Commune Colleges

Way back at the start of senior year at our coastal Southern California high school, one of my very best friends Tom said to me “My big brother is living at a small commune up by Taos, New Mexico. I visited there last summer and it’s really cool, wanna go?” I thought about it for about 10 seconds and said “Sure, why not?” I had a company car, a brown Ford/Mercury Capri, somewhat sporty, for one year courtesy of my dad. The small matter of school didn’t really intrude on our planning so once Fall semester was done we were off for great adventure: Tune in, turn on, and…drop out!

Things get a bit vague from there. It was a long drive to the gorgeous high country “land of enchantment”, snow-capped Sangre de Christo mountains, vast starry skies, and all, but unlike Tom’s previous summer initiation, it was colder than I’d ever experienced. Not far north of Taos itself was the tiny dirt-road village of Arroyo Hondo, the building that the group was constructing of hand-made adobe and wood was still in process, utilizing some actual architectural expertise. The dozen or so somewhat older communards seemed glad to have two strapping young newbies to chop frozen firewood, and we felt very welcome. Unlike many or most such institutions this one even had some local Native American members or at least connections, which might have kept us from getting our pale colonialist asses kicked - there was some tension between the indigenous folks at Taos Pueblo and elsewhere and the almost-all-white hippies.

The “back to the land” settler/commune movement had sparked in the late sixties and Northern New Mexico was one of its centers, so much so that a weird commune scene set there was featured in the landmark 1969 hippie film “Easy Rider.” By the time Tom and I arrived five years later there was already a downturn in the scene, but famed sites like New Buffalo and the Lama Foundation (a Ram Dass headquarters) were nearby, where one could drop in for spiritual talks by leading hip figures, meals, and sometimes live music.

So we had good adventures, mostly. I recall Laundry Day being an adventure, with the loading of many bags of muddy stinky clothes into a few decrepit (other than mine) vehicles, and the ritual ingestion of LSD or magic mushrooms or peyote upon departure so that when we‘d completed the half-hour drive south into Taos proper and loaded up the washing machines we were ready for fun, such as going to see “Fantasia” at the one little movie palace, or more mundane tasks like the market of pharmacy or hardware store. Braver hippies visited local taverns and usually emerged unscathed.

There was some trading of vegetables and such among communes, fun visits to soak in the famed hot springs not far away down on the Rio Grande, brisk hikes, heated debates over which single song we could hear on the record player powered only by valuable and limited auto battery juice (CSNY’s raging anti-Vietnam War polemic “Ohio” was one selection until somebody called it a “bummer song” and it was turned off), stirring of hippie brown veggie stew, debates about spirituality and philosophy, and gossip about who was doing what or who in other communes. It was all very exotic to an Orange County kid. But we were almost always cold too. After some months Tom and I irrationally headed north to even colder climes, almost being buried in snowstorms on our long slow drive to the then still-funky ski bum town of Ketchum, Idaho. We kinda wrecked that company car in the process.

Which is all a drawn-out personalized introduction to a book I’ve just found while helping to clean out some office archives. “Compost College: Life on A Counter-Culture Commune” (Devil Mountain Books, 1997) by Richard Seymour was self-published in the 1990s but author Rick never mentioned it in the years I worked with him at the extended Haight-Ashbury Free Clinics organization and the associated Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, which he edited. When I saw the hand-sketched map included in the book, indicating where his own early-70s commune had been located, I knew it was fodder for the mighty AVA’s pages.

In 1971 Richard Seymour was a 32-year old Air Force veteran with two young kids and two English literature degrees but no real career plans and, true to the times, a yearning for deeper meaning and adventure than the standard American Dream offered. So he and others decided to found an alternative college/commune in the wilds of Mendocino. This wasn’t such an outlandish idea at that point; there were counterculture settlements sprouting all over the north coast as “freaks” fled the failing urban hip neighborhoods. Seymour met an ex-dean of a small college with semi-grandiose plans for a rural “non-traditional” school and with a few other intrepid/lost souls they set off on a quest for the right plot of land.

“Compost College,” the book, is mostly Seymour’s diary from the ensuing year of seeking, planning, building, moving, wandering, tripping (the psychedelic kind), coupling, struggling, endless “consensus” meetings to figure things out, and constant self-questioning about what they’re all doing or should be doing. Seymour bravely published it in the late 1990s, a quarter century later. At a half-century later it reads as a time capsule. These bright and vaguely ambitious youth - Seymour seems a decade older than most of them - imbue their every experience and thought with cosmic meaning, consulting the Tarot, I Ching, astrology, and LSD for guidance and interpretation of even mundane tasks and choices. Theres also that classic hip cheap rotgut Boones Farm and Red Mountain wine by the jug, this being the pre-“wine tasting“ era. There’s much talk of karma, while food, shelter, gas, and other essentials are procured. They take on new names - Seymour becomes Orbit, briefly has a girlfriend called Glory Hallelulia, and there’s Stumbling Buffalo, Bluejay, Cricket, and onward. Over the year chronicled here, the group ranges from a handful to about 100 people.

So where did these “new settlers” settle? After an “organizational” meeting in Philo, the small group began in the Pygmy Forest a few miles up and inland from Mendocino town, and after months there and searching for a new spot in VW vans and bugs, of course, wind up just off the Boonville-Manchester Road, “2500 feet up” on a big spread owned by a generous guy named Dino. He has Bear Wallow, an old lodge with a pool and cabins, and lets them homestead some spots up the mountain. It’s much hotter than their previous coastal locale, plus, “the nearest town, five miles down the road, was reputed to be the redneck center of the county, definitely hostile territory.” Welcome to Boonville!

Unsurprisingly, the commune/college doesn’t last too long. The real fun was mostly back up the coast, at Mendocino or Comptche or Albion parties where “tribes“ from multiple communes gathered to dance to Cat Mother. At the college there seemed to be no identifiable formal teaching going on, as the communal cohort was constantly in flux and just trying to survive both winter and summer. Down on the Navarro River, “a very heavy place, no wonder the Indians called it holy,” “a large colony of longhairs had developed, and Rolling Stone magazine had billed it as ‘the freak Riviera of the Summer of 1971, the place to be’.” Maybe so, but soon winter rains came on, rising the banks and driving up and out most of the freaks who had managed to stay on that long. Nature can be like that. The group members scatter far and wide. As of the date of this book, there’s no sign left of Compost College on the hillside.

After some travels, including delivering one of his kids to grandparents in Oregon, Seymour wound up back down in the city, where he takes a job as janitor at the five-year-old, already fabled but perpetually struggling Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic. He’s soon promoted to business manager and is then interviewed by a board member named Dianne Feinstein and hired as CEO. “That’s how things went in those days,” he reflects. The clinics’s founder Dr. David Smith calls him “the hippie Horatio Alger.” He spent the rest of his career doing good work there and elsewhere, happily married and living in Sausalito. Some of his communal experiences surely proved useful. He died last year, a good man gone.

Some smart historians hold that “the sixties” actually stretched from circa 1964-1974, from the expansion of of the civil rights, environmental, anti-war, and other movements plus the British Invasion of rock music and advent of “the pill” and LSD to the demise of Nixon and the Vietnam War. The commune movement peaked in the middle of that “decade.” In 1970 “there were over forty communes within a twenty-mile radius of Mendocino,” Seymour notes. In his book’s introduction he speculates that the hippie communards were “looking for new group relationships to replace the lost lost extended family so important in pre-industrial America” - switching out Ozzie and Harriet for Orbit and Stumbling Buffalo, while in some ways attempting to revert to a somewhat pre-industrial way of life. But somebody had to grow or at least procure the food, and relying on “hunting and gathering at various county dumps and on the back deck of the market in Ukiah when they put out the leftovers that have passed their shelf dates” gets old fast, especially in searing heat or pouring rain.

It’s too easy to mock the communards dreams and efforts at this point. My friend Tom and I experienced just a slice of it, in New Mexico, our own little “commune college,” as it faded in 1974, returning to catch a fabled outdoor Santa Barbara concert by the Grateful Dead that, for us at least, devolved into a psychedelically-fueled end our own “sixties.” As for the more stalwart communards, failed or not, those who were not predators or leeches or just too damaged to contribute were idealists, entrepreneurs, traditionalists in some ways. At this later era of impending chaos some of their aspirations are looking wiser all the time.