~sprin5
Fri, Mar 16, 2001 (12:22)
#2
Message 3/4 From Steve Bjerklie Mar 16, 01 06:30:35 AM -0700
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X-Sender: stevebj@mail.well.com (Unverified)
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 06:30:35 -0700
To: terry@well.com
Subject: 1996 story on history of communes in Sonoma County, Part I
X-UIDL: f37165aa397ff5c09be9eeeff78110bc
Terry,
Following is the story I reported and wrote for the then-named
Sonoma County Independent. This version is a bit longer and more complete
than what appeared it print; it's very long in any case, so I'm sending it
to you in two parts. Please don't hesitate to make comments or ask me
questions about the material.
Best regards,
/Steve
___________
Sowing the Seeds of Eden:
Utopias, Communes, and the Search for a Better Way in Sonoma County
by Steve Bjerklie
The best in man can flourish only
when he loses himself in the community.
--Albert Einstein
Dave Henson is so enthusiastic about what he does and how he lives, he...
zings. He reminds me of a G-string plucked in an open tuning: everything
around him resonates in the harmonic. There's a bit of irony in this,
because when I first pulled in to the Occidental Art & Ecology Center and
saw Henson heaving pine branches into the back of a pickup I thought he was
hired help. Earlier I'd talked to Dave on the phone--polite, friendly--but
didn't expect to meet someone who's so, well, vibrant.
Henson's one of those people who seems to spend most of his waking hours
outside of himself. At various points in our conversation he drums a table,
dives his hands into dark, sun-warmed loam just to feel its goodness, and
waves broadly at the sky and at trees as if grand-marshaling a parade. "The
primary dynamic of the universe," he tells me, "is the relationship between
individuality and community." He speaks in rushes of words; my notes from
the conversation are scribbled blurts: "social strug is bout being alive";
"so few able pull off"; "strong base, empower spot--"; "hallmarks of
dem'cracy"; "don't want to isolate ourselves." He punctuates every sentence
with what I've come to call "the '60's tick"--a slight, sharp jag of the
head to toss hair out of the eyes.
Henson's spilling words about "process, the really hard work of a
community" like water over a dam when a happy, stunning woman named Kenda,
who trails behind her a streamer of soft brown hair from out of the back of
a baseball cap, comes up to the weather-worn picnic table where Dave and I
are talking and opens her hands. A small yellow-and-black striped beetle
meanders toward her thumb. "Listen," she says softly. She's right: you can
actually hear the bug, a tiny low buzz. "Isn't that something?" she
marvels, and we agree.
The bug inspires Henson, who's wearing a faded orange t-shirt
("cotton but not organic, unfortunately") with no advertising on it, not
even for a rock band, and dusty khakis with leather work gloves waving from
a back pocket, to swerve in a new direction. "The natural world is our
model. No one part dominates the system. Every time something new is
introduced, the system adapts to it, or around it. The model, of course,
has its limits. Nature takes no prisoners. We assume the need to operate
collectively." He tosses back his straight, coppery, Tom Petty hair.
Henson's face and arms are teak-tan from being outdoors most of the time.
"It's a great place for everybody to explode and actualize themselves."
The thought reminds me of something I'd heard earlier the same
morning from Michael Black, the Sebastopol architect: "Our society has a
need for real community. We need to stress the importance of openness and
telling the truth," he tells me in the living room of the pleasant, quiet
home he shares with his wife Alexandra. "We're trying to form in our
community a real extended family, a collection of diverse people with
diverse needs and backgrounds who can share and teach each other. The
Balinese have a phrase for it, suka duka. `Laugh together, cry together.'"
The outside table at which Henson and I sit, talk, and drink
chilled water freshened with mint leaves, is parked at roughly the
epicenter of the Occidental Art and Ecology Center, Henson's home and job.
The Center is one of the newest efforts in Sonoma County to create a new
kind of human community, one in balance with the environment, spiritual
disciplines, individuality, freedom, and the concept of extended
family--Utopia, in a word. If Henson is a kind of utopian free-jazz
improviser, Michael Black is his classically trained counterpart. Black and
a group of friends are in the process of procuring permits for another kind
of Utopia, what they call "cohousing," in Sebastopol on Robinson Road.
What Henson seems slightly aware of and Black only a bit more so is
that local history is abundant with serious attempts to create Utopia in
Sonoma County, dating back to the 1870s. Utopianism and the search for a
better way to live cut a swath through Sonoma County history as wide and
well-traveled as Highway 101. Why Sonoma? Fertile and affordable (until
recently, anyway) land, a steady influx of immigrants from all over the
world, and easy access to one of the world's most tolerant and intellectual
cities, San Francisco. The same reasons, in fact, that upstate New York has
also been home to a host of utopian experiments, from the Oneida community
to the Shakers. The two regions have accommodated more utopias than any
other regions of the U.S.
Sonoma County's legacy includes free love, communism, faith
healing, financial scams, accusations of medical malpractice, media
frenzies--and that's just the 19th century. The 20th added a samurai
warrior, organic gardening, sweat lodges, drugs, invasions by bulldozers,
and--a special 1990s touch--murder.
But violence of any kind except for chewing on mint leaves seems
far away from the Art & Ecology Center, which occupies the old Farallones
Institute's 80-acre site on Coleman Valley Road. Founded in the summer of
1994, the Center sponsors a broad range of workshops and seminars,
including "Permaculture Design Course," "Theory and Practice of
Ecopsychology," "3-Day Seed Saving Course," and "Rethinking
Corporations/Rethinking Democracy," among many other offerings. Arts
courses include printmaking and, with Bill Wheeler, plein-air landscape
painting. On Wednesdays, "Community Volunteer Day," visitors are invited to
work in the Center's two two-acre flower-and-vegetable gardens, which are
like Persian cities, forested with spires of foxglove. The Center also
hosts outside groups for seminars and retreats. A recent visiting
organization was a joint U.S.-Mexico association working toward improved
border and immigration policy.
The Center's land and buildings are "owned" in equal shares by
eight partners, of which Henson is one. Six of the partners, along with
four other people, live on the property in a residential "intentional
community," the '90s way to say "commune" (the community is also a legal
California general partnership). Decisions in Center management are made by
"process," which Henson describes as "a way to structure accountability, a
way to establish consensus about what needs to be done tomorrow, and a way
to be very pragmatic but also empowering." Process occurs in meetings in
the Center's central lodge led by a facilitator. Facilitating
responsibilities rotate among the partners. Partners buy their way in and,
if they should want out of the community for any reason, are bought out if
they leave. I'm reminded of something about Icaria-Speranza, but Henson
doesn't seem to know the old 19th-century community. He graduated in 1983
from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in sociology, and later went to law
school at New College in San Francisco. In between he spent time with
rebels in El Salvador, worked at the Earth Island Institute, and lived at
the Highlander Center in Tennessee, the venerable wellspring of
20th-century American social movements. "Highlander's a good model of
community," Henson says as we walk toward one of the Art & Ecology Center
amazing gardens. "It has transcended the human drama that has passed
through there."
Michael Black came to contemplate Utopia as embodied by cohousing
through involvement in social movements as well. A successful architect in
Palm Springs in the '60s--his first home was featured in Time--Black got
involved with the local Cahuilla tribe of Native Americans through a HUD
program, as the destitute Cahuillas struggled to rebuild themselves in the
wake of the holocaust of Manifest Destiny. "I was pretty successful with
them because I became an advocate, not an adversary," the elegant,
snow-haired Black says. "I even received the blessing of the tribe. They
put me on the board of directors for their Malki Museum." But what caught
Black's attention was the strong sense of community holding together the
Cahuillas in the face of enormous difficulties. He was reminded of the
safety he felt in the extended Jewish family he grew up in in Los Angeles.
"I had a strong desire for community in my own life," he says.
In 1974 Black saw a story in the Riverside Enterprise about a
social experiment in Denmark called cohousing. "That story changed my life.
That's when I was alerted this was doable." He went to Denmark to observe
the experiment up close. He came back to the U.S. determined to write a
book about cohousing but was beaten to the publisher by Kathryn McCamant
and Charles Durrett, who wrote Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to
Housing Ourselves. No matter. Black, McCamant and Durrett toured northern
California together, lecturing on cohousing.
"Cohousing is a humanistic and pragmatic way of approaching
living," Black comments. "The heart of it is in the building of community."
In a cohousing development, certain shared common indoor and outdoor spaces
promote group activities and exchanges. Residences are private, but meals,
for instance, might be shared, and so might daycare for children. An
important factor is diversity in the incomes and interests of residents;
that way, according to Black, everyone teaches everyone. "The depth to
which a community bonds varies greatly," says Black, who designed a
cohousing development in Chico, Calif., before undertaking the Sebastopol
project. "Chico"--with 25 units occupied--"has not yet bonded as it should
have. But our group in Sebastopol meets frequently, even though completion
of the project is still a ways off. We're bonding now." Other cohousing
developments in the U.S. have been built or are underway in Davis,
Emeryville, and Sacramento, Calif.; Seattle; Boulder, Colo.; Salt Lake
city; and in the states of Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, New Mexico,
Vermont, Illinois, North Carolina, Florida and upstate New York. A second
cohousing project in Sonoma County is planned to be included as part of the
350-home Courtside Village development in Santa Rosa, but snags in the cost
of sewer installations have slowed down the Courtside cohousers for the
time being.
Black expects to move in to the Sebastopol cohousing development
(which is presently nameless, though "Jewel Hill" was used earlier) in
1998, when he's 60. Back in '74 he hoped to raise his children in a
cohousing environment. Now it looks as if it'll be the grandchildren.
Presently, the Sebastopol project has nine financially committed partners
and six in process, and they come from all walks of life: event planner,
therapist, computer programmer, artist, farmer, nurse, teacher, etc. In
comments to the press Black has been careful not to evoke bad memories.
"We're not hippies," he told the Press-Democrat earlier this year. "We're
not without jobs. Most of us hold pretty responsible positions within the
community."
The articulate Black, who also designed Sebastopol's downtown plan,
is equally careful when he uses the U-word. "Utopianism, idealism--it's all
a matter of perspective," he tells me. "What some people call utopian
others might find horrible." He's referring to the partial sacrifice of
individuality that successful cohousing requires, but his words jog
something in the back of my mind. Ironically, later in our conversation
Black himself brings up the old community of Preston. I mention Altruria,
Icaria and Fountain Grove, and finally Morning Star and Wheeler Ranch.
"Oh, Morning Star!" Black's graceful eyebrows suddenly jut up into
accent marks. "You must talk to Alexandra! She was one of the first
settlers there! She and Lou Gottlieb and Ramon Sender. What a time." He
turns toward another room in the house where Alexandra maintains an office,
then looks back at me. "Back then, you know, she was called Rain. Rain
Jacopetti." I'm more than a little surprised to learn that "Rain" is
actually Alexandra's given name, the one she grew up with in southeastern
Idaho.
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe;
every man is a peece of the Continent,
a part of the maine...
--John Donne
Sir Thomas More, prior to becoming Henry VIII's lord chancellor,
wrote Utopia as the world exploded. When Utopia appeared in 1516,
Michelangelo had just completed his frescoes on the Sistine Chapel's
ceiling. Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513. In 1517, the same year
coffee was first introduced in Europe, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses
to the dark wooden door of the castle church in Saxony to begin the
Reformation. Velasquez discovered Cuba in 1511. In 1519 Cortez arrived in
Mexico.
And we think the '60s are something.
Though More's book, written in Latin, wasn't the first description
of an ideal human society--the earliest recorded journey in search of an
earthly paradise was made by Gilgamesh in 2000 B.C.--the title coined the
word's definition as we know it (in the original greek, Utopia means both
"good place" and "no place"). From More to the present day, literally
thousands of attempts have been made all over the globe to create Utopia on
Earth. The success rate seems to be fairly low.
Martin Buber, the Jewish philsopher, wrote as he watched a new
Israel form out of Palestine's sands, "The primary aspiration of all
history is a genuine community of human beings." Robert Hine, a professor
emeritus of history at both UC Riverside and Irvine and a specialist in
utopian attempts in California, tells me that Utopia is a simple concept
but a hard-won paradise. "Utopia, as I've seen it tried, is a kind of
equal-parcelling in balance: shared work, shared goals, and shared religion
or spirituality. The difficulty is when someone doesn't quite pull his or
her own weight, or when the community becomes overwhelmed by outside forces
and factors, or when one person simply gains too much power."
Utopianism first came to Sonoma County in 1875 in the person of
mystic spiritualist Thomas Lake Harris and in the body of his Brotherhood
of the New Life. Harris, a mesmerizing speaker with piercing eyes and de
rigeur 19th century John Muir-style beard, was a human smorgasbord of
spirituality: prior to arriving in Santa Rosa he had sampled Calvinism,
Universalism, Swedenborgism, and plain old Spiritualism. He dabbled in
poetry. He claimed to know Longfellow and Poe. William James called him
"America's best-known mystic."
In 1857 Harris had a series of revelations in which the message and
teachings of Respirationism were revealed to him. The basic idea was that
"supernatural breathing" enabled Man to commune directly with God--who, by
the way, is both Male and Female, according to Harris. After building a
band of followers in the British Isles and the eastern U.S., Harris
established communities in Wassaic and Brocton, N.Y., before buying (for
$21,000!) 700 acres on the sunny east hillside just north of Santa Rosa.
Shortly afterward he doubled the size of his property, which he called
"Fountain Grove," and then bought still more land. By 1884, the
Brotherhood's colony numbered about 30, and, according to Hine's excellent
history, California's Utopian Colonies, had 1,700 acres planted in
cabernet, pinot noir and zinfandel. In 1886 Fountain Grove made 70,000
gallons of wine.
The Brotherhood colonists probably needed all of it. In addition to
giving supernatural breathing lessons, Harris taught a complex sexual
theology in which every human soul is paired with a spiritual counterpart
(he also believed--and this is the truth--that little fairies lived in the
breasts of women). The ultimate human experience is to consummate sexually
with your counterpart, which shoots you right out there on to the celestial
plane. But the problem is, you don't know in whose body your counter-spirit
lodges until you, well, consummate. In all likelihood, taught Harris, your
marriage partner was not your spiritual counterpart. Go forth and find, he
sermonized. Pour the wine! colonists must've enthusiastically responded.
In actual practice, Fountain Grove harbored a lot less free-loving
than neighbors thought. Most people on the outside were influenced by what
they read about the community, not what they actually experienced. In 1891
Harris invited Miss Alzire Chevaillier, a Christian Scientist, Nationalist,
and "professional agitator," according to Hine, and Miss Chevaillier's
mother to Fountain Grove to have a look-see, and--rather unfortunately, it
turned out--Harris allowed as how he thought the beautiful and feisty
Alzire might, indeed, be the spiritual counterpart he had been searching
his whole life for. Well, he wanted to find out for sure, anyway. She was
rather less than interested. And then she went to the newspapers. Her
series of stories about Fountain Grove in the San Francisco Chronicle,
which began a widespread media feeding frenzy on the colony, proved to be
the beginning of the end. By 1892 the charismatic Thomas Lake Harris left
Fountain Grove (with a new wife), never to return. He died in 1906 at the
age of 83.
Once Harris was gone, the Brotherhood took over Fountain Grove, and
eventually the entire property came to be held by the last surviving
Brotherhood member, a Japanese samurai named Kanawe Nagasawa. The highly
educated Nagasawa--diplomat, architect and builder (it was he who built the
round barn that still stands on the old Fountain Grove property) and
skilled winemaker--continued to manage the Fountain Grove Winery until his
death in 1934. He produced, in good years, cabernets to rival Inglenook's
famed bottlings in the Napa Valley.
Back when the brothers and sisters of the Brotherhood of the New
Life pressed those 70,000 gallons of wine, another utopian experiment was
getting underway on a fertile, 885-acre tract just south of Cloverdale.
This was Icaria-Speranza, founded by French-speaking Icarians, who came to
be called such not because they arrived from a distant planet but because
they modeled their communistic community after Etienne Cabet's influential
1840 book, Voyage en Icarie. "The book was basically a description for
enlightened socialism," says Dale Ross, a descendant of Icarians and an
active member of the active National Icarian Heritage Society. "High value
was placed on families, the arts, and so on. " He adds: "Icarians were
communists in the sense that they shared all the wealth and didn't believe
in private property."
The book was written after France had become disillusioned with the
false promises of the Revolution in 1789 and the subsequent Age of
Napoleon. It was another time of wild upheaval: In the same decade, Karl
Marx's Communist Manifesto and Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species were
published. Voyage en Icarie inspired a generation in France; Icarians not
only set out for America to build communes, they emigrated to Spain as
well, establishing a successful community near Barcelona.
In America the Icarians struggled until they discovered a bonanza:
the ghost town left behind by the Mormons at Nauvoo, Ill. Brigham Young had
set out for the Utah Territory in 1846; in 1848 the Icarians moved in to a
perfectly empty but intact village (ironically, one of the first tasks
undertaken by the French Icarians was the planting of vineyards on land the
teetotaling Mormons had previously planted in corn). Yet disenchantment
among the Icarians eventually led to the exile from Nauvoo of Cabet
himself, who had joined the French emigrants. More splits occurred until
finally, in 1881, Armand Dehay and Jules Leroux scouted the Sonoma County
property and bought it for $15,000. The commune's original name, Speranza,
came from L'Esperance, an Icarian newsletter; by 1884 it was known as
Icaria-Speranza. Vineyards were planted, and fruit orchards, a prune
orchard, and vegetable gardens.
But mundane financial difficulties of the capitalist variety found
their way into the communist society. Hopes that the sale of land in Iowa
would allow Icaria-Speranza to pay off the debt on the Sonoma County land
were dashed when the Iowa property had to be sold for cents on the dollar
because of the abundant Midwestern farmland still open at the time to
homesteading. An experiment in breeding Norman and Percheron horses proved
disastrous. Plus, bringing in newcomers was difficult. To be considered for
living at Icaria-Speranza, one had to be fluent in French and conversant in
Etienne Cabet's theories. Not many takers. And once in, if you wanted out
all you had to do was say so. Exiters were paid in cash on the spot for
their share of the community. Some takers.
By 1887 Icaria-Speranza was no longer a functional community, its
property divided among the colonists. The community lives on, however, in
the name Icaria Creek and in several Dehay, Leroux and other
Icaria-Speranza descendants who still live in Sonoma County. The heritage
society meets in Cloverdale quadrennially.
Whether the Altrurians, yet another band of utopia-seekers in
Sonoma County, had heard of the Icarians or the failure of Icaria-Speranze
is not known. They established the community of Altruria about eight miles
up Mark West Creek east of present-day 101, and were also inspired by a
book, A Traveler from Altruria by William Dean Howells. The novel tells a
story of a man, a Mr. Homos, who visits a chi-chi New England summer resort
hotel and thrills the guests with stories of his utopian homeland. Not only
does Mr. Homos spellbind his listeners, he does radical things like help
the baggageman, the bootblack and waitresses with their chores.
In October 1894 a young Unitarian-Christian Socialist minister,
Rev. Edward Biron Payne, led a group of 18 adults and eight children up
Mark West Creek to the 185 idyllic acres the group had already purchased.
Payne was a social activist who grew up in Connecticut and Illinois. In
1875 the 30-year-old Payne, after graduating from Oberlin, arrived in
Berkeley, Calif., to take over the Congregational ministerial position at
the University of California, which had been open only seven years. He had
worked with the poor in Chicago's slums, with textile laborers in New
England, and had risen quickly in the Unitarian hierarchy. His brand of
Christian Socialism focused on saving society rather than the individual,
and was popular in the Bay Area of the 1890s. In certain ways, Payne's
theology was not so different from Social Gospel theology as the latter is
described in Walter Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis, a
hugely important book published at the turn of the century. (Martin Luther
King cited it specifically as an important influence on his work.)
Anyway, the Altrurians formed around Payne out of meetings he
attended and addressed in San Francisco and Berkeley. The down payment on
the Mark West land came from the $50 each Altrurian contributed as a
membership/entrance fee. Shortly after arriving in Sonoma County, the
colonists had orchards and gardens in the ground. Some of the produce was
sold at an Altrurian store in San Francisco. Perhaps it was
this taste of small financial success that led the colony to begin
construction of a hotel in Altruria, which then proved to be the fledgling
community's undoing. Plans for the structure grew ever more grandiose--a
third story would be added, and a library, office, dining hall. The project
sucked up huge amounts of money, most of which had to be borrowed.
Throughout early 1895 the hotel's uncompleted shell daily reminded every
Altrurian of their unattained dream. By June of that year, a short nine
months from their optimistic beginning, the Altrurians and Altruria were
history.
Except in one small way. The manager of the San Francisco produce
store was an energetic, agreeable and pragmatic young man named Job
Harriman. Years later, after almost winning the mayor's election in Los
Angeles, the social activist founded in 1912 Llano del Rio, a
labor-socialist utopia located in Antelope Valley that lasted well into the
1920s; Newllano in Louisiana, an eastern outpost, lasted into the 1930s. As
Altruria may have been California's shortest-lived utopian experiment,
Llano del Rio was, by certain measures, the longest.
And finally, Preston. Prof. Hine doesn't count it as an actual
utopia, for the community northeast of Cloverdale was for the most part a
colony of invalids gathered around the charismatic presence of Madame Emily
Preston, a faith healer and dispenser of patent medicines who could give
Elizabeth Clare Prophet a run for her money. Madame falls in the category
of "Quirky Christian." While some of her beliefs were fairly
straightforward--"All can go to heaven if their hearts are right," reads
part of her creed that was written on the walls of Preston's own
church--others were a bit, well..."We believe in inspiration and that it
lets us read out of the book of life that is printed in the air
everywhere," states another part of the same creed. Her church was called
"The Church of Heaven on Probation." Varene Anderson, who studied Madame's
teachings as part of her Sonoma State master's dissertation, told me
Madame's sermons, of which Varene has copies, "are pretty boring." On the
other hand, some of Madame's followers believed she had an x-ray eye that
could see through the human body.
No one really knew where she came from. Col. Hartwell Preston, who
seems to have earned his rank in the Confederate Army, was her third
husband. She had children by other men that she barely spoke of--the
husbands or the children. The key and most functional ingredient in her
patent-medicines, which contained a veritable goulash of herbs and spices,
was alcohol. People died under her care and still new patients arrived.
The Col. and Madame bought 1,500 acres on Oak Mountain in 1873, and
somehow convinced the railroad to build a spur to their property, which
they named Preston. (The present-day Preston Winery has no connection to
Madame, her history, or her medicines). They built themselves an impressive
Victorian mansion. Eventually, Preston had its own school, hospital,
cemetery, and a number of residential cottages. Madame also maintained an
apartment in San Francisco for patients who couldn't make the trek to
Cloverdale.
Local medical doctors were infuriated by Madame's "healings." But
an attempt to have her prosecuted for selling medicine without a license
failed, though the advice of Sonoma County physicians to their patients not
to use Madame's concoctions surely must've had a financial impact. What
finally did her in, more or less, was passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act
in 1906, which stopped her (and thousands of other purveyors of
patent-medicines) from commercially selling homemade drugs.
Madame died, still quite wealthy, in 1909. The property has
suffered its share of calamities since, including a disastrous wild-fire in
1988 which burned the once-elegant Preston mansion to the ground. The
Church of Heaven on Probation still stands, however, as does a graceful,
adjacent clock tower which still works--and still tolls.
>>And therefore never send to know for whom... for it tolls for
thee.<<<
~sprin5
Fri, Mar 16, 2001 (12:25)
#3
Nothing's for certain
It could always go wrong
Come in when it's raining
Go on out when it's gone
We could have us a high time
living the good life
Well, I know
--Robert Hunter, "High Time"
On assignment for Harper's Magazine, Sara Davidson walked into a
bar in Occidental one night and asked for directions to Wheeler Ranch.
"Heads turned," she wrote later. "People froze, drinks in hand. A woman
with an expressionless, milky face said, `Honey, there isn't any sign. You
just go up the road six miles and there's a gate on the left. Then you
have
to drive a ways to git to it. From where I live you can see their shacks
and what have you. But you can't see anything from the road.'"
That was in 1970. In 1996, Bill Wheeler strolls into the saloon at
the Union Hotel in Occidental to meet me for a beer, and if he's not
exactly the star of the room he's certainly everyone's best old friend.
The
beers are quickly poured from the tap. Bill's lawyer and the lawyer's
family unexpectedly show up--there are hugs, laughs, jokes, and
invitations
from Bill to come out for the annual May Day party at the ranch. "You mean
like we used to, dancing naked around the Maypole?" the lawyer, who fills
out a lawyerly dark blue suit with a chest grown by success, asks. "Nah,
Bill, I can't...I mean, can you see me doing that now?" Hearty laughs
refill the saloon.
The first thing Wheeler says to me is, "I'm not a teacher, I'm not
a leader, I wasn't anyone's guru." He drapes himself across a chair at my
table like a bearskin rug; he's dressed in thick, hard-working clothes
torn
in the legs. He looks like a cedar. "It was all an accident of history."
From 1967 until 1973, Wheeler Ranch west of Occidental (five
miles,
not six, on Coleman Valley Road) was Sonoma County's second great
experiment in open-land communalism. Bill Wheeler simply opened his
320-acre property up to anyone who wanted live there. The population
eventually reached 400, including cows and horses. Besides dozens of
flower
children from San Francisco and elsewhere, the community hosted a few
runaways, ex-cons, and soldiers AWOL from Vietnam. Residents lived in
tents, shacks, and lean-to's angled out like parasails from redwood
stumps.
There were absolutely no rules. Whatever happened at Wheeler happened
because an individual or a couple or a group on the ranch was in the mood
for it to happen. Neighbors and authorities, fed by media alarms about the
whole countercultural movement, worried that mostly what was happening was
a lot of sex and drugs.
"It was a social experiment that couldn't last," Wheeler, who
insists he's but a humble landscape artist, explains. "I knew from the
beginning it couldn't last. But it was the closest thing that came to the
forming of a tribe, to people relating on a new tribal level." He sips his
beer. With a Moses-like forehead, a nose like a battleship prow and dense,
foliant eyes, Bill is what used to be called "ruggedly handsome," in the
way Mt. Whitney or Mt. McKinley are ruggedly handsome. "The problem was,
we
assaulted the traditional sense of private property."
The accident part of the history is that Wheeler opened his ranch
after county sheriff's deputies driving bulldozers invaded his friend Lou
Gottlieb's Morning Star Ranch. Morning Star refugees were the first
communal Wheeler Ranch residents.
Gottlieb, a member and musical director of the early '60s folk-pop
group The Limeliters, had bought the 32-acre property on Graton Road in
1962 (the year Bill Wheeler graduated from Yale with an art degree)
originally as a get-away and retreat. In 1966, along with some friends
including Ramon Sender and Ben (now Roland) and Rain Jacopetti, he opened
the land to all comers.
In part II of an amazing six-part series titled "The Happiness
People" published in early summer, 1967, in the Press-Democrat, Gottlieb
explained his philosophy for Morning Star: "The people here are the first
wave of an ocean of technologically unemployables. The cybernation is in
its early snowball stages." (Really, he used the word "cybernation" in
1967. Prescient.) Showing P-D reporter Dick Torkelson around the ranch,
Gottlieb said, "This is Utopia, folks. You never thought you'd see it. If
you find a better way, then I'll do it your way." He added: "This is an
experiment in lowest-cost housing. The 16-inch stud makes life duller than
it has to be. We call it Shanti-town--get it?" (The article also provides
some wonderful, only-in-the-'60s quotes. At one point Gottlieb asked
Torkelson if he'd ever tripped, and when Torkelson said no the old
Limeliter advised, "Not to try one of the psychedelics is comparable to
not
reading Freud or not learning mathematics.")
It couldn't last, of course. Less than three weeks after the
"Happiness People" series ran, the P-D reported, "Morning Star's Gottlieb
Arrested on Health Charge." The ranch's story unfolds in headlines:
7/9/67: "Planners Ponder Way to Restrict Hippies"
8/14/67: "Gunfire Erupts at Hippie Ranch"
9/8/67: "Is Gottlieb's Hippie `Heaven' Fading?"
9/11/67: "Hippie Colony Protest Meeting Saturday"
9/12/67: "Gottlieb Doesn't Fight County `Outhouse' Charge"
("Maintaining his cool throughout the 20-minute Municipal Court
proceedings, the 43-year-old former Limeliter said he decided to change
his
plea `because I think it's below the dignity of the court to try a case'
involving an outhouse, [though] Mr. Gottlieb's description of a bathroom
facility was much more colorful.")
9/14/67: "New Injunction Aimed at Gottlieb's Ranch"
9/15/67: "Dejected Gottlieb Gets Order to Close"
9/24/67: "`Filth' of Morning Star Described by Neighbors"
And then, on Oct. 8, 1967: "Gottlieb Arrests Hippies for
Trespass."
The article states, "The era of Morning Star-1967 came to a strange end
here yesterday when Lou Gottlieb wearily arrested 15 of his `brothers and
sisters' for trespassing. Faced with a $500-a-day price tag for allowing
his friends to stay on the ranch...Gottlieb called his action a `rude
practicality.'"
Actually, it got stranger still. In 1969, after returning from a
sojourn to India, Gottlieb deeded Morning Star Ranch to God. But a judge
held that the Divine, not being "a natural or artificial person," couldn't
hold title. 7/10/69: "Gottlieb Offers His Piano To Settle Fines." Then,
after collecting evidence that Gottlieb still ran Morning Star as an
open-land community, the county moved in with bulldozers to raze
"Shanti-town." "One naked [Morning Star] member followed the machines
reading from the Old Testament while others played sadly on flutes and
guitars," writes Robert Hine, the historian, in the epilogue to his book
Community on the American Frontier: Separate But Not Alone.
"The situation at Morning Star was really sweet at first,"
remembers Alexandra (Rain). "My then-husband Roland and my son Leif [now
called Hobart] and I took up residence on a tiny sun porch that looked out
over the garden. But a lot of people who eventually came to Morning Star
were just sloughing off the rules of society, including some of the
practical rules." Alexandra, who says she "very quickly became
house-mother" to Morning Star residents shortly after arriving in 1966,
grew tired of cleaning up after everyone else's messes. After a trip to
visit her family in Idaho, she, Ben and Leif left Morning Star and moved
down to Berkeley.
The part of Morning Star that she remembers with fondness is "the
strong sense of a gathering of the tribes. It felt like we were fated to
be
together in that time and place. My disillusionment came with some of the
newcomers. Some of these people had real problems and they needed to
deconstruct themselves, but we had no tools for that other than LSD."
After the bulldozer blitz, the concept of Morning Star Ranch in
effect moved to Wheeler Ranch, which was ten times larger in terms of
acreage. Gottlieb's vision of a non-authoritarian, non-governed Utopia
took
root in Wheeler's gently undulating hills and forested canyons. For a
while
the ranch was called Ahimsa, meaning "harmlessness." Bill Wheeler took his
measure as a person and as the center of a sporadic, organic community of
anarchy-prone people from the land, which he has described as "spacious
and
lyrical." "We are separate from the land now; we have to get back to it in
the manner of the Native Americans," Bill tells me in the saloon. A
best-selling book, Living on the Earth, as much an icon of the '60s as the
first Whole Earth Catalog, was written by Alicia Bay Laurel when she lived
at Wheeler's. Indeed, Wheeler Ranch, after Sara Davidson's article "Open
Land: Getting Back to the Communal Garden" appeared in the June 1970 issue
of Harper's, became in the popular imagination the very definition of
"hippie commune."
But the bulldozers followed to Wheeler's, too. In 1973 Bill
Wheeler
suffered the same invasion his friend Lou Gottlieb had witnessed at
Morning
Star Ranch four years earlier.
When I ask him at the Union Hotel what he most feels about those
days, Bill quickly responds. "Nostalgia. Extreme nostalgia." He takes
another sip of beer. "I remember music all the time, flutes in the forest
and guitars. You'd walk along the road and all you'd hear was beautiful
music. It was a blast."
On May Day this year, in an open meadow on Wheeler's property, I
hear the old call. The meadow's thrumming with bees, birds, bells, drums
and a saxophone. A huge Maypole's hung with pink and blue streamers and
tied with rags torn from what look like a lot of favorite bedspreads. A
couple dozen people chat and carry paper plates sagging with dark mounds
of
beans and blue corn chips. They sip wine and hibiscus tea. Except for the
abundant tie-dye t-shirts, the super-prolific hair on both men and women,
the live music, and the sweat lodge built and supervised by Kingfisher, a
Cheyenne Indian, this could be a reunion in Minnesota of my mother's side
of the family. I listen to parents talk about colleges for their kids, and
to kids complaining about their parents. A beautiful girl in scarves and
beads jangles by. Dogs bounce through the grass. Birds jump from fruit
tree
to fruit tree. It's a spectacular day, blue as sapphire and green as a
pippin. "There are no rules!" someone shouts.
A map of the world that does not include Utopia
is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country
at which humanity is always landing.
--Oscar Wilde
"The social movements of the '90s have learned a lot from the '60s
and '70s," says Dave Henson. "This is an interesting time for intentional
communities, an interesting moment right now. People are expressing a
direct interest in what's going on." He waves toward a bee that hovers
around a spire of foxglove loaded with blooms.
"Community movements of the past had to deal with hard survival,"
comments Michael Black, "with farming without machinery, and with
sometimes-hostile people around. We're talking now about survival of the
spirit, or soul. The communities before were limited spiritually or by a
single charismatic leader. Cohousingt is independent of these ingredients
because the leadership's always changing.
"I believe community is in our genetic code," he continues. "I
think it's extraordinarily important in our own lives to make changes we
want to see in the country, to materialize our ideals. Cohousing is just a
small part of the big picture, but hopefully we'll have an affect."
Hope. Hopeful. Hopefully. One wonders how many times over the past
125 years those words have been spoken and thought in Sonoma County. Every
utopian attempt begins in the shining realm of hope. Still, the record of
utopian survival is pretty spotty. Of all the utopias described in this
article, only the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center is actually up and
running.
The old professor Dr. Robert Hine, who has made the study of
utopias his life's work, becomes defensive when I ask him why utopias
always seem to fail. "I never like to measure the colonies in terms of
success or failure," he responds. "Many people who have moved away from
utopian colonies say the years they spent there were the best years of
their lives, the happiest and most fulfilling. Can you call that failure?"
I ask him why he specializes in a corner of history that
comprises,
essentially, social curiosities. "Oh, it's simple. Any child of the
Depression, like I am, has to say, `There must be a better way to organize
society.' In this country we are not taught about the good of the whole
over the good of the individual." He grows quiet on the phone. His studies
have made him knowledgeable about virtually every recorded attempt to
create utopia in California, and about a lot of others throughout the
world. He can recite the strange history of Fountain Grove as if it were a
favorite bedtime story; he knows and respects Lou Gottlieb and Bill
Wheeler. Finally he says, "People who built utopian communities are
experimenting with an idea that may still come."
When? Probably not until the schism Michael Black describes--"What
some people call utopian, others might find horrible"--disappears. For
now,
the only thing disappearing are traces of Sonoma County's old utopias.
Nothing whatsoever remains of Altruria. Icaria-Speranza exists only in a
brass California historical marker and in the name of a creek; noisy
Highway 101 bisects the old commune. Only Lou Gottlieb himself lives on
Morning Star Ranch. Bill Wheeler throws his May Day party every year, but
that's it. And Fountain Grove lives on only in the name of a parkway,
housing developments, a motel, and executive and medical buildings--the
asphalt, AEK, and dark-glass uglies that Santa Rosa's "planners" would
have
us believe comprise New Utopia. These are deserving of the Fountain Grove
name? Not on your life. (It's an indication of modern society's
superfluous
and often phony efficiency that "Fountain Grove" in these new developments
is often spelled "Fountaingrove.")
But what Michael Black's words really remind me of was something
that happened up at the site of Preston last September. Preston's pretty
much gone, too, except for the church, clock tower, and scraps of
outbuildings. A handsome 26-year-old kid named Ted Van Dorn, who had grown
up around Madame's old spa, took a late-summer hike in the hills one hot
afternoon. He found someone else's new utopia. Or may have; no one knows
for sure. All anyone knows is that whatever secret, or treasure, or utopia
Ted Van Dorn stumbled across that day in the hills where people once
sought
healing--most likely a marijuana field, say authorities--was worth killing
him for. The murder remains unsolved.
Sidebars...
Sonoma County Utopias
Following is a list of notable utopian experiments in Sonoma
County
over the past 123 years. Some readers might find the '60s category a bit
sparse. Certainly more communes than Morning Star Ranch and Wheeler Ranch
existed in Sonoma County during those years, but only MSR and Wheeler
received significant attention.
19th Century
Fountain Grove
1875-1892. Founded by Thomas Lake Harris and his Brotherhood of
the
New Life. Fountain Grove eventually encompassed thousands of acres just
north of Santa Rosa, many of which were planted with excellent vineyards.
Harris was a mesmerizing speaker and spiritualist. Earlier he founded
colonies in upstate New York. His bizarre ideas about sex, however,
eventually got him in trouble in the press, and after he left Fountain
Grove in 1892 the colony ceased to function as a "utopia." Kanawe
Nagasawa,
a Harris follower and Japanese samurai who designed and built the round
barn that still stands just off Bicentennial Road, eventually came to own
the Fountain Grove property and became a notable California (and no doubt
first Asian-American) winemaker until his death in 1934.
Icaria-Speranza
1881-1887. Founded by French immigrant followers of Etienne Cabet,
who described a socially enlightened, communistic utopia in his 1840 novel
Voyage en Icarie. The Icaria-Speranza commune was located just south of
Cloverdale on 885 fertile acres. Vineyards, fruit orchards and gardens
were
planted. But financial problems and difficulties in attracting new commune
members doomed the experiment.
Altruria
October 1894-June 1895. Founded by Unitarian Rev. Edward Biron
Payne and a band of 26 followers who took their inspiration from Christian
Socialist theology and William Dean Howells's novel, A Traveler from
Altruria. The community made a down payment on 185 beautiful acres
approximately eight miles up Mark West Road east of present-day Highway
101. Only months after Altruria's founding, an ill-advised scheme to build
a hotel on the property created extreme financial hardship, soon causing
Altruria to collapse. However, Altruria's ideals indirectly lived on in
Job
Harriman's southern California utopian experiment, Llano del Rio.
Preston
1875-1909. Not "utopia" in the strict academic sociological sense,
Preston, located on Oak Mountain north of Cloverdale, was a community
gathered around faith healer Madame Emily Preston, who supposedly could
see
through people with her "x-ray eye." She also dispensed numerous
patent-medicines, most of which were based on high alcohol content. Local
attempts by doctors to have her shut for illegally selling medicine
failed.
She was stopped, however, by passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Preston
broke up after her death in 1909.
The '60s
Morning Star Ranch
1966-1969. Founded by former Limeliter and hippie spokesman Lou
Gottlieb, who invited all comers to join him on his 32-acre property on
Graton Road. Sonoma County authorities soon cracked down on Gottlieb for
various health-code violations, and sheriff's deputies finally bulldozed
Morning Star's tents, tipis, shacks and cabins in October 1969.
Wheeler Ranch
1967-1973. Artist Bill Wheeler opened his 320-acre ranch on
Coleman
Valley Road to anyone and everyone after authorities began hassling
residents at Morning Star Ranch. After MSR's bulldozing, Wheeler Ranch
continued to operate as the quintessential "hippie commune" until the
bulldozers finally came in 1973. The Ranch was featured in Harper's in
June
1970, and Living on the Earth, a best-seller in the early '70s, was
written
by Alicia Bay Laurel when she lived on Wheeler.
The Present
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.
The Center occupies the 80-acre site on Coleman Valley Road of the
old Farallones Institute. The Center itself has an educational focus;
eight
partners, five of whom work for the Center, live on the property in an
"intentional community"--the '90s phrase for "commune." Decisions in the
community are made through a formal "process" of discussion and
compromise.
Meals are common, residences private.
Cohousing
Two efforts are in the planning/permit stages, one in Sebastopol
(est. completion: early 1998) and one in the Courtside Village development
in Santa Rosa. Architect Michael Black, who is directing the Sebastopol
effort, describes cohousing, a Danish idea, as "a humanistic and pragmatic
way of approaching living." The emphasis is on community--on creating a
bond between people of diverse backgrounds, ethnicity, educations,
professions, ages, and religions.
Books
The following books and publications provide more information
about
Sonoma County's utopian experiments. Some may be out of print or difficult
to find. Books available from the Sonoma County Library are noted with a
parenthetical (SCL).
General
Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History
by Robert Fogarty
1980
Comprehensive.
New World Utopias
by Paul Kagan
1975
Comprehensive.
Seven American Utopias
by Dolores Hayden
1981
Cogent analysis of American utopianism.
19th Century Historical
California's Utopian Colonies
by Robert V. Hine
1983, revised (originally published 1953; second printing 1966)
Fountain Grove, Icaria-Speranza, Altruria. The Preface briefly
discusses Morning Star Ranch and Wheeler Ranch.
(SCL)
Wild Oats in Eden
by Harvey J. Hansen and Jeanne Thurlow Miller; Foreward by Gaye
Lebaron
1962; second printing 1976
Chapter "Eden of the West" describes Fountain Grove,
Icaria-Speranza, Altruria and Preston.
(SCL)
A Photographic History of Icaria-Speranza
Dale W. Ross, ed.
Published by the National Icarian Heritage Society
Les Icarian
(in English)
by Robert V. Sutton
1994
General study of Icarianism in America, including Icaria-Speranza
commune.
Shadows on the Land: Sonoma County's 19th Century Utopian Colonies
by Varene Anderson
1992
Well-researched and written Master's thesis available at Sonoma
State Univ. Library details histories of Fountain Grove,
Icaria-Speranza, Altruria, and Preston.
Go Tell It On the Mountain: An Account of Madame Emily Preston
with
Prefatorial Notes on the Preston Papers
by Janice Payne
1986
Master's thesis; Full description/explanation of Madame Preston's
theology and the Preston community available in Sonoma State
Univ. Library.
The '60s
Communes in the Counterculture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life
by Keith Melville
1972
General.
The Communal Experience: Anarchist and Mystical Counter Cultures
in
America
by Laurence Veysey
1973
General.
Communes USA: A Personal Tour
by Robert Fairfield
1971
Excellent chapters on Morning Star Ranch and Wheeler Ranch
(SCL; the Annex in Santa Rosa has photocopied chapters on Morning
Star Ranch and Wheeler Ranch in their clip files)
Community on the American Frontier: Separate But Not Alone
by Robert V. Hine
1985
Epilogue describes destruction by authorities of Morning Star
Ranch
and Wheeler Ranch.
(SCL)
Loose Change
by Sara Davidson
1977
Chapter 21 contains distillation of Davidson's Harper's June 1970
article about Wheeler Ranch, "Open Land: Getting Back to the
Communal Garden." Better, though, to find the full article on
microfiche at SCL.
(SCL)
Present
Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves
by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett
1988
How cohousing works.