The Ranch

Full-grown children of a commune come to grips with the original green lifestyle

Funny you should say that," Karen Barber said. "I was born on a commune." Say that? Say what? I hadn't been paying attention. Or rather. I'd been pay­ing attention only to the routine I had rehearsed: a pitch for a feature film.

Barber, a producer at Lawrence Bender Productions, was the third pitch of the day. I had two more to go before dinner. It was my third day in Los Angeles pitching this project. I was on autopilot. And the pitch had nothing to do with communes.

What had I said to interrupt the pitch with Barber's surprised reaction-a reaction that surprised me even more?

Elegant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, like the lead in an early-1960s Stanley Donen movie, Barber, I would have guessed, might have been born in Paris, London, perhaps Vienna. But on a commune?

"In northern California," she said.

Her commune name was Cloud. And she was one of the first children born in the community. In a wickiup.

"Ten to 12 kids, maybe more, were born at the ranch," Barber's father, Ben. later explained. "No doctor. No real midwife. No good roads to the hospital, which was miles away. Lucky we had no problems."

Although associated with the 1960s, communal living truly developed in the 1970s. There were big communes like California's Ananda, where a hundred or so adults and children tried to reinvent society through Transcendental Meditation; small communes like Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, where a dozen intellectuals were writing books based on their experiences in finding Eden by truck farming on acid; and urban communes like a feminist household in Washington, D.C. that was run by a male poet. All of them had kids who played and scrapped and com­peted as kids do anywhere; at Ananda little kids argued after a school rest period about who saw the biggest light of enlightenment. Even today some estimate there are more than 12,000 communal groups in North America, substantially more than Newsweek's 1969 estimate of 500 American communes.

Now these kids are adults, working and striving in the mainstream world and, I suppose, on the farm as well. How many turned out like Karen Barber? I was about to ask for her help in finding the answer.

Off and on for five years in the mid-to-late 1960s I'd lived on communes-the largest at Wendell Depot, Massachusetts. My then wife and I had considered hav­ing and raising our kids communally. The reasons for doing so seemed compelling

at the time, or so we convinced ourselves in the long autumn evenings as we sat in a circle after a typical dinner of soy burgers (our commune was vegetarian Maoist), passing an ice cream churn from person to person.

Psychologically it made sense: Kids who were raised on communes, we argued, wouldn't have the typical Oedipal issues since parenting would be diffused among many adults. Practically and economically it made sense: We would have built-in child care and shared expenses. Politically and sociologically it offered a glimpse of a renewed human­ity: Our intent-that of the 1960s project in general-was to smuggle our way back into a Golden Age of Innocence. Whether reinvent­ing humanity was an inside job (remaking consciousness using drugs and yoga) or an outside job (using revolution), we were sure we would succeed-and do so within one gen-

eration. We may have been the Generation of the Desert, but our children would inherit the future we were building.

That future would be free of conflict and petty jealousies. That future would be egali­tarian, perfectly so. Everyone would have his or her heart's desire. That future would renegotiate the social contract. Power would no longer come from economic influ­ence; money would no longer be a fist. That future would ensure everyone an expanded consciousness. An expanded conscious­ness was, we had no doubt, a better one. Consciousness is like a car; we convince our­selves we have the best available.

So after dinner, farting communally from a diet of soy burgers, soy loaf and soy milk, we'd pass the ice cream maker around the circle, each of us holding the bucket between his or her legs, steadying it with one hand as the other hand laboriously churned the handle in a masturbatory arc, as we listed what we needed to do to conjure this new Golden Age.

First on the list was free love. We were all in favor of it, a free love that would fill our farm­house with free children. A very expensive-though we didn't know it then-free love.

After these evenings of churning ice cream between our legs and reassuring one another that free love was the foundation of our new life came the languid summer afternoons when, sweaty and tired from weeding our garden, we'd head down to the creek across

the road from our farmhouse to skinny-dip.

I had a problem with skinny-dipping. My consciousness was still unexpanded enough to find swimming naked with the women on the commune arousing. My erections were exclamation points marking my failure to live in our free, egalitarian future, the free-love future that so far remained in the future.

I was already seen as a partial apostate. Every night after dinner and before the ice cream churning we would play a game of non-competitive volleyball. The object was not to beat the other team but to collaborate with it to keep the ball in the air as long as you could.

Some fun.

Unconvinced-or puzzled-by the connec­tion between Maoism and vegetarianism, I used to sneak away after lunch and. in my robin's-egg-blue Volkswagen Beetle, chug to the nearest diner, where I scarfed down

hamburgers made not of soy but meat and played pinball. I was always busted during the postprandial volleyball game: I couldn't keep from acing the ball over the net. Very competi­tive. "You've been eating meat!" my Utopian brothers and sisters accused me. Yes. I ate meat. I had erections during skinny-dipping. I was demonstrably counterrevolutionary!

Then one afternoon one of the women in the com-mune-the wife of the oldest member of our group, the guy most vociferously in favor of

free love-lagged behind with me at the stream. We were both naked, like Adam and Eve. Heeding the serpent, I made a pass. The pass was rejected. That rejected pass caused an explosion of recrimination that night in our circle. How could I have done that? I'd made the mistake of taking our Utopian talk seriously. So much for free love. So much for babies who would be the children of the whole commune. So much for the generation of hope. I left the commune.

During my movie-pitch session, when Karen Barber told me she had been born on a com­mune, this whole past, the road not taken, swept over me. What if...? I wondered.

With Barber's blessing, I call her father, Ben, who still has connections to the com­mune where she was born. He is ame­nable to helping me get in touch with her communal siblings and fills me in on the genesis of the Ranch. When C. Cordon Liddy-the local district attorney before he became a Watergate burglar-drove Timo­thy Leary out of a high-profile commune on the Millbrook estate in New York, many of the people who had been living there, including Ben and his friend Walter Schnei­der, relocated to another property near Mendocino, California: the Ranch. The commune where Karen was born.

"I built a 1O-by-14 house out of salvaged

lumber and heavy-duty plastic." Ben says. "I learned how to use an acetylene torch to cut open a milk can for a stovepipe."

Paradise. But Paradise Found inevitably leads to Paradise Lost. "Tension filled the place," Ben says. "During our weekly meet­ing with chants and drums, we'd go around a circle and start quarreling and blaming. For example, everyone complained about the flies above the communal shower. So I bought a can of Raid, sprayed them all and went back to my hooch. When people saw the dead flies, they said, 'It's a miracle!' 'No,' one of the other communards, Richard, said, 'Ben sprayed them.' At the next meeting there was a crisis. "Oh my Cod,' people said. 'Ben brought chemicals into our pure life!'"

Ben Barber left.

The commune grew to 20 to 25 adults and six or seven kids. "As soon as they could." he says, "my kids quickly moved away from the hippie scene, like kids of immigrants." Today all but a handful of the adults have left, but many of the kids have at least stayed in the area, if not on the Ranch. The ones who moved away remain in touch with the others. Last summer Ben went back to a reunion at the Ranch. "Most of them still live in a world where corporations are bad and run the country," he says. "A real us-against-them mind-set. I don't share those views, but I love the people. I went through a lot with them. They're family."

"The Ranch had 14 kids in three years," Wal­ter Schneider says. "For some reason we had mostly boys." Tall, rangy and rugged, with a good face-cautious and humorous-Schneider picks me up in San Francisco in an old Mer­cedes, a surprising hippie car. He grew up in Teaneck. New Jersey and graduated from Annapolis in 1956. He spent 15 years in the Navy, including a stint at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington, D.C. While in the ser­vice Schneider dropped acid for the first time.

"For my last three years I was using regu­larly," he says. "And I've been using ever since, for 42 years." He began to question what he was learning as part of a Southeast Asia think tank at CNA. "Like," he says, "we were told we had an overwhelming advantage in Vietnam. 'What about losing?' I asked. 'Not going to happen.' I was told." By the summer of 1967 Schneider had drifted to Millbrook.

"Leary had left West Point," he says. "He understood where I was coming from and helped me get to where I was going." Because of his military flight experience, Schneider became Leary's pilot. "I used to fly him around the country in a Cessna 337" Schneider says, "checking in on communes like Drop City." In 1968 Schneider was one of the founding group that moved from Millbrook to Men-docino. Using savings from his time in the Navy, he, along with a partner, bought the Ranch's land, which is now owned in common by many of the former members.

"We had a big house," Schneider says, "eventually 14 buildings. A goat shed, chick­ens, a small (continued on page 132)

THE RANCH

(awtintifdjrom page 94) workshop, a barn, a Quonset hut. At the other end of the property was a school. It was publicly funded." Around 50 children from the area—which included other communes and communities—attended the school. It has since closed.

Schneider drives me to Bolinas. Califor­nia, a town that prizes its privacy so much, its citizens frequently take down road signs so outsiders won't find it. All along the coastal range Spanish moss hangs on live oak like tattered political banners. When he was not on the Ranch, Schneider lived on a back road with Ruby Lee, a woman he met on the commune who had moved out to pursue her art. "There wasn't much for me to do up there," RubyLee says.

She is an exotic, serene woman who seems to flow with her robes through her beautiful, austere light-filled wood house, which is heated by a wood stove. The place is simple, elegant, well-built—not merely a shelter. A model counterculture home, although a house like this is no longer a sign of radical departure from the norm; it would be equally suited for a yuppie invest­ment banker or a crunchy conservative.

RubyLee's place is so idiosyncratically, so individually stamped by her personality, it is readily apparent how it might have been difficult for her to subsume her unique style in a communal identity. "There were a lot of strong women at the Ranch," RubyLee says. "A lot of interpersonal conflict. The woman who taught the schl tended to be divisive and difficult. She had favorites, which wasn't always good for the children."

In the spare room where I spend the night I find an old Whole Earth Catalog. Opening it is like opening a door onto the past, onto a more hopeful time when the earth seemed friendlier—or we seemed friendlier to the earth. Technology was going to save us. Solar heat. Better com­post. Better diets. Better drugs.

In the Whole Earth Catalog we could learn about eternal forms from D'Arcy Thompson and about the myth of the eternal return from Joseph Campbell. We'd build geodesic domes according to specifications laid out for us by Buckminster Tuller. who taught us to think of our planet as Spaceship Earth. We'd learn better modes of consciousness from counterculture gurus: Richard Alpert, Leary's psychedelic partner at Harvard, who had become Baba Ram Dass; John Lilly, who studied dolphin communication at the Communication Research Institute and later, through psychotropic chemicals and sensory deprivation, would claim to have broken through to another dimension (apparently the same place people go who today take DMT); Robert Anton Wilson, possibly the sanest man in America until his recent death, a combination of the "happy philosopher" David Hume, William Blake and Lenny Bruce; and, of course, Leary.

The Whole Earth Catalog told us where to buy 35-millimeter film in bulk (we were

a long way from the digital age), how to care for LPs (and a long way from the era of music downloads and the Internet) and how to use the Tandy desktop computer, one of the first personal computers, which was the size of a large microwave oven (although hack then microwave ovens were rare) and, with a lop memory of 128k, could save as much as 30 pages of manu­script. A revolution in word processing! I went to sleep dreaming of Wendell Depot, ice cream churns and skinny-dipping.

"All the kids from the Ranch—Willow, Windspirit, Ishvi, Blue Jay, Raincrow— have a bond," Noah Sheppard says. "When my commune brothers introduce me, they

describe me as, well, iheir brother."

Clean-cut in his white T-shirt, pull­over, jeans and Nikes, Sheppard, 34, could have stepped out of an Orvis ad: the well-dressed, informal businessman, which is what he is. Shep­pard, who was on the local chamber of commerce board of directors, owns and runs MacCallum House, an impecca­bly renovated Victo­rian estate promising "luxury accommoda­tions and fine din­ing in the heart of Mendocino Village." It also includes the MacCallum Suites, the Mendocino Vil­lage Inn and the Mendo Wine Tours & Limousine Ser­vice, which otters the "Equine & Wine" package, featuring horseback-riding adventures at Rico­chet Ridge Ranch and trail rides on the beach, through a

redwood forest and on a cattle ranch. "I've got 85 to 90 employees," Sheppard says.

Hallway through the three-hour trip to Mendocino, I had suggested that when we arrive in the area we go imme­diately to the commune site. "We don't have time," Schneider had said. "Noah'll be waiting for us at his hotel."

We had stopped at a big-box store, a Costco, to use the bathroom and grab some lunch. The car that pulled in beside us had an i miss konai.ii KKAdAN bumper sticker. Inside, people were lined up with two or three shopping carts crammed high with flat-screen televisions, supersi/e boxes of dried apricots, gallons of laundry soap—an abundance unimagined during the 1960s

era of abundance when, some thought, the booming economy was responsible for the development of communes.

The baby boomers were the first genera­tion to grow up out of the shadow of the Depression. Since they had no fear of going without, they embraced voluntary poverty. Today this concept has metamorphosed in our new overheated economy into "volun­tary simplicity," a trend bearing a hint of the you-can't-fire-me-I-quit mentality: I'll reduce my expectations before the bubble pops and we're all left with enforced sim­plicity, which used to be called poverty.

A different world from the dream of the 1960s.

"We move on," Schneider says philosoph­ically. "1 recently saw Ram Dass, hadn't seen

him in a long time. He was in a wheelchair. He gave the best advice I've ever gotten."

About psychedelia?

About the cosmic order?

About archetypal eruptions into our consensus reality?

"No," Schneider says. "He told me to take my blood-pressure medicine. He didn't and had a stroke."

"My dad was older than mosl of the oth­ers who came to the Ranch," Sheppard says. Like Schneider, Sheppard's parents were not boomers but war babies. "They were travelers," he says.

Sheppard was born in 1972 in Banga-

lore, India. When he was eight months old he came down with severe dysentery, and his parents decided it would be pru­dent to leave. After spending time in Lon­don they returned to the States. Alter a year or so in San Francisco, they decided city life was not for them, so they headed up the coast. In Mendocino they discov­ered the Ranch and settled down.

"About the same time, they separated," he says.

We are sitting in the MacCallum House's Grey Whale Bar. The sound system plays Dean Martin and an easy-listening lounge version of the Beatles' "Got to Get You Into My Life." The bar is stocked with top-of-the-line liquor: Knob Creek bour­bon, single-malt scotches, specialty vod-

kas. A young crowd of drinkers sits at the small, widely spaced tables, inti­mately leaning into each other and laughing low.

Like Bolinas, Mendocino has protected itself from some of the worst of the wider culture. Along with the expensive wine-tourist trade—Men-d o c i n o County offers art galleries, hot springs, cafes, yarn shops, a full-production opera company, one ballet troupe, two premier theater companies and two orches­tras—the area still reflects its counter­culture past.

At Headroom you can buy incense, tie-dyed clothing and hemp goods. Hemp Connection is a pur­veyor of fine hemp products. Alternate Energy Engineer­ing's motto is "Power to the people."

The local alternative tabloid. Green-fuse, published by the Waking Dog Col­lective, is filled with articles that, with few changes, could have been found in the 1960s East Village Rat. A recent issue ran a story called "A Life for the Cause of Peace," along with an article on South American grassroots democracy, the complaints of a disgruntled staff sergeant about the unpopular war in Iraq—"The enemy is not who the government or the media says it is," he notes—and a piece on a possible conspiracy in the Robert Kennedy murder, headlined wiikn all

KI.SK KAILS IIAVKHIK CIA KILL I UK KkKOKMKR.

"In the 1990s I went back to India to see where I was born," Sheppard says.

"It was just what I'd expected." What he expected did not charm him.

"On my second birthday." he says about one of his earliest memories, "all the kids from the Ranch were there. We always had whole-wheat carob cake on birthdays, made with goal's milk from our own goats." He couldn't wait to grow up and have a real chocolate cake.

Sheppard and his brothers grew up without electricity. They used kerosene lamps and candles. No daily newspaper. No radio—at first. (Willow Aum sneaked in the first one.) No TV. "Except." Shep­pard says, "when we visited our grand­parents. But none of us really got into it." Instead of watching TV during the long evenings, Sheppard listened to his parents read aloud to him. "We all ate together every night at the big house." he says. They were vegetarians, though, he admits, "as soon as I could. I became a carnivore. Our parents were quite hon­est with us. They didn't hide much at all. By the mid-1980s even they became more tuned into assimilating back into regular society." After he left the Ranch. Sheppard says, he realized that "most of the people I met didn't have some kind of experience growing up with so many people."

Possibly because he wasn't born on the commune, he kept the surname Shep­pard; many other kids from the Ranch use the last name Aum. Sheppard also left the commune early. "When I was 10," he says, "I moved down the road to Riverdale, another community. I had some resentment about the education we were getting. Pani, the teacher at the Ranch, was a tyrant. She chose to edu­cate some kids and not others. I said I wanted to go to the straight school so I could learn to read."

Sheppard worked all summer to buy a pair of Sperry Top-Siders, and although a lot ol the other kids his age at the Men-docino Middle School were from hippie families like his, he at first felt like an out­sider. "I was way behind," he says. "I was in sixth grade, but I read at a third-grade level. I had to spend several years work­ing very hard to catch up." He went to Cabrillo College for a lew years but quit because "I was loo eager to start work­ing." Growing up in the counterculture seems to have sharpened Sheppard's appetite for traditional-culture success. But even if he has found a place for him­self in the country's common capitalistic culture, he has chosen to live close to the Ranch, just four miles away along the ridge. "I keep in touch with all of them," he says of his brothers.

Ishvi Aum, who owns a successful local construction company, and Windspirit Aum still live near the Ranch. Blue |ay Aum moved to the Bay Area, and River Aum lives in Arizona. "He actually does my credit-card transactions at his firm down there," Sheppard says. Only Wil­low, who lives on the Ranch, still main­tains a hippie lifestyle, but they all retain

many of the values they grew up with. Ishvi, for example, refuses to use indoor plumbing. They all live close to the land, many of them growing some of their own food. "We learned something from the previous generation," Sheppard says, "but by not doing one thing, by all doing something different, we're more elfective. We're even more effective gardeners."

The commune continues to cast a cen­tripetal force on those who lived there and their families. Sheppard enjoys this. "I'm happy my parents were here and not in suburbia," he says. Not long ago his grandparents moved from Anaheim, in Orange County, to an area near the Ranch. "We had four generations liv­ing on the same property, and they live close by now," Sheppard says proudly. "Innkeeping is like having an ideal com­mune—lots of people in one place. But I'm in control. No shared anything!"

"My earliest memory," Ishvi says, "is of watching Willow being born in a big barn filled with light." Ishvi, Willow, Schneider and Marshall McNeil sit at a long table in the MacCallum House. Ishvi wears a green T-shirt, a cap, a beard and glasses. Intense, sharp and funny, he misses noth­ing. Willow is quiet, almost withdrawn, and speaks thoughtfully but rarely. McNeil, one of the elders, arrived at the Ranch in I9(i8. "My wife and I found some LSD through an Alan Watts seminar in Sau-salito," he says. "We left Marin lor New York and spent a year and a half at Mill-brook. 1 was there at the end and made my way here." Like Schneider, McNeil is tall, rangy and as weather-seamed as oak bark, with somewhat wary outlaw eyes. He speaks even less than Willow.

Sheppard comes and goes, sitting with us when not being interrupted by his duties managing the inn and plan­ning for a trip to Buenos Aires. Lav­ender Grace Kent—funny, lovely and worldly-wise—is our waitress. She grew up in a community down the road from the Ranch and spent seven years in New York City as a jazz vocalist. In between taking care of the tables around us, she finds time to comment on the story of the Ranch and the kids who grew up there.

"They learned important things," Kent says. "Basic skills. Practical things. Topog­raphy, how to find your way around with a compass. Welding. My first weld­ing project was to make a cradle for my stuffed bear out of an old water heater. Marshall taught woodworking."

"How to make a skunk-skin hat," Sheppard says.

It all sounds like the Lost Boys in Nev-erland. "We learned how to survive," Kent says.

"The best part was the holidays," Willow says. "Thanksgiving with everyone there. Christmas. Passover. Every time we had

a celebration, everyone came together."

"Real good for us kids," Ishvi says. "Then I think about how my kids grow up. It's not nearly as exciting a life. A nuclear family is a confining way to live. We weren't aware enough of the outside world, except for sports. We liked to watch football. After all, we were 10 guys."

When the kids got older, the no-televi­sion rule was broken for football. Willow's clad hooked up a four-inch black-and-white TV that ran off a car battery so they could follow games. The elders, says Ishvi, "could rig that if they wanted to, but meanwhile the houses were sliding off their foundations."

"They had a problem doing any kind of project," Willow says. "Some people did the work, and others just talked about it—what to build, how to build, where to build, what color to paint it."

"Entropy made itself felt," Ishvi says.

"We had to have some guidelines," McNeil says, "for everyone who wanted to visit, as well as for everyone who stayed. Anyone who stayed had to agree to certain obligations: help with the work, agree to cooperate."

Any other rules?

"You couldn't go outside of a fixed area," Willow says.

"A rule I liked," Ishvi says, "was if you were going to fight, fight outside."

"To protect the kerosene lamps," Wil­low adds.

"Willow had to wear shoes," McNeil says.

"No," Schneider says, "it was clothes."

"That was only a rule at school," says Willow.

"Willow still doesn't wear shoes," Schneider says.

"We did a thing called thought-up theater," Ishvi says. "Every year a couple of shows. The kids would write them. They were always political in nature."

"They did theater at political protests," Willow says.

They played war games and adventure games like Robin Hood. But the violence tended to be less physical and more ver­bal. "In general," Willow explains, "we were pretty peaceful."

"Even when we played with the red­neck kids," Ishvi says, "there were no real problems."

The kids on the Ranch were poor bin didn't think of themselves as poor kids like some of the locals down the ridge. They were aware their parents had other options and had chosen this way of life. They were essentially isolated from the consumerism and cultural references— from pop songs to brand names—of the rest of their generation, but what truly separated them from other kids their age was their extended family, which created strong ties among them.

"My mother was the head school­teacher," Ishvi says. "I grew tired of that by fifth grade." Like Sheppard. Ishvi decided he wanted a traditional

education. He says, "1 went to three col­leges in four years"—Berklee School of Music in Boston (he plays alto sax), Emerson and Hampshire. At each place, he had trouble adjusting, especially to the administration, and he felt contempt for what he calls the trustafarians, rich kids in hippie clothing who didn't have to work for a living. He also lacked the common frame of reference for popular music, TV shows and suburban rituals.

"One kid asked me if I knew The Brady Bunch," Ishvi says. "No way." He left school a semester shy of graduation. He didn't get a diploma, but he did get a wife—he married another student he'd met at Hampshire.

Willow decided not to go to college. "He had too much sense to get into debt," Ishvi says.

Ishvi's construction company employs a number of Mexican workers, whom Ishvi feels responsible for in an old-fashioned, paternalistic way and tries to protect—as he protects himself—from what he calls the straight world's stress culture, "which always wants to sell you something." He explains, "I don't live communally now. I share some property with land partners. I live simply. I still live off the land. We still have an out­house. But we have separate houses."

Willow, who is 32, still lives on the Ranch, along with Schneider. Like Ishvi, Willow says, "I live as simply as possible." He has few needs: a small generator and counterculture principles.

"It's about people taking care of peo­ple," Willow says, "being kind to each other." He speaks softly, gently, almost to himself, as if he were expressing thoughts that come from very deep and far away—nothing surprising or new but true. There is magic about him.

Would he live communally now?

Willow smiles. "If someone wants to do it, good luck," he says. Like Sheppard and Ishvi, he "believes in community, not sharing."

Eventually life at the Ranch devolved into endless meetings and arguments.

"People's relationships became a big prob­lem," Willow says. "This person with that person. That person with this person."

"Staying in a family relationship takes enormous energy," Ishvi says. "With a group of people, trying to stay together is like trying to keep hold of a smoke ring, especially when you live in the country and the infrastructure breaks down, like when the water tower fell over."

"Every six months people said, 'I'm get­ting out,' because people weren't living up to the agreement," McNeil says. "No one was doing the cooking, the cleaning, the chores. It always came down to who would dump the garbage."

"The Ranch became a negative-energy dump." Schneider says.

"Alan Watts's daughter was trying to form a commune," Schneider says. "Twenty people. Most of them college people. I was invited out there to talk about communes." He told them, "On a commune, you need people who know how to do things."

"And the problem is the ones who are not competent always take charge," Ishvi says.

It's an old problem for communes, even for the famous ones, those formed in the 19th century in Massachusetts by the Transcendentalists—Brook Farm and Fruitlands—where everyone wanted to sit around thinking great thoughts but no one wanted to work. It was even a problem for the apostle of the back-to-the-land movement, Henry David Tho-reau, who couldn't drive a nail into a board without bending it.

But despite the odds against making a commune work, people are still drawn to the dream. "What makes people come together," McNeil says, "is a crisis. A com­mune has a better chance ol surviving if it's built around a creed, a business con­cept or a belief." The Ranch was "built around personal growth," he explains, which became a problem. People out­grew the commune—or didn't grow. In

either case the sense of community and commitment weakened.

When did the commune end?

"Depends on who you ask," Willow says at last. "I'm still there."

"It was active for 22 years." McNeil says.

"It went on longer than that." Ishvi says.

"There was a sort of rebirth about 10 years ago," Schneider says. "Ishvi and Willow tried to reenergize it."

"I'm for indoor plumbing," Willow says, "but people who used to live there give you opposition to changing any of the old ways."

The older generation "is going out like the dinosaurs," Ishvi says. "What they did and what they had was a very short moment in history, but so is the way everyone lives now—consuming, a short moment in history. So maybe keep­ing the old ways"—knowing how to live simply and oil the land—"is important."

One seemingly trivial fact becomes increasingly significant to me the more I think about it and the more I compare these guys with kids their age who didn't grow up in their circumstances: Not one of them owns an iPod.

'"I'd like to see all the people who were involved come back and retire there," Ishvi says. "Have younger people join them. Do it again but with what we've all learned." Willow nods. "Living together." Willow says, "but separately."

The kids wouldn't live communally as their parents did but would build on what their parents had created. "Most of the kids who grew up on the Ranch," McNeil points out, "never changed their last name."

.After dinner I suggest to Schneider that we visit the Ranch. "Oh. it's too late," he says.

"Maybe he didn't want you to see how it's all fallen apart." Willow's mother, Leslie Campbell, says.

Campbell was, at 19. one of the young­est of the first generation to join the com­mune. Most of the others were 10 years

older and, unlike her, had gone to col­lege. "They had an intellectual basis for wanting to be there," she says. "I didn't have that at all. I wasn't a hippie. I was just experimenting."

She left Santa Clara, California, where she'd been raised, and in the late 1960s went to San Francisco for a few weeks. At a Berkeley love-in she found herself in a group hug and went home with a guy who invited her to move up to the Men-docino area, which she did on a whim.

"It was like summer camp," Campbell says. "We fooled around in the woods all day." She met Willow's father and fell in love. When he invited her to move to the Ranch, she didn't hesitate. "I did that on a lark, too," she says. "Figured 1 might as well try it out. You never know...."

She stayed for 12 years.

"I developed their ideas," she says, showing them that they could live better by cooperating than by themselves. "And I became a convert." Campbell repaired the cars and trucks and gardened, both of which she loved doing, neither of which she figures she would have done if she hadn't gone to the Ranch. She found com­munal living to be great for the mothers, especially the single ones. It was perfect day care—more than day care.

"We thought of the kids as children of the commune," she says. "I still consider them all my kids."

They all watch out and care for one another.

"A couple of years ago," Campbell says, "Willow took some bad drugs and had a psychotic break for a month, really bad. Scared the shit out of me. And all the boys—his brothers—stood up for him. He came out of it. Whether it's genetic or not, they have a real bond." A stronger bond than the adults had with one another.

"Most of the men had given over to the whole feminist thing," Campbell says. "Nice guys but not strong, masculine men." The boys, however, reacted to the matriarchy with cynicism. "Watching cou­ples switching from one to another had a real effect on the boys," she says. "There was a lot of pain among the women. Women can be brutal to one another."

None of the boys grew up wanting to live with a group of women. "They're all happy in monogamous relationships," Campbell says. "The girls are not as close to one another or to the boys." Campbell raised Ishvi's sister. "Her mother had a big anger problem," Campbell says, "and the girl needed a safer place to be."

Three of the four girls raised at the Ranch "married and have traditional families," Campbell says, more tradi­tional than the boys'. "They're not about to repeat the experiment. I don't blame them. It wasn't healthy. We preached one thing, but the reality was different."

The focus was on raising children, not on free love. But Campbell says one of the women "used to put out the red

light, and anybody was welcome. She made a point of manipulating people with her sexuality. She seduced the men and most of the women, too."

But money, not sex, became the big­gest problem. "The shared money," Campbell says, "became a farce."

At first, when no one had any money except for what they could scrounge or get from government assistance, it was easier to share. But when people got jobs and began to inherit property, it became harder. People hung on to what they had, which created resentment among the others. "It was similar to what a hus­band and wife go through," Campbell says, "but multiplied by a factor of 12 or 15." The more demanding members got more, which was the real beginning of the end. "You go up there now," Camp­bell says, "and there isn't much left."

Photographs of the brothers when they were children reveal a paradise of homebuilt, light-filled shacks in a wild garden: everyone holding hands in a circle—inside around the dinner table, outside dancing around a picnic table—a child, maybe two or three years old at the most, milking a goat.

Now most of the buildings have fallen, reduced to piles of rotting wood. "Yeah," Campbell says, "maybe Walter didn't lake you to the Ranch because it's too hard to see—through your eyes— what's happened to it."

I have one interview left to do—with Ronnie Newsome, my old high school friend who was the spiritual center of the commune I lived on. Funny, fast-talking, reckless and zany. Ronnie was our Neal Cassady, our Dean Moriarty. In April of our senior year I told him I was quitting school and hitching to San Francisco. He marshaled all the argu­ments against dropping out and con­vinced me not to. When I went to school the next day, I learned that after he had left my house, he'd packed a small bag and stuck out his thumb on Route 91 South, toward New York.

I went to Amherst College. Ronnie joined the Navy. 1 joined the school theater group. Ronnie freaked out, stripped off his uniform and threw it, with his military ID, off a ship into the water. After a stint in St. Albans Hospi­tal, he was discharged from the Navy. He showed up at my dorm, sat in on classes and did so well as an unofficial student that some official students protested.

Without a high school diploma, Ron­nie got a scholarship to Brandeis Uni­versity. Freshman year, in Ronnie's first class, the professor, discussing Waldrii, berated the students, telling them that if they had truly understood Thoreau's book, they wouldn't be in class. Ronnie agreed, walked out ol the classroom, quit school and headed back lo western Massachusetts, where we eventually

started our own commune. When I quit to go to New York and make my way as a writer, Ronnie stayed on as the commune guru, eventually blasting out his brains on acid. He was last seen standing on a highway, his thumb out, a pad of poems he was working on in the back pocket of his jeans, a Camel pack rolled up in the sleeve of his white T-shirt. The driver of the truck that killed him said he never saw Ronnie on the road.

Back then and today Ronnie has always represented my road not taken.

"You haven't thought of me in years," Ronnie's ghost says as he sits beside me on the steps of the MacCallum House in the breezy, briny-smelling dark.

"Haven't had reason to," I say.

"So you conjured me up because you couldn't figure out how to end your story on communes," he says. "You always used to come to me to solve your problems."

"Which you liked," I say. "Everyone on the commune assumed you knew what to do."

"About what?"

"About everything. Drugs. Sex. The first time I had a psychedelic-----"

"In Boston. When was it?"

"1966."

"With that bald guy, the Wizard-----"

"The East Coast version of Owsley."

"You ever hear the rumor that Owsley was supplied by the CIA?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. Leary, Aipert, Lilly—most of the psychedelic royalty had some contact with the CIA. In his autobiography Leary admitted it."

The postwar baby boom was a great experiment in social mobility; all those boomers went to college and were being

educated to become doctors, lawyers and engineers. But the culture couldn't absorb all those professionals. In a decade or so there would be a large, dis­appointed, frustrated and angry middle class. All the modern revolutions were started by a large, disappointed, frus­trated and angry middle class.

How to reduce the pressure on society from this potentially angry cohort?

"Turn on, tune in, drop out," Ronnie says.

"The middle class and rich kids could always buy back in."

"Like Patty Hearst," Ronnie says, nod­ding. "But blue-collar guys like me end up out in the cold. Out of luck."

"You're not out of luck, Ronnie," I say. "You're dead."

"Yeah. How about that? There were five of us smart working-class kids in high school. You're the only one left alive."

"Isn't that a little paranoid?"

"You're the one imagining the words I'm saying."

"So, bottom line...?"

Before I get an answer Schneider drives up and Ronnie's ghost is gone.

When I get into the car I ask Schneider if we can stop at the Ranch. "No time," he says. "You'll miss your plane."

"So," 1 had asked the night before, "was the commune a success?"

"Look at these young ones," McNeil had said.

He gestured down the table at Ishvi, Willow, Sheppard and Kent, then nodded.

"Yes."

in

I had a problem with skinny-dipping. My erections were exclamation points marking my failure.