Life on the Bus and Farm: an Informal Recollection

Copyright 1987 by John Coate

(The following is a collection of smallish pieces I wrote when I worked 
at the WELL.  They appeared in a conference there called "True Confessions."
Excerpts were later published as an article in the _Whole Earth Review_.
They describe a time and a place that seems more distant all the time...)


	                 Bus Family

	The holy man scene was a big part of the action in the late 
sixties and in San Francisco the guy who worked the local beat was Steve 
Gaskin.  I first met him when I was 18 and he was conducting Monday 
Night Class at the Straight Theater on Haight Street.  Steve was a guy 
who could attain an extremely high level of consciousness and later talk 
about it in such a way that an entire group could understand  simultaneously 
his descriptions of energy and karma and  what he knew about how to navigate, 
which basically came down  to how to make good decisions so as to not 
lose your  energy.    For a lot of young seekers these were good  
reassuring words.  One advantage to the Class being held on Monday was that 
so many people had gone exploring the day before and wanted to get a handle 
on their experience. After  awhile these gatherings grew very large with 
people coming  down from the hills plus a core of folks who had a  
definite student/teacher relationship with Steve, who by  then everyone 
called Stephen.

	In the summer of 1970 Stephen, who lived with his family in a 
converted schoolbus, was invited on a speaking tour of churches and 
colleges around the country.  A lot of the MNC crowd lived in buses too 
so naturally they wanted to go along.  Pretty soon this trip was dubbed 
"The Caravan".  There were lots of people who either didn't have 
money, or had money but no vehicle, or whatever and still wanted to 
make the trip.  Steve used to have these people gather after the meeting 
to work out the details.

	Starting a month before the October departure about 70 people met 
under a tree, decided on a treasurer, and put their cash together.  There 
was no voting, just someone who volunteered and looked honest.  It 
was a lot of cash too.  Probably eight or nine grand.

	During the week small crews would fan out around the area 
looking for buses to buy.  The first two were bought at the Gillig Bros lot 
in Hayward.  Old 5 speed clunkers form the late 40's.  The buses were 
registered as "The Bus Family".  For two weeks (the time it took to buy 
more buses) all 70 people lived together in these two buses. That's 35 to a 
bus.  How did we manage?  Partly by taking these huge group acid trips 
and getting into each others'heads, as it were.  I learned to double clutch 
a schoolbus while driving around SF stoned on acid with 35 other 
trippers on board.  The air would get so thick in there that it would 
literally get cloudy inside if there was some sort of mental confusion 
going on.  When someone would "cut loose" of whatever they were 
holding onto, it would literally clear the air.Those group sessions were 
something else.  A real cavalcade of characters.  Some of the buses made 
the whole trip and some didn't.  Several of the people on my bus are still 
close friends.  Some I haven't seen since those days.  But we were all 
actively studying group dynamics so there was very little of the "hey quit 
crowding me" feeling.  In fact part of how the group self-selected was 
who could not only hack, but thrive on the group intensity.  

	On those sardine bus trips we all sat in a circle.  Since the seats 
were taken out that was the only way everyone could fit.  That meant 
that everyone was looking at each other for long amounts of time.  The 
telepathy would get so intense that when someone would develop an 
uptight thought, lots of people would instantly get stomach aches.  
Because Steve was a general semanticist, his way involved a lot of 
talking and articulating the "truth" of the situation.  It was believed that 
a group could come to an understanding by everyone taking turns 
commenting on the state of mind of any or all of the others present.  Sort 
of like everyone picking each other's psychic lice.  As long as compassion 
was present it worked pretty well.  Because most people were pretty 
hip,and in that ultra-sensitive place one gets while on psychedelics, it 
was almost impossible for someone to "lay an uptight trip" on the group 
without it resulting in that very tangible cloudy vision I was talking 
about before.  Sometimes someone would go on a rap designed to shed 
light on something and the talker would wind up in sort of a dead end.  
Everyone would look at each other confusedly until two or three would 
say "let's cut loose of it" and upon doing so, everyone would relax the 
body tension that went along with mental puzzlement and the auras 
would get nice again.

	Later, this process got sort of codified, and everyone was expected 
to "say what they saw" about anyone else.  Your mind had to be an open 
book.  A mental nudist colony, as Stephen so aptly described it.  In the process, though, you could let go 
of tons of irrelevant petty stuff that was part of your personality that you 
may have mistaken for the real you.  Psychedelic boot camp.

	In the next few weeks we bought seven more buses and 
distributed ourselves eight or nine to each bus.  Each one had a certain 
name.  The bus I moved onto was called the "Sausalito Bus" because we 
parked it out by the Heliport to work on it.  We couldn't afford much 
paint so we only bought a few colors and lots of brushes.  We'd move a 
bus into the slot and everyone would lay into it with a paintbrush.  It 
took about twenty minutes to paint a bus.

	While we lived on the fringes of Sausalito we didn't see much of 
the larger group.  I knew that for those two weeks when it was all 70 
people in two buses that it was never going to happen quite like this 
again. As a bus was bought a group of people would volunteer to drive  
the bus away to some place while they could fix it up.  The idea was that 
when you moved onto your bus that the "group head" of that bus 
became autonomous. Except for this one little bus that was a storage bus 
for everyone's extra junk.  it was the last one to be occupied.  Eventually 
a group moved in and threw out the junk.  that was one of the ones that 
made it all the way.  By all the way I mean SF to NYC, south through 
Tenn, back to SF and then back to Tenn to start the Farm.  The Sausalito 
Bus is now a container for motors and trannys behind the Farm Motor 
Pool.

	The Carvan left SF on Oct 12th and headed for Oregon.  We had to 
stay behind because our motor was still in pieces. When we got it 
running three weeks later, we were heading down a hill in SF and the 
brakes went completely out.  I coasted through about four red lights and 
came to a stop on the Embarcadero.  Did the brake job right there.  A bus 
mechanic came over from a place across the street.  He looked into the 
rear engine compartment and said, "Red Diamond 450 eh?  It's a good 
motor but she has a tendancy to throw rods."

	We finally did leave, but could never quite catch the Caravan, 
which was OK with me because we had a lot of adventures on our own.  
On Dec 31st our motor blew up in downtown Boston, throwing nine 
quarts of oil on to the street.  Some of us decided to hitch into Cambridge 
for supplies and we were picked up by some people who let us stay in 
their house while we got our bus fixed.  We formed a painting company 
to raise the money for a new motor. Took us six weeks.  

I lived on that bus for almost two years.  Here are just a couple of 
adventures we had on our cross-country trip: One night we were in NYC, 
driving around at about 2am deep inthe West Village.  We came to a "T" 
intersection and we couldn'tmake the turn, even after many back and 
forth attempts.  A crowdstarted to gather and people were watching as they 
leaned out of their windows.

	The thing that was really preventing us from making the turn 
was this little Renault Dauphine that was parked right on the 
corner. After deliberating and talking it over with some of the folks 
onthe street, about 15 of us surrounded the Renault, picked it upand put 
it on the sidewalk.  We then easily made the turn.  Wethen picked the 
car up again and put it right back where it was.

	Everybody cheered as we drove off...

 On our way back west we stoppedoff in Salina, Kansas, to visit a friend.

	While parked in front of her house, two Salina cop cars stoppedat 
the bus and instructed Joel, who was onboard, to go in thehouse and tell 
us to get into the bus and follow them down to thestation.  No special 
reason was given.  They apparantly didn'tsee the need for one.

	When we got there, we parked the bus and went inside where 
weall (there were ten of us-five men and five women) weresequestered 
in a room.  This very burly detective guy with abutch cut came in and 
said, "Ok, I want to speak to all the men,one at a time."  I was the last 
called.  As each of the otherguys came back in the room I asked in a 
whisper, "did he askabout the dope?"  Each time the answer was no.

	I don't know why really, but when he interviewed me, right 
awayhe asks me if we do drugs.  I said, "I smoke grass."Then he asks, "do 
you have any grass on your bus?"

	Now when we left Sausalito, we had a kilo of grass and by 
thistime we still had about a pound left, stashed in a compartment.

	In that fraction of a second before answering, I thought, "if I
lie to him and say no, then they're going to tear our bus apart
piece by piece until they find it and we're all going to wind up 
in Leavenworth."

	So I gulped a little and said, "yes." "How much do you 
have?"(gulp again) "A pound.""OK, when we get through talking, I 
want you all to take me out there and hand it over."

	I'm thinking we're all busted for sure now, but when we let 
the guy on our bus he sat down, looked all around at this mobile piece of 
Haight Street with all its physical and astral furniture done up in neo-
Sarah Bernhardt, got a totally different look on his face and just said 
"wow" softly. He was completely enchanted.

	I gave him the bag of smoke all the while answering his questions 
about our lifestyle and values and then he said, "well,I'm sorry, but I'll 
have to keep this.  But y'all can go."

	So it's true, folks, the truth really can set you free sometimes.

	A lot of why we couldn't quite catch the Caravan was that 
everywhere we went the local "freaks" (as we sometimes called 
ourselves) would come around and invite us over to their scene.  Like in 
Charleston W.VA. where we went into a living room full of people and 
had an all night party.  Or the week in Salt Lake City with these 
mountain men type guys (you know the ones who wear leather 
everything and smoke their dope out of deer horn pipes), or the people 
we stayed with in Chicago where this guy was tripping on mescaline 
who had just escaped from Poland or someplace and he kept reliving his 
buddy getting machine-gunned as they climbed the fence at the border.  
Or the people in Vermont that took us in for awhile.  It goes on and on.  
I loved that brief era.  There was a lot of trust.

	                                      
                      The Farm


	The Caravan ended up down a dirt road in rural Tenn. staring at 
the business end of Homer Sanders' shotgun. That was the start of the 
Farm.  I didn't make it there until later that winter.  When we got back 
to SF, the Caravan (close to 100 buses by then) had already left for Tenn.  I 
had to get off the bus for awhile to pay some debts and to get out of the 
draft.  The bus took off for Phoenix to nestle in to ad-hoc commune life 
down there under the direction of two charismatic members of the bus 
clan who said they preferred sunshine and self-determination over 
endless firewood hustling while "copping to the Farm agreement."

	Nov 1971 I thumbed down to Laveen ariz with Joel, another 
wayward bus member, and a guy named Sam to reclaim the bus and 
drive it to its rightful place at the Farm.  The timing was right because 
the people living on it were ready to move elsewhere.  Needing money, 
the three of us who were to drive it east lived at the Laveen commune 
for about three months while we raised money.

	This was a scene in itself.  It was situated on this ancient ten acre 
citrus grove.  There were about ten regular residents plus another ten or 
so people who came and went as they journeyed around Arizona in this 
little trade route.  We paid the rent by taking a pickup truck out to these 
giant carrot fields and loading up on the bent and forked carrots that 
don't sell.  Cost:five bucks.  Then we washed them and juiced them all 
through this bank of Champion juicers and poured it into gallon jugs.  
Then we trucked the product all over Phoenix, selling to a regular 
clientele door-to-door, beneath the auspicies of the law.  Also we sorted 
dates and figs, keeping a third of the good ones.  Our diet mostly 
consisted of oranges, grapefruits, carrot juice, peyote, dates, figs, and 
avacados.

	That was the most unstructured group scene I've ever been part 
of.  No rules at all, but lots of fun because everyone was nice.  I made 
extra money working as a janitor at nights.

	We shipped out in Jan of 72 and arrived at the Farm a week later.  
The ultimate commune of it's time, although we always called it a 
"community" because it was spiritual instead of political. Our arrival 
at the Farm was pretty classic.  At that time the gate was right by the 
main house where a lot of administrative type business took place.  We 
pulled up just as the sun was going down on a clear and warm February 
evening.  A lot of people we knew were hanging out on the front porch 
of the house, including a few who had lived with us on the bus.  So our 
arrival caused a real stir.  But checking in at the gate was interesting 
because when the gate man asked us our names, Sam said his name was 
"Sam".  

	Leslie the gate guy said "is that your full name?  we use our full 
names  here."

	Sam said, "well, no.  Actually the the name on my birth certificate 
is Frank, but nobody ever calls me Frank.  I've always been Sam since I 
was a baby."

	Leslie said, "but since we go by our real names here, you have to 
be Frank."

	"But I don't want to be Frank..."

	All this time I can see all my friends anxiously awaiting us to 
come in for a big greeting so I say, "look, can't we sort this out later?  We 
want to say hi to everyone."

	Leslie says, "no, we really can't go further until we resolve heavy 
matters like what your real name is."

	So, Sam finally says, "ok, ok, put down Frank then."

	Finally we drove in.  Later Stephen arbitrated the whole thing by 
changing Sam to Samuel, which is what everyone called him for years.

	Another interesting conversation we had with some of the 
numerous Farm residents who dropped by to make our aquaintance in 
those first few weeks involved a story Joel told about a time we parked 
our by out in front of the Capitol Theater in Port Chester NY during a 
Grateful Dead concert.  Some of us went into the concert and some of us 
stayed out there to mind the bus.  As Joel related the story, a cop came on 
the bus while we were sitting around drinking tea.  We had just polished 
off a joint and our dope can was sitting out there with the teapot and 
cups.  

	Joel said,"The cop says to us 'I think you're doing something 
illegal in here' and looks at all of our stuff.  Well, our dope can looked 
just like a sugar can so I sort of manifested the can to be a sugar can and 
said we were just having tea."  

	One of the guys we were telling this to stops us and says, "hold it 
right there.  You 'manifested the can as a sugar can?  That means that 
even without saying it you faked the truth to the cop.  That's kind of 
living a lie, don't you think?  That isn't how we do things here."  

	I could see that this "truth telling" business had already gotten 
pretty baroque in some people's minds.

	As a gift to the people there we brought  with us from Arizona 
large quantities of oranges, figs, dates, nuts, and most notably , peyote.  
Of course this made us very popular with a lot of people.  And we were 
happy to give it out.  But one guy kept coming back again and again to 
get some more buttons.  It was getting a bit much for me.  One time I saw 
him coming and I knew what he wanted.  So I picked out a big button 
and when he came into the bus, before he or I said anything at all, I 
threw the button at him and bounced it right off his forehead.  Well, this 
was a "violent action" requiring much sorting.  A bad way to 
handle\"sacrament" showing "no respect"...But I just shined it on.

	It's hard to discuss the Farm in quick bursts.  For now, suffice to 
say that it was wonderful and awful at the same time.  The main thing 
that always sticks with me about it is what an incredible pool of talent 
made up the bulk of the members.

	At first, before there was a Caravan, the Farm was going to just be 
this small ashram sort of deal in the Sonoma hills.  I was invited to be 
part of that group.  But during the Caravan everything changed.  This 80 
to 100 vehicle group of maybe 250 people after spending more than six 
months on the road together, through birthings, busts, being frozen in at 
Rock Springs, Wyoming, and being herded straight through Kansas by 
the troopers who sealed off every exit on the interstate, had become a 
community on the road.  

	Why Tenn?  Because land was cheap (the Farm was bought for 
$70/acre-that's $70K for 1000 acres) and it was far off the beaten path.  
And there is a traditon for unorthodox religious practices there.  It meant 
that you couldn't just drop in and out of the place.  To go there at all 
required a certain commitment.  Also, it was a media center  and was far 
enough away from either coast that it couldn't be   confused with any 
other scene.  At first I was disappointed that it was to be back there.  I was 
hoping for Nor Cal or maybe Oregon.  The Caravan headed to Nashville 
to look for a home and the press ran ahead of us with the message to the 
Nashville city fathers, "there's over two hundred hippies headed to 
Nashville to live! What are you going to do about it??"  What they did 
was set aside a huge Army Corps of Engineers campground by a lake for 
our exclusive use.  While we stayed there the people from Nashville 
would come out to check us out.  One Weekend over ten thousand local 
people came out.

	During an excursion to a Nashville music store, some of our 
people met a girl named Amy Martin who said her family owned some 
land about 70 miles south that we could live on until a permanent place 
was found.  So the Caravan headed down to Summertown. The 
caretaker of that land was one Homer Sanders, a grizzled old fellow who 
was a self-sufficiency marvel who knew how to do everything.  But he 
didn't like the idea of all these hippies coming down bringing attention 
and drugs and stuff into his turf.  So he met the group with a loaded 
shotgun.  this was where Stephen showed what a diplomat he could be.  
he convinced Homer that it would be Ok, so he let us pass.  The next day, 
the guy who owned the access road closed it to us.  So the first thing we 
had to do was cut a road out to the highway.  

This Farm was called the Martin Farm and the group lived here all 
summer.  It was here that the big grass bust happened.  City slickers that 
we were, we didn't think anyone would notice if we had a little grass 
field, even thougha railroad track went right through the property.  And 
we also didn't take into consideration that this was moonshine and 
hunting country and this land was like a big backyard to everyone in the 
area.

	It turned out that a big piece of land was for sale right up the road.  
It was perfect.  Up on a ridge, lots of cleared land, a spring, and what 
seemed like miles of oak and hickory forest.  The place was called the 
Black Swan Ranch but when the buses rolled onto it in Oct 1971, most 
never to leave, it became The Farm.

	Like I said before, I didn't arrive until late Jan '72 with two guys 
and one lady (who was my girlfriend at the time).  We parked down on 
one of the roads that were residential streets with buses instead of houses 
and settled in.     I joined the farming crew.  Joel worked at the store.  
Sam joined the construction crew.  Robin didn't like the scene much and 
left.  The catch to living there was "copping to Stephen".  You had to 
enter into a student/teacher relationship with him.  That wasn't a 
problem for me because I was already in one, although right from the 
start I could see that now that everyone was living there and not going 
anyplace else that the group living pressure cooker was going to go up, 
not down.

	The population increased from the start.  Really all you had to do 
was show up, turn in all your possesions (except clothes and personal 
stuff) and "cop to Stephen".  By the following summer the  Farm had 
nearly 400 residents.  In those early days before the thing got huge, you 
could not only know everyone there, but you also knew "where they 
were at" meaning that you had a feel for what their ongoing 
attitude/mental condition was.

	There were about 70-80 single people there.  About 45 male/35 
female.  Since it was a "family monastery" emphasizing being a 
"householder yogi" single people felt a lot of pressure (sometimes real, 
sometimes imagined) to marry up, and many did.

	After living in our bus for some months, we gave it to a family 
and dispersed into the various singles dwellings. These were co-ed at 
first, although the women later decided to segregate into their own 
places.

	What kind of places were they?  Tents.  Big 16x32 army tents that 
we had bought in bulk at auction.  The first ones were erected right on a 
leveled dirt floor.  My tent had eight other people.  We had this big 
skylight over the kitchen.  One night during a brutal storm the skylight 
blew off.  We woke up the next morning to find snow all over the 
dishes.

	When everyone arrived at the Farm, miles from any town known 
to west coast civilization the Caravan was over.  We had landed.  The 
plan was to live there for generations on end.  It was no longer a 
situation where you could turn your bus around or just not show up for 
the next MNC.  It was considered a lifetime commitment and given the 
extraordinay degree of awareness that everyone had for everyone else's 
state of mind, if you didn't carry that dedication around with you it was 
obvious to great numbers of people.  And it was a tough thing to fake 
to.   


                            The Motor Pool

	I worked on the farming crew for close to a year.  I spent a lot of 
time fixing tractors and equipment.  So much so that I decided to switch 
over to the motor pool.  All of the Farm's 100+ vehicles got serviced 
there.  I didn't know much, but then neither did anyone else.  The boss 
was Jose Mundo, a Puerto Rican from New York.  I thought he had 
diesel in his veins, because he could fix anything at all and sometimes 
not even get dirty.  Meanwhile the rest of us are knocking the skin off 
our knuckles daily.  Jose would go around the pool checking out 
everyone's progress.  He was the person who really taught me how to 
work on a job until it was finished, even if it meant staying with it into 
the night.  I can still hear him now yelling at me, "hey John!  Take your 
hands out of your pockets!  You can't work like that!"  

	Most of the vehicles were either very old trucks or very old cars.  
There was hardly any money for parts so you had to take stuff apart and 
just find some way to make it work.  We also did some interesting things 
with schoolbuses like cutting off the roof right behind the driver's seat 
and converting it into a giant pickup truck.  The first job I had in the 
pool was changing the rear leaf springs on a big old White garbage truck.  
Took me almost a week!

	To raise money a couple of the guys hit on the idea of selling 
scrap metal to the local scrap yard.  We went around the countryside and 
bought wrecked cars that seem to be in every yard, loaded them on a 
semi trailer with this big Ford boom truck, and hauled them to the 
hammermill down in Pulaski.  Most of our activity centered in Hickman 
County, which is one ofthe poorest in the state.  Every morning we'd 
drive up in our little convoy of 48 Chevy pickup, boom truck, and semi, 
a 64 White Super Mustang.  If we didn't have any cars lined up we'd 
hunt for them, but often we'd find whole fields of them that we'd work 
for a couple of weeks.  Hickman County is one of those counties where 
there are onlyabout seven different names in the phone book.  There 
were fivepages of Tidwells alone. Crashing cars is kind of a sport inthose 
parts and like I said sometimes there were whole fields where the guy 
would brag that he or one of his boys had personally wrecked every one 
of them.We'd buy the cars for two bucks each and then get fifteen at the 
scrapyard.  You had to remove the seats and gas tanks or they wouldn't 
take them.  We took out the motors and sold them seperately as cast 
iron.

	 I have a lot of classic memories from then. There was the day we 
pulled some cars out of Grinder's Switch (it's a real place...but Minnie 
Pearl is really from Centerville).  Or the day I wasdriving around looking 
for cars and I spotted a total of 22 '57 Chevys ranging all the way from 
perfectly cherry to tail up in a creek.  Or the time I took a back seat out of 
a '55 Caddy to finda huge copperhead coiled and looking very upset.  
Going into people's homes was also fascinating.  Once I made a deal with 
a guy for five cars while he was laying in his bed at 11 am drinking 
straight whiskey while the tv was on a permanent vertical roll.

 But the strangest day was... it had been a very long day but we managed 
to get a total of eight cars on the trailer (7 was usual).It was almost 
sundown.  Pulaski was 30 miles and I would have to really trot to make 
it.  After the boomer picked the eighth car up and set it on top I 
unhooked the cable and let it drop down.  It was hanging straight down 
about six inches from the side ofthe trailer.

	I jumped down and hopped in the cab and fired up the semi.  I 
yelled "see you" to the other guys and started to pull away.  I looked in 
the right side mirror and all looked fine.  The other guys were waving to 
me to have a good one.  Or so I thought.  As I'm looking in the mirror I 
notice the boom truck start to rockon its side toward me.  Slowly it keeps 
coming.  Am I seeing this?  Then with a thud it falls completely over on 
its side like a great bull elephant that has just been bagged.

	Turned out that as the trailer went past the boomer hook itcaught 
the end of the trailer and pulled it right over.  

	That boom truck was a sorry sight limping home with the 
driverdoor crushed.  They made me drive it.

	In 74 Stephen and three others were sent to the Tenn State Pen for 
a year over a grass bust that had ocurred a couple of years before. 
During that year the reigns of power shifted to the rest of his 
family and the longer he was gone, the less influence he had on all of us.

	From the very beginning,  many people on the Farm had the 
notion that in the serious quest for group enlightenment, sense of 
humor took a low priority.  Not that people didn't want to have fun, but 
all that ego-peeling that went on made one cautious to crack very many 
jokes.  But down in the pool, if you didn't have a sense of humor about 
the whole thing you were really in trouble.    I mean, how many frozen 
blocks and empty gas tanks can you put up with before it all becomes just 
too funny? The other controversy was sports.  A lot of us were closet 
sports fans.  The only physical activity was hard work or yoga.  Some of 
us wanted to play a little touch football.  This was an unspeakable 
notion-to play a "violent" game.  We even got this old black and white 
tv working and set it up in the motor pool office so we could watch 
baseball, football, and car races.  I don't think I've ever enjoyed watching 
a World Series more than seeing the Reds play the Red Sox on that fuzzy 
old tube.  So these two notions, satirical humor and enjoying competitve 
sports, emerged together and began a major change in at least the lives of 
the pool crew.  

	We had some great characters at the pool.  And because we 
worked on the cars we had to take a lot of test drives. We would go into 
town and buy soda and cookies, bring them back and work into the 
night.  The whole pool scene was such a comedy of errors and much of 
the rest of the Farm seemed that way too.  All these city college kids 
trying to carve a town out of the oak and hickory.  So we would joke 
about it. We got a bunch of CB radios and used them to talk to each 
other.  Everyone got a handle.  I walked into the pool one morning with 
this big cowboy hat I had found and the boys greeted me in unison, 
"Howdy Tex!"  I came back with "how y'all boys doin' this mornin'?" 
and that became my handle.  Anthony became "Wildman", Paul was 
"Limey", Rupert was "Mr. Safety", Dennis was "D.D.", Wilbur was 
"Bossman", James was "Mr. Wizard" and Frank was "Mr. Kaputi".  
Frank was the boss by then.  Jose Mundo went on to do something else 
and the pool needed a boss.  Wildman and had been scrapping and Rupe 
was doing the medical vehicles and DD was really running the shop.  
Frank was the welder.  

	But up at Stephen's house, where the Farm was really managed 
back then, it was perceived that the motor pool was overly populated 
with "independent operators".  They decided to shut down the scrapping 
business for the most part and have us all work in the shop.  Wildman 
and DD ran the shop for awhile but word came down that Frank was to 
be the new boss.  Frank wasn't really a take-charge guy so he just let us 
do whatever we wanted.    The whole deal seemed ridiculous with 
people coming up to Frank and asking him when they can get their car 
fixed or whatever and him saying "I don't know. Ask Dennis..."  We 
named him Mr. Kaputi and the pool became the "Kaputi Shop".  We 
even got a registered car dealer license as Kaputi Motors.

	Around this time the father of one of the guys sent down a bunch 
of nuts and bolts and other sundry hardware from his company's 
surplus.  While digging through these cans I found a bunch of tie clips in 
a bag that were painted gold with a bolt stuck to it.  I had the idea of 
creating "The Secret Order of the Golden Bolts".  I wrote a speech for 
Kaputi and found him this funny suit of clothes and sun glasses and we 
had this ceremony giving a bolt to selected members.  The criterion for 
getting in was that you had to have made some sort of huge blunder.  
Mine was tipping over the boom truck.     From then on we had solid 
laughs.  We started playing football on the big lawn in front of the pool.  
We had great games every day.  Some people were very dismayed by this 
behavior but others were right with it.  The construction crew was 
undergoing a similar loosening up.    We formed our football team, The 
Golden Bolts, and challenged the other guys on the Farm to a game.  So 
one Saturday we had the big Bolts vs All-Stars game down in the 
meadow.  We all wore yellow shirts and had plays worked out.  We 
killed them. I think the score was 49-7.  Those were fine moments, the 
best to be had.  In many ways I still go by Tex to honor that.

Despite all hardships, that's why I stayed.  

Because the good times were so incredibly good.  When someone would holler 
"Joint Break!" across the shop and we would retire to the woods for our 
communion, I felt that we were living on liberated soil.  I could look 
around at the woods and my buddies and say, "this is ours." 
What could be finer than that?


                        The Trucking Company

	Around this time we got the idea that if we bought a big semi and 
leased it out, we could make money hauling freight and have a big truck 
to serve the Farm's needs.  I wanted in on this in a big way.  I knew I 
could drive, but was I "cool" enough?  There were big doubts among the 
pantheon of Farm managers who vetoed anyone doing anything 
"heavy" if they didn't have their "energy" together.  So it was decided 
that I should thumb down to Louisiana and work on the oil rigs where 
you could make good money fast.  So, that's what I did.  There were 
some other Farm guys living in Houma La, in a trailer working as 
roustabouts and welder's helpers for an outfit that built offshore rigs.I 
was let off early on a weekday morning on the southbound onramp to I 
65.  As I put down my pack and stuck out my thumb, I looked down at 
the dirt by my feet.  Right between my legs sat a nice baggie lid of grass 
that someone had apparantly just thrown out of a car window.  "Good 
omen" I though as I stuffed the little bag into one of my rolled up socks. 

	I lived down there two or three months and sent all my money 
north.  It was a time of searching for me.  Actually, we had a lot of fun 
down there.  We worked on a big drill barge that was being outfitted with 
all new equipment.  The maniacal speed with which they moved the 
project forward was about the craziest dang thing I'd ever seen.  In order 
to make sure they always had someone around to do odd jobs, they hired 
about 30% more roustabouts (nothing more than a general laborer) than 
they needed.  Most were supplied by the big Atchafalaya Labor Co.  When 
they really needed men they tooka bus to New Orleans and literally 
picked the sleeping drunks off the sidewalk and brought them down to 
their bunkhouse camp.  Since there were so many guys around and they 
hardly kept any real track of you, you could cruise all over the barge and 
check out the action.  The derrick went up 150 feet.  One night (we 
worked from noon to midnight, seven days a week) a few of us took 
some mushrooms and climbed to the top of the derrick and just sat for 
hours meditating on the black expanses of the bayous.we also made 
frequent stops to the local Tastee Freeze and went to the movies.  

We even hit a few bars in New Orleans.  Some of us got pretty drunk 
one night.  I remember sitting with one of our guys and he said, 

" I don't care about enlightenment.  I don't need enlightenment.  I just 
want to be a good guy.  That's all.  Just a good guy."

"But Robert, you already are a good guy."

"No, I mean really good.  Not just good.  Really good.  I'm not there yet.    
Hmmm, maybe that's a little like enlightenment."

"Maybe so.." 

I did a lot of thinking those months and damn near shipped out on a 
freighter to  South America.  I only changed my mind when Wildman 
asked me   over the phone to come back and join the Trucking 
Company.

	When I came home we had bought a 72 Mack cabover semi and a 
40' flatbed trailer, and signed on with Cheorokee Hauling out of 
Nashville.  I left the pool for good then in early '76 and became a full 
time truck driver with Wildman, Limey, Grease Monkey, and Bossman.  
Release!  That meant that I could spend every other week off the Farm 
driving all over the country.  It was a great experience and a special time 
of bonding for us on the crew.  Real truckers taking the grand industrial 
tour of America.  Since we always went as two man teams, it never got 
too strung out, although we did have a some hair-raising adventures.  
Restaurant food too. 

 Here are just a few:

I was heading to Bristol,VA with a huge overload of steel("take this load 
or sit all weekend").  It was early Fri.morning and I had about 200 miles 
to go.  Actually, this was the one trip my wife Tish took with me.  She 
was pregnant with our daughter Jennifer at the time. The plan was to 
unload and then deadhead (that's right! Itmeans drive with an empty 
trailer) to middle Tenn. for the weekend.  I'm rolling along about 75mph 
contemplating the beauty of interstate 81 when I look in the side mirror 
just in time to see two trailer tires on the same axle blow at the same 
time.Just what I need, two flats!  So here we are overloaded by about 8K 
lbs., log books way behind, in possesion of a fuzzbuster (illegal in VA), 
holding a lid of grass, doctored bill of lading, only twenty bucks in my 
pocket, and I only have one spare tire!Right away I get on the CB and 
start breaking for someone who just might have more than one spare, 
hoping that a State Trooper doesn't come by first.  After an hour or so of 
frantic calling,an older trucker stops and has an extra spare.  I tell him I 
only have 20 bucks (the rim alone was worth more) and he says opening 
a wallet fat with big bills, "You think I need money?  Ha Ha!  Sold!"  I 
put on the tires and we headed down to a truck stop just above the scales 
that I was planning to dodge.  Turns out that the weight men have 
portablescales set up on the regular "dodge route" and I have to go over 
some tiny road into Roanoke.  This guy who I call the "Angel ofMercy 
with a Five O'clock Shadow" drives over the road ahead of me and then 
calls us at the truck stop and tells me it's ok to come on ahead.  We made 
it to Bristol at 4:45 Fri. night fifteen minutes before they closed up for the 
weekend. His handle was Mickey Mouse.  I never saw him again.           

	Once Wildman and I picked up a load of Masonite siding in Paris, 
Tenn. on a  Friday, spent Saturday  at home in southern Tenn. Headed 
out on Sun morning for our drop on the docks of Galveston, Texas.  It 
was a beautiful morning and, hey, we weren't even overweight!  Headed 
toward Memphis, turned south through Tupelo, Miss. and rolled on 
down through the heart of Dixie.  Hadn't seen a single open "chicken 
coop" all day, but right on this side of the Louisiana border sure enough 
there it was.  I wasn't worriedbecause we weren't overweight.  And we 
weren't. Except that therewas too much weight on our front trailer axle 
and we couldn't shift it.  They don't just take your total weight, they 
weigh you one axle at a time.  Crud!  Another weight fine - this time 75 
bucks, which I didn't happen to have on me.  Usually what you do in 
that case is have your company wire an advance to you at the scale or 
someplace nearby and pay the fine.  Trouble was, it was Sunday and my 
agent's answering machine said he was out and wouldn't return for a 
couple of hours.  Nothing to do but wait.  Now this scale jockey was a 
classic Mississippi good ole boy and he was pretty friendly.  We shot the 
shit awhile and I kept calling with no results.  I kept thinking that he 
would let us go, but he wouldn't think of it.  Then we started talking 
football.  Just the day beforeI had watched Alabama kill Ole Miss about 
38-7 and I startedtalking as if I was a big Ole Miss fan and what a rotten 
defeat that was and how Bear Bryant stinks and stuff and we started to 
hit it off real good.

	Pretty soon he says, "you know, boys, I'm gettin mighty 
hungry and that agent of yours don't look like he's gonna show 
today.Why don't you give me twenty dollars so me and my partner can 
getus a steak dinner and we'll just call it square."  

	Man, we forked that 20 spot right over, hopped in our rig and beat 
the boulevard straight to Galveston...

	Another time Limey and I picked up a load of cast iron pipe in 
Montgomery, Ala. and headed for Los Angeles.  This was a "trip lease" 
which means you run under a different company's authority for one trip 
only.  We had to go through about 800 miles of Texas and if you trip 
lease through there you have to have a ton of extra paperwork including 
a copy of the lease which you have to send registered mail to the state 
DOT *before* you enter the state.  That means tracking down a post 
office and the whole nine yards.

	Well, "our papers were in order" but we approached the Texas  
border in a driving rainstorm and there wasn't a dang post office around 
anywhere.  Lime and I figured that since we had allthe stuff and our 
story was plausible that we'd just roll on andlet the chips fall.

	The weather turned good and we flew on through the Texas night 
stopping for fuel in Odessa.  Morning found us in cactus 
country,everything was rolling, so we thought we'd light one up and 
head on to El Paso.  

	Not five minutes after becoming "one with the scenery" I see the 
flashing red light as an unmarked Texas DOT car motions us to pull 
over.  Of course we had everything together - we weren't even 
overweight. Except for one thing--we didn't mail in our lease so we 
didn't have the registered mail stub.  "Ok, boys, y'all will just have to 
follow us into Van Horn to see the Judge."

	Van Horn-motel capital of West Texas.  Police, fire, and City Hall 
all in the same little building.  The Judge was presiding in a tiny 
courtroom with the jail quite visible through the doorway right next to 
the bench.  We explained our story thinking he'd see it our way, and he 
did-sort of.  

	He said, "well usually the fine is $200 ...BUT since this is
your first offense the fine will be only one hundred dollars!!"

	It was turn left and pay or turn right and go to jail, so we cleaned 
out our wallets and headed to LA.

	             Monteagle Hill

	 In the winter of 76 our own work was slow so I took a job driving 
18 wheelers for a trucking company in Nashville, TN.  I drove this beat-up 
old Peterbilt and whatever trailer was available. One early morning I 
picked up a very heavy load of plate steeland headed down to 
Chattanooga. The boss would always say, "take as much weight as he can fit 
on there."   One the way there you have to go down Monteagle Hill-the 
"grapevine" of the South.  Miles long and very steep, this notorious hill 
has claimed many a rig over the years.  

It's one of those mornings so foggy you can only see three feet ahead and 
as I start down the hill I look in my mirror and see smoke coming out 
from my trailer wheels.  Hmmm...I thought these brakes were a little 
gimpy, why the hell can't those guys keep them adjusted?  As the grade 
gets steeper, signs start appearing that say "truck pit 1 mile" then "pit 1/2 
mile".  At 1/4 mile I decide to test my stopping power cause I know that 
past that pit it's five miles of straight down...So I put on my brakes and 
there ain't nothing there at all.  Now, that's a bad feeling-being inside 
of an 80,000lb rig that won't stop.  There's only one thing to do-pull it 
into the far rightlane and take it into the sand pit.  Hope it stops me since 
past the pit is a steep cliff with a pile of smashed up rigs at 
thebottom.Well it did the job...I came to a halt about halfway down 
the pit with my front tires completely buried in the sand.  Got
pulled out by Mr. Burton Cagle of Jasper,TN who cruised the hill
with his monster tow truck.  He was also the local constable and
host of a popular wood stove social scene down at his shop.  He loaned me 
the tools and I crawled under and adjusted the brakes myself.  
Old Burton hit me for a C- note and took off.

Whenever I catch a whiff of burning brake smell it always takes me back 
to Monteagle Hill.

************	

So often negative events stick with great detail in one's mind with the 
most clarity later. 

	Often the good times can be more difficult to chronicle. Here's a 
few examples: Playing in a band where there are hundreds of people all 
of whom you know by their first name and all of you are rocking out as 
hard as possible, and when the song is over, everyone shouts in unison 
"all right!". Or over a thousand people sitting in silent meditation for 
over an hour then chanting an Om together and finishing off with that 
sound trailing out to the woods knowing that "we're all one" isn't just a 
phrase but a living right now reality.  Or simple stuff like riding to work 
with your crew in the morning.  The point isn't why did we leave, but 
why did we stay, when any of us could have been out of there anytime.  
Most people were no more than a phone call away from being out of 
there.  Why didn't they go?  why would you stay and put up with such 
things?  It wasn't the brainwash trip by any means.  we believed we were 
creating a unique reality, controlling our own destiny, and for some 
years there it was true.  You can't do that without massive struggle at 
times.  But once again, the good feelings are often contained in the way 
people look into each other's eys and the silent understanding.  It's a 
hard thing to quantify.
	
I think much of the difference comes in the area on 
violence/nonviolence.  I think the Farm and S 
in particular did an extraordinary job in keeping the violence at such a 
low level.  Sure people got angry sometimes and if you did you could be 
sure that someone would tell you about it.  and then you could sort that 
out for hours.  And maybe it was dealt with by having that anger 
supressed, which isn't a real solution.  But there were countless times 
when differences were worked though so that the people involved felt 
ok about it without coming to blows, or saying "fuck you" or whatever. I 
have seen so many conflicts resolved by people agreeing to "let go" of the 
thing that bothered them that no one can tell me that it can't happen 
just like that.

	Another aspect of violence is what we called "astral violence" or 
violence at the thought level.  We felt that the part in the New 
Testament where Jesus said "thou shalt not be angry with thy brother" 
was something to aspire to and follow.  Anger can be used as a tool for 
social manipulation and everyone was sort of on guard watching out for 
it.  We learned that an angry thought or feeling didn't have to be 
assumed to be "you" but just that: a though or feeling.  recognizing it like 
that makes it possible to find other ways to express your view on a 
conflict or situation.  You can also receive anger from another   person 
and diffuse it rather than push it back in the other person's face.  
Stephen used to really hammer on that, and he was right.  Looking back 
on it, I'm not so sure how well he himself did on this point, but I think a 
lot of us got pretty good at it.  It's a great  technique for resolving 
hassles, or at least keeping them reasonable.    

While I was in Louisiana I heard that some of my buddies had formed a 
new band.  This was the other main reason I came back.  The band was 
called "The Wild Dogs" and was really startingto tear things up at these 
gigs they played around the Farm, mostly parties.  I felt I had a rightful 
place in this band and I wanted to claim it. 

	The main man was Michael Gavin, AKA Mick.  He was a great 
pal: one who never ceased to stick by me regardless of how out of sorts 
with things I got or how "uncool" I had become.  I can't make this claim 
about everyone!  

	Anyway he and many others were orchestrating the builder's 
version of the attitude shift towrd fun and humor that we had in the 
pool.  We had a few parties and while jamming we decided to do some 
of the more taboo rock and roll songs that had heavy sexual innuendo 
and other taboo qualities.  The previous band I had been in, the 
Homegrown Band, was pretty restricted to songs that would let you 
dance but were lyrically uplifting.  

	Micahel however not only liked to sing those rowdy songs, but 
had no inhibitions at all about providing visual entertainment as well.  
There were two lady singers in the band two and the three of them were 
a real riot to watch. We wanted there to be a band that rocked to the hilt-
no holds barred.    to do cover tunes of rock classics and songs by the 
Stones.  The Stones were considered very uncool because they had 
violent songs and bad karma over Altamont, but nothing could rock you 
like "Jumpin' Jack Flash" or "Honky Tonk Woman" either.  We wanted 
to do those songs.  We started playing these gigs around the Farm doing 
whatever we wanted.  It was an overnight smash.    We instantly became 
the band of the people.  

	I will never forget that special feeling of all these people you know 
and love so well-hundreds of them-just *rocking out* all the way.  It was 
an ecstatic experience.  I think with the exception of my marriage and the 
birth of my son that it is my finest memory of my Farm days.

	But too much fun didn't seem to make Big Steve too happy.  All 
this time there was always the "official" band - the Farm Band.  They 
were good - very good.  I loved the guys in that band, but they were doing 
a different kind of thing, one that I know involved great personal 
compromises to some of the members.  Because they were the band that 
Stephen took with him on his numerous cross-country tours, liking 
them and what they did seemed almost required.  All their songs were 
original message-type songs.  Some were great, some weren't.  But this 
whole sanctioned quality that they had just didn't sit well inside with 
the Farm's rebel element.  There were many people who preferred The 
Dogs.

	Our confidence grew as a band.  One of our favorite songs was 
called "Farm Jargon" or "At a Level", whatever seemed right at the time.  
It was really just a regular song like "Lucille"  but halfway through it 
Mick would wave his arms and holler "Stop the music!  Stop the 
music!"We'd act stunned and he'd start in on this whole riff using only 
the Farm's most shop-worn jargon about how at a level there was a place 
where there was an uncool vibe going down and like someone was ona 
trip and not copping.And it would dissolve into this big comic sort-out.  
Early Farm theater.  It was a riot.  Satire.  We loved it.

	But Steve didn't go much for this popularity.  I really think he felt 
threatened whenever a movement happened that he didn't think up or 
lead.  What a dumb move, really, because with all that talent and 
brainpower, the last thing you want to do is stifle it or mold it in a 
narrow fashion.  I say Stephen was the luckiest guy in the world to have 
all that good energy and talent around him.  Too bad he didn't see it for 
what it really could have been.

	Anyway, the word started to get out that Mick was out of hand and 
the Dogs were "uncool".  Here we go again I thought.  But this time I'm 
standing my ground.We played a gig with the Farm Band one Saturday 
night with us playing the first set.  There was a light show and the 
atmosphere was high and thick.  We played great.  Tight, together, no 
mistakes.  When we came off that stage the guys in the Farm Band said 
"nice set."We thought later that night that we could take this act to 
Nashville and clean up on the party circuit, especially the frat parties 
where you could make hundreds of bucks in one night.

	But the next morning Mick gets this call.  It's from the big man.  I 
lived with Michael at the time and as I sit there with the phone to his ear 
only occassionally mumbling a "yeah' , an "uh huh", or an "I can dig 
that"  I knew he was getting the business.In those days there was just no 
way you could realistically sustain Stephen's heat and stick around.But 
we tried.  Mick, Brandon the bass player (who had been one of the four 
guys who went to the Tenn state pen for the grass bust), and a couple of 
others of us kept the band together, but one of the guys pulled out.  It was 
like he couldn't stand to be associated with us anymore.  It was too 
expensive.  Also, we were all incredibly busy.  So the Dogs dissipated.  

	Later we had a sort of reunion concert at this annual outdoor bash 
we called "Ragweed Day".  we were real gamers that day.  Sloppy, but 
rocking hard.  The reviews were mixed. Too lewd for some of the more 
straight-laced types  

	Wild Dogs music had become socially unacceptible.  It was just 
before it's time.  Later when the kids all became teenagers, the antics of 
the Dogs seemed pretty tame. 

	But the real deed had already been done.  This thing I call the rebel 
element had begun and was irreversible, even if it laid low on occassion.    

	Later I went on to play in a band backing up a talented lady singer 
on the Farm named Sylvia.  I thought she was fairly autocratic, but I 
went along because I needed the work.  We played off the Farm gigs, 
though and I really liked that.  Also we played some amazing prison gigs 
including one at Brushy MT maximum security in eastern TN where the 
average sentence is sixty years. Jailhouse rock!  But it was hard to tell 
which they liked better - the music or looking at the women.

                           The Farm Food Trip

	Naturally if you have a commune in the country and you call it 
the Farm you're going to grow a lot of food, and can it, freeze, it, and eat 
it.  And a lot of it is going to spoil, too.

	Everyone on the Farm had to agree to be a total vegetarian 
including no dairy and no eggs.  With all that work to do, how in the 
hell are you going to have enough energy do do anything?  And who is 
going to grow all this food?  Nobody (and I mean nobody!) had ever 
really farmed before, but one guy had grown a backyard garden with 
some success and another guy had been raise on an apricot orchard in 
San Jose (rare indeed these days), so they became the bosses of the 
farming crew.  Fortunately for us, one of the best crops that grow in TN 
is soybeans and we became some of the first large groups to eat soybeans 
as the main diet staple.  (I know that 7th Day Adventists have that kind 
of diet but they have a lot of variety that we didn't have-we ate them 
straight).

	We had huge vegetable patches that were harvested by the crew or 
by everybody on special days and the crops were brought to the store, 
which was a small building where everybody got all their stuff.  Nobody 
used money at all. The Farm bank had all the dough and did all the 
buying, using a person called the Buyer to go out and get loads of toilet 
paper and soap and stuff like that.

	We got some tractors-old IH Farmalls and Olivers-and had a 
couple of horse crews.  For the first year we didn't eat any white sugar 
(considered it bad stuff) so to get a business going and to have sweetner 
we started this big sorghum operation.  We went in with this guy and 
planted these gigantic fields with cane.  We built a sorghum mill on the 
Farm (probably the best looking bldg built there). When harvest time 
came truckloads of us would go out to the fields and cut it down by hand.  
I'll never forget the feeling of despair I had when I was let off in the 
middle of this field where all you could see in any direction was 
sorghum cane and saying to myself,"I have to cut this whole field down 
BY HAND?"  All I had for breakfast was a bowl of cornmeal.

	That breakfast was served in the community kitchen.  This was 
where most single people ate.  They served three meals there, with the 
menu consisting of whatever there was around at the time.  In the 
summer that meant a lot of good stuff, but in the fall and winter it could 
get pretty meager.  We milled our own flour and had decent cereal in the 
morning, but for other meals it was beans and hand rolled tortillas.  If 
you were on tortilla duty you could expect to roll a few hundred of them 
during a shift.

	During the fall of 72 we got so low on money that the only thing 
we had to eat in any real quantity was wheat berries.  We called that 
winter "wheat berry winter" and for me it was the leanest season of my 
life.  My weight went down to 145 (now it's 185).  But also that was 
because we didn't know what we were doing much and our soy 
technology wasn't yet developed.

	By the next year, we had a soy dairy operating and we started to 
make tofu in quantity.  The tofu was really very good.  We had more 
food to eat that next year too. Also we decided that white sugar wasn't so 
bad after all. This got us in all sorts of trouble with the counterculture-at-
large. But I didn't give a shit.  Give me those cookies!!

	When Stephen was in the Pen, we went on a grass fast to express 
our solidarity with our men in the slam.  To keep things lively we 
decided that it would be ok to drink Coke and Dr Pepper and other 
caffeinated sodas.  Soon we were all sugar junkies.  But it was fun.  That 
caff can give you a kick after so many years of non-stimulus.

	Around the time S got out of the pen, he started having big time 
visions of grandeur.  He thought that we were such a heavy-duty 
flagship for humanity that we could expand in a very big way.  It is my 
feeling that this was the beginning of the end.  Almost everybody there 
was of the opinion that if we made a nice together community that it 
would speak for itself, but when the man talks...

	What happened was that people started moving to other parts of 
the country to found "sister" Farms.  One was in Wisconsin, another in 
Missouri.  One was in Florida and that is the one that ties in here because 
it was intended to be a heavy duty farming operation.  It was thought 
that with so many people wanting to move to the Farm that they could 
stay awhile, learn some stuff, then head to another Farm and crank out 
the crops.  we took out huge bank loans and got in debt for all this 
farming equipment.  Planted acres and acres of stuff in Tn, Wisconsin, 
and Florida. We lost our ass.  The Farm from then on had a huge debt 
and as each year went by, it became more obvious that although we were 
predicting that the USA would suffer a depression, we would become 
some of the first victims.

	But our diet had become pretty together and we started selling soy 
based foods through our food business, Farm Foods.


                          The Tumbler

	The early 70's was the time when the feminist movement was on 
the rise.  It was obvious that almost every male in America carried 
around with him certain inbred attitudes that assumed superiority over 
females.  At the Farm we were big on purging each other of all 
undesirable conditioning and nowhere did people's trips manifest 
themselves more clearly than in male/female relationships.  We were 
all big on the idea of "ladies and gentlemen".  This meant for the men 
that all traces of macho had to be eliminated.  You had to "cop to your 
lady".

	For awhile the farm had a special tent set up where Stephen sent 
men with rough edges so that they could bump up against each other 
with the idea that they would smooth each other out.  This tent was 
called the "rock tumbler" and it was especially common for some guy 
who exhibited some arrogance to be pitched right out of the birthing of 
his own child and sent to the tumbler.  I lived right across the road from 
the tumbler and I can recall many times seeing some guy with a half-
smile half-growl on his face carrying a sleeping bag on his way to a 
month stint in the tumbler.  One of my buddies was Martin and he was 
especially skilled at ferreting out subconscious attitudes in others and 
working out with them for hours on end until they would "cop" and 
make a visible change.  I was also not too bad at this activity and quite 
often in lieu of TV or something I would go visit Martin and sit in on 
one of the ongoing "sort sessions".  Sort session was our term for sorting 
out all the subconscious attitudes and thought that people would have 
so that all would be understood and we could go back to whatever else 
we did, which wasn't much it sometimes seemed.  My dad came to visit 
me that summer of 72 and later remarked that he was never at a scene 
like that where people would "sit down, have dinner, clean up, and then 
spend the rest of the evening criticizing each other."

	Anyway, what follows is my attempt at reconstructing a tumbler 
sort session.  There are five people present, M, J, W, T, and K:

M: So, where you at W?   
W: Me?  Nothing.   
M: I was wondering if you were still holding or did you feel cool about 
having your thing gotten into last night?   It feels like there's still 
subconscious sort of hanging in the air.  It's in the astral weather.  
W: Well,  I  could dig the information,  but the way you came on about it 
didn't come from a compassion place.  Like you're putting blame on me 
or something because you aren't satisfied with my response.   
M: It feels like you're still on a trip.  You may be taking blame but I ain't 
dishing it out.   You really haven't copped. I can tell from your aura that 
you haven't copped to the       information.  
J:  There is a pretty murky astral in here.  W, what are you in your head 
about?   
T: So, what about the MCP vibes that got you sent here in the first place?  
W: I feel that I see where it's at and I've already strraightened up.  I gotta 
do some fine tuning I admit.  Gotta work on the old square inch.  I mean 
like I want to get straight with my old lady.  But I don't need you sticking 
me with every little thing you say you see.  
K: But that's just a verbal cop.  I can tell that you aren't coming from a 
pure place.  Too much tight stomach.  The colloid's going rigid.  
J:  Yark!  this whole riff is backsliding...it isn't enough to just say you're 
cool about it.  You have to give us some.  It feels like the old swamp 
routine.  At this rate you're kid's gonna be grown before you ever cop to 
your lady in a Tantric way.  
M: Maybe what you need is a ten day talking fast so when you come out 
of it the first thing you say will be a righteous thing instead of these 
verbal deflections designed to thwart us, which just makes us come on 
stronger till you cop.  It's as above so below y'know.

	Anyway, this kind of thing could go on for days, with each person 
doing his level best to say the thing that will contain so much self-
evident truth that the person in question could just say "OK, you're 
right!  I see it now! I don't want to be that way.  Now I have the handle I 
need."  And you know, sometimes that actually happened.  I can 
remember more than once dropping over to a house where people were 
sitting around talking and upon my arrival they said, "Ah!  Just who we 
were talking about! Sit down.."

        We said it was like a mental nudist colony.  It was a 
definite flaw in our thinking to imagine that great numbers of people 
would be interested in that kind of thing.

	I know it's hard to imagine these encounter group-gone-wild-
shootouts having much real benefit, and I know several people who 
never budged, ever.  But others were able to get to the heart of their 
thoughts and feelings about many things.  I seriously doubt that any 
group can survive without some way of being able to speak frankly and 
even bluntly to each other without the inhibitions of politeness standing 
in the way.  Later as we got to know and understand each other better the 
need for such intensity diminished, and when the size of the Farm got 
beyond a certain manageable size it was difficult and tiring.  I think the 
Farm really got too large after about say 1974 when the population grew 
beyond 500.

	Digressing slightly:  This weekend I watched the ch 9 show about 
Ken Kesey that interviewed Ginsberg, Ram Dass, Garcia and others and it 
really jogged my thinking.  I'm sort of a "second-waver", someone who 
was still in high school when these legendary happenings occurred.  But 
as soon as I got out of hs I went in search of whatever was on those trails 
that had been blazed by Kesey, Leary, Kerouac, Garcia, and Stephen as 
well as others.  The show took me back to a day that I had forgotten 
about, which was The summer before the Caravan had left.

	I knew that going on the Caravan would be the big bus trip, but 
also it would mean throwing my lot in with Stephen, perhaps more 
than I really wanted too.  If you have read some tripping stories I have 
put in this confs, you might infer that some of that Millbrook/Prankster 
dichotomy was going on in my own head.  By that I mean that to my 
eyes, the Kesey style was doing acid on the streets or in some other very 
unpredictable place maybe talking at length with people you've never 
met before and learning to be tough and glib and fast on your feet. 
Looking for an edge.  The Dead were like that for me too. Jerry Garcia 
would establish eye contact with individuals and play to them until he 
got them off.  As it is today, they were doing a lot more than playing 
music.  These guys represented a wild style, one that isn't very involved 
in leaders and teachers.  Stephen used to be quite close to Garcia, but as 
Stephen became more of a guru the relationship deteriorated.

	So, on what you could call the Millbrook side of this you have 
Leary, and Alpert and the whole Eastern religion aspect where you keep 
yourself high and together with meditation, or stillness, or certain diets 
or yogas. Structure, organization, method, technique.  Reaching down to 
your inner self, centering.  As a 15 year old I attended a Tim Leary lecture 
at the Berk Community Theater called "The Way of the Buddah" where 
Leary tied the LSD experience to the Buddah's path of right living and 
the process of transcending material attachments.  Stephen took this 
approach more and more too.  He talked about self-discipline and trying 
to have good karma, and paying attention to being truthful and correct.  

	The first time I went to Monday Night Class Steve talked about all 
kinds of things I couldn't understand.  It was dark in there and everyone 
would get into this huge arm in arm circle and OM together like some 
kind of round millipede.  Too strange for me, but interesting.  Later after 
some hair-raising trips, one of which was spent alone way out in the 
scrub bushes of Mt Tam I felt I had to confront something vague and 
scary that was inside me, like some kind of inner battle against invisible 
forces.  I went off by myself because I figured if anyone saw me they 
might try to haul me in for a thorazine shot.

	 I'm sitting on a hill, looking out at the fog and the ocean and I'm 
thinking about what I had learned:  that I can confront anything that is 
in my head because I always have my yes and my no.  And then my 
mind slips into a calm state.  Calmer than I had even experienced.  The 
stillness is broken by the thought "no-mind".  Then I remembered that it 
was one of the terms I had heard Stephen say that I hadn't understood.  
"No mind"?  What is that?  So, sitting up there I thought "No mind!"  
So, that's what it is!  I had heard of Lao Tsu and the "yes and the no" 
from Stephen too.  So, I started to understand what he had to say.

	So...I'm pacing around Sutro Park one Sunday afternoon before 
this Caravan gets organized wondering if I was going to go with the 
Kesey/Prankster/Grateful Dead style or the yogi/teacher/organized 
community style.  I had hitched all over the West Coast looking for a 
community that felt right and this group had the most elements that 
were available.  I almost moved to Big Sur, I almost moved to Portland, 
but I decided to go with Stephen.

	That decision made me more of a follower than I had been and I 
was aware that there was a definite trade-off in doing it.

	It brings up an important aspect-this Christ/Buddah thing.  We 
used to talk about the difference between anavatar and a teacher-that a 
teacher could be enlightened and could transmit mind like a Zen master, 
but an avatar would do more than that.  An avatar takes on the karma of 
the world so to speak and in the early days S was always careful to avoid 
that.  "I won't punch your ticket"  he would say. But that fateful day 
came on the Caravan`when he`said to`continue you had to`cop`to him 
bas a Buddahb.nhe usually avoided the word`Christ,`and`although I 
thought bok,`sure Buddah" `I`didn't see him as`the`world`avatar typen 
`But`later, Suzuki`Roshi`founder`of the Zen center`and`the 
man`S`described as the most realized person he had encountered became 
ill and S went out to see him.  Upon his return to TN Steve said that 
although Richard Baker had received the transmission of mind and the 
Abbotship of the center, Stephen had assumed the mantle of "planetary 
logos".  This I never heard him say in public, but this is what I heard late 
at night out at his place.  To me it was all so far over my head that I 
didn't think I would know the difference anyway, which I suppose is 
how a lot of young students give their proxy to their teacher.

	It was not long after this that Michael took off.

	This whole thing leads me to one other point, which is a certain 
trap that psychedelic drugs can have.  LSD and others can give you such 
an incredible view of things and you can make so many changes so fast 
that you can get the idea that you were attaining some kind of 
enlightenment. I even thought "gee I'm only twenty years old.  At this 
rate I'll be up there with Hui Neng by the time I'm 30 (Hui Neng was the 
sixth Zen Patriarch).  Looking back on this, I can see how wrong that was.  
It's a line you have to walk if you choose that path though, between 
confidence and arrogance.

	Looking back on all of this, I think about the trade-offs involved 
in joining something or following someone.  The teacher has all these 
heavy trips and then those experiences get sort of codified.  
Communities based on the teachings of a charismatic leader are almost 
all this way and is a lot of why they seem doomed to fail from the start.  
Because the followers can just go through the motions, or even may 
believe and practice everything and even mature tremendously, they 
will never have enough of their own experiences.  That's why I am into 
communities, but not leaders or teachers.  One reason I was involved 
with transportation on the Farm was so that I could get away and have 
some adventures of my own.  I doubt I would have lasted very long 
otherwise.  As soon as the pioneer hacks his way through the bushes and 
a path is laid out, it isn't the same anymore.

	But it also must be said that by the early 70's it was pretty apparant 
that there weren't going to be hundreds of large experimental 
communities in every state and if you wanted to do something with 
other people then leaving the Farm could seem kind of bleak too.  What 
else was there to do?  So a lot of people really gave S a certain amount of 
lip service and "got with the program" but were really there for the folks 
rather than being a hard-core student.

	The satellite Farms were an interesting thing because for the most 
part they were enjoyable scenes with a lot of self-determination, like Cliff 
described, but they were manifested out of an idea that was part of what 
brought the whole show down.  To understand this I think you have to 
go back a ways to the philosophical underpinnings of the Monday Night 
Class days.

	"What will be the answer to the answer man?"  Stephen was the 
answer man and the way he liked to work was for people to ask him 
questions and he would lay out a rap that addressed each question.  He 
was once asked what he thought his contribution to the religious 
vernacular was and he said "attention is energy".  And I think that's 
pretty right.  Anyway that was his theme.  Whatever you put your 
attention on will grow and develop.  So naturally you only wanted to 
put your attention on good stuff that got you high and made you a better 
yogi.  No guns, no tv, don't go in the army, pay attention to the vibes 
you put out, be loving, stuff like that.  But also, it isn't enough to do it 
for just yourself.  That was his other big thing.  Mahayana in Sanskrit 
means the "great boat", Hinayana means "small boat" and they are two 
main divisions of Buddhism.  The way S interpreted it was that you 
should think in terms of the great boat, or all of humanity.  To be 
planetary.  "Because", he would say, "there is no final and perfect 
enlightenment for anyone until there is for everyone".

	So, the Farm as the three dimensional manifestation of these 
ideas was going to be a "great boat" scene.  I had moved there thinking 
that it would be a largish group of a few hundred, but it grew much 
larger than that very quickly.  I remember Kesey once saying that his 
ideal for commune population control was that no house could be 
visible to any other house.  I liked that idea, but after we got settled 
there were a lot of people from all over the country who wanted to move 
down and join us.  And lots of single mothers who needed a safe place 
for their kid. And strung out people who could use some help.  It was 
the great boat alright.  And at first it seemed to work.  So the mahayana 
revolution needed to get the word out.  That was the ostensible point of 
those Stephen/Farn Band tours.  Farms were needed all over the place, 
but they had to be staffed by people who knew what they were doing, so 
it seemed like just as your crew was hitting its stride, a couple of the best 
people would move away to some other Farm.  They'd be replaced many 
times by someone who often times needed more help than he or she 
would give.

	In _Buddenbrooks_ Thomas Mann makes the point that just as 
something seems to be right at its peak, the seeds of its downfall are 
already sown and taking root. Every year we printed a "Farm Report" 
and mailed them out.  I still have one from Jan 1975, and although 
everything looks great and prosperous and fun, the whole scene was 
already irretrievably overextended.

                        The Cracker Truck

	Although I had gone an the Caravan and had hopped freights and 
had numerous physical and mental adventures, by the time I was 21 I 
still felt inside that I didn't really have what I would call survival skills.  
In the late 60's I thought our society was coming apart at the seams.  As a 
kid from the California suburbs who was raised by  highly intellectual 
parents I felt that although I was a legal adult, I didn't know how to do 
anything.  A lot of why I moved to the Farm in TN was because I felt that 
I could learn how to live on this earth.

	First I tried farming, but soon I formed a rock band that travelled 
around the local towns.  In order to do this we had an equipment truck 
that had once been a delivery truck for Nabisco. We called it the Cracker 
Truck.  As I got more into the band and less into farming I spent more 
time keeping this truck running.

	The percussionist in our band was Anthony. Later we called him 
"Wildman" because there seemed to be no limit to his energy.  He was 
one of the first friends I made on the Farm, and frankly I sought him out 
as a friend because I admired how he would charge into a task and stick 
with it until it was finished no matter how long it took or how much 
hassle was involved. Once we had a gig in Knoxville in the middle of 
the winter and the night before we had to leave the heater went out in 
the truck.  Tony tore into that heater even though the motor pool had 
no doors on it at the time and it was zero degrees outside.  We worked 
and worked on it late into the night.  By dawn we had fixed it and we 
took off for our gig.  I was so inspired by this effort that it gave me more 
energy than was lost from no sleep.  The gig in Knoxville was the best I 
had ever played up to that time.  Anthony and I were later partners in 
the trucking company.  He is still my brother and confidant.  My younger 
son Erik's middle name is Anthony.

	Soon after that our band quit travelling and instead of going back 
to the farming crew I went over to the motor pool and my job was to 
keep the Craker Truck running and use it for general hauling for all the 
various crews.  It was the first time I had ever had sole responsibility for 
something.

	One thing we were very high on was scamming good used stuff. A 
lot of what I did was to go get lumber from worksites and junk from 
Nashville.  One of the Farm couples, Michael and Cynthia were 
planning a trip to New York and New Jersey to bring back a load of 
windows, furniture, and other stuff and they commissioned me to take 
them.  I knew the truck was in somewhat fragile condition but I was up 
for an adventure and I felt I had something to prove to myself.  Also, by 
coincidence, my father was going to be in NYC at the same time and I 
could spend a couple of days with him in Manhatten.

	We took off for New York City, Great Neck, Long Island to be 
exact.  There we would load furniture.  Then to the pine barrens of 
southern Jersey for some heavy duty office windows someone gave us.  
The down to DC for some other stuff (that was at fig's in-laws).  Things 
went well for the first day as we left Tenn and passed into Virginia.  But 
right at a tiny town called Ft Chiswell the truck started to miss and buck 
and then finally died altogether.  It restarted and ran just long enough to 
get off the road.  After checking things over I saw that one of the rocker 
arms that opens an intake valve had broken.  Should we try to limp 
home or fix it there and continue the trip?  I found that by removing the 
rocker arm, push rod, and plug wire, we had a five cylinder truck that 
would at least function.  But that wasn't going to get us to NYC so we 
headed off into the Blue Ridge Mts to find a rocker arm in a junkyard.  
After five towns and ten junkyards we found one and were back on our 
way.

	Everything's great right on through VA and PA and then right on 
the bridge going to NJ the motor makes this huge racket and stops again.  
The pushrod from that same cylinder had bent from the stress.  I'm 
getting a bit desparate because I don't want to miss my dad, but we had to 
find a pushrod.  I disabled the cylinder again and we found an 
International dealer who had a push rod. Put it in, and hammer down to 
the Apple.  Like clockwork they dropped me off, all dusty and greasy in 
front of a swank hotel in Manhatten and I spent the next two days with 
my dad.

	Out at Michael's mom's place we loaded the furniture and headed 
south.  Right in the middle of the Verazzano Narrows bridge the truck 
died.  What's wrong now?  The trucks are whipping by so fast it's 
terrifying.  Michael gets out and with frantic hand gestures waves the 
trucks off from bearing right down on us while I see what's going on.  
Nothing up top under the hood so I crawl under the truck, lay on my 
back and see that the fuel pump float bowl has filled with crud.  With my 
back on the roadway I can feel the whole bridge moving whump whump 
with each passing vehicle as I undo the bowl and dump out the dirt.  
This must be how it feels to do repairs in a war zone.  But it started and 
we made it out of there.

	We load the windows down in southern NJ and as we gas up we 
see that there is a huge gas leak in the fuel tank.  I stuck some goop on it 
and we drove to DC for the rest of the stuff.  At fig's in-laws we took off 
the gas tank and fixed it by soldering a patch made out of a penny.

	On the way home the truck would sometimes die and then restart 
after a few minutes.  I didn't know what caused this but when we were 
only three miles from the Farm it wouldn't restart at all so I had to 
dismantle all the fuel lines until I found the ball of solder that had been 
sucked up into the lines and would then drop back into the tank.

	But we made it back and we got all the stuff and I hadn't relied on 
anyone else to figure it out.  It was a major rite of passage for me.Well, I 
was hooked right then and there.  The next gig I had was as a driver for 
work crews who went to Nashville each day.  This was when we realized 
that working would bring in money (!) During the summer we would 
camp out en masse at Old Hickory Lake pitch tents and go into work.  I 
drove buses, metro vans, trucks, you name it.  When winter came I went 
into the pool and we started our scrapping operation.  What a fleet we 
had!  Our first car carrier was a 1946 Diamond T flatbed that seemed like 
a B 17 with wheels. Our crew pickup was a 48 Chevy.

	A low point for me was a time I drove 40 guys home in a bus and 
there was a giant mud zone in the road.  I misjudged it and came to a 
slogging halt right in the center of the mud lake.  Everyone had to get 
out and wade over to a dry spot.

	Sometimes I think that to a Viet Nam vet who had rites of passage 
under fire that these events may seem sort of light weight, but I suppose 
it's what you make out of whatever happens to you that counts.

	One thing we haven't discussed too much here is money.  Where 
did it come from?  Who controlled it?  What was it like for the rank and 
file?

	The money for the land came mostly from inheritances that a few 
member donated.  Our money system was based on the passage in the 
Book of Acts where it said, "and those who believed took all their 
possesions and parted to each according to their need" (quote from 
memory therer..)  Which meant that if you had a lot you gave a lot and if 
you had a little you gave a little.  It would all average out.  I suppose it 
did, but there are a few people who quite literally gave away their chance 
to be rich for life.  That's a heavy commitment.  Later, money came from 
working. Either selling books, or food, or by working in town.

	At first, hardly anyone knew how to really do anything.  Out of 
200-250 adults there were something like 100 liberal arts degrees (or 
almost degree before dropping out).  The first big breakthrough we had 
was when there were a bunch of bills coming due and we decided to go 
up to Nashville and work for it doing whatever we could do.  Mostly 
this meant going to Manpower and taking whatever we could get for two 
bucks an hour or something. My job was to drive the men and women 
to their gigs around town, and then go to whatever job I got.  They were 
some real doozies too.  One I had was busting cartons of sour milk into a 
holding trough and throwing the empty carton into an incinerator. 
Another was laying plastic sheets under an apartment foundation. And 
there was stacking lumber, and moving boxes.  Those who knew 
carpentry formed a crew and worked at some building projects. Hey, big 
flash!  Working can get you high!

	Soon word got out that the Farm folks made some sizeable work 
crews.  We started getting steady work at a pallet factory, and the place 
that publishes the phone books.  The carpenters started working with the 
same builders regularly, and the construction crew began to be a 
professional unit.

	Money was always pooled.  Paychecks were always to the Farm 
and not to the individual.  Recently I checked with the Social Security 
Admin and they said they showed that between 1969 and 1982 I had only 
made a total of $3000!  And that was mostly made in 69 when I had a job.  
From 72 - 82: nada.  That means that I spent several years without 
having any money at all.  What was that like?  It was liberating in a way 
because you didn't have to worry about it, but you really did because 
there was hardly any of it around, which meant your clothes got a lot of 
mileage and you didn't get fat.

	Speaking of old clothes, the neighboring county seat, Hohenwald, 
had this amazing junk store called JD's that got these bundles of clothes 
down from Chicago.  Huge amounts of clothes, which of course the 
Farm folks bought in great numbers. JD (and later, when business 
boomed a few others) would just cut open the bundle and let the clothes 
fall on the floor.  They would get three feet deep sometimes.  The best 
bargains you ever saw, but you had to forage for them.  One time I went 
there with a guy who was new to the Farm.  We went in there about 
midday - "dinnertime" - and there was this Tennessee family sitting in 
there on a big spread out blanket eating a picnic complete with fried 
chicken and watermelon.  "Y'all don't mind us!" they said.

	The money for the first few years was controlled by one bank 
person, usually female, who worked with S and his family, as well as 
other informal advisors, and she made the decisions.  this was such a 
burnout, high pressure job, that nobody lasted very long. Whoever tried 
to weild power behind running the money, it seemed to make kind of 
crazy.  And it was in this period that many of the heavy decisions to go 
into debt over farming were made.  And of course there always seemed 
to be money for S and the band who travelled with him as he "recruited 
for reality" as he liked to say.

	 But I was far from the money.  Not until 76 when I drove trucks, 
did I handle it at all.  Crew bosses had checkbooks and drove pickups, 
and there was a little graft that came about.  Certainly when I went to 
town with Wilbur, my boss (we called him bossman - and another 
amazing character) I got more soda and chips than when I went on the 
general town run.

	 Cliff  built his house from scammed materials.  Later it was ok to 
work on Saturday and keep the money.  But there was much inequality.  
Still, it came closer to Chaiman Mao's ideal of the richest earns no more 
than three times as much as the poorest than anything I've seen.  For 
better or worse.

	Another area is the tribal aspect.  Were we tribal?  We certainly 
thought so at the time.  And Compared to anything we had seen in 
American suburbia I think it was.  It didn't last long enough for there to 
be great traditions to hand down through the generations, but the 
closeness was pretty extraordinary too. That's what all that "getting 
straight" and "sorting it out" was about.  Trying to get real close real fast, 
so we can get on with the trip.  We thought that if there was something 
you felt about another person that didn't feel right, that you should go 
right to that person, preferably with "fairwitnesses" around and get 
straight with that person.  Of course you can get kind of carried away, but 
without tv, the evening conversations can get pretty interesting.

	I saw it as dharma combat.  The Zen tradition says that any 
wandering monk can go into a monestary and challenge the master to 
dharma combat - outwitting the other person verbally, and thus showing 
superior understanding - and the monk can take over the monastery.  
Steve was pretty impossible to top, but we tried it on each other all the 
time.  I really saw myself as a young monk who wore a jean jacket insted 
of a robe, going out into the world each day seeking enlightenment for 
myself and the planet.  I believed also that the battles that Arjuna waged 
in the Bhagavad Gita take place each day within each of us.  So I didn't 
care much about money, and I enjoyed the intensity.  In fact that was the 
real key: it wasn't enough to handle the intensity, you had to *thrive* on 
it.  Living with a people who believed that in great measure, and liked to 
get high, and were willing to sort it out and then *recognize and get high 
on the mutual understanding when it comes about*, can get to feeling 
pretty tribal.  I still feel that way towards many people from those days.  
So it is real, it just didn't maintain the structure of living together.  But 
you know, I'd be a liar if I said I didn't miss that intense interaction 
sometimes.


	At first the work scene was fairly loose since hardly anyone had 
much in the way of survuval skills.  You could move around from crew to 
crew. As people became more skilled, one tended to stick with what you knew 
best.  Of course there was always a certain amount of people who 
floated...

	We experimented from time to time with having one person be a 
labor coordinator.  The first time was when we had this huge sorghum 
cane harvest.  If you didn't have something real specific to do on a given 
day, you could be drafted to cut cane.  Being the coordinator was a tough 
job, and trying to get someone to drop their plan for that day or week and 
do something else often resulted in a sort session.  Like this:

M walks into the community kitchen in the morning looking to fill out 
the crew. B is eating breakfast.

M: Hey, B, how's it going today? 
B: Um, good! 
M: What you got happenin today? 
B: Well, I was going to look for diaper pails, then I have to   check out 
some stuff in the junkyard... 
M: Well, you know, we need some monkees out in the field today to   
cut cane.  We really need to Hyah to get it done.  Feels like   maybe you 
could cut loose of your plan today and help out. 
B: Hmmm...well, I.. 
M: Don't hold back 
B: I'm not, it's just that I was 
M: well, you can't be attached to you plans sometimes 
B: But it feels like your coming on and leaning on me to   do something, 
when I have to cop to some other stuff. 
M: Well, I don't want to put out funky vibes, it's just that   we have to 
cop to what we all have to get behind, you know?

	Took real negotiating, getting someone to harvest cane.

	Later, when we sent out regular work crews, we started a work 
company we called "Farm Hands" and if you didn't have a fairly 
important job, you went out on those crews.  By about 75, everyone had a 
job, and every crew had a "strawboss".  Well, not everyone had a job.  
You see, at the same time all this was going on we had a gate policy that 
allowed some pretty incompetant people to live there who weren't 
capable of holding a job for very long.  So there were always people doing 
very little but eating just as much and requiring space to sleep and 
whatnot. Plus you could come to the Farm to have your baby and there 
were few if any requirements for what you had to contribute.

	
The gate policy and how it related to the economic situation is another 
big area...

	As far as parties went, at first we didn't party that much.  We were 
just so dang serious about what we were doing, that we mostly talked 
and worked out with each other.  It was often humorous, don't get me 
wrong, but that is different than parties. The farm had a band that played 
great rock and roll at times, and there were other bands, but the concept 
of a party came later. When Cliff built his house they had a 
housewarming party.  That was one of the first Wild Dogs gigs.  

There were canning parties at harvest time. It took awhile to move from 
serious yogi posture, to joking party mode.  Mostly the social gatherings were 
structured around a band gig.  No late night poker parties, no pool hall, 
no movie theater, no miniature golf.  Just us (and a little dope 
sometimes). 

	Living with all those people gave me great appreciation for the 
"neighbors" concept.  There were a bunch of people who I knew would 
always be my good friends as long as we never lived together.  On the 
other hand, there were a couple of group situations where the chemistry 
was excellent and we had loads of fun.  the last place we lived before 
moving to DC was like that. We just had a terrific time together.

	And the kids do miss that great feeling of being right down the 
road from your friends.  Miles of woods for exploring, watermelon 
patches to raid, bike trails, and that special anarchy that is so appealing to 
a young'un.  But they don't miss the poverty.  And either do I.  Popcorn 
for breakfast and telling your two-year-old, "I'm sorry, you've had your 
half banana for the week" really gets old.


	The whole gate scene is a story in itself.  Of course we had to have 
a gate.  There was a steady stream of visitors, both locals and far-flung.  
Some just wanted to see the place for the day. we called this the 
"Disneyland tour".  In the early years on a given Sat or Sun there would 
be as many as 25 car loads of locals who wanted to look over the place.  
At first the gate was this little building like a kiosk but later we moved 
this house up from Summertown and it became the gatehouse.  There 
was a regular crew and weekends would rotate different couples 
managing things. At night single men would take shifts.  I did many 
many nights of night gate, and a lot of disneyland tours too.  Once a 
carload of locals who looked like they had just come from church drove 
up and the man said, "can you just drive through or do you have to park 
here.  This is the hippie colony isn't it?"  Some of them liked to get into 
discussions about not eating meat, or religious arguments.

	Night gate was quiet - reflective.  It did feel like watch on a ship.  
Every now and then a car would drive up with a couple or a family or 
some singles, and you had to sign them in, see what they wanted, and 
usually find them a place to stay for a few days. If you did the weekend 
gate you often had people coming in a steady stream in all sorts of 
conditions and attitudes that you had to deal with.  Once I had this nutty 
guy who was staying at the gate house because nobody else could quite 
handle him, and right as I'm talking with five rainbow family people, 
two couples who have come to have their babies on the Farm, a teacher 
from Long Island, and a runaway from Knoxville, this guy walks up to 
me and breaks a bar stool over my knees.  Another time a woman went 
into labor right in the gatehouse.  

	But usually it involved maintaing an ongoing discussion about 
what we were about, what the visitor had in mind, stuff like that.  AT 
first all visitors stayed in people's homes.  As a single guy I must have 
literally put up and talked with hundreds of visitors from all over the 
US and Europe.  Later the numbers got so great that we put up a visitors 
tent that was staffed by rotating volunteers.  Later still a special 
campground was set up.

	The gate was also a checkpoint charlie scene where you had to say 
where you were going and what you were doing.  Do you have room in 
your car for this person to get taken to the bus?  Is this really another 
motor pool "test drive"?

	One night a bunch of drunk locals showed up on horseback with 
burning torches with full intention of burning the place down. The 
night gate man talked then out of it.

	The Farm was an unusual thing to live next to, especially since 
your daddy made moonshine or had a fear of God that exhibited itself in 
spontaneous open arguments with Satan.

	Our most noteworthy neighbor was Homer Sanders.  He had been 
the caretaker of the Martin Farm where the Caravan had landed from 
Nashville.  He took a liking to us, and soon we collaborated with him on 
a sawmill and other projects.  He didn't have any teeth and it took real 
training to be able to understand the jokes he constantly told.  He knew 
how to do everything involved with living on that land.  A great guy; a 
living folk hero who had fought it out with every revenue agent in the 
area.

	When we first moved there, of course we had to hustle to make 
friends with our neighbors.  Otherwise they would have shotgunned us 
right out of there.  Since we were a religious group we decided to get into 
religious dialogue with the locals, matching out patchwork eclecticsm to 
their Christian fundamentalism.

	Our first foray along this line was when we invited members of 
the local Church of Christ to come up for three Monday nights and 
discuss the differences and similarities of our beliefs.  The chance to 
preach to the heathens was something these good folks wouldn't turn 
down and they came up in great numbers for these meetings.  At one 
point Stephen is telling this whole story about the Tibetan Yogi Milarepa 
and how he was a lot like some of the Biblical heavies in the way he had 
to construct these stone houses then tear them down, then rebuild them, 
each nine times, as a way to become unattached to the fruits of your labor 
and stuff when this old guy stands up and says, "excuse me..now I don't 
know about this Miller feller, but I do know that the Bible is the word of 
God for him too!"

	Later, as a sort of sociological study, some of us went to a local 
pentacostal church for a few weeks.  The singing was good, the preacher 
got excited, and people started babbling in a different language (although 
it seemed they all spoke the same one) then they called the new people 
to come down and receive salvation.  One of the preachers was our 
neighbor, Willard Staggs.  Now Willard weighed about 300 pounds, and 
when he put his hands on your forehead and said, "may you receive the 
love of JEE SUSS!" it would knock some of the people right on the floor!

	Afterwards, some of the people that we knew there, including the 
main preacher, Johnny Prentiss and his wife Betty, surrounded a couple 
of us and really lit into us.  "don't you know the things you believe are 
wrong?" "What will your children do when you condemn them to an 
afterlife of hell?"  I knew it would be my last visit to the Summertown 
Covenant Church.

	But soon, they set up a revival tent right outside the gate for a 
week and had these noisy revivals every night.  I couldn't resist checking 
it out one more time.  When I walked in the tent there was Willard 
standing there almost in a trance, sweat pouring off his head, having a 
standoff with Satan.  He kept saying, "When you see Satan like I see 
Satan, the only thing you can do is to look him straight in the eye.  You 
look him in the eye and you say 'now you get out of here Satan.  You 
just get out of here right NOW!  RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW RIGHT 
NOW!!!"   I thought the guy was going to explode.  Later they called up  
Woody, another neighbor who had said that he was called to  preach  
while up in the firetower the other day.  So Woody is so  struck with   
the heaviness of preaching his first sermon that he  freezes at the pulpit.  
Everyone chants, "preach Woody, preach!"  and everytime they say it he 
gets stiffer.   

	 The county we lived in was Lewis County, second or third poorest 
in the state.  It was run by Boss Ward, who held no elective office but had 
everyone in his back pocket.  His office was under the stairway in the 
courthouse in Hohenwald.  The county was all white, except for this one 
ridge way up on the county border.  That's how it was in all the counties 
that didn't have industry (like Maury County which had industry and 
black sections of town)..the blacks would all live by themselves in the 
most remote part of the county.  See, just because civil rights laws were 
on the book didn't mean any blacks were going to move into 
Hohenwald or Pulaski (the town where the Ku Klux Klan was founded).  
Some of those people were so poor that when we scrapped some cars at 
this black lady's place up on the ridge and I asked her where the 
outhouse was she said they didn't have one - they just went out with the 
hogs.  Another time when we were out in Hickman County we asked 
where such and such road was and the guy said, "oh it's out at the 
colered settlement".  To get there you went over the ruttiest god awful 
roads, past wiped out buildings and weed infested fields and then the 
road abruptly changes into a fairly decent paved road.  Suddenly you are 
in a little tiny town, complete with gas station, juke joint, store, some 
pretty good houses and a lot of very funky ones.  The colored settlement.  
Next time any of you may be driving around in certain areas of the 
South and you just see white people around and wonder where the black 
folks live..

	But we were able to move around fairly unharmed, since we 
couldn't be put into any category any of them had seen or conceived.