's mother, Josephine Jarvis, 79, shakes her head about the suspected
50 marijuana plants investigators spotted by helicopter. "Ron was stupid,
and I have told him that. He had it growing out here in the open," she said.

Still, the Jarvises are no ordinary drug suspects. For seven years, they
charmed strangers who even now wish the family only well.

Even Bennett said: "This family was different. They were artists and have a
good family, more of a 1960s-type family."

A piece of land

Ronald and Eileen

Jarvis met in a

Georgetown disco in

the 1960s, their

relatives say. Both had

long hair; he drove a

motorcycle. They

were unabashed hippies, and after they married, they moved to West Virginia
as part of a "back to nature" subculture.

Their life savings went into a farm on a scruffy piece of land crawling with
snakes and ticks. The isolated property is 20 miles from the nearest town,
accessible only by one-lane dirt roads. They had no electricity or running
water. Eileen planted a vegetable and herb garden. Ronald built a one-room
house out of evergreen trees.

In the 1970s, Eileen gave birth to Yancy, then to two more sons in the
one-room house.

Molly and Lily were born in a rusted yellow school bus that had been
abandoned on their property. Anna was the last child, four years younger
than Lily. None of the children has a birth certificate.

The couple spent mornings teaching the children how to read and write. The
walls of their house were decorated with letters of the alphabet. In the
afternoons, they played on a tire swing and made pottery out of sludge from
a nearby stream. Yancy carved faces out of tree stumps.

The family sold wooden furniture and crafts in mall parking lots to stay
afloat. They needed little cash because they made their clothes, grew their
food and had no telephone or utility bills.

But on a sticky August day in 1992, their pastoral life ended. Federal
agents flying over the backcountry in search of illegal crops found what
they say were suspicious plants on the Jarvises' land.

Anna, then 6, remembers the whirring of a low-flying helicopter and the
ticks that were out en masse that day.

Ronald and Eileen made a split-second decision to run -- leaving their
dinner of chicken and rice burning on the wood stove. Eileen took three of
the children and sped off in the family's white van.

"I understood what was going on, and I was pretty [upset] because my life
was all gone," said Lily, who was 10 when they left. "I knew we were never
coming back. It was pretty strange and scary."

With police crawling over the property, Ronald crept back into the house to
get Anna's Raggedy Ann doll and his gold pocket watch.

He and his sons spent the night in the woods, watching breathlessly as
agents came within a foot of their hiding place at one point.

Two days later, the family was reunited and got a friend to drive them to
Annapolis. But first, they left their van in the parking lot at the bank
with a note under the wiper, explaining to loan officers that the family
"would be leaving town" and could no longer afford payments.

In Annapolis, the family scraped together enough money to buy a battered
50-foot-long boat. Black paint flaked off the sides of the 60-year-old ketch
and water poured into the hull. It was towed to the Backyard Boats Marina in
Shady Side. The Jarvises asked to stay at the marina a few weeks -- long
enough to repair the vessel.

"At first I thought: What a raggedy group of people on this derelict boat,"
said Ginger Griffith, the marina's general manager. "In my heart, I knew
they must have been very weird or on the run, but I never asked."

The eight slept on the boat and used the marina's showers and bathrooms.

Ronald and his sons worked on the boat late into the night, replacing each
plank using antiquated hand tools.

Eileen worked in the marina's main office. "She was the most effervescent,
competent, reliable and congenial worker you could have asked for," Griffith
said.

Residents of the bayside community remember her homemade watermelon juice
and holistic remedies for their colds. A lithe blonde with porcelain skin,
Eileen looks like her daughters.

A few weeks at the marina turned into two years.

The family built a treehouse in a nearby glen and made a bench from saplings
taken from the grove behind the marina. The limbs were twisted together by
hand, without nails, glue or screws.

But in November 1994, the Jarvises and their parrot, Lorenzo, vanished
again. They left behind their cat, some clothing and their painstakingly
rebuilt boat.

"It was sad leaving there," said Molly, 19, fiddling with the earrings on
her multiple-pierced ears. "It was the first place we went -- before it was
just us."

The townspeople had tipped them off about federal agents asking questions
around town. The Jarvises had become part of the community by then --
patrolling the piers during storms and lending a hand to anyone needing help.

"I think our government is totally out of line spending this much time and
effort to harass this family," Griffith said.

Griffith said Eileen called her later to apologize about running away. She
told Griffith that she would do whatever she needed to do to keep her family
together.

The Jarvises fled to Central Florida, where they lived at first in a trailer
at a campground. Eileen worked in the front office. Ronald and the boys
found jobs at a sawmill.

Six months later they moved across the Suwanee River. Ronald tied fabric
between trees and made a tent for his wife and girls. He moved with his sons
to St. Augustine, where they worked construction.

"We would swim a lot and try and find something to do," said Lily, now 17.
The highlight of the week was when their father brought his paycheck back to
the tent on the weekend.

After their tent flooded, Eileen and the girls went to St. Augustine and
lived for a time with Ronald, the boys and two family friends. Ten people
slept on the floor of an apartment. In two years in St. Augustine, they
moved in and out of eight houses, trailers and boats.

In 1996, the boys went back to Shady Side to reclaim the boat. The rest of
the family moved into a treehouse above the Suwanee to wait.

They bathed in the river, the outdoors serving as their bathroom. Lily
refurbished bicycles she found in a nearby campground. They used them to
ride the 12 miles -- each way -- to the nearest grocery. Dinners were
split-pea soup, wild mustard greens, rice and floral plants.

The Jarvis daughters, still vegetarians, are all reed-thin.

The family built fires to smoke out bugs. Sometimes, it lost clothes and
shoes to rodents.

"If we would leave for a week the whole house would be destroyed by the
rats," said Anna, now 13. "They were really big, but if they saw you, they
would run."

The girls said they spent days "swamp hopping," running around cypress trees
and romping through puddles.

"The treehouse was neat because there was no one around. It was just us,"
said Lily.

One day, after almost a year had passed, a game warden stumbled upon the
Jarvises. Spooked, the family went to St. Augustine, then joined the boys in
Maryland.

After getting the boat, the Jarvises headed south again, eventually reaching
St. Augustine. The girls found work at the marina, Anna baby-sat and did
laundry, and the boys went back to construction. The Jarvises pooled their
money.

About this time, Molly met a boy she liked at a roller-skating rink. The
girls got pagers so that friends could get in touch with them. Life seemed
to be settling down.

But on June 2, a muggy night -- much like the one when they began running
seven years earlier -- the U.S. Marshal Service caught up with the Jarvises.

It was the whirring of a helicopter hovering above that again alerted them.
As Eileen peeled sweet potatoes for dinner, Anna started to scream.

Police in a helicopter, a speedboat and 10 cruisers had surrounded the boat.

"They had big guns," said Anna, the only child who saw the arrest.
Authorities ordered her to lie face down with her arms and legs spread
apart. She choked back sobs. Her mind went blank.

It was a few hours before her siblings returned home to find that their
worst fears had come true.

A `stopping point'

"It was not supposed to happen," said Lily. "But now there is a stopping
point. Before it was, `Just keep going.' "

For years, the children never knew for sure where they would be sleeping
come dark. They kept their shoes on all night and their few belongings in
plain sight so they could be scooped up in a hurry.

"I think my dad is relieved," said Molly, who wears the earrings her mother
wore the night of her capture.

"It is hard to find one person, but two adults with six kids! And we went
back to the same places. They must not have been looking too hard."

For now, the boys are in Florida working for money to pay their parents'
attorneys. The girls are in Elk Lick with their grandmother. They visit
their parents in jail every Wednesday and Sunday, but rarely go back to
their old house.

The grandmother is going to begin teaching Anna in the fall. The girls are
fixing up the cellar so Anna can study there. They get knots in their
stomachs at the sight of a uniform or the sound of a siren.

But they say they have no regrets about their lives, about missing the usual
rituals of youth: prom, high school football, going steady. "I thought all
that would be really boring," said Molly, the 19-year-old, who wears rings
on her toes and dreams of becoming an artist. "My mom would always say that
this experience was building character."

If their parents get prison time -- and Ronald Jarvis faces up to 20 years
- -- the children say they will move nearby.

"We never want to be apart," Molly said.