The Communal Truth

Recently, I was a guest lecturer in a popular course at UCLA about the 1960s titled "Agitational Communication." A student asked me, "Did you guys really believe what you were saying, or was it all just rhetoric?"

"Both," I answered. "Countless people were actually living their ideals, personally and in communal situations, but there was lots of rhetoric too."

With the baby boomer generation coming of middle age and putting into perspective their own personal histories, innumerable autobiographies and memoirs have been glutting the literary market. Indeed, a New Yorker cartoon recently depicted an editor at a publishing house saying to a writer, "Congratulations! Your manuscript was the one-millionth personal memoir submitted to us this year."

In 1999, actor Peter Coyote's Sleeping Where I Fall survived that fierce competition, telling the story of his chosen journey from riches to rags-from being delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven, leather-roofed Cadillac limousine, to traveling with hippies in a truck named the "Meat and Bone Wagon," retrieving radishes, lettuce, tomatoes and squash from a garbage bin behind a Safeway supermarket.

It was with the San Francisco Mime Troupe that Coyote first experienced what was later to become his trademark theatrical pursuit: the dissolution of the boundaries between art and life. And it was there that he met a couple of life actors, Peter Berg ("perhaps the most radical and cranky member of the troupe, and arguably the most brilliant") and Emmett Grogan ("determined to be a life star? moving through a room with the detached concentration of a shark"). They formed the nucleus of what would become the Diggers, a loose confederation of friends who were part psychedelic social workers, helping supply local hippies and new arrivals to the Haight-Ashbury scene with food and shelter, and part practitioners of avant street theater.

In December 1967, the Diggers sponsored a parade called "The Death of Money." There they were, without a permit and 4,000 strong, chanting, "The streets belong to the people!" When the police arrested two Hells Angels, the coffin marked with dollar signs that marchers had been carrying was passed around and spontaneously filled with bail money, to the utter surprise of cops and bikers alike. In return, the Angels threw a party in Golden Gate Park on New Year's Day, footing the bill, with free beer and music by the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company.

As the Diggers operated at the edges of the counterculture, they expanded through combinations and alliances, such as the one with the Hells Angels. They referred to this larger, center-less coalition as the Free Family, a group that established a series of communes in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. They sought to create an environment devoted to an alternative lifestyle, one not tied to the conventions of polite behavior. But it quickly became obvious that the credo of "Do your own thing" didn't work in an overloaded household. Somebody would use someone else's toothbrush, and objecting to that might be regarded as bourgeois. Ideological conflicts invaded the communal spirit. One individual removed the bathroom door, asserting that the fear of being observed was a neurotic vanity to be banished. High aspirations were tainted by petty arguments. There was even a hair-raising public fight over a spoon. Their experiment in communal living continued to unravel.

"The only reason to fix the trucks now," Coyote wrote, "was to escape from one another. Life continues after something dies, it simply does not continue in the same way. We maintained our chores and responsbilities, but the activity was pro forma. Everyone knew that the Free Family as a source of future security was a fiction."

By contrast, The Farm-a commune in Tennessee that also evolved out of a San Francisco community-succeeded in hanging together and working productively. I contacted founder Stephen Gaskin to uncover The Farm's accomplishments and the secret of its success. "As in the Japanese game of Go," he told me, "sometimes one consolidates one's forces in a citadel. Other times one sends out one's stones to larger territories that can be integrated later. We realize that we're doing both of those here on The Farm. We vote in the elections. We are good to our neighbors. We do work for, and are worked for by, the people in the neighborhood. Sometimes a manager in one of the local stores will recognize me and tell me something like, 'No Farm person has ever bounced a check at this store.' We have Tennessee in-laws.

"On the other hand, we are citizens of the world who reach out for peace, for justice and support for Indians and all native peoples. We work for women's rights and against nuclear fuel cycles all over the world. We have organized a national peace effort from The Farm called Peace Roots Alliance. We put up billboards in major cities and run educational meetings resisting the war in Iraq."

The Farm's relief and development agency, Plenty International, founded in 1974, grew into an earthquake relief program in Guatemala that moved millions of Canadian International Development Agency dollars into kilometers of water-pipe between 1976 and 1981. The Farm organized water projects in South Africa and soy dairies in the Caribbean.

"On the way to doing these things," Gaskin said, "we learned how to sharpen a chain saw, shoe a horse, plow a field, how to deliver babies [his wife Ina May is the author of Spiritual Midwifery], how to take blood pressure, how to feed a thousand people, how to field an International Relief and Development Company, and all the lessons that result in The Farm still here after 35 years.

"The things we had to learn to feed ourselves and deliver our babies were relevant in the small countries. I think the important factors in The Farm's long term survival was that we tried not to be doctrinaire. We were not Baptists, we were not macrobioticists or Marxists or Jains or Buddhists. We were hippies who wanted to live together and who would accept the level of organization that it took to achieve that. I think that allowed us to bend rather than break when heavy changes happened."

In 1967, Gaskin was a teaching assistant at San Francisco State College. Some students said they liked him but that he didn't know what was going on, and that they wouldn't be able to take him seriously until he saw The Beatles' movie, A Hard Day's Night. He did, and recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies, resulting in the founding of his "Monday Night Class." The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world. They began as a nucleus of a dozen folks and eventually grew into meetings of as many as 1500. It was from among these seekers that a convoy to Tennessee was launched. "The most important thing to come out of the Monday Night Class meetings," Gaskin writes in an introduction to a revised version of his 1970 book, Monday Night Class, "and the glue that held us together, was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together. Every decent thing accomplished over the years by the people of Monday Night Class and The Farm-its later incarnation-came from those simple hippie values. It was the basis for our belief in spirit, nonviolence, collectivity and social activism.

"I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. By that I mean that the ethnicity I grew up with was such a white bread, skim milk, gringo experience that it wasn't satisfying for me. It had no moxie. Now, being a hippie, that's another thing. I feel like the Sioux feel about being from the Lakota Nation. I feel like Mario Cuomo feels about being Italian. It makes me feel close with Jews and Rastafarians. I have a tribe, too. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the free-thinkers, Voltaire and so on, back to Socrates and Buddha, but the wave of revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. And rock 'n' roll lights my soul and gives a beat to the revolution."

Time magazine may have invented the shorthand term "hippies," but in reality those who participated in the counterculture that exploded out of the blandness and repression of the Eisenhower-Nixon years were surfing on an epidemic of idealism, displaying courage and imagination. Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll were merely the underbelly of what was essentially a mass spiritual awakening-a movement away from western religions of repression toward eastern philosophies of liberation-a generation of young pioneers, traveling westward without killing a single Indian along the way

. In 1969, Vassar graduate Roberta Price got a grant to visit communes and photograph them. When she and her boyfriend David visited a commune, Libre, in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley in southern Colorado, its alchemy transformed them from observers into participants. In 1970, Roberta and David got married, left graduate school in Buffalo, moved to Libre and built a house around a huge boulder high on a ridge overlooking the valley. Roberta's book, Huerfano: a Memoir of Life in the Counterculture, published in 2004, serves as a nice slice of countercultural history.

Several Huerfano Valley residents have gone to Barnes & Noble-the main bookstore in the Pueblo, Colorado area-and asked for a copy of Huerfano, only to be told that they don't have it. One clerk admitted that they do in fact have some copies, but they keep them hidden in the back, adding, "This book will never be put out." Blame it on the cover. It's an old photo of the author, standing in an isolated field, apparently nude-"apparently" because, except for her smiling face, arms, lower legs and bare feet, her body is blocked out by a treasure of freshly plucked weed that she's holding.

A review in the Los Angeles Times advised readers to "Ignore the picture on the cover of the naked woman hiding an enormous bundle of marijuana. This memoir of life in one of the great communes of the West is better than that-and for many people a road not taken that is fascinating to read about."

Nevertheless, the use of marijuana was an integral aspect of communal life. In fact, with the grant money that went to produce the book, Roberta bought a Pentax Spotmatic and some film, and David bought a Corvair camper and a kilo of weed.

"We use every part of the marijuana plants we harvest," Roberta writes. "What to do with the stems and seeds is the biggest challenge and takes the most ingenuity." And she proceeds to describe a recipe for marijuana butter, to be used in making brownies. At Libre, a variety of hallucinogens were smoked or ingested: Windowpane LSD and Owsley Orange Acid. Sticky black opium from Vietnam. THC iced tea. Psilocybin mushrooms. Peyote at a solstice gathering. MDA that had been developed by the U.S. Army to dose hostile populations, in order to make them docile and manageable. Marijuana that had been smuggled into the country in stuffed alligators from Colombia. Hashish that had been molded and wrapped as Maja soaps from Spain.

"You know," someone observed while passing a pipe, "you don't have to smoke much hash to look at these cliffs and hear dinosaurs eating ferns."

I once asked Ken Kesey, in reference to a phrase he had uttered, "What's your concept of 'the communal lie'?"

"I remember delegates from two large communes," he replied, "stopping by once at my farm and negotiating in great tones of importance the trade of one crate of cantaloupes, which the southern commune had grown, for one portable shower, which the northern commune had ripped off of a junk yard. When this was over they strutted around in an effluvium of 'See? We're self-supporting.' Bullshit. A crate of melons and a ratty shower isn't enough summer's output for 60-some people to get off behind. It was part of a lie that the entire psychedelic community, myself more than most, was participating in.

"When a bunch of people, in defense of their lifestyle, have to say 'Look how beautiful we were at Woodstock,' I can't help but ask, 'How was your cantaloupe crop this year?' Being beautiful or cool or hip is too often a clean-up for not pulling weeds. Woodstock was beautiful, and historic and even perhaps Biblical, but Altamont was far more honest. Success is a great spawning ground of confidence and camaraderie; bald truth is found more often up against the wall. Bullshit is bullshit and neither the length of the hair nor the tie of the family can make it anything else."

Libre was able to avoid that danger by the diligence of its inhabitants in developing self-sufficiency. Roberta writes: "I wonder what to say on application forms? That after graduate school I acquired new skills? I can mix cement, blow dynamite, bank a fire, use a chain saw, split wood, milk goats, make yogurt and Parmesan cheese, bake donuts, ride bareback, hunt mushrooms, start fires, frame roofs, cure bacon, punch cows. That I've memorized the shapes of three thousand clouds, calibrated one hundred eleven rainbows, and watched five babies slide out into life? That big birds bring me messages, and I've stared straight into a cougar's yellow eyes? That I lived in the Orphan Valley for seven years with friends, crazies, and some who were both, that we were heroic fools or foolish heroes-I can't say which, and maybe it doesn't matter."

She makes reference to "raptograms" in the book. As she explained to me, "It was a point I was making on raptors being big birds, hawks and eagles. There are various parts of the book in which they brought me messages, or at least it seemed like they were bringing me messages at the time." Her sense of communication with other species was sharpened while riding her horse Rufus, who, she wrote, "turns when I think about it, before I tell him with reins or knees. I experiment more, thinking, not moving my hands or my body, and every time he anticipates my direction. I don't tell anybody about our telepathy." In 1969, the first three couples at Libre got money from the National Institutes of Health, the federal government's medical research arm, in connection with a study to determine whether communal living facilitated psychic communication. I called Dean Fleming, one of those originals (after 20 years, Libre finally got telephones), and he described the experiment:

"Stanley Krippner came out to Libre, and he invited us to come to Maimonides Hospital in Washington, D.C., so we stopped there on our trip back east. The six of us went into this Dream Lab. It was basically a sensory deprivation chamber. It was completely dark, completely silent. He said, 'Okay, now, one at a time I want you to think of an image, and just think of it, and the other people will say what they get from that.'

"We were so absolutely right on that it was kind of terrifying. Unbelievable. I mean we caught it every time. It wasn't like, 'Oh, yeah, we know exactly what it is.' For example, one us thought of the Chrysler Building in New York, and somebody else said, 'I see the helmet of Kali.' I remember thinking of the Verrazano Bride, and then people said, 'Yeah,' they see this like horizontal line above another horizontal line, there's two of them, they're two different colors. It was pretty interesting, but it wasn't absolute, in the sense of saying, 'Oh, yeah, that's the Verrazano.'"

I contacted Stanley Krippner-co-author of Dream Telepathy and Becoming Psychic, and co-editor of The Psychological Effects of War Trauma on Civilians-and asked about his conclusions in that study.

He recalled saying something like this: "There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence that ESP experiences are reported more frequently by people who are emotionally or physically close to each other than people who are strangers or who live at considerable distances. Because commune members share emotional and physical proximity, it would be expected that they would report mutual ESP. Whether this is actual ESP or ordinary communication thought to be ESP is another question, of course. I probably did not mention that commune members often shared sexual 'closeness' as well, and lovers, or at least bedmates, report ESP more frequently than mere acquaintances."

For Roberta, sexual closeness was a strong learning experience:

"David was the only person I'd ever slept with. I was an idealistic monogamist, but we'd talked about it some. We frowned on hypocrisy and the stifling repression of our parents' generation. You have to follow your heart, but it's dangerous, uncharted territory. 'This is a consequence of freedom,' he said, 'and we need to support everyone.' 'How do you support people with conflicting lusts?" I asked. 'These are frontiers we're facing,' he explained, as if we were a New Age Lewis and Clark. 'We have to love them all.' "In the year and a half we've been here," she wrote, "there's been a lot of bed-hopping among our comrades. There were those cataclysmic switches at the first Thanksgiving at Libre in 1969, between our first and second visits, even before we moved west-when Peter's wife, Judy, left Peter after he went off with Nancy at the Thanksgiving dinner, and Nancy's husband went back to Austin, and she moved in with Peter and stepped over a broom and got married to him. Linda left Dean that Thanksgiving and went off with Steve, who left Patricia?

"So far, it doesn't seem as if any couple is holding up too well against free love. 'It doesn't mean I love you less, you know,' David said. 'We're capable of loving people in different ways at different times, and we shouldn't repress these feelings. We have to overcome possessiveness and jealousy so that we can explore all the possibilities. If we love each other, we'll give each other this freedom.'"

One afternoon, Roberta brought a hand mirror to a Libre women's meeting: "We're going to look at our vaginas," she informed David. "Men see their sexual organs all the time, and it's, well, empowering for women to see theirs." She wrote that members of another commune, the Red Rockers, "are more on the cutting edge. The men had a men's meeting, and they paired off and slept together, although they all kept their underpants on.

"Open marriages bloom all around us, usually before the old marriages wither and die and newly passionate couples spring up. Our attitudes have changed so much from those of the repressed society in which we grew up. If you feel any affection or attraction for someone, it's downright rude and quite awkward not to make love if the opportunity comes along. It's not much more than a handshake to some."

Finally, though, Roberta-who had a few flings herself-told David, "I want a monogamous relationship now or nothing." He chose the latter and, after seven years at Libre, she departed, leaving her extended family behind. She is now an attorney, specializing in intellectual property rights. She has recently represented some tribes on cultural/intellectual property issues, such as Pueblo of Zia and their decade-long attempt to protect their sacred Zia Sun symbol from tawdry commercial use: Since there has been a change in Trademark Office protocol on Native American symbols, largely due to her efforts.

And Libre, now in its 37th year, with 15 members, continues to flourish. Dean Fleming tells me: "The first wave is mostly all over the place. The second wave is still here, like David, and all those people who came in the early 70s and stuck it out. Part of it was the people who started it were all kind of crazed and pioneer-type people, and they're obviously going keep on doing things full time. I'm a painter and so I wanted to have a good studio. I was in New York before, on Broome St., thinking what's the perfect studio, and I said it has to be really beautiful in the country and it'd have to be surrounded by friends. So that was the reason for the Libre community.

"And it's still unbelievably beautiful and it's still full of friends. Not nearly as crazed as it was in the 60s and 70s. But it's still frail. We had a situation where the land would not belong to any individual, belonged to the whole group. And likewise for houses, so people come and go, they can't just sell them off, the land belongs to all of us, and we kind of keep checks and balances on it. And now our kids that were born here are becoming members, and even if they're not here, they're beginning to come and take care of the place, and maybe we'll get another generation out of it before it's worn out." Certainly, the Free Family had its evolutionary role. Peter Coyote wrote in Sleeping Where I Fall that "the Diggers understood fundamentals about the relationship between culture and imagination, and culture and politics, but our spurning of more traditional political alliances was, I believe, somewhat snobbish and counterproductive. The failure to curb personal indulgence was a major collective error. The ideas and moral positions that emerged during this period-the civil rights movement, feminism, holistic medicine, organic farming, numerous alternative physical and spiritual therapies and disciplines, and perhaps most important, bioregional or watershed political organization, were abetted by agents like the people remembered here: flawed and imperfect people certainly, but genuinely dedicated to creating more enlightened options for themselves and others." He tells me, "I was just at my daughter's wedding, where her guest list included many members of that family who are not related to her by blood, but people that she considers her 'kin.' Our children (and their children) are still friends, still in close touch as we are. We're still all in touch, come to one another's aid when necessary, and are bonded by indelible experiences. The fact that one of our communes out of nearly a dozen collapsed is no more a death knell to the Free Family than the collapse of one star is to the rest of the universe."

In a recent episode of Doonesbury, triggered while watching the ultra-materialistic Cribs on MTV ("This is my bling-bling room," says a rapper, "where I put all my shiny, expensive stuff for my boys to envy!"), Boopsie's daughter asks her live-in babysitter, Zonker, "Did you really once live on a commune?"

He was only one of three million such participants.