by Peter Coyote
The Red Rockers were much wealthier than the Free Family (most of them were originally rich kids from Beverly Hills, in fact), and they had none of our ideological conflicts about easing their labors with technology. They argued that they did not buy enough merchandise to offset the energy gains made from collective living, but they were not forthcoming about where their money came from, and we didn’t ask. I guessed trust funds and inheritances.
The day of our move to the Ortiviz farm arrived, and in Digger style, it was a comedy of errors. Trucks became separated, half our people had no gas, and hours and gallons were wasted siphoning fuel from one truck and driving miles to deliver it to another.
The Ortiviz farm appeared to be a breeding ground for wrecked automobiles and rusted farm implements. The sole building was a heavily weathered but well-made adobe farmhouse that we eyed warily until it began to rain, and we jammed inside posthaste. The house was not much: a large, whitewashed kitchen and a back room filled with drying onions laid out in a crisscross pattern on the floor. However, it was ours; it was free, and we had made do with worse.
Shortly after we arrived, Tom pulled up in a blue pickup with the words “I-Am-You” painted on the side. He regarded us cautiously as we pored over the house and grounds, cataloguing resources. He talked to me for a long while. He was long-boned, as spare as a piece of sun-bleached cottonwood, with heavy wrists, and his eyes behind his rimless glasses reminded me of the darkness inside a hollow log. He appeared stubborn and psychologically entrenched.
Our initial conversation concerned two local hippie haters who had been frightening people and forcing them off the roads with their trucks. Just before we arrived, one of them had shot a bucket out of a man’s hand in front of his son, and the boy was still afraid and sleeping badly.
It turned out I had met the other. Gristle and I had stopped by a small ranch on the way to Ortiviz Farm, where we found the owner repairing a smashed propane tractor. Clad in stained khakis, he was a dark, skinny man with a brooding face that reminded me of a crushed olive. In response to our query about work he replied, “Yes, I do need help, but I don’t hire your kind.”
We discussed this situation and I suggested a trap for the hippie haters but Tom chastised me obliquely and sagaciously, saying, “If you’re going to live somewhere, you have to keep peace with your neighbors. When a man steps out of the bushes and points a gun at me, I tell him to shoot straight so I don’t feel it. Sometimes that changes things more.”
I admired this courageous resoluteness and had to admit to myself that my image of our riding in and cleaning up other people’s dilemmas was a masturbatory fantasy. There would be serious consequences to any violence we initiated, and it would be wreaked on the people who lived here after we moved on.
The next day we pitched our camp in the old house and transformed it into a lovely space that astonished the Red Rockers and Triple A folk when they came to visit. That night we were invited to play the Starlite, a local bar in Walsenburg, as a coming-out party for the caravan’s arrival. Sam washed my hair with yucca root she had dug that day, and by the time she was done I felt clean and shiny as a new enamel basin. I shaved and put on a fresh white shirt and the pants Sam had made for me with silver studs running down the legs. She brushed out my hair and tied it behind my head in a bun with a strip of crushed velvet, Navajo style, and I dusted and polished my cowboy boots. I was ready to rock and roll. As usual, it took hours for the group to depart: gas had to be siphoned yet again, instruments loaded, kids fed and tended, and it was dark by the time we began the forty-mile drive to Walsenburg.
The Starlite was a revelation. It was packed wall to wall with freaks, Chicanos, old cowboys in stained and dented hats, and women in demure polyester frocks or gypsy finery. Everyone was hooting and jumping up and down to the music of the Triple A band, a tight, funky, and extremely professional group. (In fact, they were professional; several members had made records.)
As we entered en masse, someone shouted, “The caravan is here!” and the room offered us a loud cheer. This was our moment, an acknowledgment that we had accomplished what we had promised. We surged into the Starlite proudly, everyone looking great in the bar’s amber light: white teeth, clean, sun-browned skin, silver rings, bracelets tinkling, swaying, swaggering, and laughing. I was proud of my people.
During a break, the Triple A bass player, a lovely L. A. rock-and-roll girl with a thicket of curly hair and the improbable name of Trixie Merkin, invisibly palmed me a ten-spot. I was touched by her consideration and with her gift was able to buy enough beers to get our people up to room speed. It was not at all unusual for us to be so far from home with less than ten dollars among twenty or thirty people, yet somehow things always seemed to work out.
Turning from the bar to deliver the suds, I bumped into Susanka, a tall and sensual belly dancer from San Francisco. I had pierced her ear and the nose of her friend at the Treat Street house months before. Susanka informed me boldly that they had both been waiting to sleep with me to say thanks. She offered a smile suggesting that inconceivable delights lay in store for me, then faded into the crowd, mouthing “I’ll see you later” silently.
Carla began to dance, and the crowd made room for her. My God, that girl could dance! Her eyes were closed and the energy of serpents, earthquakes, magma flows, and torrential winds flowed through her body like spurts of hot oil. The Triple A trombonist was laying down syncopated, double-tongued riffs over the drums. Mai-Ting danced like a motor whose governor had snapped. Suddenly my spine was seized by the music’s insistent force, and I was propelled into the crowd, dancing the broken-breath boogie. Beers were passed over our heads, flecking the dancers with froth. Old women smiled ecstatically, flapping leathery limbs with abandon, while the old men snatched at the young girls. You could change dance partners simply by facing a different direction. The room was braiding itself into ecstatic recombinations of multiracial, cross-generational possibilities. I had never seen a whole town high before.
The Triple A set ended and they offered us the stand. None of us were used to electric instruments, but we were game to try. With Owl on drums and Richard Evers, one of the caravaners, on electric piano, I was playing guitar and trying to sing but couldn’t hear myself over the monitors. The music wasn’t working, and I hated to let down my team and the collective high spirits. David from Triple A sat in on drums and encouraged us to try once more, refusing to let us leave the stage on a low note. I began to sing “Devil Dance,” a song of mine that was emblematic of our view of reality and very popular in jam sessions:
If you weep, it’s only skin deep,
If you weep, it’s only skin deep,
Because—every skeleton wears a grin.
Your bones are begging you to give in.
Every skeleton wears a grin.
Your bones are begging you to give in.
The song took off and the room was high and happy again, and the caravan band powered the room for a successful set.
Stumbling into the street at closing time, I looked up and noticed the constellation Orion, a premonition of winter. Just as I was about to crawl into my truck, a stranger approached and gave me a paper printed by our people at Black Bear, concerning a pending clear-cut of timber near our borders. The silt from the cut would choke Black Bear Creek, and they were preparing their resistance. This planet bulletin had reached me without postage or address more than a thousand miles away.
(Some things never seem to change. Black Bear was unable to stop the first cut, and the consequences were predictable. The creek was jammed by the crushed granitic soil that washed down after the trees no longer held it in place, and the road into Black Bear was washed out as well. After that debacle, logging was prohibited in the drainage until 1995, when the Forest Service decided that these severe slopes and endangered species’ habitats could be logged again, restarting the struggle among Black Bear, the progressive community, and the government.)
We paid for our triumph
s at the Starlite the next morning, crawling out from underneath our trucks with tongues swollen and eyes running, decimated by hangovers. Everyone was so wretched, the morning’s amusement became determining who was in the worst shape. The emergence of each new victim of excess provoked waves of laughter. We assembled a triage center and began passing out strong coffee, nicknaming it the “sacred herb.”
I had promised to help a fellow from Triple A named Harmonica Jack work on his Chevy truck this morning; it had been immobilized on blocks for months. I was crippled with a hangover and not looking forward to the task when Susanka, the belly dancer, and her friend Pat drove up, grinning like Cheshire cats and primed for sexual play. They were both scrubbed shiny clean and appeared unfazed by last night’s debauch. My already wavering devotion to Harmonica Jack’s truck began to oscillate wildly. I bullied young Jeff into helping Jack and had just crooked my arms through Susanka and Pat’s, prepared to run off with them, when Sam walked out of the house and immobilized our trio with a “Hi, ladies” that could have snapped the nipples off a stone statue. I stood by watching stupidly while Sam assessed the efficacy of her initial salvo. Sensing that Susanka and Pat were appropriately disarmed, she holstered her weapons and enlisted them to go pick sweet corn with her.
I slouched away to help Harmonica Jack, and by afternoon we had his truck off the blocks and almost roadworthy. A Chicano in a blue pickup stopped and asked if we needed help. In the back of his truck was a freshly dead coyote.
I asked him what he was going to do with it. “Sell it,” he said, with a curious, sheepish smile. I offered to trade for the body, and we assessed tools and various items until Harmonica Jack pulled a fluorescent-red foul-weather jacket from his truck. The Chicano, a woodcutter named Raymond, liked it and a deal was made.
The home folks were cooking venison over an elegant adobe fire pit that Paul Shippee had constructed in the Ortiviz front yard. Bob Santiago was cutting the meat by the light of the Coleman lantern. I laid the coyote in the stark glow of the hissing lamp, and all conversation stopped. The light pattering against skin and fur linked us in common mortality: the coyote, lips curled away from his teeth in a death grin, eats the deer, now roasting savory on the fire, which we, the humans, will consume, all of whom will one day die. Everyone stood still, quiet, respectful before this truth.
I took the body inside and Jeff held the front feet while I skinned it. The coyote was a fat and healthy male, and I worked attentively, careful not to cut the hide, passing it successfully over the ears and head. I saw the purple hole behind his ear where the bullet had punched out his life. Children and adults filtered indoors and watched in silence. I was absorbed in my work and in my prayers to this little cousin, intent on expressing my respect and allowing no frivolous thoughts to intrude on my concentration.
When the skin was free, I rubbed his body with cornmeal, pierced his ear with my turquoise earring, and wrapped him in white muslin to bury later. I tacked the skin to a board and salted it so the hair would not fall out. By the time I was finished, almost everyone was asleep. I wandered outside. Crazy Kevin was sitting with a woman before the fire. Over his right shoulder, in the glow of the firelight, gleaming in the darkness, was a bleached coyote skull. I blinked, startled—and it was revealed to actually be a wild sunflower bush. (Three other people had the same experience that night.) Orion was brighter and higher in the sky. I returned to the house and hung blue corn everywhere. I took the clock off the wall: I knew what time it was.
The next morning all the children and several adults told me they’d had coyote dreams. This didn’t surprise me. Sam was affected as well. In response to my criticism, she admitted her hostility to the Sirens (Susanka and Pat) but then skewered me by declaring that she had been through her last changes about my lovers. “I learn to love them,” she said, “and then, when you lose interest in them, you blame the breakup on me. I’m tired of it.” She told me she was now “straight with everything”: my pleasure was her pleasure, and consequently I couldn’t hurt her anymore.
I was dumbfounded by her accuracy and her gift of freedom, which I construed conveniently as unconditional love and permission to live true to my predilections (no matter how adolescent). I was overcome with gratitude, feeling as if she had released me from the conflict of loving her and other women as well. We fell against each other laughing and talked intimately and affectionately—at least for the rest of that day.
The summer passed in this manner: fretting and feuding over personal dramas and public politics; fixing trucks, playing music, and frolicking; taking care of the children; and following an easy organic sense of time.
At the first hints of autumn, people began to crystallize their plans. Shippee decided to stay in Boulder and study with Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher. Mai-Ting and Tall Paul Mushen decided to stay in the valley and make it their home. The Bergs planned to travel East and winter in Maine. Jeff and Carla decided to return to California. Jeff traded his truck for a red MG and confessed to me how much he missed the city and the fun of getting high. His confession made me cringe, remembering how many times I had been high with him and other young people with whom I should have been a role model rather than a codependent. Just before he departed, he searched his gear and retrieved a photo of me he called “Coyote Crash.” In the photo, I am stoned on heroin and pasty gray; my eyelids seem to have andirons dragging them down, and my lower jaw is moronically slack. Jeff gave it to me conspiratorially, as a bond between us, teasing me by saying, “I’ll be there again before you will.” Then he piled Carla and Owl Pickens, who was going west to see his older sisters, into his new MG and roared off down the road in a cloud of dust.
That was the last I saw of Jeff. Several years later, the picture of his coffin, a fifty-gallon drum weighted with chains, appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. He had been murdered after having confessed to Carla that he had witnessed something that scared him witless, making the rounds one day with Hell’s Angel Moose. When he left the house the following day for an appointment at a local chop shop where he had been fabricating false compartments in pickup trucks for smuggling drugs, he never returned.
The ceremonial punctuation mark of our stay in Colorado was a big peyote meeting, held with the Red Rockers and some Cato Indians from Oklahoma. Originally intended to be our welcome to the Huerfano, by the time it was organized it served as our farewell. The first task in preparation was to cut the trees for the tepee. A slow-talking, chunky blond Red Rocker named Tush picked me up one day and we drove into the mountains toward Rainbow Lake, climbing past stands of aspen, scrub oak, and blue spruce until we arrived at a shadowed lodgepole pine grove, where the slender trees stood erect as porcupine bristles. We apologized to each and stated our purpose before cutting them. Others had left for Texas to gather “buttons” in the peyote fields, and we kept them in mind as we worked, wishing them luck and a safe journey.
It was dark by the time we finished. The combination of high altitude and a debilitating case of diarrhea had made me disoriented. My feet were blistered from not wearing socks, and the task of pulling the spiny, twenty-five-foot trunks up the steep hillside in the dark was exhausting. Branches poked and tore me, snagging my clothes and scraping my skin. I recalled reading somewhere how peyote always grows amid thorns.
We tied the poles to the truck rack and stopped in Westcliffe at a coffee-shop whose “Western” decor announced its owners’ hope that an Aspen-type boom was about to transform the homely Huerfano Valley into moneymaking real estate. Drinking our coffee, we overheard that people were planning to build a ski resort and that Bob Hudson, one of the local hippie haters, was going to run for county supervisor. He had promised to tar all the roads to increase property values. It was a disheartening vision, but it clarified the tensions in the valley. Like black people and Mexicans, hippies were considered bad for real estate.
On the drive home, a fat, happy coyote danced down the center of the road in front
of Tush’s truck. He spun in a double circle, winking at us in the headlights. Tush looked at me oddly, and I nodded. A good sign.
It required another two days to skin the poles with a drawknife. It was nice work, straddling a pole and watching the long tendrils of bark curl over the blade, leaving long trails of white moist skin shiny behind it. The pine pitch crusted on my fingers, and my muscles were sore from stooping and working the knife, but I felt as if these labors were preparing me for the meeting.
Mai-Ting squatted next to me while I worked one day. She described an underlying panic in camp, as people prepared for the impending breakup and wondered anxiously if they were prepared for living without the support of the group. The peyote meeting could not be coming at a better time.
Not far away, Ben Eagle and his wife Chipita had built a camp. They had arrived on horseback from southern New Mexico. Ben and Chipita were true edge dwellers. They had wintered again in the bitter cold Sangre de Cristos in their little canvas tents, spending their days hiding from the “tree police,” as they referred to the Forest Service. This was where Sam had found them on her trip earlier in the year.
Ben was completely immersed in the peyote path and had taken to preparing elk hides for the ceremonial water drums. He became so purely dedicated to the process that one conservative Indian elder, after meeting Ben and reviewing his drum, confided to a friend that he had not known that “the Spirit spoke English.”
The way life braids experience, strands disappear and then surface unexpectedly. In 1993, I was walking on the Rue Princesse in Paris when two strangers in 1940s retro Western garb approached from the opposite direction, saying, “Hey, Peter” as they passed. Assuming it was someone recognizing me from films, I acknowledged the greeting but did not stop until they both began laughing, and the man said, “You don’t know me, do you?” Ben was beardless now, in his midforties; Chipita, still petite and attractive. They manufacture earrings in the Huerfano Valley, employ six hundred people, and sell them all over the world. They no longer live in a wikiup but in a modern, high-tech house they’d built and showed me in photographs. Both are still on the peyote road. Both are still grand and fearless. We spent the evening in Paris eating Mexican food and reminiscing about the life we had shared thousands of miles and many years ago.