When I reached the woodsy, frontier town I knew to be near Wheeler's,
I stopped in a bar to ask directions. Heads turned. People froze,
glasses in hand. A woman with an expressionless, milky face said,
"Honey, there isn't any sign. You just go up the road six miles
and there's a gate on the left. Then you have to drive a ways to git
to it. From where I live, you can see their shacks and what have you.
But you can't see anything from the road."
After six miles, there was a gate and a sign, "Beware of cattle."
I opened it and drove down to a fork, picked the left road, went around
in a circle and came back to the fork, took the right and bumped against
two logs in the road. I got out and moved them. Nothing could stop
me now. Another fork. To the left the road was impassable—deep
ruts and rocks; to the right, a barbed-wire fence. Raining harder,
darker. This is enough. Get out of here fast. Try to turn the car
around, struggling to see… then the sickening dip.
I got into my sleeping bag and tried to find a comfortable position
in the crazily tilted car. My mood swung between panic and forced
calm. At about 5:00 a.m., I heard rustling noises, and could make
out the silhouettes of six horses which walked around the car, snorting.
An hour later, the rain let up, and a few feet from the car I found
a crude sign with an arrow, "Wheeler's." I walked a mile,
then another mile, through rolling green hills, thinking, "If
I can just get out of here." At last, around a bend were two
tents and a sign, "Welcome, God, love." The first tent had
a light burning inside, and turned out to be a greenhouse filled with
boxes of seedlings. At the second tent, I pushed open the door and
bells tinkled. Someone with streaked brown hair was curled in a real
bed On two mattresses. There was linoleum on the floor, a small stove,
a table, and books and clothes neatly arranged on shelves. The young
man lifted his head and smiled. "Come in."
I was covered with mud, my hair was wild and my eyes red and twitching.
"I tried to drive in last night, my car went down a ravine and
got stuck in the mud, and I've been sleeping in it all night."
"Far out," he said.
"I was terrified."
The young man, who had gray eyes set close together and one gold
earring, said, "Of what?"
"There were horses."
He laughed. "Far out. One of the horses walked into Nancy's
house and made a hole in the floor. Now she just sweeps her dirt and
garbage down the hole."
My throat was burning. "Could we make some coffee?"
He looked at me sideways. "I don't have any." He handed
me a clump of green weeds. "Here's some yerba buena. You can
make tea." I stared at the weeds.
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Shoshone."
"Mine's Sara."
"Far out."
He got dressed, watered the plants in the greenhouse, and started
down a path into the bushes, motioning for me to follow. Every few
feet, he would stop to pick yerba buena, listen to birds, watch a
trio of pheasants take off, and admire trees that were recently planted—almond,
Elberta peach, cherry, plum. They were all in blossom, but I was in
no mood to appreciate them. After every ten minutes of walking, we
would come to a clearing with a tent or wooden shack, wake up the
people in their soggy sleeping bags and ask them to help push the
car out. The dwellings at Wheeler's are straight out of Dogpatch—old
boards nailed unevenly together, odd pieces of plastic strung across
poles to make wobbly igloos, with round stovepipes poking out the
side. Most have dirt floors, though the-better ones have wood. In
one tent, we found a young man who had shaved his head except for
one stripe of hair down the center, like a Mohican. He grinned with
his eyes closed. "In an hour or so, I might feel like helping
you." We came to a crooked green shack with a peace sign on the
door and the inside papered with paintings of Krishna. Nancy, a blond
former social worker, was sleeping on the floor with her children,
Gregory, eight, and Michelle, nine. Both have blond hair of the same
length and it is impossible to tell at first which is the girl and
which the boy. At communities like this, it is common for children
to ask each other when they meet, "What are you?" Nancy
said, "Don't waste your energy trying to push the car. Get Bill
Wheeler to pull you out with his jeep. What's your hurry now? Sunday's
the best day here. You've got to stay for the steam bath and the feast.
There'll be lots of visitors." She yawned. "Lots of food,
lots of dope. It never rains for the feast."
Shoshone and I walked back to the main road that cuts across the
320-acre ranch. The sun had burned through the fog, highlighting streaks
of yellow wild flowers in the fields. Black Angus cows were grazing
by the road. People in hillbilly clothes, with funny hats and sashes,
were coming out of the bushes carrying musical instruments and sacks
of rice and beans. About a mile from the front gate we came to the
community garden, with a scarecrow made of rusty metal in the shape
of a nude girl. Two children were chasing each other from row to row,
shrieking with laughter, as their mother picked cabbage. A sign read,
"Permit not required to settle here."
BILL WHEELER WAS WORKING in his Studio, an airy, wood-and-glass building
with large skylights, set on a hill. When Bill bought the ranch in
1963, looking for a place to paint and live quietly, he built the
studio for his family. Four years later, when he opened the land to
anyone who wanted to settle there, the county condemned his studio
as living quarters because it lacked the required amount of concrete
under one side. Bill moved into a tent and used the studio for his
painting and for community meetings.
Bill is a tall, lean man of thirty with an aristocratic forehead,
straight nose, deep-set blue eyes, and a full beard and flowing hair
streaked yellow by the sun. His voice is gentle with a constant hint
of mirth, yet it projects, like his clear gaze, a strength, which
is understood in this community as divine grace. Quiet, unhurried,
he progresses with steady confidence toward a goal or solution of
a problem. He is also a voluptuary who takes Rabelaisian delight in
the community's lack of sexual inhibitions and in the sight of young
girls walking nude through the grass. He lives at the center of the
ranch with his third wife, Gay, twenty-two, arid their infant daughter,
Raspberry. His humor and self-assurance make it easy for those around
him to submit to the hippie credo that "God will provide,"
because they know that what God does not, Bill Wheeler will.
Bill promises to rescue my car after he has chopped wood and started
a fire for the steam bath. "Don't worry," a friend says,
patting me on the back. "Bill's saved people who've given up
hope, lost all confidence." A grizzly blond called Damian says,
"Why don't you let me pull her out?" Bill says. "Damian,
I love you, but I wouldn't trust you with any of my vehicles."
Later, we pass Damian on the road, into which he is blissfully urinating.
"Ha," Bill says, "the first time I met Damian he was
peeing."
With the jeep and a chain, Bill pulls out the car in less than two
minutes, and as it slides back onto secure road, I feel my tension
drain away. Maybe I should stay for the feast. Maybe it really is
beautiful here. I park the car at the county road, outside the first
gate, and walk the three miles back to Wheeler's. The access road
cuts across property owned by James G. Kelly, a breeder of show cattle
and horses, who is enraged at the presence of up to a hundred itinerant
hippies on the ranch adjacent to his. He has started court action
to block Wheeler from using the access road, and his hired hands walk
around with guns slung over their shoulders and their faces pinched
with bilious hate.
On a bluff behind Wheeler's garden, the steam bath is set to go.
Red-hot rocks are taken from the fire into a plastic tent that can
be sealed on all sides. Shifts of eight or nine people undress and
sit on the mud floor, letting out whoops, chanting and singing. Gallon
wine jugs filled with water are poured on the rocks, and the tent
fills up with steam so hot and thick that the children start coughing
and no one can see anyone else. After a few minutes, they step out,
covered with sweat, and wash off in a cold shower. The women shampoo
their hair and soap up the children. The men dig out ticks from under
the skin. Much gaiety and good-natured ogling, and then, as the last
shift is coming out, a teen-age visitor carrying the underground Berkeley
Tribe wanders in and stops, dumbfounded, staring with holy-fool eyes,
his mouth open and drooling, at all that flesh and hair and sweat.
The garden, like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces have floated together,
presents the image of a nineteenth century tableau: women in long
skirts and shawls, men in lace-up boots, coveralls, and patched jeans
tied with pieces of rope, sitting on the grass playing banjos, guitars,
lyres, wood flutes, dulcimers, and an accordion. In a field to the
right are the community animals—chickens, cows, goats, donkeys,
and horses. As far as the eye' can see, there are no houses, no traffic,
nothing but verdant hills, a stream, and the ocean with whitecaps
rising in the distance. Nine-year-old Michelle is prancing about in
a pink shawl and a floppy hat warbling, "It's time for the feast!"
Nancy says, "The pickin's are sort of spare, because tomorrow
is welfare day and everybody's broke." She carries from the outdoor
wood stove pots of brown rice—plain, she says, "for the
purists who are on Georges Ohsawa's ten-day brown-rice diet"—and
rice with fruit and nuts for everyone else; beans, red and white;
oranges and apples: yogurt; hash; pot; acid; mescaline. A girl says
there are worms in the green apples. Another, with a studious voice
and glasses, says, "That's cool, it means they were organically
grown. I'd rather eat a worm than a chemical any day." They eat
with their fingers from paper plates, and when the plates are gone,
directly from the pot. A man in his forties with red-spotted cheeks
asks me if I have any pills. "I'll take anything. I'm on acid
now." I offer him aspirin. He swallows eight.
Everyone who lives at Wheeler's ranch is a vegetarian. By ome strange
inversion, they feel that by eating meat they are hastening their
own death. Vegetarianism is, ironically, the aspect of their lifestyle
that aggravates even the most liberal parents. ("What? You won't
eat meat? That's ridiculous!") Bill Wheeler says that diet is
"very very central to the revolution. It's a freeing process
which people go through, from living on processed foods and eating
gluttonous portions of meat and potatoes, to natural foods and a simple
diet that is kinder to your body. A lot has to do with economics.
It's much cheaper to live on grains and vegetables you can grow in
your garden. When Gay and I moved here, we had to decide whether to
raise animals to slaughter. Gay said she couldn't do it. Every Thanksgiving,
there's a movement to raise money to buy turkeys, because some people
think the holiday isn't complete without them. But an amazing thing
happens when carrion is consumed. People are really greedy, and it's
messy. The stench and the grease stay with us for days."
Gravy, roast beef, mashed potatoes, Parker House rolls, buttered
peas—the weekly fare when Bill was growing up in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. His father, a lawyer who speculated famously in real
estate, told Bill he could do anything" with his life as long
as he got an education. So Bill, self-reliant, introspective, who
loved the outdoors, went to Yale and studied painting. After graduating,
he came to San Francisco to find a farmhouse where he could work.
When he saw the 320-acre ranch which was then a sheep and Christmas
tree farm, he felt, "I've got to have it. This is my land."
He bought it with his inheritance, and still has enough money to live
comfortably the rest of his life. "My parents would be shocked
out of their gourds if they saw the land now," Bill says. "They
died before I opened it."
The idea of open land, or free land, was introduced to Bill by Lou
Gottlieb, a singer with the pop folk group, "The Limelighters,"
who, in 1962, bought a 32-acre piece of land called Morning Star about
ten miles from Wheeler's Ranch. Gottlieb visits Wheeler's every Sunday
for the feast; when I met him, he was walking barefoot with a pink
blanket wrapped around him like a poncho and fastened with a giant
safety pin. A man of soaring height with crow eyes and a dark, silky
beard, he talks in sermonettes, rising on his toes with enthusiasm.
Gottlieb and a friend, Ramon Sender, decided in 1966 to start a community
at Morning Star with one governing precept: access to the land would
be denied to no one. With no rules, no organization, they felt, hostilities
would not arise, and people could be reborn by living in harmony with
the earth. Gottlieb deeded the land to God, and, shortly', a woman
sued God because her home had been struck by lightning. "Now
that God owns property, "her lawyer argued, "He can be sued
for natural disasters." It was not until 1967, Gottlieb says,
that hippies began to patronize open land.
"From the first, the land selected the people. Those who couldn't
work hard didn't survive. When the land got crowded, people split.
The vibrations of the land will always protect the community."
Gottlieb points to the sky. "With open land, He is the casting
director." What happens, I ask, if someone behaves violently
or destructively? Gottlieb frowns. "There have been a few cases
where we've had to ask people to go, but it's at terrible, terrible
cost to everyone's soul that this is done. When the land begins to
throw off people, everyone suffers." He shakes his body, as if
he were the land, rejecting a germ. "Open land has no historical
precedent. When you give free land, not free food or money, you pull
the carpet out from under the capitalist system. Once a piece of land
is freed, 'no trespassing' signs pop up all along the adjoining roads."
Bill Wheeler refers to his ranch as "the land," and talks
about people who live on the land, babies that are born on the land,
music played on the land. He "opened the land," as he phrases
it, in the winter of 1967, after Sonoma County officials tried to
close Morning Star by bulldozing trees and all the buildings except
Gottlieb's house. Some Morning Star people moved to Wheeler's, but
others traveled to New Mexico, where they founded Morning Star East
on a mesa near Taos owned by another wealthy hippie. The Southwest,
particularly northern New Mexico and Colorado, has more communes on
open land than any other region. The communes there are all crowded,
and Taos is becoming a Haight-Ashbury in the desert. More land continues
to be opened in New Mexico, as well as in California, Oregon, and
Washington. Gottlieb plans to buy land and deed it to God in Holland,
Sweden, Mexico, and Spain. "We're fighting against the territorial
imperative," he says. "The hippies should get the Nobel
Prize for creating this simple idea. Why did no one think of it before
the hippies? Because hippies don't work, so they have time to dream
up truly creative ideas."
IT WAS SURPRISING to hear people refer to themselves as "hippies";
I thought the term had been rendered meaningless by overuse. Our culture
has absorbed so much of the style of hip—clothes, hair, language,
drugs, music—that it has obscured the substance of the movement
with which people at Morning Star and Wheeler's still strongly identify.
Being a hippie, to them, means dropping out completely, and finding
another way to live, to support oneself physically and spiritually.
It does not mean being a company freak, working nine to five in a
straight job and roaming the East Village on weekends. It means saying
no to competition, no to the work ethic, no to consumption of technology's
products, no to political systems and games. Lou Gottlieb, who was
once a Communist party member, says, "The entire Left is a dead
end." The hippie alternative is to turn inward and reach backward
for roots, simplicity, and the tribal experience. In the first bloom
of the movement, people flowed into slums where housing would be cheap
and many things could be obtained free—food scraps from restaurants,
second-hand clothes, free clinics and services. But the slums proved
inhospitable. The hippies did nothing to improve the dilapidated neighborhoods,
and they were preyed upon by criminals, pushers, and the desperate.
In late 1967, they began trekking to rural land where there would
be few people and life would be hard. They took up what Ramon Sender
calls "voluntary primitivism," building houses out of mud
and trees, planting and harvesting crops by hand, rolling loose tobacco
into cigarettes, grinding their own wheat, baking bread, canning vegetables,
delivering their own babies, and educating their own children. They
gave up electricity, the telephone, running water, gas stoves, even
rock music, which, of all things, is supposed to be the cornerstone
of hip culture. They started to sing and play their own music—folky
and quiet.
Getting close to the earth meant conditioning their bodies to cold,
discomfort, and strenuous exercise. At Wheeler's, people walk twenty
miles a day, carrying water and wood, gardening, and visiting each
other. Only four-wheel-drive vehicles can cross the ranch, and ultimately
Bill wants all cars banned. "We would rather live without machines.
And the fact that we have no good roads protects us from tourists.
People are car-bound, even police. They would never come in here without
their vehicles." Although it rains a good part of the year, most
of the huts do not have stoves and are not waterproof. "Houses
shouldn't be designed to keep out the weather," Bill says. "We
want to get in touch with it." He installed six chemical toilets
on the ranch to comply with county sanitation requirements, but, he
says, "I wouldn't go in one of those toilets if you paid me.
It's very important for us to be able to use the ground, because we
are completing a cycle, returning to Mother Earth what she's given
us." Garbage is also returned to the ground. Food scraps are
buried in a compost pile of sawdust and hay until they decompose and
mix with the soil. Paper is burned, and metal buried. But not everyone
is conscientious; there are piles of trash on various parts of the
ranch.
Because of the haphazard sanitation system, the water at Wheeler's
is contaminated, and until people adjust to it, they suffer dysentery,
just as tourists do who drink the water in Mexico. There are periodic
waves of hepatitis, clap, crabs, scabies, and streptococcic throat
infections. No one brushes his teeth more than once a week, and then
they often use "organic toothpaste," made from eggplant
cooked in tinfoil. They are experimenting with herbs and Indian healing
remedies to become free of manufactured medicinal drugs, but see no
contradiction in continuing to swallow any mind-altering chemical
they are offered. The delivery of babies on the land has become an
important ritual. With friends, children, and animals keeping watch,
chanting, and getting collectively stoned, women have given birth
to babies they have named Morning Star, Psyche Joy, Covelo Vishnu
God, Rainbow Canyon King, and Raspberry Sundown Hummingbird Wheeler.
The childbirth ritual and the weekly feasts are conscious attempts
at what is called "retribalization." But Wheeler's Ranch,
like many hippie settlements, has rejected communal living in favor
of a loose community of individuals. People live alone or in monogamous
units, cook for themselves, and build their own houses and sometimes
gardens. "There should not be a main lodge, because you get too
many people trying to live under one roof and it doesn't work,"
Bill says. As a result, there are cliques who eat together, share
resources, and rarely mix with others on the ranch. There was one
group marriage between two teen-age girls, a forty-year-old man, and
two married couples, which ended when one of the husbands saw his
wife with another man in the group, pulled a knife, and dragged her
off, yelling, "Forget this shit. She belongs to me."
With couples, the double standard is an unwritten rule: the men can
roam but the women must be faithful. There are many more men than
women, and when a new girl arrives, she is pounced upon, claimed,
and made the subject of wide gossip. Mary Cordelia Stevens, or Corky,
a handsome eighteen-year-old from a Chicago suburb, hiked into the
ranch one afternoon last October and sat down by the front gate to
eat a can of Spam. The first young man who came by invited her to
a party where everyone took TCP, a tranquilizer for horses. It was
a strange trip—people rolling around the floor of the tipi, moaning,
retching, laughing, hallucinating. Corky went home with one guy and
stayed with him for three weeks, during which time she was almost
constantly stoned. "You sort of have to be stoned to get through
the first days here," she says. "Then you know the trip."
Corky is a strapping, well-proportioned, large-boned girl with a milkmaid's
face and long blond hair. She talks softly, with many giggles: "I
love to go around naked. There's so much sexual energy here, it's
great. Everybody's turned on to each other's bodies." Corky left
the ranch to go home for Christmas and to officially drop out of Antioch
College; she hitchhiked back, built her own house and chicken coop,
learned to plant, do laundry in a tin tub with a washboard, and milk
the cows. "I love dealing with things that are simple and direct."
Bill Wheeler admires Corky for making it on her own, which few of
the women do. Bill is torn between his desire to be the benefactor-protector
and his intolerance of people who aren't self-reliant. "I'm contemptuous
of people who can't pull their own weight," he says. Yet he constantly
worries about the welfare of others. He also feels conflict between
wanting a tribe, indeed wanting to be chieftain, and wanting privacy.
"Open land requires a leap of faith," he says, "but
it's worth it, because it guarantees there will always be change,
and stagnation is death." Because of the fluidity of the community,
it is almost impossible for it to become economically self-sufficient.
None of the communes have been able to live entirely off the land.
Most are unwilling to go into cash crops or light industry because
in an open community with no rules, there are not enough people who
can be counted on to work regularly. The women with children receive
welfare, some of the men collect unemployment and food stamps, and
others get money from home. They spend very little—perhaps $600
a year per person. "We're not up here to make money," Bill
says, "or to live like country squires."
When darkness falls, the ranch becomes eerily quiet and mobility
stops. No one uses flashlights. Those who have lived there some time
can feel their way along the paths by memory. Others stay in their
huts, have dinner, go to sleep, and get up with the sun. Around 7:00
P.M., people gather at the barn with bottles for the late milking.
During the week, the night milking is the main social event. Corky
says, "It's the only time you know you're going to see people.
Otherwise you could wander around for days and not see anyone."
A girl from Holland and two boys have gathered mussels at a nearby
beach during the day, and invite everyone to the tipi to eat them.
We sit for some time in silence, watching the mussels steam open in
a pot over the grate. A boy with glassy blue eyes whose lids seem
weighted down starts to pick out the orange flesh with his dirt-caked
hands and drops them in a pan greased with Spry. A mangy cat snaps
every third mussel out of the pan. No one stops it…
Nancy, in her shack about a mile from the tipi, is fixing a green
stew of onions, cabbage, kale, leeks, and potatoes; she calls to three
people who live nearby to come share it. Nancy has a seventeen-year-old,
all-American-girl face—straight blond hair and pink cheeks—on
a plump, saggy-stomached mother's body. She has been married twice,
gone to graduate school, worked as a social worker and a prostitute,
joined the Sexual Freedom League, and taken many overdoses of drugs.
Her children have been on more acid trips than most adults at the
ranch. "They get very quiet on acid," she says. "The
experience is less staggering for kids than for adults, because acid
returns you to the consciousness of childhood." Nancy says the
children have not been sick since they moved to Wheeler's two years
ago. "I can see divine guidance leading us here. This place has
been touched by God." She had a vision of planting trees on the
land, and ordered fifty of exotic variety, like strawberry guava,
camelia, and loquat. Stirring the green stew, she smiles vacuously.
"I feel anticipant of a very happy future."
With morning comes a hailstorm, and Bill Wheeler must go to court
in Santa Rosa for trial on charges of assaulting a policeman when
a squad came to the ranch looking for juvenile runaways and Army deserters.
Bill, Gay, Gay's brother Peter, Nancy, Shoshone, and Corky spread
out through the courthouse, peeling off mildewed clothes and piling
them on benches. Peter, a gigantic, muscular fellow of twenty-three,
rips his pants all the way up the back, and, like most people at Wheeler's,
he is not wearing underwear. Gay changes Raspberry's diapers on the
floor of the ladies' room. Nancy takes off her rain-soaked long Johns
and leaves them in one of the stalls.
It is a tedious day. Witnesses give conflicting testimony, but all
corroborate that one of the officers struck Wheeler first, leading
to a shoving, running, tackling, pot-throwing skirmish which also
involved Peter. The defendants spend the night in a motel, going over
testimony with their lawyer. Bill and Corky go to a supermarket Lo
buy dinner, and wheel down the aisle checking labels for chemicals,
opening jars lo lake a taste with the finger, uhmmm, laughing at the
"obsolete consciousness" of the place. They buy greens,
Roquefort dressing, peanut butter, organic honey, and two Sara Lee
cakes. The next morning, Nancy says she couldn't sleep with the radiator
and all the trucks. Gay says, "I had a dream in which I saw death.
It was a blond man with no facial hair, and he looked at me with this
all-concealing expression." Bill, outside, staring at the Kodak
blue swimming pool: "I. dreamed last, night that Gay and I got
separated somehow and 1 was stuck with Raspberry." He shudders.
"You know, 1 feel love for other people, but Gay is the only
one I want to spend my life with."
The jury goes out at 3:00 p.m. and deliberates until 9:00. In the
courtroom, a mottled group in pioneer clothes, mud-spattered and frizzy-wet,
are chanting, "Om." The jury cannot agree on four counts,
and finds Bill and Peter not guilty on three counts. The judge declares
a mistrial. The county fathers are not finished, though. They are
still attempting to close the access road to Wheeler's and to get
an injunction to raze all buildings on the ranch as health hazards.
Bill Wheeler is not worried, nor are his charges, climbing in the
jeep and singing; "Any day now…" God will provide.
We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody
has to earn a living…We keep inventing jobs because of this false
idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind, of drudgery because,
according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right
to exist…The true business of people should be to…think
about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came
along and told them they had to earn a living. - R. Buckminster Fuller
HIGHWAY 101 RIBBONING DOWN THE COAST: narcotic pastels, the smell
of charbroiled hamburgers cooking, motels with artificial gas-flame
fireplaces. Total sensory Muzak. California banks now print their
checks in salmon and mauve colors with reproductions of the Golden
Gate Bridge, the High Sierras, the Mojave Desert, and other panoramas.
"Beautiful money," they call it. As I cross the San Rafael
Bridge, which, because the clouds are low, seems to shoot straight
into the sky and disappear, Radio KABL in San Francisco is playing
"Shangri-la."
South of the city in Menlo Park, one of a chain of gracious suburbs
languishing in industrial smoke, Stewart Brand created the Whole Earth
Catalog, and now presides over the Whole Earth Truck Store and mystique.
Brand, a thirty-year-old biologist who was a fringe member of Ken
Kesey's Merry Pranksters, put out the first catalog in 1968 as a mail-order
source book for people starting" communes or alternate life-styles.
The success of the catalog—it is selling a thousand copies a
day—indicates it is answering needs that cut across age and philosophical
gaps. One of these is the need to regain control over the environment,
so that when the refrigerator breaks, or the electric power goes out,
you don't have to stand, around helplessly waiting for repairmen,
middlemen, and technical "experts" to fix things at your
expense. The Whole Earth Catalog lists books and tools that: enable
one lo build furniture, fix cars, lea in real-estate law, raise bees
for honey, publish your own books, build houses out of foam, auto
lops, or mud, and even bury your own dead so that the riles of passage
are simple and meaningful. The Catalog also speaks to the need to
break out of the inflationary cycle of higher earning and higher spending.
It offers books such as How to Get Out of the Rat Race and Live on
$10 a Month and How to Live on Nothing, and suggests The Moonlighters'
Manual for people who want to earn subsistence money with minimum
commitment of psyche.
Brand, says, "I admit we encourage starting from scratch. We
don't say it will be easy, but education comes from making mistakes.
Take delivering babies at home. That's hazardous! We carry books that
tell how hazardous it is. People have lost babies that way, but it
won't hit the fan until we lose a few mothers. When it works, though,
it's glorious." Brand, with oversized blue eyes and gaunt cheeks,
breaks into infectious laughter as he describes his fantasies. "The
city-country pull is behind everything going on now. An anthropologist
Cherokee we know feels the cycle goes like this: a kid grows up, has
talent, goes to the city to fulfill himself, becomes an ideologue,
his personality deteriorates, and to recuperate, he goes back to the
land. The impulse to return to the land and to form "intentional
communities," or communes, is being felt in the sudden demand
for publications like The Green Revolution, founded in the 1940s to
promote rural revival, and The Modern Utopian, produced by "Alternatives!
Foundation" in Sebastopol, California, which also runs a commune
matching service.
Brand says there are few real alternative lifestyles right now: "There's
black pride, and the longhaired run for the hills. That's it. What
we want are alternative economies and alternative political systems.
Maybe alternative ecologies. You can't do this with six people."
Brand points out that new social programs "are always parasitic,
like newborn babies. They feed off the parent culture until they're
strong enough to be self-sustaining." The communes in New Mexico,
he says, can eventually develop their own economy by trading goods
and services and paying in tokens, "like the casinos in Las Vegas.
The climate is great for experiments now. There's no end of resources
for promising ideas. But people had better hurry, because the avenues
will start being closed off." He laughs, thrusting his chin up.
"Things are getting weirder and weirder."
No society racing through the turbulence of the next several decades
will be able to do without [some] form of future-shock absorber: specialized
centers in which the rate of change is artificially depressed…In
such slow-paced communities, individuals who needed or wanted a more
relaxed, less stimulating existence could find it. - Alvin Toffler,
"Coping with Future Shock"
ROADS ACROSS THE UPPER NORTHWEST are flat and ruler-straight, snowbound
for long months, turning arid and dusty in the summer. At an empty
crossing in a poor, wheat-growing county, the road suddenly dips and
winds down to a valley filled with tall pines and primitive log cabins.
The community hidden in this natural canyon is Freedom Farm, founded
in 1963. It is one of the oldest communes to be started on open land.
The residents—about twenty-four adults and almost as many children—are
serious, straightforward people who, with calculated bluntness, say
they are dropouts, social misfits, unable or unwilling to cope with
the world "outside." The community has no rules, except
that no one can be asked to leave. Because it predates the hippie
movement, there is an absence of mystical claptrap and jargon like
"far out." Only a few are vegetarians. Members do not want
the location of the farm published for fear of being inundated with
"psychedelic beggars."
I drove to the canyon in the morning and, having learned my lesson,
left the car at the top and walked down the steep, icy road. The farm
is divided into two parts—80 acres at the north end of the canyon
and 120 acres at the south. The families live separately, as they
do at Wheeler's, but their homes are more elaborate and solidly built.
The first house in the north end is a hexagonal log cabin built by
Huw Williams, who started the farm when he was nineteen. Huw is slight,
soft-spoken, with a wispy blond beard. His face and voice are expressionless,
but when he speaks, he is likely to say something startling, humorous,
or indicative of deep feeling. When I arrived, he was cutting out
pieces of leather, wearing a green-and-brown lumberman's shirt and
a knife strapped to his waist. His wife, Sylvia, was nursing their
youngest son, while their two-year-old, Sennett, wearing nothing but
a T-shirt, was playing on the floor with a half-breed Norwegian elkhound.
The cabin was snugly warm, but smelled faintly of urine from Sennett
peeing repeatedly on the rug. There was a cast-iron stove, tables
and benches built from logs, a crib, an old-fashioned cradle, and
a large bed raised off the floor for warmth and storage space. On
the wall there was a calendar opened to January, although it was March.
I asked Huw how the community had stayed together for seven years.
He said, deadpan, "The secret is not to try. We've got a lot
of rugged individualists here, and everyone is into a different thing.
In reflection, it feels good that we survived. A lot of us were from
wealthy backgrounds, and the idea of giving it all up and living off
the land was a challenge." Huw grew up on a ranch 40 miles from
the canyon. "I had everything. When I was fourteen, I had my
own car, a half-dozen cows, and $600 in the bank." When he was
fifteen, his house burned down and he saw his elaborate collections—
stamps, models, books—disappear. He vowed not to become attached
to possessions after that, and took to sleeping outdoors. He remembers
being terrified of violence, and idolized Gandhi, Christ, and Tolstoy.
At seventeen, he became a conscientious objector and began to work
in draft resistance. While on a peace walk from New Hampshire to Washington,
D.C., he decided to drop out of the University of Washington and start
a nonviolent training center, a community where people could live
by sharing rather than competing. He persuaded his mother to give
him 80 acres in the canyon for the project, rented a house, called
the Hart House, and advertised in peace papers for people to come
and share it with him.
The first summer, more than fifty came and went and they all lived
in the Hart House. One of the visitors was Sylvia, a fair-skinned
girl with long chestnut hair and warm wistful eyes that hint of sadness.
They were married, and Huw stopped talking about a peace center and
started studying intentional communities. He decided he wanted a community
that would be open to anyone, flexible, with no prescribed rules to
live by. Work would get done, Huw felt, because people would want
to do it to achieve certain ends. "It's a Western idea. You inspire
people by giving them a goal, making it seem important; then they'll
do anything to get there." If people did not want to work, Huw
felt, forcing them would not be the answer.
The results were chaotic. "Emotional crises, fights over everything.
A constant battle to get things done. A typical scene would be for
one guy to spend two hours fixing" a meal. He had to make three
separate dishes—one for vegetarians, one for non-vegetarians,
and one for people who wouldn't eat government-surplus food. He would
put them on the table, everybody would grab, and if you stood back
you got nothing. When people live that close together, they become
less sensitive, and manners go right out the window. It was educational,
but we knew it wasn't suitable for raising children." The group
pooled resources and bought another 120 acres two miles away. Huw
and Sylvia built their own cabin and moved out of the Hart House;
another couple followed. Then around 1966, the drug scene exploded
and the farm was swamped with speed freaks, runaways, addicts, and
crazies. A schism grew between the permanent people and the transients.
The transients thought the permanents were uptight and stingy. The
permanents said the transients were abusing the land. When most of
the permanents had built their own cabins, they began talking about
burning down the Hart House. I heard many versions of the incident.
Some say a man, whom I shall call George, burned it. Some say everyone
did it. Some said they watched and were against it but felt they should
not stop it. Afterwards, most of the transients left, and the farm
settled into its present pattern of individual families tending their
own gardens, buying their own supplies, and raising their own animals.
Each family has at least two vehicles—a car and a tractor, or
a motorcycle or truck. Huw says, "We do our share of polluting."
The majority at Freedom live on welfare, unemployment compensation,
and food stamps. A few take part-time jobs picking apples or wheat,
one does free-lance writing, and some do crafts. Huw makes about $50
a month on his leather work, Ken Meister makes wall hangings, Rico
and Pat sell jewelry to psychedelic shops, and Steve raises rabbits.
Huw believes the farm could support itself by growing organic grains
and selling them by mail order, but he hasn't been able to get enough
cooperation to do this. "It's impossible to have both a commune,
where everyone lives and works collectively, and free land, where
anyone can settle," he says. "Some day we might have a commune
on the land, but not everyone who lived on the land would have to
join it."
The only communal rituals are Thanksgiving at the schoolhouse and
the corn dance, held on the first full moon of May. Huw devised the
corn dance from a Hopi Indian ceremony, and each year it gets wilder.
Huw builds a drum, and at sundown everyone gathers on a hillside with
food, wine, the children in costumes, animals, and musical instruments.
They take turns beating the drum but must keep it beating until dawn.
They roast potatoes, and sometimes a kid, a pig, or a turkey, get
stoned, dance, howl, and drop to sleep. "But that's only once
a year," one of the men says. "We could have one every month,
and it would hold the community together." Not everyone wants
this solidarity, however. Some are like hermits and have staked out
corners of the canyon where they want to be left alone. The families
who live nearby get together for dinners, chores, and baby-sitting.
At the north end, the Williamses, the Swansons, and the Goldens pop
in and out constantly. On the day I arrive, they are having a garden
meeting at the Swansons' to decide what to order for spring planting.
The Swansons, who have three young children, moved into the canyon
this year after buying, for $1,000, the two-story house a man called
Steve had built for his own family. Steve had had a falling out with
Huw and wanted to move to the south acres. The Swansons needed a place
they could move into right away. The house has the best equipment
at the farm, with a flush toilet (sectioned off by a blanket hung
from the ceiling), running water, and electricity that drives a stove,
refrigerator, and freezer. Jack Swanson, an outgoing, ruddy-faced
man of thirty-five, with short hair and a moustache, works on a newspaper
150 miles away and commutes to the farm for weekends. His wife, Barbara,
twenty-four, is the image of a Midwestern college girl: jeans cut
off to Bermuda length, blouses with Peter Pan collars, and a daisy-printed
scarf around her short brown hair. But it is quickly apparent that
she is a strong-willed nonconformist. "I've always been a black
sheep," she says. "I hate supermarkets—everything's
been chemically preserved. You might as well be in a morgue."
Barbara is gifted at baking, pickling, and canning, and wants to raise
sheep to weave and dye the wool herself. She and Jack tried living
in various cities, then a suburb, then a farm in Idaho, where they
found they lacked the skills to make it work. "We were so ill-equipped
by society to live off the earth," Jack says. "We thought
about moving to Freedom Farm for three or four years, but when times
were good, we put it off." Last year their third child was born
with a lung disease which required months of hospitalization and left
them deep in debt. Moving to the farm seemed a way out. "If we
had stayed in the suburbs, we found we were spending everything we
made, with rent and car payments, and could "never pay off the
debts. I had to make more and more just to stay even. The price was
too high for what we wanted in life," Jack says. "Here,
because I don't pay rent and because we can raise food ourselves,
I don't have to make as much money. We get help in farming, and have
good company. In two or three months, this house is all mine—no
interest, no taxes. Outside it would cost me $20,000 and 8 per cent
interest."
A RAINSTORM HITS at midnight and by morning the snow has washed off
the canyon walls, the stream has flooded over, and the roads are slushy
mud ruts. Sylvia saddles two horses and we ride down to the south
120. There are seven cabins on the valley floor, and three hidden
by trees on the cliff. Outside one of the houses, Steve is feeding
his rabbits; the mute, wiggling animals are clustering around the
cage doors. Steve breeds the rabbits to sell to a processor and hopes
to earn $100 a month from the business. He also kills them to eat.
"It's tough to do," he says, "but if people are going
to eat meat, they should be willing to kill the animal." While
Steve is building his new house, he has moved with his wife and four
children into the cabin of a couple I shall call George and Liz Snow.
George is a hefty, porcine man of thirty-nine, a drifter who earned
a doctorate in statistics, headed an advertising agency, ran guns
to Cuba, worked as a civil servant, a mason, a dishwasher, and rode
the freights. He can calculate the angles of a geodesic dome and quote
Boccaccio and Shakespeare. He has had three wives, and does not want
his name known because "there are a lot of people I don't want
to find me."
Steve, a hard-lived thirty-four, has a past that rivals George's
for tumult: nine years as an Army engineer, AWOL, running a coffee
house in El Paso, six months in a Mexican jail on a marijuana charge,
working nine-to-five as chief engineer in a fire-alarm factory in
New Haven, Connecticut, then cross-country to Spokane. Steve has great
dynamism and charm that are both appealing and abrasive. His assertiveness
inevitably led to friction in every situation, until, tired of bucking
the system, he moved to the farm. "I liked the structure of this
community," he says. "Up there, I can get along with one
out of a thousand people. Here I make it with one out of two."
He adds, "We're in the business of survival while the world goes
crazy. It's good to know how to build a fire, or a waterwheel, because
if the world ends, you're there now."
Everyone at Freedom seems to share this sense of imminent doomsday.
Huw says, "When the country is wiped out, electricity will stop
coming through the wires, so you might as well do without it now.
I don't believe you should use any machine you can't fix yourself."
Steve says, "Technology can’t feed all the world's people."
Stash, a young man who lives alone at the farm, asks, "Am I going
to start starving in twenty years?"
Steve: "Not if you have a plot to garden."
Stash: "What if the ravaging hordes come through?"
Steve: "Be prepared for the end, or get yourself a gun."
There is an impulse to dismiss this talk as a projection of people's
sense of their own private doom, except for the fact that the fear
is widespread. Stewart Brand writes in the Whole Earth Catalog: "One
barometer of people's social-confidence level is the sales of books
on survival. I can report that sales on The Survival Book are booming;
it's one of our fastest moving items."
Several times a week, Steve, Stash, and Steve's daughter Laura, fourteen,
drive to the small town nearby to buy groceries, visit a friend, and,
if the hot water holds out, take showers. They stop at Joe's Bar for
beer and hamburgers—40 cents "with all the trimmings."
Laura, a graceful, quiet girl, walks across the deserted street to
buy Mad magazine and look at rock record albums. There are three teenagers
at the farm—all girls—and all have tried running away to
the city. One was arrested for shoplifting, another was picked up
in a crash pad with seven men. Steve says, "We have just as much
trouble with our kids as straight, middle-class parents do. I'd like
to talk to people in other communities and find out how they handle
their teenagers. Maybe we could send ours there." Stash says,
"Or bring teen-age boys here." The women at the farm have
started to joke uneasily that their sons will become uptight businessmen
and their daughters will be suburban housewives. The history of Utopian
communities in this country has been that the second generation leaves.
It is easy to imagine commune-raised children having their first haute-cuisine
meal, or sleeping in silk pajamas in a luxury hotel, or taking a jet
plane. Are they not bound to be dazzled? Sylvia says, "Our way
of life is an over-reaction to something, and our kids will probably
overreact to us. It's absurd. Kids run away from this, and all the
runaways from the city come here."
In theory, the farm is an expanded family, and children can move
around and live with different people or build houses of their own.
In the summer, they take blankets and sleeping bags up in the cliffs
to sleep in a noisy, laughing bunch. When I visited, all the children
except one were staying in their parents' houses. Low-key tension
seemed to be running through the community, with Steve and Huw Williams
at opposite poles. Steve's wife, Ann, told me, "We don't go along
with Huw's philosophy of anarchy. We don't think it works. You need
some authority and discipline in any social situation." Huw says,
"The thing about anarchy is that I'm willing to do a job myself,
if I have to, rather than start imposing rules on others. Steve and
George want things to be done efficiently with someone giving orders,
like the Army."
At dinner when the sun goes down, Steve's and George's house throbs
with good will and festivity. The cabin, like most at the farm, is
not divided into separate rooms. All nine people - Steve, Ann, and
their four children, the Snows and their baby - sleep on the upstairs
level, while the downstairs serves as kitchen, dining and living room.
"The teen-agers wish there were more privacy," Steve says,
"but for us and the younger children, it feels really close."
Most couples at the farm are untroubled about making love in front
of the children. "We don't make a point of it," one man
says, "but if they happen to see it, and it's done in love and
with good vibrations, they won't be afraid or embarrassed."
While Ann and Liz cook hasenpfeffer, Steve's daughters, Laura and
Karen, ten, improvise making gingerbread with vinegar and brown sugar
as a substitute for molasses. A blue jay chatters in a cage hung from
the ceiling. Geese honk outside, and five dogs chase each other around
the room. Steve plays the guitar and sings. The hasenpfeffer is superb.
The rabbits have been pickled for two days, cooked in red wine, herbs,
and sour cream. There are large bowls of beets, potatoes, jello, and
the gingerbread, which tastes perfect, with homemade apple sauce.
Afterwards, we all get toothpicks. Liz, an uninhibited, roly-poly
girl of twenty-three, is describing bow she hitchhiked to the farm,
met George, stayed, and got married. "I like it here," she
says, pursing her lips, "because I can stand nude on my front
porch and yell, fuck! Also, I think I like it here because I'm fat,
and there aren't many mirrors around. Clothes don't matter, and people
don't judge you by your appearance like they do out there." She
adds, "I've always been different from others. I think most of
the people here are misfits - they have problems in communicating,
relating to one another." Ann says, "Communication is ridiculous.
We've begun to feel gossip is much better. It gradually gets around
to the person it's about, and that's okay. Most people here can't
say things to each other's face."
I walk home - I'm staying in a vacant cabin - across a field, with
the stars standing out in brilliant relief from the black sky. Lights
flicker in the cabins sprinkled through the valley. Ken Meister is
milking late in the barn. The fire is still going in my cabin; I add
two logs, light the kerosene lamps, and climb under the blankets on
the high bed. Stream water sweeps by the cabin in low whooshes, the
fire sputters. The rhythm of the canyon, after a few days, seems to
have entered my body. I fall asleep around ten, wake up at six, and
can feel the time even though there are no clocks around. In the morning
light, though, I find two dead mice on the floor, and must walk a
mile to get water, then build a fire to heat it. It becomes clear
why, in a community like this, the sex roles are so well-defined and
satisfying. When men actually do heavy physical labor like chopping
trees, baling hay, and digging irrigation ditches, it feels fulfilling
for the woman to tend the cabin, grind wheat, put up fruit, and sew
or knit. Each depends on the other for basic needs - shelter, warmth,
food. With no intermediaries, such as supermarkets and banks, there
is a direct relationship between work and survival. It is thus possible,
according to Huw, for even the most repetitive jobs such as washing
dishes or sawing wood to be spiritually rewarding. "Sawing puts
my head in a good place," he says. "It's like a yogic exercise."
IN ADDITION TO HIS FARMING and leather work, Huw has assumed the
job of teacher for the four children of school age. Huw believes school
should be a free, anarchic experience, and that the students should
set their own learning programs. Suddenly given this freedom, the
children, who were accustomed to public school, said they wanted to
play and ride the horses. Huw finally told them they must be at the
school house every day for at least one hour. They float in and out,
and Huw stays half the day. He walks home for lunch and passes Karen
and another girl on the road. Karen taunts him, "Did you see
the mess we made at the school?"
"Yes," Huw says.
"Did you see our note?"
Huw walks on, staring at the ground. "It makes me feel you don't
have much respect for the tools or the school."
She laughs. "Course we don't have any respect!"
"Well, it's your school," Huw says softly.
Karen shouts, "You said it was your school the other day. You're
an Indian giver."
Huw: "I never said it was my school. Your parents said that."
Aside to me, he says, "They're getting better at arguing every
day. Still not very good, though." I tell Huw they seem to enjoy
tormenting him. "I know. I'm the only adult around here they
can do that to without getting clobbered. It gives them a sense of
power. It's ironic, because I keep saying they're mature and responsible,
and their parents say they need strict authority and discipline. So
who do they rebel against? Me. I'm going to call a school meeting
tonight. Maybe we can talk some of this out."
In the afternoon I visit Rico and Pat, whose A-frame house is the
most beautiful and imaginative at the farm. It has three levels—a
basement, where they work on jewelry and have stored a year's supply
of food; a kitchen-living-room floor; and a high sleeping porch reached
by a ladder. The second story is carpeted, with harem-like cushions,
furs, and wall hangings. There are low tables, one of which lifts
to reveal a sunken white porcelain bathtub with running water heated
by the wood stove. Rico, twenty-five, designed the house so efficiently
that even in winter, when the temperature drops to 20 below zero,
it is warm enough for him to lounge about wearing nothing but a black
cape. Pat and Rico have talked about living with six adults in some
form of group marriage, but, Pat says, "there's no one here we
could really do it with. The sexual experiments that have gone on
have been rather compulsive and desperate. Some of us think jealousy
is innate." Rico says, "I think it's cultural." Pat
says, "Hopefully our kids will be able to grow up without it.
I think the children who are born here will really have a chance to
develop freely. The older children who've come here recently are too
far gone to appreciate the environment."
In the evening, ten parents and five children show up at the school,
a one-room house built with eighteen sides, so that a geodesic dome
can be constructed on top. The room has a furnace, bookshelves and
work tables, rugs and cushions on the floor. Sylvia is sitting on
a stool in the center nursing her son. Two boys in yellow pajamas
are running in circles, squealing, "Ba-ba-ba!" Karen is
drawing on the blackboard—of all things, a city skyscape. Rico
is doing a yoga headstand. Steve and Huw begin arguing about whether
the children should have to come to the school every day. Steve says,
in a booming voice, "I think the whole canyon should be a learning
community, a total educational environment. The kids can learn something
from everyone. If you want to teach them, why don't you come to our
house?" Huw, standing with a clipboard against his hip, says,
"They have to come here to satisfy the county school superintendent.
But it seems futile when they come in and say I'm not qualified to
teach them. Where do they get that?"
Steve says, "From me. I don't think you're qualified."
Huw: "Well I'm prepared to quit and give you the option of doing
something else, or sending them to public school."
Steve says, "Don't quit. I know your motives are pure as the
driven snow…"
Huw says, "I'm doing it for myself as well, to prove I can do
it. But it all fits together."
They reach an understanding without speaking further.
Steve then says, "I'd like to propose that we go door-to-door
in this community and get everyone enthused about the school as a
center for adult learning and cultural activity first, and for the
kiddies second. Because when you turn on the adults, the kids will
follow. The school building needs finishing—the dome should be
built this summer. Unless there's more enthusiasm in this community,
I'm not going to contribute a thing. But if we get everybody to boost
this, by God I'll be the first one out to dig."
Huw says, “You don't think the people who took the time to come
tonight is enough interest? I may be cynical, but I think the only
way to get some of the others here would be to have pot and dope.”
Steve: "Get them interested in the idea of guest speakers, musicians,
from India, all over. We can build bunk dorms to accommodate them."
Huw: "Okay. I think we should get together every Sunday night
to discuss ideas, hash things over. In the meantime, why don't we
buy materials to finish the building?"
On the morning I leave, sunlight washes down the valley from a cloudless
sky. Huw, in his green lumberman's shirt, rides with me to the top
road. "My dream is to see this canyon filled with families who
live here all the time, with lots of children." He continues
in a lulling rhythm: "We could export some kind of food or product.
The school is very important—it should be integrated in the whole
community. Children from all over could come to work, learn, and live
with different families. I'd like to have doctors here and a clinic
where people could be healed naturally. Eventually there should be
a ham radio system set up between all the communities in the country,
and a blimp, so we could make field trips back and forth. I don't
think one community is enough to meet our needs. We need a world culture."
Huw stands, with hands on hips, the weight set back on his heels—a
small figure against the umber field. "Some day I'm going to
inherit six hundred more acres down there, and it'll all be free.
Land should be available for anybody to use like it was with the Indians."
He smiles with the right corner of his mouth. “The Indians could
no more understand owning land than they could owning the sky.”
We've got to get ourselves back to the garden. - Joni Mitchell, from
the song, "Woodstock"
LAST HALLOWEEN IN JEMEZ, NEW MEXICO, the squidlike "rock-drug-alternate-culture"
underground gathered itself together to discuss what to do with the
energy manifested at Woodstock. How can we use that power, they asked,
and prevent it from being sickened and turned as it was at the Rolling
Stones Free Concert in Altamont? The answer seemed to generate itself:
buy land, throw away the deed, open it to anyone and call it Earth
People's Park. Hold an earth-warming festival and ecological world's
fair—all free. A nonprofit corporation was formed to collect
money and handle legal problems. But there would be no authorities
and no rules in Earth People's Park. Paul Krassner, Tom Law, Milan
Melvin, Ken Kesey, Mama Cass Elliot, and the Hog Farm traveling communal
circus led by Hugh Romney fanned out to sell the idea. They asked
everyone who had been at Woodstock in body or spirit to contribute
a dollar. At first, they talked of buying 20,000 acres in New Mexico
or Colorado. In a few months, they were talking about 400,000 acres
in many small pieces, all over the country. They flooded the media
with promises of "a way out of the disaster of the cities, a
viable alternative." Hugh Romney, calling himself Wavy Gravy,
in an aviator suit, sheepskin vest, and a Donald Duck hat, spoke on
television about simplicity, community, and harmony with the land.
The cards, letters, and money poured in. Some were hand-printed, with
bits of leaves and Stardust in the creases, some were typed on business
stationery. One, from a young man in La Grange, Illinois, seemed to
touch all the chords:
Hello. Maybe we're not as alone as I thought. I am 24, my developed
skills are as an advertising writer-producer-director. It seems such
a waste. I have energy. I can simplify my life and I want to help.
I am convinced that a new lifestyle, one which holds something spiritual
as sacred, is necessary in this land. People can return to the slow
and happy pace of life that they abandoned along with their understanding
of brotherhood. Thank you for opening doors.
P.S. - Please let me know what site you purchase so I can leave as
soon as possible for it. D
