Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Like the Haight-Ashbury, Wheeler’s Ranch, Olema, or the Huerfano Valley, Shawnee became a magnet for “the best and worst of men,” as Stewart Brand has aptly characterized the dominant contradiction of outlaw communities. There were druggies and welfare deadbeats, subsistence farmers, hunters and gatherers, psychedelic pilgrims, dope growers, wanna-be shamans, craftspeople, even an Amish carriage maker—all manner of souls seeking new lives and space in which to invent them. Colorful, multiracial, and undeniably “other,” the newcomers strained social services that the self-reliant farmers had never deigned to use. Understandably, these new settlers were a bitter pill for the displaced owners to swallow, and public sentiment rallied against them.

  To us at Turkey Ridge they were a cousin family, and Samurai Bob would eventually gravitate there, linking our two communities. Dented and dirty vehicles and unkempt folk migrated up the road to Turkey Ridge in increasing numbers, seeking the use of our shop or carrying goods for barter. Their influx strained our resources and alienated many of our neighbors. One such was my mentor, Jim Clancy, who after my father’s death had left his position as farm manager and gone to work for the Park Service. As a federal employee, he was now on “the other side,” and due to the growing polarization between the straight and hip communities, we became personally estranged, with unfortunate consequences.

  We could not turn the squatters away. Whether we approved or disapproved of their behavior, they were under attack by the Army Corp of Engineers and the Forest Service, and as political bedfellows we were forced into an alliance.

  Compared to the squatters, we were rich, even if our life was a daily regimen of hard farm labor (or Wall Street cold calls). At day’s end, we returned to spacious lawns, solid houses, and a well-equipped shop, free from harassment by the authorities. We were no longer the most extreme, self sacrificing purists on the set. In the eyes of the Shawnee folk, we were the “upper class,” and they turned on us the same subtle, manipulative guilt trips that we had used so effectively on wealthy Hollywood hippies and Haight-Ashbury merchants.

  This perception of an inverse relationship between wealth and righteousness held true even among our own people. Gristle, sporting his foxy grin and rubbery ethics, appeared one day driving his patched-up school bus. He was followed up the drive by a partner in another bus whom he’d met on the road, red-bearded Texas Bobbie, a quiet hipster from Austin, Texas. The “school-bus people” represented a new subclass in the Turkey Ridge community, dividing us subtly into “farmers” and “gypsies.” Gristle used his relative disenfranchisement masterfully to justify constant pilfering. Every “game” has its form, even the “formless” game we played, and as long as selflessness was measured by poverty or lack of attachment to material goods, those who had the least could use their situation to lever advantages from those who had even marginally more. It did not matter if the “more” was a tool or a clean shirt; having surplus proved that you were a revolutionary backslider.

  There were limits, though, and despite the fact that Gristle was family and Texas Bobby a nice fellow, the day that Griz ostentatiously drained his filthy crankcase oil all over the pristine white gravel driveway, we kicked their asses out.

  After the high and heady spring and summer work had ended, and after harvest time, and after the cider, firewood, and foodstuffs had been laid away and winter closed in, the collective claustrophobia intensified. Winter winds funnel through the Delaware Water Gap relentlessly, and with the temperature hovering between zero and ten degrees, it was punishing to be outside. With no farmwork to be done, more and more time was spent in the main house—together.

  Tensions between Samurai Bob and the rest of the house continued to rise, and one night the women convened a meeting to discuss his continued residency. My loyalties were divided. I realized that Bob was a difficult man to live with and that he had alienated people in the house, but driving him away appeared to me to be bullying by the majority. If we were seeking new cultural alternatives, I argued that we had to test our ideas in the world, which included Bob and others with whom coexistence was, well, difficult.

  Hindsight offers some clarity, and now I realize that our fixation with total freedom condemned us to marginality. While we believed that we were creating “alternatives” that the majority culture could take advantage of at a later date, we were actually scoring a line in the sand between our way of life and everyone else’s.

  Internal pressures produced a fault line at Turkey Ridge between those who clung to countercultural alternatives and those who felt that assimilating into the community and working invisibly in place would spark a transfer of revolutionary ideas and energy.

  The problem for Bob was that his vision did not fit into either of these frameworks—or into any other. For those of us who accepted the responsibilities and limits of maintaining home and hearth, his laissez-faire attitude was destructive deadweight. From his point of view, we were selling out his revolution for creature comforts, but he was not raising children and had little understanding of their requirements. He somehow exempted me from his rigorous judgments, perhaps because I was never severe with him or perhaps because, when all was said and done, I owned the farm.

  The afternoon before the scheduled meeting, I was troubled over what I knew would be an ugly confrontation. I went for a walk by myself along the lake. The leafless trees were black against a lowering sky, and the gray water lapping the saw-toothed ice around the lake’s edges made it resemble the mouth of a nightmarish shark. At one moment, a single wild duck landed on the water and reminded me of Ibsen’s play. In The Wild Duck, an eccentric family, bonded by innocent rituals and fictions (the life lie), is destroyed by an idealistic young visitor who insists on telling the “absolute truth” and destroying all illusions. The play perfectly embodied the conflicting intentions of Bob and the group, and I regarded the duck as a heaven-sent sign that understanding might lead to a resolution.

  But it was not meant to be. The meeting, held on a freezing night before a roaring fire in my former bedroom, was the nightmare I had anticipated. Bob had decided to weather it on LSD, which only made communications more problematical. I attempted to mediate between the “commonsensers” and Bob, who by this time had transcended or descended into obscure realms of para-sense. At one point in the evening, after I mentioned the day’s omen and explained the story of The Wild Duck to him, he served neither of us with a Freudian slip, replying, “Of course I understand you. I side with the absolute truth . . . I mean the life lie.” His slip was seized by the others as evidence of his deepest intentions, and my sign from the heavens became the agency of his undoing. Bob left permanently and moved into Shawnee the next day.

  As the meeting reached its ragged conclusion, the downstairs door slammed, and Ariel and Jeremiah appeared at the bottom of the stairs, shivering in their blankets and crying with fear and cold. They had awakened in the cabin and, finding no one there, had walked the fifty snowy, windy yards barefoot to the main house. Their howling was accusatory, and in that synchronistic way that physical acts sometimes mimic emotional states—a glass falling and breaking into sharp edges during an argument, for instance—the children forcefully expressed the forlorn feelings inside the house.

  The federal assault on Shawnee was brutal and effective. Early on the drizzly morning of February 27, 1974, the Army Corps of Engineers, accompanied by U.S. marshals (many of the same marshals used against the Native American occupation of Alcatraz), arrived at Shawnee-on-Delaware with bulldozers. They gave the squatters fifteen minutes to gather what they could, then fired up the mammoth D-9 cats. Lovingly tended gardens were scraped away, and domestic animals cut loose to forage untended. Ramshackle houses filled with homemade furniture, beaded charms, stained glass, and children’s drawings, were ground into rubble under the clanking steel treads. The pitiless metal blades sliced through the walls in a cacophony of snapping timbers, tinkling glass, dull implosions of hot water heaters, the bleating of goats, curses of the dis
possessed, and the inconsolable keening of children and infants. Afghanistan? Lebanon? Israel? No, this was the United States of America in 1974, disciplining its citizens for trying to slip through the nets that held them in thrall.

  For those previously aware of the lengths to which some would go to protect the interests of the “owning class,” this should not have been surprising. Miners had been machine-gunned by John D. Rockefeller for trying to organize, students had already been gunned down at Kent State by their own National Guard, and Native Americans had recently been truncheoned off abandoned Alcatraz Island to render it safe as a valuable tourist concession. Now it was the hippies’ turn. The Shawnee squatters were not the first to feel the full force of America’s rapaciousness, but like today’s aging, bewildered middle managers, sacrificed to the “imperatives” of the global economy just before their pensions were fully vested, the cut was not made kinder by knowledge of that shared heritage.

  Kent remembers this period as a time when people at Turkey Ridge began singling out people, trying to locate the growing malaise in an easily identifiable (and removable) source, like a latter-day Salem witch trial. One day during lunch, Nichole blurted out, “It’s you, Kent. You’re just fucked up and you make everyone miserable. Everything would be so much better if you just left.”

  Kent was mystified and said nothing. Later that afternoon Nichole came to him in the field and apologized, throwing her arms around him, and reported that she had simply been expressing the distillation of gossip she had heard at different times around the farm. There was gossip, of course—not necessarily malicious, but the small complaints and gripes that occur when people cannot or will not confront one another directly. Emotional geysers like these erupted unexpectedly, small panics, like steam escaping from fissures in the earth, indicating pressure building below the surface. It was time for me to take a trip.

  After struggling with our own economy so diligently, we had often wondered how other alternative communities addressed the problem. The idea of fulfilling the original caravan dream of linking other groups into a conscious, mutually supportive network seemed attractive and became the genesis of the “Trade Route.”

  Nichole and I planned a midwinter trip, taking the children in Kent’s truck, the Big Fucker, through New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. We would visit other communes and communities and take a census of what they produced that might be sold or bartered. At journey’s end, we would print that information and mail it back to everyone we visited so that all could share in the information. At each commune, we would leave a square of material to be embroidered, and at next year’s harvest, we planned to rendezvous and join the patches together in a quilt symbolizing the new network.

  We piled the kids and Josephine into the truck and took a January test run to Woodstock, New York, where we stayed with friends of Freeman House Martin and Susan Carey. Martin is a small man with tiny hands, feverish energy, a large nose, and an infectious giggle; he created many of the complex graphics for free events in the 1960s, including several Digger posters. His wife Susan, a distractingly beautiful earth mother and equally consummate artisan (a jeweler), embodied for me boundless tolerance and an endless faith in the ultimate trustworthiness of the universe. We stayed with them and their collective family, the True-Light Beavers, for several days, laughing while designing an absurd TV sitcom about life on a commune, peopling it with the freeloaders, fuck-ups, religious cranks, and revolutionaries we had all encountered. In the process, we became lifelong friends.

  Nichole and I drove tirelessly from town to town, group to group, promoting the Trade Route gospel while the kids rode in the large plastic bubble overhead. Once, noticing stranger than usual reactions to our truck, we pulled over and found the children stark naked in the bubble, screaming with laughter, emulating the thrashing movements of copulating adults for the locals we passed on the road.

  Each commune had its idiosyncrasies. One place in Phoenicia, New York, had lost five members in a car crash just before we arrived. They were in deep mourning but chose to tell us nothing about it, so we lingered for several days describing our plans with the oddest feeling that something was wrong. As we were about to leave, I told them how we felt, and the story emerged.

  At a place called the Wooden Shoe in New Hampshire, when we headed for the outhouse in the subzero weather, they gave each of us a bowl of iodine-water to “rinse with” in lieu of toilet paper. We didn’t spend a second night, which might have been the point, the iodine being their equivalent of Olema’s three-meals-a-day black-bean cuisine for guests who overstayed their welcome.

  The trip was generally successful. We met weavers raising their own sheep and farmers plowing with horses, organic produce growers and potters. New England was dotted with small groups who had ducked below the surface of the mega-economy, building lives based on belief systems they could support without reservation. Almost everywhere we stopped, people loved our idea, contributed to our list of needs and surpluses, took a square, and promised to meet us at the harvest celebration.

  We were received well everywhere but at one of our own houses, which, given the general level of crankiness of Free Family people, shouldn’t have surprised me. One frigid, blustery night, after having been lost for hours in a remote corner of Maine, we stumbled through a hundred yards of waist-deep snow to carry the children into a farmhouse. Carol Baleen lived there, the widow of Alan Hoffman, who had been killed several years earlier when a semi truck smashed into the back of a pickup he was riding in en route to Black Bear, catapulting him sixty feet.

  The residents immediately set us to work cleaning food for the evening’s dinner, snow still clinging to our clothing. No one offered a cheerful greeting, a cup of hot tea, or comfort for the children. The aggressively unstated subtext was “Here we work and are all equal.” When Nichole rose to get herself a cup of coffee and asked if I’d like one as well, she was targeted by hostile women who read her simple civility as subservience.

  Later that night, during a discussion about sexuality and children—what they should see or know and how to tell them—Carol suddenly demanded, “What’s wrong with incest?” She spat the question at me as if my predilection to exempt my daughter (or any child) from my sexual attention was proof of fatal bourgeois conditioning. I was stunned and, I must admit, speechless. The issue was so intuitively repugnant that I had never even considered it. I must admit to an impulse to slap her face, but the ghost of Mary Corey, the Red Rocker I’d almost struck years earlier, interceded. I collected myself and managed to respond that as a woman, my daughter might have a number of sexual encounters in her life, and I thought that she might appreciate having at least one male relationship that would be a refuge from such attention. It still seems like a suitable response to me—almost as good as the one I thought to myself but did not utter: “That’s the creepiest fucking question I’ve ever heard, Carol.”

  By the time we returned to Turkey Ridge, several months had passed, and Nichole and I were barely speaking. She had stormed out of one household, shouting that she could not bear the sound of my voice any longer. I was hurt, but I could understand why. At every place we stopped, I offered some evangelical variant of the same speech, exhorting others to participate in “the evolving, countercultural nation that will support regionally organized, self-sufficient communities.”

  I’m certain that I painted overly rosy pictures of the scene at Turkey Ridge, glossing over problematic details and allowing my optimism to transform rough sketches of the new world into finished oils. I’m also certain that while I was creating an enchanting self-sufficient future, the feeding, care of the children, and our laundry was left to Nichole. Tonto was pissed.

  Nichole’s son Jeremiah was also acting out. He was angry with his mother for repeated absences, manipulation, and the kind of irresponsible behavior associated with drug use. This increased Nichole’s general level of irritation and impatience. When I pointed out that she often
lied to him opportunistically and sometimes neglected his needs, she turned on me and declared that his behavior was my fault for not loving him as much as I did my own daughter. Perhaps I didn’t love him as much as Ariel, but I did take care of him equally well, and loved him for who he was. I felt badly for him because I knew his anger was justified. Nichole’s abundant charm could finesse numerous adults, but her son knew what he needed and, failing to receive it legitimately, was determined to get it any way he could.

  I was so distracted by my relationship with Nichole and the growing tensions at the farm that when we returned I never cleaned and repaired Kent’s truck. After three months on the road, it was filthy and in need of much mechanical tweaking. Not to express my gratitude and respect by taking care of it was an affront to common decency, let alone our evolved trucker etiquette. It also created an extra burden on Kent, who, like the rest of us, was overworked. True to his nonjudgmental nature and impeccable manners, Kent said nothing and dived into the catastrophe we had made of his beloved truck’s innards, patiently sorting and repairing, degreasing and soaping while I argued bitterly with Nichole, flushed with shame and trying to repress the conclusion that I had replicated with her the same dynamics of my relationship with Sam.

  While Nichole and I were away, Nina had become ill and no one knew precisely what was wrong with her. She went to consult my father’s doctors in Manhattan. They intimated that she might have liver cancer but stressed that they could not be sure. Nina absorbed this information and sat in front of the fireplace in her bathrobe day after day, musing and smoking cigarettes in silent depression. By her own admission she was “gone.” Her daughter Angeline was taken over by the group, and life washed over Nina as if she were a rock in the center of a turbulent stream. She became a piece of living sculpture, her unbreachable isolation a mockery of group hopes.