West of Eden

Modern civilization stoops to a low profile outside Taos, New Mexico. In good weather, an ordinary sedan can take you to Indian pueblos unchanged in 1000 years. Recent settlements of young Americans who have elected to drop out of the affluent society are more primitive than the pueblos and harder to find, tucked away on dirt roads beyond the easy reach of interfering authority.

One day last summer at Morning Star, a communal colony hidden in the lower reaches of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it was possible to believe that the calendar had been entirely erased. The time machine here is tuned permanently to pioneer days, but this was a scene out of history's earliest morning.

Stripped naked in the afternoon heat, a dozen long-haired, beaded boys and girls were furiously working adobe, their bare brown young bodies glazed with mud and sweat. Out on a raw, high, open tract covered with coarse brown grass and stunted clumps of aromatic pñon trees, they looked like aborigines, savages, primitive peoples in a documentary about New Guinea.

In this area of New Mexico, the sky is like the open sea. You can see the weather forming a long way off. In one section of the enormous sky, turbulent gray clouds were sputtering dark veils of rain and bright hairline crackles of lightning. The storm had been hovering down near Taos all morning. Now it seemed to be moving up.

The young workers were paying the storm no particular attention. They were packing earth, water and straw into simple wooden forms to make adobe blocks. In the lower fields, thousands of sun-dried bricks were stacked neatly among the canvas tepees in which most of the members of the commune were living. Many more bricks were needed. Summer was nearly over. In these mountains, snow begins to fall early in October.

Life was not easy at Morning Star. There was no electricity, no well. Even the water for the adobe had to be trucked up from New Buffalo, a commune out on the other side of the paved highway that ran through Arroyo Hondo. Fruit and vegetables often came up from the orchards and gardens of Five Star, another collective farm located near a natural hot spring in the sage desert south of Taos. All along the road to Five Star, the desert was littered with trash. The farm was dusty and stony. Some of the people were living in crude dugouts roofed with tar paper. There was plenty of food. Five Star had planted more than it could harvest. Some of the crop had begun to rot in the fields.

Morning Star was more picturesque. About 20 yards down from the work site, a crumbling old adobe house was flanked by a couple of ancient trucks leaning anachronistically against mud walls. A tom turkey wandered out of a clot of trees and strutted past naked babies playing in the dirt. A cast-iron wood-burning stove stood out in the open, its sheet-metal chimney wobbling in the wind. Over a campfire, water boiled in a 55-gallon steel drum. A naked girl with the wiry black hair and lean, tawny body of a young squaw was chatting idly with two hugely pregnant girls in faded cotton dresses lounging on the torn cushions of the former rear seat of a car.

In a couple of years, Morning Star might be as prosperous as New Buffalo, where one large adobe house was already occupied and two others were under construction, walls finished, fireplaces installed and roofing with pine poles begun. New Buffalo had seen its share of troubles, but there seemed to be money available to the commune. There was a tool shed filled with power equipment, a new yellow tractor, a Mercedes-Benz sedan. In the small rooms of the adobe house, sheepskin rugs covered the raw-earth floors. The governor of New Mexico had visited New Buffalo and had been impressed.

There was no telephone at New Buffalo, but there were electricity and water, even a washing machine. The food was tasty and substantial, including not only the usual beans and rice but also homemade jams and cookies. The kitchen was filthy, though, and filled with flies. Young women, naked to the waist, were shucking corn back of the cookhouse. They saved the best ears for seed and dried the rest on the roof. Even the big yellow worms were kept and fed to the chickens. "We have something very important here," one girl said. "We believe in God."

If New Buffalo was medieval, Morning Star was neolithic--freakier, somewhat desperate, not very talkative, much more dramatic. People might freeze to death in those tepees, come winter. There was a sense of presence.

From around the back of the house, a bearded blond boy in hitch-up jeans guided a mule-drawn buckboard to a halt. Wordlessly, he stopped and embraced a tall, slender girl who was wearing a long gingham granny dress and kerchief. For a long time, they held each other--a tiny, fragile tableau of human need set in the overpoweringly grand theater of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the trembling storm-cloud heaven.

The sky blackened. Rain fell. Lightning and thunder crackled angrily. The boy and girl bounded apart to arms' length, still holding hands. The storm delivered its full load. Heads thrown back to the sky, mouths open and laughing, they gamboled in the downpour. Up on the adobe ground, the naked workers continued uninterrupted by the rain. The hot cast-iron stove sizzled. The campfire smoked and steamed. In the open doorway of the house, one of the pregnant girls stood staring across the wide plateau to tree-covered mountains beyond, where the sky was a crisp, transparent cobalt blue. At twilight, her labor began. Attended only by her friends, she gave birth at dawn. After a day's rest, she returned to work in the fields, carrying her infant on her back in a cloth sling, pausing occasionally to give the baby her breast while the work of survival went on all around her, serenely confident that when winter arrived, Morning Star would be ready.

• • •

James Marcus Ayers of Denver called himself a tripper drifter. He had been hitchhiking for months throughout the Southwest and had seen many communes. Now, on his way back to Taos, headed toward home and civilization, wrapped in a striped wool poncho and carrying an Indian charm made of horsehair and hawk feathers, he was still trying to make sense of what he had seen.

"It's hard to understand why people would want to give up everything that's gone before," he said. "Why suffer if you don't have to?"

For the past few years, American parents have been trying to answer the same question. As the decade of the Sixties ended, it seemed as if more and more young people were rejecting the fruits of urban capitalism in a rush to rural communalism. In doing so, they were following an old tradition.

America was settled by people very much like the kids with long hair in the communal colonies of the Southwest. It is no accident that Massachusetts and Pennsylvania call themselves Commonwealths. Our history is filled with utopian experiments--Oneida, Amana, New Harmony. Brook Farm. A few survived. Most failed. Yet the urge to create new societies continued.

The modern history of communalism started with the French Revolution of 1789. The communes of Paris were the city's smallest political subdivisions, roughly the equivalent of today's neighborhood political clubs. When the government fell, they elected a committee called the Commune to run Paris. It lasted until 1794. The Commune was revived for a few months in 1871, after the evacuation of Paris by Prussian troops, then suppressed.

The word itself comes from the Old French communer, to share. The root is the Latin communis, public or common. From the same sources we get community, communism, communicate and Communion, a sharing with God. Boston Common was once a sheep meadow belonging to the whole settlement. This is the central idea in communalism--the elimination of individual, exclusive ownership of property. Communalism and communism once meant pretty much the same thing. Today, the Communist is usually thought of as a central planner and theoretician, a politician. The communalist is an activist, less interested in the business of deciding how to share but vitally involved in promoting the experience of sharing.

Newsweek called 1969 "The Year of the Commune" and guessed that there might be as many as 500 communes in America, with a total population of 10,000. The Modern Utopian, a magazine published by the Alternatives Foundation of Berkeley, printed an alphabetical listing of 120 active communes. It began with the Ahimsa Community of Parsons, Kansas ("Buddhist, eight adults, no new (continued on page 240)West of Eden(continued from page 174) members wanted"), and ended with the Yellow Submarine Commune in Eugene, Oregon (no comment). In Ann Arbor, Michigan, there was one commune living in four houses supported by three rock groups. This was Trans-Love-Energy, home of the White Panther Party and the MC5. It had been organized by John Sinclair, now serving a ten-year prison sentence for giving--not selling--two marijuana cigarettes to undercover narcotics agents.

In Brooklyn, a real-estate firm called The Apartment Key advertised house rentals "suitable for communes." In Menlo Park, California, the Portola Institute, a hip think tank, created the Whole Earth Truck Store, a kind of traveling Sears for rural collectives.

It turned out that there were communes all over America--urban, rural, suburban and exurban. Some banned drugs. Others gave LSD free to all members and visitors. Many were little more than crash pads, but some were as comfortable as any good fraternity house. And, in a way, that was what most of them resembled--coed fraternities where the parties smelled of grass instead of beer.

To the adult experts, one thing was very clear: The communal-living phenomenon was real, and it might be dangerous. The communes had something to do with drugs and revolution. There were warnings.

"More and more of our children will move into psychedelic communes unless society tries to understand the stresses that alienated them in the first place," said Dr. David E. Smith, director of the Haight-Ashbury Medical Clinic.

What were those stresses? What was that alienation all about? Why were the children of America rejecting everything their parents had tried to give them? Where did everything go wrong?

• • •

The Sixties opened with a burst of Kennedy laughter that was cut off by rifle bullets. The nation became expert at staging state funerals. We wallowed in the gloom of imperial responsibility. We went to war, and this time, we lost. The game became ugly, boring and senseless. Some of the young tried to save themselves by fighting the manic national parent; others ran and hid. Orphans of affluence, they knew almost nothing about survival. To most of them, money was something that came out of a wallet; food was found in refrigerators and work was a tedious magic that Dad did to make the house machine keep buzzing. Scrounging in the rich garbage of the American nightmare, they returned, in effect, to man's original state. They became hunters and food gatherers.

They smoked marijuana, took any pill that anyone offered, made love to one another. They did not go to school and they did not receive grades. They dressed themselves in crazy old costumes and made every day Halloween. And finally, they began to explore one of the dirtiest words of all: communism. There was a great sharing. In the general euphoria of this communion of the children, even grownups could smile and take a flower. It was 1967 and the Summer of Love was transforming the foul tenements of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury and New York's Lower East Side into the temples of what was to be a new society in which money and profits would not exist.

No one wanted to believe that it all had the sad beauty of the games children played at the entrance to the gas chamber. No one wanted to believe that the lovely girl with the strange stare and the soft voice and the woven crown of flowers was Ophelia. No one wanted to believe that those were funeral flowers. No one wanted to believe that death could be so satisfying.

In October of that year, Groovy, a pleasant mental defective, and his girlfriend, Linda Fitzpatrick, the daughter of a well-to-do Connecticut exurbanite, were murdered in an East Village cellar, where they had hoped to score acid.

The Summer of Love was over and the Winter of Speed was beginning. Hip was buried in a mock funeral on Haight Street. Long-haired dealers with guns were running the scene now. The original hippies who had not disappeared into the desert when the teeny-boppers arrived were looking for safe holes to hide in. Shivering was epidemic.

Many of the casualties of this dream that failed fled into the Indian country. A defeated people, they went to the Indians to learn how to live off the land. They saw no other way to survive.

• • •

Ever since the beginning of the psychedelic revolution in the late Sixties, there has been an intensive fascination with the Indian roots of the American experience among the turned-on young. They may reject their parents, but they are still afraid of the dark. They need experts to teach them how to live in the raw. The Indians are experts. They have been out there in the wilds a long time, existing quite well without the benefits of industrial civilization.

The Taos Pueblo was already old when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado came to New Mexico, seeking the mythical golden cities of Cibola. Today, the Indians of the pueblos live much as they did then. They have never accepted modern concepts of property rights. The reservation and the buildings belong not to any person or family, not even to the pueblo itself, but only to the universal life force. The cultural ethic of the pueblo Indians of the American Southwest idealizes peace and order. In order to achieve and maintain union with nature, the people of the pueblos willingly subordinate themselves to the group spirit; yet they do not recognize the validity of master-slave relationships. The Taosenos have refused to accept, in principle, the authority of any government to direct their lives as a moral, ethical or natural right. In the face of superior force, they have accommodated themselves to successive Spanish, Mexican and American Colonial presences. During the past 400 years, they have successfully--if temporarily--revolted against each of their conquerors whenever external rule began to interfere with the basic experiences of the way of life of the Taos Pueblo. The young Americans living in the communal groups that have begun to dot northern New Mexico with canvas tepees, old school buses, tents, trailers and adobe huts often say that the Indians were the original hippies

• • •

Morning Star in New Mexico is the offshoot of an earlier commune with the same name set up on a 31-acre ranch near Santa Rosa, California, by Lou Gottlieb, formerly of the Limelighters folk-singing group. When Gottlieb began the venture in 1965, he thought it would be a start toward the formation of what he called the Alternate Society, the opposite of the Great Society, an answer to the problems of the "age of cybernation, economic abundance and technological unemployability." Gottlieb's experiment broke up under the pressure of various stresses, internal and external. Some of the people went to New Mexico and tried to create a new Morning Star that would succeed.

Other long-hairs began arriving in New Mexico as early as 1967. Within two years, they had spent more than $500,000 on land. In Taos, there was a general store run on what appeared to be a low-profit basis. A hippie automobile-repair shop was accepting payment from those who could afford it and allowing others to use its facilities free. A free medical clinic was in operation.

If a totally moneyless society was undoubtedly a long way off, still there was evidence of a budding Alternate Society. The runaways were learning how to take care of their own. Yet they were hardly welcome among the local people, who were afraid of drugs and disease. There were two cases of bubonic plague in the hippie colony in Placitas. During the Thirties, plague had threatened northern New Mexico. No one wanted to see it return.

There was also something less rational, the kind of intangible prejudice that greets any minority group. A discussion overheard in the Kiva Coffee Shop of the Kachina Lodge in Taos was typical. This one was going on at a corner table among two real Americans in white short-sleeved shirts and a middle-aged man whose orange shirt and leather string tie were evidently supposed to suggest solidarity with Western tradition.

"Them hippies are tryin' to take over, but they don't want to work," said one of the white shirts.

"Oh, they'll work, all right," the wild Westerner said. "You just got to give them the kind of work they like. Executive work, that's what they like. Of course, there's not much of that around, is there?"

"Haw-haw!" they guffawed, pounding the table and stamping their feet. "You hit that nail right on the head," said one. "They gonna be executives with the telephone company or nothin'. They ain't lazy. They just particular. Haw-heehaw!"

About 30 miles south, the 50 current members of the Hog Farm, a traveling circus of a commune that had just spent the past 18 months moving like gypsies from town to town in three large, gaily painted buses and a motley caravan of other motor vehicles, were sitting in front of the Road Hog, their oldest and favorite bus, discussing plans to build a real kiva in which they could live comfortably during the winter.

A kiva is ordinarily understood to be a ceremonial building, traditionally circular and consisting mainly of a large round hole dug in the ground, walled with adobe and roofed with pine poles. It is one of the oldest forms of shelter known to man. The pueblo Indians no longer live in kivas, but they use them for such sacred rites as the peyote service. In many languages, the word for temple is etymologically closely associated with the word for house. As important a breakthrough in human development as housing is thus understandably memorialized in religious ritual.

The Hog Farm was among the most recent communes to settle in the New Mexico area but one of the oldest groups in the psychedelic movement, a wild seed that sprang from novelist Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters. Kesey, not long released from jail after serving six months for possession of marijuana, was living on a ranch outside Eugene, Oregon.

"Ken told me it's a place to die, not a place to live," former Prankster Hugh Romney announced to the group after the work meeting was finished. "He said, 'I am building a graveyard.' He doesn't want anyone coming up there."

In the colorful world of the superhip underground scene, it's not likely that there are many men more colorful than Hugh Romney, who used to walk around Manhattan wearing an orange-nylon jump suit and a sweat-stained cowboy hat with a steer horn projecting horizontally from the crown. He lost his front teeth somewhere and has never found time to replace them. Richard Avedon was on his way out to New Mexico to photograph Romney for the Museum of Modern Art. "If I ever get my front teeth back, I'm dynamite," Romney said.

The Hog Farm got its name when Romney and his wife, Bonnie Jean, began living with a couple of friends on a pig farm in the San Fernando Valley, rent-free in return for feeding the 40 pigs every day. A psychologist, Romney maneuvered the rapidly growing group all across the country, putting on concerts and light shows. In an article in The Realist, he described the Hog Farm as "an expanded family, a mobile hallucination, a sociological experiment, an army of clowns." Among its members is a 400-pound female pig named Pigasus that ran for President in 1968. More recently, Pigasus was bred to a local stud. One of the Hog Farm's most precious possessions is a photograph of Pigasus getting it on with her swain.

The Hog Farm came out of the underground into the national media in August 1969, as a result of its services at the Woodstock Music Festival. The Hog Farmers ran the freak-out tent, where victims of bad drug trips were brought down. The Hog Farm was credited with major responsibility for keeping the peace when some 400,000 fans arrived for this outdoor show on a farm in Bethel, New York, where no more than 100,000 were expected. Hog Farmers also provided similar services at the Dallas Music Festival. A psychiatrist observing the freak-out tent was amazed at the skill with which bum trippers were calmed. Asked for his professional opinion on their techniques, he replied, "How can I comment on what they're doing? I'm here to learn."

Not everyone was quite so impressed with the Hog Farm's performance at Woodstock. "I didn't like the way they treated their women," complained Jim Fouratt, a founder of Gay Liberation Front. "I thought it was ugly the way a guy would just grab a naked girl, throw her to the ground and get his rocks off."

During a conversation about sex in communes, one Hog Farm visitor said, "My wife spent two months in a commune in San Francisco and never got fucked."

"It's very easy to spend two months in a commune without getting fucked," a girl replied.

Another said, "Well, winter is coming soon, the cold will bring everyone together again."

The Hog Farm, unlike many of the communes in New Mexico, refuses to take itself seriously. Komney, in particular, has the almost mystical genius to make fun of life without offending anyone's belief in the dignity of human existence.

One day, Romney and the others were informed that Red Dog, the "money commissioner" for the Hog Farm, had lost the commune's entire bank roll of $900, leaving them without funds for food while they waited for a $6500 check to arrive from the promoters of the Woodstock festival. Despite the loss of the bank roll, the kitchen crew was trying to figure out an evening meal. Feeding is the responsibility of a volunteer called the dance mistress, who plans the menu and supervises the cooking. It looked as if the commune was going to get something like rice and beans.

Fortunately, a reporter and a photographer from a national magazine showed up with enough expense-account money to feed the entire commune for a couple of days. The magazine men bought meat for the evening meal, not realizing that many of the Hog Farmers were devout vegetarians. The following morning, all the vegetarians agreed that the night had been a bummer, filled with bad dreams, screaming and widespread bum trips, as a result of the meat eating. The more probable cause of the excitement was a girl who freaked out in a high fever resulting from what appeared to be pneumonia. In the early hours of morning, she was taken to the Embudo Hospital at Dixon. While being examined by the doctor on duty, she asked dreamily, "Doctor, how much does an angel weigh?"

"How should I know?" the physician replied.

"You ought to," the girl said. "There's one sitting on your shoulder."

In the ordinary course of a day, crises such as this are a routine part of the Hog Farm adventure. In fact, they provide one of the more significant attractions of communal life for Hugh Romney.

"If you're married and you have a kid," he says, "maybe something important will happen once every six months. The baby will step on a nail. Your wife will damage the car. Here, something is happening every minute. Every day, you get the opportunity to make significant decisions."

Communal living allows people to work out hang-ups acquired in the course of growing up in the nuclear family. A man like Hugh Romney has the satisfaction of playing parent over and over again. The more dependent members get to be children as much as they please, until they're tired of the role. Each person can act out his own fantasy in a highly permissive setting in which the demands of reality are minimal. Responsibility for managing the affairs of the commune is assumed by commissioners like Red Dog, who volunteer for their jobs and hold them only as long as the work satisfies them.

In addition to the more predictable commissions--sanitation, work, housing, and so on--there is a full-time dope commissioner, who forages for drugs. On this day, the dope commissioner was in Denver. When he returned with a shopping bag full of grass, there was a great communal smoke-in. Dozens of Hog Farmers rolled joints in mass production while others lighted up. Soon there was a joint in every hand. Musicians got their instruments and the mountain air was filled with rock music and the smell of burning grass. In addition to the communal smoking, there were invitation-only sessions later on. When it comes to dope, the Hog Farm has not reached pure socialism. There are always private stashes, not only as a hedge against scarcity but also, frequently, because of the sometimes limited availability of a really high-class product. There is a widespread feeling that publicly distributed grass is rarely as good as private stock. If the Hog Farm is any guide, there will probably be a black market in bootleg marijuana even when the weed is legalized. It is human nature to mistrust officially sanctioned pleasure.

• • •

How must the parents of the soldiers of the psychedelic revolution feel? Have they delivered their children into the hands of Charles Manson?

When Life ran a cover story on communal living, the pictures combined the rugged poetic patina of Marlboro Country with the romantic sentimentality of Bible illustrations. In reality, most of the communes were physically little better than prison camps. If the Government had forced hippies to live in them, the Red Cross would have complained. Yet they were much better than our mental hospitals, reform schools, orphanages and jails.

At the energy centers of the communalist movements are social workers without portfolio, unable to accept the brutalities of official charity and unwilling to ignore the victims of America's continuing urban disasters. There is a war going on between our cities and our people. The communes are emergency wards and rest homes for the casualties.

This aspect is most obvious in Synanon and Daytop Lodge--communal therapy centers for drug addicts--but it is visible also in groups operating without any formal philosophy or mission. Last summer, 15 to 25 persons were fed and housed daily in Lagunitas, California, by an outfit called Young Ideas that seems to have started out as a business but evolved into a commune.

The driving force here was Jim Brewster, 33, an Army helicopter pilot who was discharged for the good of the Service under less-than-honorable conditions. The less-than-honorable conditions had something to do with an A.W.O.L. charge and Brewster's unofficial business operations. Young Ideas was headquartered in a big old Chinese-style roadhouse owned by the Lotus Fortune Cookie Company. The building had evidently been a restaurant. One of its huge kitchen ranges was fitted with woks--broad, slope-sided pans used in Chinese cooking.

The pagoda flourishes of the house curled against great redwood trees. The property bordered a state park. There was a small creek running in and out of the trees to a deep pond. Salmon spawned there in the springtime. In the summer, the pond was thick with kids, many of them naked. Highway workers, linemen and other utilities service people sometimes ate lunch on the roadside and watched the show.

Someone once asked, "Do you have group sex?"

The answer was, "How can we avoid it? There are no walls."

There was only one bathroom. Efficient use required a suspension of the rules of privacy. A boy would be taking a bath. A girl would come in to wash her face. Another girl would sit on the pot.

One of the girls, Nancy, very tall and blonde, had a voluptuous figure, which she exhibited as often as possible. She seemed to have a profound sexual itch that she was unable to relieve for very long.

"Nancy's on a heavy fuck trip," said Brewster. A dropout from Brigham Young University, she seemed to be determined to act out some idealized standards of free love. She had one steady lover and lots of in-betweens. When Nancy was getting to know a new lover, her moans and cries filled the house at all hours. When she was in heat and looking for satisfaction, it was impossible to ignore her constant display of flesh. Getting caught with her in the narrow kitchen was an exercise in grope therapy. She hit mercilessly with her breasts, her behind, her thighs. Sometimes she was only playing. Too quick or crude a response could cause her suddenly to act offended.

"You're crazy! You're crazy!" she would shriek, running away in a funny goosy sway that wasn't very sexy at all.

"Love is the form of communication I know best," Nancy explained. "When I'm having trouble with someone, I find that the best way to work it through is to ball him. It clears the obstacles fast. I don't think people really know each other until they've balled."

On a Saturday afternoon, Nancy wore her see-through blouse to the local supermarket. This so highly disturbed one old party that he made a citizen's arrest and the girl was charged with indecent behavior. She spent a couple of hours in jail before being released on $50 bond. The charge was later dropped.

The others were more discreet, attempting to maintain at least the appearance of monogamy. There were flirtations that cut across the lines, but, as in conventional society, they were usually well hidden, despite the close quarters. For privacy, you had to go outside. In July and August, Jim Brewster and his girl, Sherri Wik, slept out in the open in a big four-poster bed planted on the hillside like an advertisement for antique furniture. Next to the bed there was an old oak night chest with a white-china pitcher of wildflowers.

Young Ideas was in the business of odd jobs--gardening, home repairs, house painting. The workers and their girls and wives lived in the Chinese house. Young Ideas charged its customers four dollars an hour and paid the workers two dollars an hour, of which half was deducted for room and board. No great profits accumulated. Once, when there was no money, Brewster pawned his gold Rolex wrist watch for $175 and bought food. Individuals who had outside incomes were expected to pay their way. At peak population, it cost upward of $1500 a month to keep the place alive. During one four-week period last summer, no one who came to the Chinese house was refused food or temporary shelter.

Among the long-term residents were a few teenagers. One 16-year-old girl had apparently been abandoned by her parents. There were two married couples in their early 20s, two adult single girls and five single men. One man was in his 50s. He had spent five years in prison for armed robbery. A couple of the others had done time, too, mainly for petty offenses. Sherri's daughter, Santee, a two-year-old, was the only child. On weekends, there might be as many as ten visitors eating and sleeping there.

Brewster and Sherri were the dominant figures. They had started the whole thing. They paid the rent and the bills and dealt with outside authority. They were the adults. The others, for the most part, were children who would grow up and move on. Jim and Sherri and the baby would remain.

If there was a unifying philosophy at the Chinese house, it wasn't more than this: no violence. There was the unquestioning belief that no situation could possibly require force. It was an unspoken but absolute denial of the existence of incurable evil.

A young poet, Bill "Aquarius," chose for a while to live in an abandoned metal water tower in the woods. He shared it with a scorpion. He refused to entertain a visitor's suggestion that he kill it.

"That's not necessary," he said. "The scorpion and I have to learn how to live together. If it gets used to me and I get used to it, then we can get into each other's thing and understand each other."

Guy, a big, young Georgian who commuted between the Chinese house and his apartment in San Francisco, was a recent convert to pacifism. At one time, he had carried a pistol. For a while, Guy had been obsessed with the fate of the American Indian. Wearing feathers, buckskins and beads, a hunting knife at his waist, he had sermonized the patrons of the cheap bars of San Francisco's Tenderloin, pounding a Bible and commanding sinners to repent and do something about their Indian brothers.

"I don't think I was quite rational then," he admitted, "but, you know, I converted some of them. It didn't take permanently, of course, but I did get a few righteously hooked."

Like most of the people who lived in the Chinese house, Guy kept his hair short and wore ordinary heavy-duty work clothes. In a frayed straw hat, Li'l Abner boots, plaid-cotton shirt and blue-denim jeans, he was Mr. Hick. But beneath the getup there was a very complicated, subtle and individual intellect. A skindiver, he seemed to be searching in the dark, cold waters off Point Reyes Peninsula with a singleness of purpose for a satisfaction that had eluded him on land. In the course of his search, he amused himself by hunting abalone, which he brought back to the kitchen at Young Ideas. Restaurant abalone usually tastes like fishy eggplant. The life is too long gone by the time it reaches the plate. Guy's abalone had the fresh essence of the open sea, a very special experience.

Guy found a runaway Siberian Husky in the woods and brought it back to the house. The dog was a wild brute with thick fangs made for grinding bones. There were three other dogs living at the house: a russet Weimaraner named Janice, a heavy-boned black Labrador called Barney, and Lilith, an elegantly successful product of the mating of a male coyote and a female Alsatian. They were beautiful hounds, constantly posing, as if waiting for Andrew Wyeth to paint their portraits.

Lilith and Janice were Brewster's dogs. Janice had taken acid once. Her eyes still seemed to burn with what she had seen. Lilith was feline and tawny, more cat than dog. She had a serious case of the hots for Brewster. He would sometimes take her in his arms and embrace her, rolling on the floor, kissing her mouth and making love noises in her ear, feeling her up shamelessly.

"She's a chick," Brewster explained as he got up from a heavy make-out session with Lilith. The dog lay on her back, her legs spread, pumping her sex in pleading passion, her dignity totally forgotten. "Ho-ly shit, Lilith!" Brewster howled. "Give us some slack!"

For the rest of the month, the child, Santee, imitated Jim's vehement plea. "Gimme slack!" she would shout in her baby voice, cracking the last word like the tail of a whip.

When the Siberian arrived, Janice was in heat. The big dog immediately claimed her as his own. He was a jealous lover, suspicious of the easy immorality of communal life. Whenever Barney approached Janice for a friendly sniff, the new dog attacked with the blunt fury of a wolf. Guy was warned that the Siberian was dangerous.

"That dog is a good dog," he argued. "Just don't mess around in his thing with Janice and he'll be peaceful as a pup." Visiting dogs who showed up at the Chinese house for the usual light socializing were immediately driven out by the Siberian male, who walked around in a stiff-legged patrol, growling deep down in his chest. Sometimes he would stand next to Janice in dumb adoration, lost in a love trance.

Several times a day, the house was in uproar, dogs whirling and roaring. One of the men trying to separate them was bitten on the chest and arm by the Siberian. While the victim was being taken to the emergency room at Marin General Hospital, the dog growled at Brewster.

• • •

Quick and big, Brewster is a perfect endomorph, with the round, thick muscles of a boxer, not the kind of man to take any crude shit from a hound. In eight years in the Service, he had worked his way up to master sergeant before becoming an officer and a helicopter pilot. At the time of his discharge, he was a captain. On the biceps of his right arm, there was a fat white scar.

Brewster had neatly trimmed hair. He was wearing striped white-and-blue pants and a Phi Mu sorority T-shirt, one of a collection that included an official Mickey Mouse Club T-shirt and another emblazoned with the slogan of Olympia Beer: "It's the water!" It showed a cascading mountain stream just like the illustration on the Olympia label. Into the stream a little boy was urinating.

Jim Brewster wore costumes, not clothing. They were subtle costumes, selected to enhance roles rather than merely to adorn. It seemed sometimes that he could remember which role he was playing at the moment only by looking in the mirror. In a tan-poplin bush jacket, he was a young field executive in the construction business. A football jersey turned him into an all-American college jock. When he went to court to explain how he had managed to accumulate $1200 worth of traffic citations, he wore a navy blazer with brass buttons, a peach-striped white buttondown oxford shirt and cream-colored flannel pants.

"Your Honor," he testified crisply, looking the judge straight in the eye, "I don't know exactly how it happened myself. My marriage was breaking up and I was living alone. I was going through a great deal of emotional confusion."

"You say you were not living at home?" the judge asked. "Where were you living?"

"I moved around a lot."

"Did your wife forward the citations?" the judge questioned.

"I guess not, your Honor," said Jim Brewster, picking up his cue. "But I know that's no excuse." The boyish sincerity of his mea culpa was laid on with a fine sense of drama. He was the most clean-cut person in the courtroom. You could tell that he was a stable young householder who had gotten mixed up and put himself back together again. Go, and sin no more, was the verdict.

"Sometimes I think I ought to just go ahead and become an actor," Brewster confided later. "That's all I do is play these different roles."

The growling dog triggered the wrong Jim Brewster role; he leaped for the dog, grabbing it by the collar, with the evident intention of throwing it out of the house. The dog snapped, its solid jaws hardly seeming to move. Brewster jumped back, blood dripping from his forearm. The Siberian ran out of the house. For the next day, the doors were kept locked while attempts were made to convince Guy that the dog had to go.

"That dog doesn't bother anyone unless you get on his case," said Guy. "You'll notice that he hasn't attacked one person first. You just got to give him time to settle himself. You got to understand him." The following day, Guy was bitten, but still the dog remained.

Janice looked embarrassed. "I know he's a gangster," she seemed to be saying with her liquid, human eyes, "but I can't help myself--I love him."

That afternoon, Guy took the Siberian to Rancho Olompali, a big spread near Novato. As many as 200 people had once lived there communally, supported by a millionaire who had taken LSD and gone all the way on a Jesus trip. A fire had gutted the main house. The columned ruins were Grecian. They stood unrepaired, a bombed-out mouth. Two children had drowned in the swimming pool. There was a new fence around it, but the water was green with slime.

There were ovens at Olompali in which 900 loaves of bread had been baked every day and given away. A wedding had been performed with bride, groom, preacher and guests all naked. Before the tragedy, the people at Olompali had considered themselves gods, conduits to earth for immense energies from mystical sources. The millionaire's family committed him to an institution. Now there were only a few scavengers left.

A bearded boy brought corn, squash and tomatoes out of the Olompali vegetable garden and laid them at the feet of the visitors from the Chinese house. They ate the young corn raw. It was sweet and tender, but the kernels were misshapen and irregular from inconsistent watering. The squash and tomatoes were just coming ripe. The visitors filled baskets with the vegetables.

A little billy goat walked up to the Siberian dog. The massive jaws flicked once. The kid fell dead without a sound. Guy was stunned. He took the dog into his pickup truck and left. He did not return to the Chinese house for several days. When he did, the Siberian was not with him.

"I suddenly realized--that could have been the baby," Guy confessed.

"Right! Finally!" Brewster shouted. His voice was cheerfully cynical but weary of pushing.

• • •

"Happiness is unheard of unless advertised on television," Brewster wrote later in his trip book. A trip book is a kind of journal, a shorthand record of a person's psychedelic trips, an attempt to retain the fleeting experience. Many are filled with drawings and notes from friends. The best time to bring your trip book up to date is when you're on acid or speed or just plain grass. Few people seem to make entries when straight. The preferred instrument for writing is a felt-tipped pen, which glides smoothly, producing a bold line filled with character and color.

Many people like rice-paper tablets with rough, handmade colored paper covers, the kind you can buy in any Japanese notion store. Brewster's book was an ordinary gray single-entry ledger that cost 69 cents. It was filled with block writing that revealed a very private Jim Brewster in moments approaching poetry, an explanation of the riddle of what a cashiered Army captain who looked like an astronaut was doing running a psychedelic communal living experiment.

Here are a few excerpts:

Countless nows ago a shadow went undetected.

Final figures do not matter; each individual has his own timekeeper.

God has become a household word instead of a good father.

As the years roll by, what happens to the minutes?

Clear light! Pulsing plasma echoes through the iceberg. Bravo, Mingo, you've succeeded again!

"I want to be a me when I grow up."

"That's absurd. You've got to be like us."

The past tense of me is you.

The constant river changes. When will we catch up?

In more linear moments, Brewster confessed to a sense of mission that seemed to make him feel anxious and uncomfortable. He liked taking care of people who weren't making it on their own. He liked watching the unconscious movie that was performed every day in the living room of the Chinese house: thick yellow sunlight filling the open door; Santee playing in the dust motes, her face smeared with chocolate; Lilith rising gracefully in liquid shivers to exit on the run; a naked girl prancing lightly down the steps to stand and chat before the bathroom door; a blonde in her blue shift taking fresh-baked pies out of the oven; Harvey Mandel's burnt-sienna sleepy music pouring through the room; and Sherri, dark-haired Sherri of the slender legs, walking across the shadows and the light, only her cryptic smile announcing that she knew he saw her dancing to the beat.

Brewster didn't know, didn't like to think about, how they got there, where they were going. "I don't know how it happened," he answered once. "I don't know why I'm doing this. I just deal with whatever is in front of my nose at the moment." Another time, he said, "I came back from Vietnam with a duffel bag full of grass and got into the acid scene. I spent fourteen months hallucinating at the Avalon. I heard all these assholes jacking themselves off verbally about the movement. When I couldn't take it anymore, I decided to see what I could do."

Finally, he came up with this answer: "I believe that the system is falling apart. I am attempting to arrange for my own survival when it gets into the heavy scenes." In his tone of voice there seemed to be the implication that if it came to revolution and civil war, he would not have to assemble soldiers. All he would have to do was issue weapons. It was not a pleasant vision.

At the end of 1969, the Chinese house was almost empty. After Christmas, the remaining few were sent away. Brewster was tired of playing social worker. "I guess it failed because of overindulgence," said Fred, a young acidhead botanist who had helped out with the gardening. A few days later, Sherri and Jim were alone with Santee in the big house. It looked as if Young Ideas was finished as a communal experience. Brewster was calling up friends with theatrical connections. He was going to become an actor. Or he and Sherri were going to move North, way up the Coast. They would find a big old comfortable house and turn it into a country inn. They would charge cash in advance.

By the time January was over, though, there were five souls living at the Chinese house--Wolf, an old-timer, Pamela, a newcomer, and Sherri, Jim and the baby. After a long rainy spell, the forest was green and fresh. Sherri and Jim came in and the telephone was ringing. It was a friend, one who had returned to the city.

"What are we doing?" said Brewster. "We just came in from walking in the hills in the most gorgeous golden sunset. And now I'm standing at the living-room window, watching salmon leap in the creek. You wish you were here? Well, come on out, brother. We got a groovy trip going. What color do you want us to paint your room?"

• • •

By the summer of 1970, there were 10 to 15 persons living at the Chinese house. There were a big vegetable garden, geese, chickens and rabbits. Brewster's Rolex, redeemed during the winter, was back in pawn, but new sources of income were being developed. Young Ideas had an arts-and-crafts store and was managing a successful rock group, AUM.

There was a new goal--a big farm up in the Sierras near the snow line, a place to work out a total survival scheme, where the umbilical cord would finally be cut.

Perhaps to the visitor from the city, the question still remained, "Why give up everything that has gone before?" The answer is existential. A rural commune is a base camp on the edge of time, a platform for mounting expeditions into the original moments of existence.

Sometimes it's impossible to achieve the peak of awareness without surrendering the tools of civilization. It becomes necessary to get out of the automobile and walk into the elemental wilderness beyond the road. In order to be reborn, you have to strip off the protective clothing--both symbolic and real--and leave the path for the depths of the forest, assuming as part of the adventure the possibility of getting lost.

From Young Ideas, there was one expedition that began to approach this kind of experience. On the beach at Point Reyes, a national seashore on the Pacific Ocean, where a primeval wind roars constantly, Jim Brewster stood with a small group of people who had forgotten one another's names and called to a seal swimming about ten yards offshore.

"Tse-tse," Brewster howled in an outrageously playful baby talk. "Come on, tse-tse." For some long period that no one wanted to measure, the big man spoke to the seal in noises that really did sound like seal talk. The seal poked its head up out of the water, scanned the humans curiously and moved a few yards closer in. At this point--where the three elements of earth, air and sea met--intelligent animals from foreign worlds were in contact, recognizing each other as strange but living inhabitants of the same universe.

The sun was setting. It was growing too cold to enjoy the game. On the way back, one person looked at the scene and said in a voice bordering on ecstasy, "It's so beautiful--and it's not symbolic of anything!" When the long climb through high seaside grass was nearly completed and the road was almost in sight, the flashing beacon of the RCA Communications Center appeared in the rapidly darkening sky, a message from America calling its straying children home from their play on the shores of eternity.

• • •

On a Sunday in September, the Hog Farm was scheduled to give a benefit concert for Embudo Hospital in Santa Fe's Greer Garson Theater. Four Hog Farmers awoke well before dawn to drive to a hot spring in the mountains near Los Alamos by sunrise. There were two couples and two babies. The road reached out of the desert through enormous finger-shaped eroded cliffs that looked like the rocky, sea-worn bluffs at Point Reyes. Next came pine-covered mountains. High in the mountains, the car came around a long curve and broke out into the open. On the right, a meadow as big as Manhattan Island extended like some cosmic football field. It was a place for 500-foot-high gods to hold decathlons, a pasture for Apollo's cattle.

Several miles farther, the car stopped at an unmarked gravel parking area by the road. The Hog Farmers walked down a steep hillside and across a stream bridged by fallen logs, then up through the woods about a quarter of a mile to a natural pool into which steaming water flowed from a crack in the rock. On the rocks were the remains of candles lighted by people who had used the pool at night.

Everyone undressed and got into the hot water. From there, it was possible to see the entire valley. Before long, a couple of Indian forest rangers appeared and chatted jovially with the naked Hog Farmers.

"This is a sacred Indian spring," the older of the two foresters explained. "You come into this spring and it will cure all sicknesses, leaving you refreshed and healthy. People come from all over to bathe in this water. It cures the arthritis, the rheumatism, the aches and pains. These waters purify and sanctify the soul."

"Do you bathe in this spring?"

"No," the Indian replied. "I'm too busy. I got to keep the place clean." While he talked, the forester and his partner carefully picked up debris left by previous bathers. The older man held up a piece of glass. "See, this is what I'm afraid of."

"Don't you have a day off?"

"My wife, she got all kinds of work for me on my day off. I got my gardening."

"This is your garden," one bather said in the traditionally pontifical and symbolic rhetoric used for conversing with Indians. The gray-haired forester looked at him blankly, then understood that he meant the forest.

"Oh, no," he said, "I got a vegetable garden. I grow melons. Well, we got to go now. Good luck to you."

When the foresters left, the Hog Farmers carried out a relaxing exercise. Two people, one holding the feet, the other the head, gently rocked a third person in the water slowly and rhythmically. The muscles of the body relaxed, the breath diminished and the soul entered the timeless void. One by one, they served one another. The babies dozed on the rocks. Young acidheads who had been camping overnight on the mountain above the spring came down to bathe. An astonishingly beautiful eight-year-old blonde girl stripped and got into the hot spring, paddling up to each man and looking deep into his eyes with a frank stare of love while her mother sat on a rock and watched.

After washing with Dr. Bonner's Bio-Degradable Liquid Soap, the Hog Farmers dressed and walked slowly back to the car, stopping on the way to drink from an icy spring. When they reached the parking area, the campers were there, too, passing a bottle of Red Mountain wine and eating Kraft American cheese.

Someone brought out a loaf of dense bread baked in the Hog Farm kitchen for the trip to Santa Fe. There was also a jar of homemade peach preserves made by a girl at New Buffalo. The food was shared. One of the campers played a guitar with professional polish. Otherwise, the meal was eaten almost in silence. It was not necessary to point out that this was Sunday and this meal was Communion. On the way back down past the great meadow, a sudden rain fell briefly, leaving the air moist and sweet.

That night in Santa Fe, the Hog Farm collected $780 for Embudo Hospital, a way of returning the kindness shown sick hippies. After the light show and concert was finished, the entire commune walked solemnly up the center aisle and on out into the lobby--arm in arm, hand in hand--singing, "All we are saying is give peace a chance." Over and over again they sang that refrain, until it echoed in the brain like an insistent, hypnotic prayer: "All we are saying is give peace a chance."