Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  We find David’s house, and a woman responds to our knock and asks us to leave while they eat. “Come back in an hour,” she says. When we return, the room is packed with rodeo-riding Indian dudes, tough and dusty, close-cropped black hair, high cheekbones, pitiless eyes. The vibes inform us that if we are inappropriate with this old man, we might not leave the mesa in the same shape we arrived.

  We stay soft and silent. They feed us red beans, tortillas, coffee with milk and sugar, and say that it’s all right to smoke. David is slight, neat, self-contained. He wears a pale green bandanna around his forehead, keeping his snow-white hair out of his eyes. He seems very cheerful and gives an impression of sophistication. There is nothing frail or distracted about him, even though we have been informed that he is well over ninety. His wife resembles Madame Khrushchev, and she hums to herself softly and constantly.

  The differences between our two cultures (if I could risk calling our Olema prototype a culture) are extreme. Inside the Monongye’s home, the walls are bare plaster, devoid of decoration. Only a basket, a rattle, and a paho, or feathered prayer stick, lend any semblance of color, and they appear to be placed for reasons of storage and not decoration. Small bundles are tucked neatly in the rafters. The house possesses no contrived aesthetic; everything is completely functional. Yet the behavior of the Monongyes’ guardians leaves absolutely no doubt that some invisible spiritual treasure permeates every inch of this couple and their house.

  We finish the meal in silence, smoke, wait patiently for some sign of what to do next. After about an hour, David asks a few questions about why we’ve come. We answer as honestly as we can, and about fifteen minutes later, as if on cue, the hard boys file silently outside, into the night.

  We offer them a beautifully tie-dyed sheet that Sam has made, an intricate piece that took her days to tie and dye. As Mrs. Monongye opens it, I’m embarrassed to see a two-inch notch neatly and inexplicably cut out of one corner. Our flawed gift appears bright, gaudy, defiant, ebullient, confident, and vain in the environment of their home. She blesses it [the tie-dye], then rises and makes some popcorn while we continue explaining to David why we have come.

  I am at a loss but, even in my normally erratic condition, would have felt his genuine authority. I explain what we have been trying to accomplish during the last several years, explain our experiments and points of view, our trials and errors. I speak candidly about our failures, collectively and personal, and express my heartfelt desire to bring something of worth back to my own people.

  David listens, his wife listens, and it feels as if the walls listen, without judgment. It feels like the experience in a psychiatrist’s office where one’s own statement of the problem is a prelude to understanding. When I am finished, he begins to speak, while his wife offers him the bowl of popcorn she has blessed.

  He says something that is obviously a prayer in Hopi, blessing the corn, which he then shares with us, making some sort of invocation. He talks at great length, initiating us into the universe of Hopi mythology. Particularly compelling is his recital of predictions of what he calls “the last days,” the period when a world age dizzy with incoherence and indulgence was about to disintegrate. Signs marking the end of this Fifth World included:

  • Hopi lands, the least valuable on earth, will be coveted. [Coalmining at Black Mesa]

  • Spider woman will have covered the world with her web. [Phone and telegraph lines, etc.]

  • Men will fly.

  • Demons will be on the trails, and travel will be unsafe. [Would you let your children hitchhike?]

  • The end will be at the hands of Red Men from the East, who will be pitiless.

  David invites us to stay with him. We are shocked because we have been repeatedly warned that white people are not allowed to spend the night in Hotevilla. He offers us his guest room and, smiling broadly at me, tells me that it’s perfectly okay for my “beautiful dog” [whom I had locked in the car and he had never seen] to sleep with me.

  He ushers us into a tiny room overwhelmed by a large metal-framed bed. The room is painted a cool green and has only a dresser with a mirror over it and some sepia-toned photos on the walls.

  Nineteenth Day

  We fall into a deep sleep, and when we awake, the outside room is full of old men having a meeting of some kind and talking in low, guttural voices. We try to remain invisible as we take our coffee and watch surreptitiously. Bright desert light pierces the windows and smoky air, pasting rectangles on the floor. Men sit everywhere; some doze, some seem completely attentive. When one man speaks, no one interrupts in any way until he is finished. Except for grunts or nods of assent, the speaker has the floor and can take as long as he needs to think. No one pays the slightest attention to us.

  How different it is from the chaos of our communal life. Children line the walls in respectful silence. When they get restless, they rise and slip outside like shadows, and only after the door closes quietly behind them do you hear the cries and screams of play, the aural tracks of children everywhere. I am chastened and amazed. Steady parents raise steady children.

  I don’t remember now how many days we stayed—long enough to hear David sing often and tease us about white people’s music, which, according to him, is only about “love.” He observed that the Hopi have many songs about water, which they consider the rarest and most precious of resources, and then asked, with feigned innocence, if white people sang so often about love because it was equally rare in our world. He did wicked and witty parodies of cowboy songs and seemed genuinely pleased that I had written songs about owls, the hills of Olema, and other forms of life.

  One day, shortly before we left, he walked me around the mesa, offering me precise directions to the sites of abandoned Hopi villages, explaining to me why and under what conditions each had been built, which had good water, and which did not. As he marked each site he asked me to be sure to remember. I did not understand why he was being so particular.

  We left with his blessings, rested and full of energy. It was hard to acknowledge and comprehend all I had learned. At the time, I felt that he had offered us these empty villages as bomb shelters for some future Armageddon, places to hide our people if we needed them, and I was flattered and touched. Today, I realize that the most important gift we received was the opportunity to witness and participate in an ancient, ordered spiritual life, for our bodies to experience what such an existence felt like. We were afforded a glimpse into a self-sufficient system that had taken thousands of years to develop. The lightness of their personal lives, the absence of demands they made on the environment and each other was chastening and elevating. For all its hard lessons and physical difficulties, the trip had succeeded. We had a high-water mark to aspire to, and I returned to California with that fixed as firmly in mind as my mind could fix anything then.

  Fosmo and I drove hard, excited by what we had learned and anxious to begin the work of renewing Olema. We entered the front yard of the main house just as Maryanne Pickens entered the third day of a total nervous breakdown. Everyone had been sleepless for days, jarred by her nerve-wracking screams, afraid to leave her unattended. People were strung out and exhausted. Maryanne was a babbling wraith, laughing, trying to seduce the women, and occasionally standing stock-still and shrieking at the top of her lungs. People were too distracted to do more than react to our return as an opportunity to transfer the responsibility for Maryanne into fresh hands. By the end of the next day, it was apparent to all that the Pickens would have to move. Maryanne, in the only way available to her, had finally created a condition that forced J. P. to pay attention to her.

  My last wrenching image of their departure was J. P’s two-and-a-half-ton house-truck lumbering off and Maryanne’s pale arm waving frantically through the barred window in the back door, while she begged, in a voice raw as bloody meat, for the aid and understanding that we were unable to provide.

  While I was away, the Gypsy Truckers had arrived, and they gathered around
me now, in a corral full of new trucks, unknown faces watching Maryanne’s departure. The Gypsy Truckers precipitated the final bloom and eventual decay of Olema.

  18

  full bloom

  On my return I moved Sam and Ariel out of the overcrowded Olema ranch house into a small, abandoned outbuilding, a tiny horse barn about ten by ten feet square, with an old Dutch door and feed stalls that had to be removed. We tar-papered it against the winter, insulating the windows with plastic and the rough wood floors with old carpets. I put in a wood-burning stove and built a loft for sleeping. Though the shed was tiny, it sufficed for the three of us and our two dogs. Eeja was roaming farther and father afield, drawn by coyotes yapping on the distant ridge. One day, she simply did not return.

  It was a low-rent shanty with wooden battens nailed across the black tar-paper skin outside, but it was warm and dry. The old wood glowed in the kerosene lamplight, and it was lovely to lie there and listen to the dull comforting murmur of rain spattering on the slate roof. The stage was set, the play was cast, and if Sam and I were not exactly blissful together, we were not unhappy and intermittently in love—about par for most relationships, I suspect.

  Meanwhile the Gypsy Truckers had moved in. I think Vinnie (“Chick-a-dee, Chick-a-daa”) Rinaldi met them at the Orange Julius stand in San Anselmo. They were a dashing troupe of bandidos, mustachioed, long hair tied back with bandannas, with conchos, intricately stamped buttons of silver, running up the seams of their leather pants. The women wore long skirts over their boots and scarves around their heads; dozens of bracelets made their arms tinkle and ring. They had beautifully crafted flatbed trucks with ornate wooden houses built on the frames sporting nifty gingerbread trim, giving them the ornate jewel-box complexity of fine fairy story illustrations. Vinnie told them about Olema, and they pulled into the big corral en masse and circled their wagons. They needed a place to put up for the winter, to ready their vehicles and gather supplies before moving north. After exploratory consultations and some meals, herb, and music, we agreed that they could stay.

  Olema at this point (the autumn of 1969) was in full flower, jammed to the rafters with divergent souls, intentions, needs, visions, and aspirations, all feeding like aphids on its nourishing stem. Does a flower intuit that when its bloom is at its peak, it is preparing to die?

  I was still the nominal “head man” by virtue of having been the first to colonize the place and perhaps because I had the overarching vision of how Olema dovetailed with the rest of the Free Family; however, my authority was strictly based on persuasion and personal regard. People came and went at Olema and were accepted or rejected according to mysterious consensus. It was commonly agreed that Olema was “free turf,” that one could do and be whatever one chose to be, an anarchic social experiment designed to discover alternative modes of living and working together based on personal authenticity rather than economics.

  My daily routine in the morning was simple: slip on my coveralls and amble out of the cabin, fire up my Coleman camp stove, and make a pot of coffee. More often than not, I might pad down to the main house and see if anyone else had done it before me. There was usually a can of Top cigarette tobacco on the kitchen table, and it was nice to sit in the weak light, roll a smoke, and contemplate what comedies the day might produce while my coffee steamed beside me on the porch stoop.

  Babies would wake, cooing and gurgling. Mothers, steamy from sleep and smelling of talc and breast milk, shuffled into the kitchen on maternal call. Usually someone had made bread, and there might be a pot of jam or honey nearby to smear on it.

  Little by little others woke and threaded their way to the kitchen through the prior evening’s abandoned guitars, clothing, and accessories, and the intricate ballet of assessing one another’s morning moods began. Talk was initially minimal. People gravitated toward the coffee, condensed milk, sugar, and tobacco, and pursued their somnolent wake-up rituals. Before long the thick silence in the house would be dispersed by buzzing energy: children bumping into tables and rolling in the dust, mothers chatting on the stoop, elbows on bent knees, soft curves draped in faded skirts and hair caught in bandannas, bangle bracelets and earrings jingling, all glad for any hint of sun to drive off the morning fog.

  Discussion centered on the needs of the day: laundry, flour, gaskets, fuel pump, welding rod, weeding, gathering mussels at Tomales Bay. Runs to town were consolidated, baby-sitters designated, and the parceling out of always-insufficient money for gas and supplies was usually negotiated with ironic goodwill:

  From the men: “Well, if we don’t have money to fix the truck how will we get to the bulk food store?”

  You could feel the invisible chords of communication among the women, who had no need to look at one another to agree. Someone might look down at the ground or laugh into her palm before responding, “Fine. Fix the truck . . . and while you’re at it, fix dinner too, because there’s no food.”

  These ripostes oscillated back and forth until temporary equilibrium was achieved. There was generally not too much anxiety because, despite lack of money, we had all the time in the world. What we had lost in material surplus we more than made up for with the luxury of unstructured, free time.

  By the second cup of coffee, cigarette at the halfway mark, a musical instrument usually appeared. Jed Sherman was a handsome, mustachioed, longhaired Gypsy Trucker with a laconic good humor; he and I were the two dominant guitar players. Jeff (of Jeff and Carla) was an up-and-comer, but the best musician at Olema was a wiry, goateed young man with an extremely sardonic manner and eccentric personal style named Freeman Lockwood, professionally known as Steamin’ Freeman.

  Freeman played violin and spent almost every waking hour practicing jigs and reels from a thick fake book of traditional Irish music. He would play six to seven hours a day, every day. He and I commandeered an abandoned room next to the chicken shed and built bunk beds for visiting musicians to use after late jam sessions. Before he died of an overdose, Michael Bloom-field would come from the city to play our cracked old upright piano all night. Olema was his hideout from the high-pressure rock-and-roll life that interfered with his joyful music and enthusiasm; on one occasion, harmonica player Paul Butterfield joined him. But excellent as these musicians were, equally skilled anonymous players drifted in off the road, and the standard was elevated and demanding.

  Music was one of the social arts, and we took musical skill and etiquette seriously. Good players would travel from commune to commune, or house to house, to play and learn and teach new songs. Skill was highly appreciated, but show-offs and stage hogs were cold-shouldered until they understood that the most valued talent was the ability to create inclusive ensembles. There was space for both the individual and the group, but all had to work cooperatively.

  When people returned home after a trip, they brought gossip, adventurous tales, presents, new goods, staples, and enough energy to generate stupendous parties. The men gathered wood and built a fire or set up a barbecue if there was meat. Depending on the scale of the event, we might build a sweat lodge, drag out the home brew and slice up the hash brownies.

  Skirts rustled, metal bowls clanged, flour dust hazed the air, and the house was permeated by an incense of lentils and cardamom, marinating meat, and rising dough. Sam was clearly a leader among the women there. She was imposing, and her entrance could dominate a room, but her self-confidence oscillated between impervious and absent. She had a grand style and witchy powers. Though, like most of us, she was picking her way through the rubble of her own psyche, she could, especially to the younger girls, appear to be a goddess, fully formed and worthy of emulation.

  It was Sam who taught the Olema women to tan the deer hides we retrieved in numbers from the Point Reyes garbage dump during hunting season; to make an oatmeal-thick mash from wood ashes and water so that the hair could be rubbed off; to pickle the skin in sulfuric acid and water or rub it with brains, then break it to softness over a fence post or over the back of an ax jamme
d into a stump. Though the ultimate utility of such skills might have been marginal, they contributed to our sense of independence from the larger culture and supported our intentions to be in continuity with indigenous people who centuries earlier had lived where we were living. Such skills also enabled us to create trade goods and currency out of found objects, personal skills, and time. We could create wealth by redefining it in a game that was not stacked against us.

  Lew Welch was a frequent visitor to Olema. A tall, freckled, sad-eyed Irishman whose face was often suffused with childish wonder and delight, Lew was already famous as a Beat poet. He lived sporadically and stormily with a thick, powerful Slavic woman called Magda; when she would tire of his drunken escapades, he would move out of their Marin City pad and up to Olema. He loved jazz and Magda’s two children and was proud of tutoring their musical abilities. He introduced me to Magda’s oldest, Huey, when Huey was ten years old. Lew beamed with delight as the child scatted tricky jazz riffs Lew had taught him. He might well have been proud. Magda’s Huey became Huey Lewis of Huey Lewis and the News and honors Lew’s memory to this day by maintaining his stepfather’s bardic traditions and catholic curiosities.

  I was pleased to have Lew at the ranch because I felt his presence conferred on us a legitimate descent from the Beats. I was extremely proud that Lew had dedicated a poem called “Olema Satori” to me.

  One day he was sitting on the floor of the Olema living room, cradling his ever-present gallon jug of Cribari red wine in his lap. He was deep in his cups. The room was pulsing with music and dense with marijuana smoke. Tall, fulsome Carla, the world’s most voluptuous seventeen-year-old mother, was utterly abandoned to sinuous dancing, naked from the waist up, and glistening with sweat. Lew was watching with undisguised lust. He turned to me, grinning crookedly, raised one finger, and said very slowly and very clearly, “The . . . worst . . . Persian . . . voluptuary . . . could . . . not . . . imagine . . . our . . . most . . . ordinary day.” Having managed this, he pitched over, unconscious.