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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Aging of Aquarius
  • Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2004 06:23:50 -0600

Aging of Aquarius

http://www.latimes.com/features/lifestyle/la-ca-
oconnor27jun27,1,1743366.story?coll=la-home-style

June 27, 2004
LA Times

Aging of Aquarius
* Graybeard capitalists keep hippie dreams alive as communes learn to
adapt.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Times Staff Writer

Albert Bates grows nostalgic remembering the freewheeling days when
hundreds of hippies left Haight-Ashbury in a caravan of psychedelic
buses for a celebrated back-to-the-land pilgrimage. Bates was a law
student when this electric circus rolled through New York in 1970,
and
he found it irresistible. Soon he followed, joining a young, affluent
exodus to the American countryside that would be one of the most
profound social experiments of its time.

His long hair and beard have grayed, but Bates still lives at The
Farm,
the storied American commune he helped build in backwoods Tennessee.
Sipping Mystic Brew organic coffee at its eco-village, he chuckles at
the memory of the trippy energy that once inspired some communards to
boot up their "Marijuana Macintoshes" and design a Geiger counter
they
sold, for almost nothing, as a dashboard ornament for anti-nuke
protesters.

"It was a novelty item, but it turned out to be very accurate," Bates
says with a grin. "It was pretty funny."

The homegrown Nuke-Buster is no joke now.

Today, the computerized, satellite-accessible nuclear detectors are
used
worldwide by police, military, firefighters and federal disaster
officials. They are used to stem nuclear contraband at the borders
that
Belarus and Kazakhstan share with Russia. Since the Sept. 11
terrorist
attacks, sales have risen 30%, to $2.5 million last year. The Farm-
based
manufacturer has been commended by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Not bad for a place that spent years under FBI surveillance.

"Homeland Security's been good to us. We're high-tech hippies now,"
says
Stephen Gaskin, the charismatic former San Francisco State lecturer
who
was once The Farm's guru, preaching a long-abandoned doctrine of
multiple-partner marriage and marijuana spiritualism. "We've had to
find
ways to survive," Bates echoed, "in the material world."

Hundreds of American utopian communities face the same challenge. A
surprising number are thriving. But if American communes were once,
in
the eyes of Joan Didion, "slouching towards Bethlehem," many today
lean
closer to Merrill Lynch.

Tie-dye, wood-burning stoves and mandalas still abound. But so do
multimillion-dollar industries and financial restructuring that
residents earnestly liken to the transformation of the Communist
world.
They may have dropped out of mainstream society to live a utopian
dream,
but now they embrace capitalism as a tool of survival, on their own
terms. Most, including The Farm, no longer define themselves as
communes, describing themselves as collectives, cooperatives and
egalitarian communities.

More than 600 such settlements in the United States are listed in the
directory of the Fellowship for Intentional Community. The
Fellowship's
executive secretary, Laird Schaub, estimates that at least 10,000
Americans live in rural collectives.

That population could climb as high as 150,000 when religion-based
cooperative communities — such as the Hutterites, who do not
believe
in
private property — are factored in, according to University of
Kansas
religion professor Tim Miller, who studies communal life.

People in their 20s and 30s still join collectives, but now more of
the
newcomers than ever before are older than 50, Schaub said.

"There's a surge," said Schaub, 54, a member of the 30-year-old
Sandhill
commune in Rutledge, Mo. "We've been astounded at how easy it is to
get
summer interns who want to learn about organic farming. We have to
turn
them away."

The communities produce industrial strength quantities of organic nut
butters, artisanal cheeses, vegetables, tofu, hammocks, commercial
vegetable and flower seeds — even a dessert wine endorsed by
European
wine snobs.

Virginia's Twin Oaks produces hammocks for Pier One. The nut butters
produced by a Missouri commune, East Wind, supply such mainstream
chains
as Whole Foods and Wild Oats, whose stores also market Sandhill's
organic sorghum.

In a region where family farms have become an endangered species in a
single generation, organic farms such as Sandhill are lauded by the
Missouri Department of Agriculture Web page as possible models for
survival.

Some communities, like Harbin Hot Springs, in the Northern California
town of Middletown, host paying tourists, with such amenities as
hikes
and shiatsu massage. Innisfree, in the Blue Ridge Mountains in
Virginia,
runs a boarding school for disabled children; another community has a
summer camp for urban kids. Sunrise Ranch in Colorado runs a
conference
and retreat center, a growing source of income.

The communities have slick websites, marketing directors,
federations,
group health plans, hotlines, magazines, conventions and thick
directories filled with romantic names — Dancing Rabbit, Dancing
Water,
Abundant Dawn, Dawning Star — that evoke an ocean of idyllic
yearning.

Far from retreating from society, many invite the world in. Last
year,
the Findhorn community in Scotland hosted a U.N.-affiliated
environmental conference. The Farm started its own U.N.-recognized
international relief agency, called Plenty.

Yet at many communities, the graying elders are soul-searching as
they
ponder who will carry on their legacy. People interested in living
there
permanently are often aging '60s veterans who are among the 74
million
U.S. baby boomers making the transition to senior citizenhood.

Even at the venerable Farm, hundreds of commune-born children have
grown
up and moved to Nashville, New York or California. Few return to live
at
the end of this dirt track, past the farmhouse where the Confederate
flag flaps in the breeze.

"There are people who need to see their children come back here, as
an
affirmation that what they did has legs," said Cynthia Holzapfel, 56,
the managing editor of the $1-million-a-year Farm-based Book
Publishing
Co., which has had several bestsellers: "Spiritual Midwifery," "Tofu
Cookery" and "Defeating Diabetes."

"I'm a little more Buddhist about it. We've built it. If they're
going
to come, they're going to come," said Holzapfel, a warm, open-faced
woman with Birkenstock sandals, thick yarn socks, and a gray bob,
leaning against a shelf of soy "meat" products in the warehouse of
the
mail-order health food business at The Farm.



Capitalism wasn't the only thing that happened to The Farm along the
road to Utopia. The commune engaged in a collective divorce in 1982,
firing their charismatic leader, Gaskin. Homes that once housed 60
people were given over to single families and residents were required
to
contribute $135 a month to the community foundation. The bitter
exodus
that ensued downsized The Farm from a 1,500-strong commune to a
200-member cooperative today.

*

Deer roam; hippies thrive

That divisive rupture, like The Farm's ragtag infancy, is difficult
to
envision in the serene pastoral landscape beyond the pamphlet-filled
visitors center. Rustic wood-frame homes nestle in the trees and
sun-bleached grasses of gentle hills reminiscent of Marin County.

Roaming deer herds, swelled by three decades of vegetarianism, lend
the
1,750-acre Farm the look of a game park. Grain silos are painted with
flowers and butterflies, and rusting psychedelic buses from the 1970
exodus dot the landscape.

Near the entrance gates to this idyll lives Gaskin, who led the
four-month bus caravan from Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco to the
motherland at a time when the Vietnam War was raging, the Haight was
fading and the Manson murders had cast a dark shadow on the
California
counterculture. Gaskin, a buoyant 69, with long gray hair and fringed
Davy Crockett epaulets of beaded buckskin, is living out his days as
something of an international hippie emeritus ("famous but not rich")
in
demand for such honors as judging the annual Cannabis Cup in
Amsterdam.

But for years this was the Stephen Gaskin Farm, and he made the
rules.
He led Sunday morning meditation services, presided over his
followers'
weddings and funerals, and managed the commune's finances. (Though
for
most of 1974, he had to do this from the Nashville Penitentiary after
he
was convicted of marijuana cultivation.)

His wife, Ina May Gaskin, was one of the pioneers of the modern
natural
birth movement and author of the popular "Spiritual Midwifery." Their
children were raised in one of The Farm's radical lifestyle
experiments,
a "group marriage" in which the Gaskins and two other couples
cohabited,
sleeping with each other's spouses and raising their children
together —
something 8% of The Farm adults practiced in the early 1970s,
according
to official Farm history.

Today, however, they seem the picture of bohemian domestic normalcy,
as
Ina May, peering out sternly from granny glasses and upswept gray
hair,
serves fresh-baked scones and talks about why she discouraged Farm
couples from giving children such noms de boheme as Sunshine and
Blossom.

"I didn't think naming your child 'Orgasm' was the best way to
maintain
a good relationship with their grandparents," she said crisply.

Not to mention the neighbors.

The Farm sits on the Barrens, a highland plateau off the Natchez
Trace
that was once favored by moonshiners and highway robbers. The Ku Klux
Klan was founded 20 miles away. When the hippies arrived in this wild
heart of the Bible Belt, Lewis County banned the sale of alcohol, but
land was cheap and zoning liberal — a fact that lured the commune
movement from 1960s meccas like California to the American Heartland
and
heavily rural states like Vermont, Virginia and Oregon.

Gaskin banned abortion and artificial birth control. He spread the
word
that single mothers could deliver and leave their unwanted babies at
The
Farm. Other couples came to experience natural childbirth, and Farm
midwives delivered 2,300 babies here.

In those days, 10,000 people visited The Farm a year. Most crashed
for a
few days, but about 1,500 stayed on to create a self-contained
counterculture universe, complete with clinic, an ambulance service
and
a commune-wide phone system dubbed "Beatnik Bell." All money earned
outside was handed over to The Farm.

By 1982, many of these norms were being challenged. People got tired
of
being poor and wanted to keep their wages.

"People said, 'Why should he have that much authority?' " said Phil
Schweitzer, co-director of The Farm's Media Village, a video
production
business. "We were now in our 30s, and we didn't want a charismatic
leader."

Gaskin was fired and the new trustees demanded cash dues. Hundreds
left.
Those who stayed after "the Changeover" began creating private
businesses. When Carter-era subsidies for solar energy dried up,
high-tech Farmies turned instead to the radiation detectors.

Today, SE International, now a private company, is among the most
lucrative businesses on The Farm. Its modular office park, decorated
with soft blues and modern art, hums with activity. Men with long
graying ponytails sit on large, ergonomic balls, meticulously wiring
board circuitry.

In contrast from the old days, the owner and president of the company
is
a woman and so are most administrators.

Some back-to-the-land settlements still exist communally. One is East
Wind, in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks, a day's drive from The
Farm.
East Wind began 30 years ago with an exodus from Boston. The 1,000-
acre
settlement, atop a stunning 800-foot ridge where deer and cougars
roam,
was just paid off in January. It is now collectively owned by its 75
members. It is prosperous, with a 100% medical and dental plan for
full
members that has covered everything from eyeglasses to colon cancer.

East Wind is home to many in their 30s and 40s. But as at other such
settlements, the typical new applicant tends to be male and older
than
40, like Chris Ward, a San Fernando Valley native who moved there
nearly
a year ago.

"I decided to retire here," explained Ward, a mechanic with long gray
hair, whose unfettered alternative lifestyle suddenly seemed less
attractive at 60. "I don't have a 401(k) and I haven't paid enough
Social Security to collect from it. You need those things now in
order
to survive."

Communal living can be a lot of work at a place like East Wind, which
has become a major national player in the natural nut butter
business.
The commune grosses $2.3 million a year producing a million pounds of
the butters. Its hammocks, also sold to Pier One, gross $223,000 a
year.
This means clients, shipping deadlines, spread- sheets. Big rigs and
overnight de- livery trucks regularly groan over the rutted, unpaved
country road into East Wind.

"A lot of people think communes and think group sex and everything,"
said Cara Austin, 35, the Paris-raised daughter of American
expatriates
who runs the East Wind hammock factory. "It must be a big
disappointment
when they come here and find everyone in a committed relationship."

East Wind enjoys a cordial coexistence with its Ozark neighbors. For
one
thing, most of its annual domestic spending budget, $500,000, is
spent
locally at mom-and-pop businesses, cementing acceptance in the quaint
fieldstone-built Ozark town of Gainesville.

East Wind also helped lead a successful drive to defeat an aggressive
attempt to open a Wal-Mart nearby. East Wind maintains a local
stretch
of highway, and the local sheriff manages to overlook the perennial
dispute over commune skinny-dipping when he comes for dinner at
election
time.

East Wind has its own mythology, with buildings named for references
to
"Star Trek" and the Chinese revolution. A communal outhouse sports
two
toilet seats side by side, and there are communal (and some private)
showers. People live in shared houses and check out one of the 10
cars
for trips. There are strictly observed traditions, such as calling
people by their first names to encourage intimacy.

At The Farm, intimacy is a fact, not an option. Old grudges dating
from
the Changeover resurface. Former spouses work side by side. For
Holzapfel, the deep kinship is a contrast to the alienation and
anonymity that dogs some of her friends in mainstream America.

"We have preserved a lot of old-fashioned values," she said. "People
today feel so disposable. We don't feel that way here. If you face
hard
times, you're more likely to cut your own paycheck than lay people
off."

Yet the future still poses a question. Farm leadership wants to
attract
young families, but banks will not extend loans for single-family
homes
without individual property titles. The Farm is considering building
rental housing; otherwise, "I can imagine The Farm becoming an old
hippie retirement home," Schweitzer said. "I'd hate to see that
happen."

Gaskin has his own solution: He is building retirement cabins for an
elder village he calls Rosinante, the name of the bony, aging horse
of
Don Quixote, who was famed for tilting at windmills and embracing
lost
causes.

The Farm may have lost a few causes along the way, but perhaps its
most
enduring legacy is already deeply manifest in the American
mainstream.
Many of the ideas nurtured at The Farm and other communes are now
widely
accepted.

Ina May Gaskin's "Spiritual Midwifery" has sold 540,000 copies, and
tofu
is served at shopping mall food courts. The ethos of ecological
sustainability is embodied by the state of Tennessee adding seed
money
for the spring purchase, by a Farm-based foundation, of an adjoining
1,168-acre parcel to protect the headwaters of the lush Big Swan
Creek.
The new parcel cradles the Farm in a 4,000-acre haven of protected
native hardwood forest, crucial to birds, wildlife and the local
water
supply.

The Farm may have relinquished the free-floating exuberance of youth,
but perhaps it has acquired an equally valuable idealism of another
vintage.

"Now The Farm has the wisdom of older people," said Douglas
Stevenson,
the 30-year Farm veteran who steered the Swan Creek project to
fruition.
"That kind of experience helps guide you to success. It's one thing
we
didn't have in the old days."

*

Anne-Marie O'Connor can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.







  • [Livingontheland] Aging of Aquarius, Tradingpost, 06/30/2004

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