Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

For sale: twenty-two thousand dollars.

  Elsa, Redwood Kardon, a tall, handsome, steady brother from the L.A. Free Clinic, conscripted into the family by Berg and myself, and Phyllis Wilner camped there for a weekend, poking around the old but serviceable house and outbuildings, the abandoned orchards, and the meadows and cooling themselves in the frigid creeks. They concluded that the Free Family had to own it. The down payment was $2,200, and while this amount seems minuscule today, it will place things in perspective to realize that collectively they were having trouble raising their monthly rent of thirty-five dollars or that between 1966 and 1975 my approximate annual income was $2,500.

  But Elsa has always possessed an optimism that exists independently of objective criteria. “I believe that if I have a righteous need for something, it will come,” she says even today. The group drove nine hours nonstop to San Francisco and spread the news of their glorious find to friends at the Willard Street house. Dour, bespectacled Eva “Myeba” Bess listened in silence and left the room. She returned moments later, stone-faced, and handed Elsa a two-thousand-dollar check. Richard was unhinged. Selfless generosity was so foreign to his orientation as to be inconceivable. Eva’s simple act permanently anchored Richard’s belief in the Free Family, and he left immediately to seek the rest of the money necessary to outfit a homestead. With the fanaticism of the newly converted, perhaps he took things a bit too far when he left Elsa and their new baby as collateral with a dealer who advanced him a large amount of LSD to transform into cash.

  Group schemes for raising money proliferated like legislation in Congress, as our various subsets and clans began the process of making Black Bear our own. Michael Tierra, Redwood, Marty Linhart, Peter Lief, and Elsa traveled to Los Angeles to raise funds in Babylon. Elsa was ecstatic. “They all became my lovers,” she remembers, “except Peter, who was stoned on acid every day and never came out of his room.”

  Tierra had a list of celebrities who were either sympathetic to their goals or terrified of invasion by his wild friends and paid them to leave. When actor James Coburn was recalcitrant about supporting this vitally important revolutionary endeavor, Michael burned an American flag in his house. The ensemble was royally received by designer Charles Eames, who took a particular fancy to Elsa and her work. Peter Tork of the Monkees generously offered a place to stay while Elsa and the others worked the town. “He was sweet,” says Elsa with some chagrin, “and I felt bad because the boys ripped him off for everything that was liftable.”

  Film director Michelangelo Antonioni wrote them a check in an elevator; Steve McQueen gave a little. Their rap appeared bullet-proof. Elsa, wild-eyed and idealistic as a hippie Joan of Arc, prophesied fervently that “a new world will be born.” The boys came on hard, relentless and mercenary. Even Grogan, who was not traveling with them, scammed a great deal of money for Black Bear Ranch, but predictably to those of us who knew him, it never reached ranch coffers.

  This traveling dog-and-pony show epitomized the conflict of high idealism and unprincipled selfishness that characterized many Digger activities. Elsa’s vision was an unsullied white, straight from the tube. I’m sure the boys were believers too, but the colors of their visions were not as pristine.

  Elsa’s group raised about fifty thousand dollars—serious money and hard work at any time. Because the title had to be in someone’s name, Richard signed all the papers. They assembled tools and supplies, bought and repaired an old Coors beer truck to transport them, and prepared to depart for their new life. When the core group—Richard and Elsa, Mike Tierra and Gail Ericson, John and Inga Albion, Eva Bess, Roselee, Redwood, Peter Lief, and Efrem and Carol Korngold—rolled down the dirt road and parked at the ranch house, they were shocked to find people already camping there who refused to budge. It was, after all, free land, wasn’t it? Some stayed, some drifted on. Richard and Elsa’s party set up housekeeping in the barn because the main house was already full.

  It would be hard to overestimate either the isolation of Black Bear Ranch or the collective inexperience of this initial group of pilgrims. With the exception of John Albion, a miner’s son from Colorado, no one possessed even the most basic skills for rural living, let alone primitive rural living.

  Richard decided to take the bull by the horns. One day shortly after they had arrived, he called a meeting in the main house for the following morning. Donning an old school band uniform (for authority), he placed a large blackboard at the head of the room and, reprising his experience as a labor organizer, set to work organizing his friends into shitter committees, food-prep committees, janitorial committees, planning committees, and so on. As cleverly as a latter-day Jefferson, he laid out a blueprint of an enlightened community, and then, pleased with the design, order, and probity of his model and awash in optimism, he rested.

  By the next day, the blackboard had disappeared, nothing had changed, and Richard was crushed. It was bad enough that the title to this impending disaster was in his name, but winter was approaching and the idea of being snowbound with this crew in an isolated canyon plagued Richard’s mind with Donner party fantasies.

  Kirby Doyle arrived high on acid with a truck full of plywood and geodesic dome materials. The next morning he told everyone how he had spent the night listening to the spirits of the old miners weeping—a bad omen. Despite this gloomy premonition, Richard and Kirby assembled a geodesic dome in what had once been the garden of the main house. Elsa, Richard, Yoni, Aaron, Indira, and Jeannie Di Prima, daughter of poet Diane Di Prima, and her dog spent the first winter in that fifteen-foot-diameter dome, which also served as the family kitchen and art studio.

  By January, they had run out of kerosene for the lamps and even matches. The house was freezing. No one knew how to chop wood, and only one or two people knew how to cook. Everyone was stiff with cold. The babies were sniffly, the grown-ups crabby. Oblivious to such trivial temporal concerns, Michael Tierra would wander into the kitchen in a silk dressing gown, famished after a morning’s piano practice, and wonder aloud, “Where’s my breakfast?”

  At the first thaw, county crews plowed the road. Richard and two others took the old Coors truck into the tiny town for the first mail run since the snow had trapped them. Three days later, they had not returned and the ranch members panicked, imagining them lost over a cliff. In fact, they had driven to San Francisco, where other Diggers raised money to stuff the truck with grains, cooking oils, flour, raisins, dates, nuts, granola, kerosene, cornmeal, and enough staples to get the ranch through the rest of the winter. When they returned six days later, they were celebrated as heroes.

  It was one of the worst winters in California’s recorded history, with more than four feet of snowfall. The roads were so impassable that Mark volunteered to walk out for critically needed kerosene and matches on homemade snowshoes. He completed the grueling eighteen-mile round-trip in one day, returning home with twenty gallons (about 120 pounds) of kerosene, which leaked en route, burning his skin painfully.

  Emergency situations are often an excuse for suspending democratic processes, and several members at Black Bear proceeded to take advantage of this time-worn political tactic. The general population was aware that something needed to be done but didn’t know where or how to start. Richard joined forces with Efrem Korngold and Marty Linhart to form the “Let’s Get with It” political party (read “junta”). Using combinations of revolutionary rhetoric, blandishments, and threats, they organized firewood crews to fell, cut, and split wood for heat, cooking—and sex, for that matter, since the women had begun withholding their favors out of general disgust with the men’s ineptness (or perhaps because they were simply too cold). Responsibilities for kitchen, cleanup, and children’s duties were assigned in similar fashion. Affairs became more organized, although “organized,” in this context, does not mean normal.

  Since the inhabitants of Black Bear were urban people who had never lived in the country before, their imaginations were prey to horrible inventions. The surrounding area was
truly wild—canyons brimming with black bear, cougar, and lynx—and the presence of such carnivores became magnified in their minds into dire threats. Some were afraid to let their children out of sight; others spent all day, every day, indoors. Gradually a consensus emerged that since they had moved to the country, they ought to be out in it occasionally. Timers were set, and once every hour the coffee-klatching and the bitching were suspended, and everyone ran outside to do laps around the house, screaming at the tops of their lungs to frighten away potential predators.

  The group survived the first winter somehow, acquiring the minimal skills necessary to exist outside the support systems of urban life. As it evolved and prospered in the next years, Black Bear became an integrated component of the Free Family network, a situation not always to its advantage. “Family” members would often arrive like invading birds, dropping seeds of conversation and random political ideas from the distant city, which, in that isolated environment, sometimes engendered genetic mutations barely resembling the parent notions that spawned them.

  There was, for instance, a period of time when everyone abandoned their tiny single-family dwellings and individual rooms to sleep together in the main house in order to subvert what had been diagnosed as “growing factionalism.” All clothing was suspended from pipe racks in the center of the room, and everything was free for anyone else to use. There was no private property. Monogamous couples were disparaged as decadently bourgeois by a faction that held sway for a season, decreeing that no one could sleep with the same person for more than two consecutive nights because that would encourage “coupling.”

  I was visiting then and smitten with Geba, a magnificently zaftig earth mother who, to my fevered imagination, had stepped directly from an R. Crumb illustration. She maintained an outside bed on a hill she called the Eagle’s Lair. It was lovely to be there, under the stars and rustling trees, and the idea of having to report to the main house as a sexual conscript was unappealing, to say the least. On the day that my allotted time with Geba was up, I sought refuge with Richard and Elsa in their diminutive creekside house. They somehow managed to float above all institutional rules, and I spent a heartbroken day in bed with both of them, making love to Elsa, taking Nembutals with Richard, and, according to Elsa, moaning rather undecorously about my crush on Geba.

  By 1969, Black Bear was becoming famous in the counterculture. Sociologists Glenn Lyons and John Salter visited, observed, and took notes, and finally abandoned scientific objectivity and moved in. Psychologist Herbert Marcuse’s daughter, Yeshi, lived there with her husband Osha and their daughter Rainbow. Sociologist Don Monkerud arrived to prepare a book on the fledgling community and fell into its clutches. There exists a wonderful photo from this time in which John Salter, pad and pencil in hand, is standing fully dressed beside the hole that Babo, stark naked except for boots, is digging for a fence post while John questions him about Black Bear life.

  Children were born at Black Bear, and gardens were planted and tended seriously. Local Indians—Karoks, Yuroks, and Hoopas—attracted by the novelty of this zany community with its bare-breasted women and the copious amounts of elderberry wine we made, brought freshly caught salmon as trade and gifts and generously taught people how to smoke it. Once they brought a dead cougar, a protected species and consequently as illegal to possess as drugs but much more difficult to hide. We destroyed the evidence by eating it. “Not so many people have ever eaten cougar,” Elsa points out fairly.

  Jon and Sarah Glazer, two rotund and indefatigable Digger foragers, appeared one day with their Chevy pickup bed filled to overflowing with quivering red whale meat, donated by the experimental whaling station at Point Richmond. Black Bear chefs concocted ingenious recipes, and for months people ate whale-a-cue, canned whale, broiled, steamed, sliced, diced, chopped, ground, pressed, smoked, and sun-dried whale until some people imagined that they were living underwater and that the swarm of gnats before their eyes were krill on which they should be feeding.

  “We ate a lot of placenta,” Elsa adds as an afterthought, referring to the group custom of ritually tasting the afterbirth of infants born on the ranch.

  The ranch had a way of eroding standards of scientific objectivity. Sociologist Don Monkerud once became so incensed by Kirby Doyle’s lack of physical labor and ceaseless sermonizing about the Bear Flag Republic and how northern California should secede from the south that he shattered a half-gallon jar of honey over Kirby’s head—and then spent the rest of the day crazed with guilt over wasting precious honey.

  It was easy to get out of touch there. Free Family members came and went often, bringing food and drugs, stopping to visit and help out, but remaining relatively immune to the site-specific madness. The collision between inside and outside realities became markedly obvious one spring when Marty Linhart appeared in the city after an isolated winter, wearing a dress, covering his long pigtails coyly with a scarf tied as a babushka. Marty was a muscular, very hairy, bearded Jewish guy with a broken nose, curiously illuminated eyes, and manic enthusiasms. There was absolutely nothing effeminate about either his appearance or sexual predilections. He just happened to be wearing a dress. City family members were reassured that he was only “exploring his gender” under the tutelage of Black Bear women. They had collected money, quite a lot of money, actually, and sent him to the city to have a vasectomy. Marty thought that this was a capital idea. He was copulating his brains out up there, and if the price tag was tying off his seminal vesicles, he could hardly wait.

  In the same way that one behaves gently so as not to unduly startle a sleepwalker, several of us elected to chaperone Marty around the city, trying to subtly help him remember “normal” life. We smoked dope and ate Chinese food. We visited friends and remarked obliquely how interesting it was that he was the only man we encountered wearing a dress. Our perspective prevailed, and we convinced him to use the money to get his teeth fixed, which he needed to do. He did, and he threw away the stupid dress and returned to Black Bear like any other ordinary, messed-up man, to face the wrath of the women whose money he had misappropriated.

  In 1993 I was swimming at the Salmon River, visiting Black Bear alumni who live in the environs or who return there every August to keep family bonds tight. One day Marty appeared sans beard, hale and hearty, with an effervescent and charming wife and a dazzlingly precocious and beautiful sloe-eyed daughter whose presence provoked my nine-year-old son into a frenzy of attention-getting activity. She was a stunning reminder of the potential cost of being too quick to trade the future’s possibilities for a momentary fancy.

  And, of course, there had to be a bear.

  On one visit to Black Bear, I learned that a bear had been marauding through the ranch, violating food stores, scaring people, and generally making life miserable. Efrem was planning to shoot it. I didn’t know Efrem well at the time; I had not yet learned to love and respect him. I perceived him as a dyspeptic, analytical fellow who affected a blue Chairman Mao hat, and his natural dryness and reserve gave him a rather officious air.

  I felt that killing the totem of the ranch could only bode badly for us. Furthermore, it seemed like a poor way to announce our intentions to the other species we were learning to cohabit with, so I volunteered to do something about the obstreperous bear. I elicited a promise from Efrem to give me three days, and I jumped into my truck with Tattoo Larry to find some native people who, I hoped, would know the appropriate thing to do.

  I had made some good friends among the Tripps, an old and established Karok family on the Salmon River. We began our mission by visiting first Hambone and then Willis Tripp. Each person they sent us to referred us to another, and everyone seemed shy and diffident about advice. By the end of the second day, Tattoo Larry and I were tired and frustrated. On the third day, we were referred to a small hardscrabble farm where an old native man was milking a solitary cow. He listened to our story in silence, rose, and walked away, and we waited there an hour, uncertain whether or not he had eve
n understood us.

  “The bear doesn’t have any sense of danger in the noise of a gun,” he said when he returned. “That’s why you can’t frighten him away. Fill a shotgun shell with rock salt and shoot him in the butt. He’ll get it then.” Larry and I were elated; at last we knew what to do. We leaped in the truck and began our return to Black Bear.

  When we arrived the bear was dead. It had entered a cabin, and after this worrisome escalation, Efrem had spotted it grazing on berries and killed it with a rifle shot. I was crushed and angry. All our efforts had been for nothing, and to my mind, our family claim of being other than exploitative settlers had been seriously compromised.

  Infuriating me further, Black Bear people were flaunting bear claws, teeth, and fur as talismans, as if they were hunters who had felled the creature with a spear and earned the right to display its power. I was sick. Only Zoe Leader—Malcolm Terrence’s partner, a beautiful girl with dazzling eyes, now a merchandising executive at the Walt Disney Company—had thought of Larry and me. She had wanted each of us to have a tooth of the bear to honor our efforts and had buried the skull to hide it; however, she could not find it again. This was fortunate for me, because I would have coveted a bear’s tooth. Its loss saved me from what would have been a morally indefensible contradiction—judging others while doing the same thing myself.

  I felt estranged from Efrem after that. In time, he separated from his wife Carol and moved in with Harriet Beinfeld, a sunny woman, the daughter of an eminent surgeon. I lost track of them when I left Black Bear the last time.

  When I saw them next, I was living on my family farm in Pennsylvania, attending to affairs relating to my father’s death. They arrived on a blustery winter night in 1972 or 1973 and I learned with astonishment that they had been living in England, studying acupuncture. Efrem appeared radically transformed. He was calm, self-collected, and very gentle. But the bear still stood between us.