Commune Stories

Dear Ms. Towle, Franklin Town Librarian/Historian:

I had the pleasure of returning to Franklin in the 1990s to visit the land on which our commune, Earthworks, existed from February 2, 1970, until some time roughly four years later when it finally and fitfully dissolved.

My wife and I stopped at the general store for sodas and to ask after old friends when we noticed your impressive book on the history of the town of Franklin for sale on the counter. We opened on impulse to the index under “commune” and were pleased and surprised to find your history of our small moment in the life of this lovely town.

Though your words were mostly kind and good humored, and perhaps reflected how the commune and its members were perceived by many of the townspeople amidst whom we lived, the history you provided was limited in its view and somewhat derisive. I write this addendum to your rendition in an effort to provide a more accurate picture of the Franklin commune as it was and as it was meant to be.

Earthworks, or “the Franklin Commune” as we were universally known by others, was founded in an effort to “return to the land,” to master the skills that would promote agrarian self sufficiency, and to help create a society that would provide an alternative to the despair and destruction we were experiencing in our culture, our country, and our environment. We were upset about the state of world affairs and had set about in a manner we acknowledged to be experimental to improve them. We were particularly opposed to our government’s military violence, to the competitive behaviors we felt were inherent in capitalism, and to the selfish male dominated non-cooperative values we then believed were wrongly engendered by the nuclear family. The Vietnam holocaust was to us a source of daily pain. So too was the perceived destruction of our natural environment and the permanent annihilation of other living species. We hoped we could make things better. We intended to be social reformers and pioneers, not escapists. Our productive and social failings, and our now obviously erroneous views regarding how planetary life might actually and ultimately be improved, especially in the light of subsequent world and personal history, humble and embarrass us today. Yet all of us benefited from our time and experiences at Franklin, learned lessons not available in classrooms or cities, and grew as people, parents, and citizens.

Dr. Jane Wheelwright, a Jungian therapist, who shared some of the values we espoused, purchased the farm we lived on for us. Jane was always the “owner” of the Franklin commune property, but she imposed no restrictions on our personal practices or use of the land, and left us free to do with our lives and the property as we wished. Since we didn’t believe in private ownership of property this little fiction worked quite well. Jane never provided any money directly to us, but did pay the taxes on the farm, thus leaving us use of the property free and clear. In hindsight, her graciousness, and the fact that we did not actually own the land, influenced a number of our decisions and contributed to a number of attitudes and practices that did not serve us well.

Four couples, along with four children, began the commune with a very vague, somewhat shared, but poorly articulated vision of what our goals and our lifestyle were to be. Genuine participatory democracy was our ideal. Private ownership was out. Collectivity was in. Individual leadership was out. Male dominance was out. The nuclear family was out. We would try to live self-sufficiently, without dependence on fossil fuels or purchased goods. We would heat and cook with wood, grow our own food, do the farm work with horses, raise cash crops to barter for other necessities, educate our own children. The means to achieve these ends were often not agreed upon, and our vaguely articulated ideals were often in conflict with the reality of individual social and emotional demands, as well as the demands of farm life. For guidance we looked to romanticized visions of Native Americans and other indigenous “natural” people and to agrarian communes elsewhere in the world as we chose to selectively perceive them.

No matter how skilled or unskilled a commune member was, for example, we believed every person was required to learn to perform every task as an equal, whether that was pounding nails, shoveling manure, operating machinery, or mopping the floor and caring for the children. (“Give a person a fish and you feed him/her for one day. Teach a person to fish and you feed her for a lifetime.”) I remember the shocked disapproval of two men visiting from an Israeli kibbutz as they watched ten or twelve healthy and potentially productive adults standing around doing nothing as one inexperienced communard tried to back the hay wagon up the ramp to the barn for unloading at the height of haying season. Efficient we were not.

We also had a disastrous open enrollment policy. After all, since people should not own the land or the earth, and since private ownership was eschewed, anyone who wished to be a part of our commune must be welcomed. At times during our first summer well over forty people were living on the farm, which strained our resources tremendously. And although the core group of “founders” always held some primacy, we were often trying to give that power away as well.

Evening meetings were mandatory to process events and divide the next day’s work responsibilities. These meetings were also leaderless, frustrating, and inefficient, but in our view necessary to the development of the new society we imaged we were creating.

Our first purchase was a cow. That none of us had ever owned or milked a cow before in our lives did not deter us from this simple, safe, child centered, and immediately rewarding enterprise. Next we bought a team of horses, Jim, the steady and practical older gelding, and Mike, his stronger but far wilder and younger partner. Horses, unlike cows, are not easy or non-dangerous. They also don’t respond well to multiple handlers. Naturally, when word got out that we were planning to work with horses some of the old timers from town who loved and honored this way of life came by to offer instruction and encouragement. Particularly important to us was George Truax, who gave endlessly of his time and wisdom in the arts and crafts of horse management, horse care, and the use and repair of horse drawn equipment.

After our first cow and horses we acquired others, as well as chickens, pigs, goats, more dogs, and cats. The farm was fertile and richly blessed with good growing lands. It also had a remarkably healthy and productive sugar bush, with a more or less complete set of sugar gathering and processing equipment. Although we had only moved onto the farm in February, and knew nothing at that time about horses or sugaring, when the sap started running after town meeting that spring of 1970, like many other Vermont farmers, we set out our taps. We produced over 150 gallons of fine quality maple syrup that first spring, marketed the syrup to a natural foods outlet in New York City under the Earthworks label, and made what seemed a handsome profit. Given the labor we put into this endeavor we probably cleared fifteen cents per hour.

Naturally, when our horse drawn equipment broke down, as old equipment often and inevitably does, we were hard pressed to find or fashion parts. In this realm, we became increasingly familiar with numbers of lovely, profound, and philosophical older farmers who gave graciously of their knowledge, skill, and used machine parts. Ken and Grace Spooner were also important to us in this regard. We often had the image that we kept a team of horses to spread manure on the fields, to plow the fields, to sow hay for the animals, to reap hay for the animals, including the horses, so they could take out the manure, etc. We were their servants as well as they were ours. The margin of profit on our “self-sufficient” turn of the century dairy was slim at best.

We were extremely happy and also extremely troubled throughout our existence. The beauty and the freedom we appreciated were ample and ever present. The hardships and harsh demands of farm life to novices were equally prominent. Inordinate amounts of time were spent making the simplest decisions. We were ridiculously inefficient. We did not achieve our production goals. Our notion that we could raise all our food organically fell short each year. Yet we put tremendous effort into food production and gardening, planted and harvested a two-acre vegetable garden, produced twenty five to fifty percent of the foods we consumed, and lived on an unbelievably meager amount of cash given our numbers.

Then too, we were not prepared for the rigors of country life and experienced some profound and serious setbacks. Large animals who we loved and cared for got sick and we had no sense of how to help them heal. Some even died in our care. Potato bugs ravaged our fields notwithstanding a commitment that every man, woman, and child would spend one hour each morning collectively hand picking bugs off our crops, an endeavor we persisted in for weeks. And the August drought the summer of ’70, when our spring and potable water source quite literally ran dry, shocked us as well as seriously threatened ours and our children’s health and well being. With over forty people living on the property, and with the main crops needing to be harvested, the fact that we didn’t have water to drink created an energy and time consuming problem we had completely failed to anticipate or prepare for.

In this regard, our failure to harvest the oat field planted in spring’s enthusiasm reflects over commitment and the absence of good harvesting equipment, as well as an overall level of disorganization and naiveté. The collective harvest of the oat field in winter was a political and spiritual gesture as much as a practical one, where over seventy persons from elsewhere in the state joined us one cold January day to make our way through the field in a visible manifestation of the rewards of joint endeavor. The image was far more important than the actual meager product. The sheaves of harvested oats that stood in that field were a reminder to one and all of what we were capable of achieving …and what we had failed to achieve.

There was energy in the commune movement that was far greater than we were, a social force operating beyond our will or control. Whereas one day there seemed to be few if any communes in Vermont or in the nation, by the summer of 1971 there were easily one hundred separate conglomerates of people sharing living situations in Vermont who considered themselves communes. These ranged from “political” communes, with no base on the land, to “spiritual/life style” communes with no interest in politics. In the summer of 1971 the Earthworks Commune co-sponsored a “gathering of the tribes” at the Franklin farm. Over three hundred people from dozens of separate communes across the state showed up for this meeting and numerous projects whose scope exceeded that which any one commune could create emerged from the gathering, including a free health clinic in Burlington, a food buying co-op, and a children’s school at the Mt. Philo commune in Ferrisburg which drew children to it from numerous communes across the state.

The fire that destroyed the main house and wood shed right before Thanksgiving of our second year was a devastating blow and came at a particularly unfortunate time in the evolution of the commune. We had finally achieved a modest degree of stability. Our membership was relatively fixed at thirteen adults and six children. We had a very successful summer and fall from a production perspective. The shed was filed to the rafters with over sixty cords of wood. The root cellar held hundreds of pounds of summer crops, canned food, and preserved meat. We had devised a plan to reduce the number of mouths we had to feed in the difficult winter months, including a plan to house the children at the Philo Commune’s “Children’s School” and rotate parents as teachers to that site. We were prepared for sugaring well in advance.

After the fire we were forced to face the issue of our survival in very pragmatic terms. We had no place to live, no food, and no financial resources. A series of meetings about regrouping versus dissolving were held, mostly at Nat and Mimi Worman’s home. We decided to attempt to stay together and rebuild. We erected a makeshift cabin where we could cook and where eight crowded adults could sleep. Others slept in the barn and converted school buses. Many from town succored us with food and clothing; communards from elsewhere in the state, particularly the Mullin Hill Commune in West Glover, provided manual labor. We drafted plans to build a combination workshop and home, the very home where the Gagne family who farms this land lives today.

Building in the midst of a Vermont winter is not ideal to say the least. Daylight hours are pitiably short. Frozen boards split from the pounding of nails. Gloved hands are not agile. Yet we did survive that winter, the children went to the school at Philo, and the stock thrived. By spring many people from elsewhere in Vermont came to help in the sugaring and rebuilding. Naturally, numerous helpers also meant numerous visitors to feed and house, but we were now organized, even “specialized.” Only three or four people drove our team of horses. Only three or four people worked the fire and the fifteen-foot boiling pan in our sugarhouse. Guests helped cook, care for youngsters, carry wood, and gather sap.

I have a particular vision of that sugaring season which captures the essence of the Franklin commune experience for me. We were gathering heavily flowing maple sap on a glorious sunny day, temperatures in the high forties, using a three hundred gallon tank being drawn by our team of horses on a dray through deep snow. Dozens of people were tromping through the woods pouring sap from the tap buckets into gathering buckets and unloading those buckets joyfully and speedily into the horse drawn tank. As we drove the first fully loaded tank back toward the sugarhouse the dray hit a hidden rock and tipped over pitching the gathering tank off the dray and onto its side. Though we only lost about twenty or thirty gallons of sap, the tank was far too heavy for us to right and reset on the dray, even with all the people power we had. So we set about unloading the sap we had gathered in the tank back into the gathering pails and then retraced our steps through the snow to the trees we had just harvested where we poured the sap back into the very buckets just unloaded. It was as if someone had taken a movie of our operation and was now playing the reel in reverse.

Yet we did right the tank, and again made sweet syrup amidst our laughter, self doubt and self ridicule. We also finished the shop, planted the year’s crops, and persevered through similar joys and failures for a number of years more.

Then the war in Vietnam ended and the “counter-cultural” energy seemed to dissipate. Commune parents and their biological children hungered to make safer saner units to live in. Couples now separated could not comfortably live with ex-spouses in new couplings. Old disputes and disagreements as to how we would live were no longer promising of agreeable resolution. Founding members drifted off and the connection to Jane was frayed. Newcomers did not find the commune as romantic or attractive as it had once been. The commune dissolved. Jane sold the land. The sap flowed in the trees. The grass grew over the scar in the earth that had been our home.

Nearly half a dozen residents of Earthworks still live in Vermont, some in politically and socially active roles. Others have careers in carpentry, psychotherapy, and the law. Occasionally we get together out of on going friendship or just plain curiosity. I know where every one who lived on the Franklin commune twenty years ago is today. Except for Peter and Shannon and their son who was born on the farm and lovingly named Truax, after our departed mentor George.

Hassids

• see also http://vtcommune.blogspot.com/ – a franklin commune blog … and http://comicsbeat.com/rip-peter-mcfarland a very nice tribute to a Franklin Commune founder by his niece

We were sitting on the front porch outside the house early one summer morning, more of a six foot wide deck than a porch, with no railings and no steps, the porch an idea incomplete in actualization, like so much in our lives then, in front of the main door to the living room, the door we never used in winter because it let cold air directly into the belly of the house, and never used in summer because it had no screen and let all the flies into the house. Everyone was there to begin the morning meeting on what was a warm, glorious, bright, sun filled summer day, Vermont at its stunning, fecund best. The dogs and cats cruised around the dangling legs of the people seated on the edge of the deck. They rubbed themselves and wove in and out of people’s legs, porch support posts, and standing children. They snapped at flies and lolled in the sun. They gazed down the road. It was going to be a scorching hot day.

The chickens scratched around looking for grain and bugs. The flies buzzed the half empty breakfast dishes. People were rolling and smoking cigarettes, or quitting smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee or giving up drinking coffee, finishing breakfast or fasting, everyone awaiting to start the meeting so we could get on with the day, at least twenty of us sitting or leaning on the edge of the porch, standing on or near the porch, watching the horses in the field, playing with the kids, brushing their long hair, petting the dogs and cats. A most beautiful Vermont summer morning. And there was much work needing to be done, fields to be planted and harvested, horses to be hitched, trips into town, machinery needing repair, construction and maintenance projects, animal husbandry projects. Kids care. House care. We had discussed this all in last night’s meeting and were waiting now to make a few last minute accommodations, when far down the long driveway leading to the house we noticed a black Volkswagen driving slowly towards us, hardly kicking up dust.

No one we knew had a black Volkswagen. Natives of northern Vermont and hippies didn’t do little Volkswagens. VW vans maybe, although parts were hard to come by, but not bugs. Never. We were Dodge Dart, Volvo, and Chevy people.

By the time the Volkswagen reached the sugarhouse we saw that there were New York plates on the car. By the time the VW reached the remains of the animal carcass and the car engine hoist in the side yard we could see that there were two men with dark clothing and heavy beards in the car, two men wearing big black felt hats, big black beards with curly sideburns, and long black coats. The car stopped right next to the porch. The engine was turned off. The men stepped out into the dust of our driveway and the bright Vermont sunshine in their long black coats and shiny black dress shoes. It grew totally still on the deck, all eyes drawn to the VW. No one said a word. You could hear the flies buzzing. Our mouths were opened in anticipation. This is not a dream, I thought, although I wondered for a moment.

“We are here to find the Jews,” the shorter bearded man said.

“A CIA ruse,” whispered Charlie under his breath.

“We want to know why so many Jews are joining communes,” the taller bearded man said. “We are traveling around Vermont, visiting communes, trying to find out why so many Jews are drawn to live on them. We’ve been to Glover, and to Packer’s Corners. The people there told us the Franklin commune was rich and prosperous.

One by one people started to drift away from the porch, molecules dispersing from the center. Tasks all of a sudden seem urgent. There were so many things to do, and talking to two crazy guys in long black coats from Brooklyn who are looking for Jews was not one of them. I looked around and within sixty seconds there were only three of us left on the porch, the only Jews on the commune.

“Why don’t Hasidic women have equal rights?” Leslie asked them with her fierce, deep, and abiding feminist attitudes on florid display as she walked away before they could even answer.

“I don’t believe in god,” Hutcher said. You could tell from his pronunciation alone that he’d spelled it with a small letter gee.

“How can you not believe in God?!” one of the Hassids asked, quite genuinely shocked.

“Just a question of which myths and fairy tales you choose to believe in,” Hutcher said, and he too walked away.

“So, how many Jew live on this commune?” the taller one asked me.

“Well, three,” I said, “the gorgeous woman with the dark hair who just walked away from you, the guy with the bushy beard who just told you god didn’t exist and walked away from you, and me, who has a lot of work to do and is now also going to walk away from you.”

“Wait, please,” the tall one said earnestly, “we really do want to see your commune, to understand why you are living here.”

I’m thinking about this when two year old Maia comes running over to me from around the corner of the house. She has a smile on her face stretching from ear to ear. Her hands look like they haven’t been washed in days. She is carrying a piece of toast with honey dripping from it. Her clothes are filthy. Her mouth is ringed with crumbs. A squadron of flies is following her looking for breakfast. She is still the cutest sweetest creature I have ever known. And more than that, she has clearly been sent to rescue me.

“They need you over there,” she says, pointing to Barbara and Libby who are watching their little messenger and grinning while preparing to hitch the manure spreader to the old John Deere tractor. They have clearly sent Maia as their emissary.

“You are the sweetest little pumpkin I have ever seen,” I say to her. “Come on, we’re going to show these gentlemen our farm, okay.” I look at Libby and wink.

“Okay. Let’s show them Piggy and her babies first,” says Maia, who I pick up into my arms as we walk from the porch toward the big garden.

The way our farm is laid out, in a pattern established generations before we ever set foot on it, like so many Vermont dairy farms, the barn stands between the house and the nicest vista on the property. The idea being that when you look out from the front of the house, from the kitchen, from the living room, or from the deck, what you would see is the barn. After all, the barn was the lifeblood of the family farm, and apparently you needed and wanted to see it when you look out from the comfort of your home. Industry before beauty. The problem, of course, is that if you are hippies and the massive red structure is all you see when you look out the window you know you are being cheated of a view. And in order to see the stream at the bottom of the meadow behind the barn, or to even see the rolling hill rising behind the stream into the hardwoods where the sun sets and the moon rises, you have to stand inside the barn with the door to the manure pile open.

We walk on the rutted dirt road between the house and the barn, me in my overalls and big boots, Maia her floral dress and flip flops pulling me along by the hand, the Hassids in their black long coats and no longer so shiny shoes beside us.

“The field you see in front of you is our vegetable garden,” I say, “we have over three acres of vegetables under cultivation. Lettuce, tomatoes, summer and winter squash, potatoes, onions, string beans and pole beans. We planted it by hand. We weed it by hand. We fight the bugs off by hand. No chemicals.”

“It is so very, very beautiful,” says one of the men.

“You are truly blessed,” says the other.

And as I look out over the field in that moment it does feel as if we are blessed, although I have never thought of it that way. The sunflowers have started to bloom. Incredibly beautiful golden sunflower petals glisten in the morning sun. The light pouring trough the petals reveals their translucence. Drunken bees, drawn to the cornucopia of sunflower pollen, are stumbling into the aura of the flowers. In the movement of the sunflower heads on the tall stalks you sense the breeze.

At the end of the barn is the cattle run. At the bottom of the run are Piggy and her babies, a dozen of them grunting and rutting and crawling around on their mother who has been laying against the fence her belly fully distended. When she senses our approach she shakes off her slumber and the piglets to raise up on her stubby legs, alert for food. I show the Hassids the pigsty feeling a bit defensive.

“Run up to the garden and grab one or two of the tomatoes that have fallen on the ground, Maia, would you,” I say.

“We bred this pig,” I tell the Hassids. “The boar is in the barn. He’s just too big and nasty to let out. Takes seven or eight people and the better part of an hour to get him back in if he’s free. Tried a leash but couldn’t hold on to him. A very tough old man, Arnold. That’s the boar’s name.” I’m smiling. “We’ll sell some of these piglets before winter and slaughter the others for meat. They never cost us a penny. The first pigs were given to us. I know they’re not kosher, but they can be mighty tasty.”

“God is good,” says the tall one.

“You are richly blessed,” says the other

“This is so beautiful,” they say. “My God, look at this wonderful place you have here. It is a gift, a mitzvah, a sign from God. Look at those hills, those fields, those wonderful animals. Oh, God must love you so much!”

I like these guys. They see the place as it is, beautiful as it is. Even in its dirtiest aspect.

Maia comes running down to the pigpen. She throws the tomatoes inside the fence. There is joyous squealing and grunting before the tomatoes are turned into pork. She is laughing. I am laughing. The Hassids are laughing.

I take the Hassids inside the barn, show them the horses, and give them the independence from technology rap. They are attentive and appreciative. They seem to understand why this place and the choices we have made here make sense to us. I am struck by their enthusiasm. It is earnest and genuine. Our farm is, of course, spectacularly beautiful and they are seeing it for what it is. They do not see the warts, the mess, the broken down machinery. And if they do, they’re not saying anything about it.

“What magnificent animals they are,” says the shorter of the men. “And so many little ones. God must love you. It is a sign. A gift. You are so blessed. It is a marvelous wonderful marvelous wonder.” You gotta like this guy.

They ask me more about the farm, about how many people live here, about what we really do, about what inspires us. They are surprised we appear to have absolutely no spiritual or religious practices. They keep saying, “God loves you,” as if the fact they really believe it quite simply means it is true. I am a bit in awe of their affirmative positive energy. I show them the rest of the barn, the chickens, the hay we have harvested. I talk about self-sufficiency and political relevance. The dogs follow wagging their tails. I am aware of my dirty overalls, my hair, untended and uncut for months down around my shoulders. I see myself through their eyes, a rural Jewish giant who needs a shave with a beautiful two-year-old child in my arms who is still smiling across an entire continent.

“I really have to get to work fellows,” I say, “people are waiting for me.”

They nod. We start back toward their car. They continue effusive in their praise and enthusiasm. It is ridiculous, but I too am still smiling.

We reach the house. They shake my hand earnestly. Passionately. They climb into the VW.

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” I say, “good luck on your journeys.”

“It was a pleasure to meet you,” they say. “You have such a gift here. God is so good to you.” They are bubbling over with excitement as they climb back into their car. “Count your blessings,” they yell with that same ridiculous enthusiasm from the rolled down car window. “Remember God loves you,” they shout. “You are blessed one thousand times,” they say. “Remember to pray. Give thanks,” they say. They start their engine.

“Say a thousand prayers!” they are shouting. “Remember that God loves you. Tell God you love him! The world is good! The word is good. God is the word. God is good. Lay on your phylacteries every day! Remember!”

“You know,” I say, almost as an after thought I could have sworn I’d said to myself, “I’ve never put on phylacteries in my entire life.”

“What?” they shout in unison, “you have never worn teffilin? It is a blessing, a mitzvah, something that must be done. It is an honor, a duty to do so.”

It’s like a Charlie Chaplin movie. The car which had started to roll slowly forward down the hill screeches to a halt. It grinds backs up to the porch. The two guys in the black beards and coats jump out of the car and run over to me.

“But you are Jewish, yes?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never laid teffilin?”

“No.”

“Laying tefillin is a mitzvah, a blessing. Please, if you would be so kind, perhaps we could lay tefillin on you here and now.”

I think about it for all of two seconds. “Sure,” I say, “Why not?”

So the short one goes back into the car and takes out a beautiful deep blue velvet pouch with gold embroidered lettering on it. From inside the pouch he removes the phylacteries, the small black leather boxes with the lengthy leather straps attached.

“Let us say the morning prayers together,” the short one says.

“This will be good,” the tall one says. “It is an honor for us, a blessing to be able to do this for you.”

“Stand here,” one says. “Give me your left arm.”

For me this has all become a little embarrassing. But it is also strangely moving. I put Maia down. I stand in front of them facing the early morning sun arisen over the distant hills as they wrap the ritual boxes and thongs around my arm and fingers. They say words in Hebrew, rocking back and forth, eyes closed, enraptured.

“Repeat after me,” one says. And I repeat the sounds that seem so familiar, even if their literal meanings are completely obscure.

The prayers are soon over. My arms are unwrapped. The ritual objects are placed back in their ritual containers. I pick up Maia who has been standing there watching this entire process eyes wide. The men are smiling. Their eyes are shining. We shake hands again.

“God is good,” they say for the hundredth time.

“God is good,” I say back.

They get in the car. They start the engine and roll slowly down the driveway yelling out the windows, “God is good.”

I hold onto these images. The incongruity of the Hassidic men in their black long coats standing in the mess that is our commune that morning, seeing the beauty that I saw, perhaps even seeing more beauty than I saw, showing me the very beauty they have seen, opening my eyes to a kind of enthusiasm I do not usually feel. It is good to have had this moment of phylacteries being wrapped on my arms as the working day is about to begin. I take Maia’s hand. We walk together toward the manure spreader.

The men call back once more, a faint echo that runs up the driveway and thru our land to end in the hills behind us. “God is good. God is very good.” I hear it softly. I see them looking at one another in the VW. They are laughing joyously. Giddy.

By the time Lu and I get to the garden Barbara and Libby are also there. We have come to the garden with the strong intention of weeding, of tearing out unwelcome and unproductive plants to make greater room for the selective few, to assist the plants we favor, to cull those we did not ask to be here. Since we don’t use chemicals or pesticides all weed killing and bug killing is the work of loving hands. And every farmer knows that yield is significantly increased when you grant more access to earth, air, fertilizer, and water to the plants you love and need. Funny how love and need get merged in our consciousness.
It was a glorious hot summer day. The kind of day you dream about all year long in Vermont. A day when the air grows still, when the sun is so hot the distant trees literally vibrate when you look at them, and the familiar horizon seems blurry through the thickened air. This is the sunshine that creates mirages in the desert and even in Vermont.
That this constellation of players has gathered for this afternoon of weeding is unusual. Charlie and Mary Pat, sparked by the intense summer heat, have taken all of the kids to the local lake for a swim, something that rarely happens. Barry and Leslie have gone off to Burlington for a break from the collective routine and to visit friends. Hutch and Linda are in the house. She is quite pregnant now and not moving easily, especially in the heat. Theirs will be the second child born on the commune this year. Peter and Shannon and the infant Truax are off on some errand, spending time away and alone as they like to do. It is a release they need, although their frequent escapes are always judged and resented by some left tending the store. He is such an amazing individual as well as an individualist, our Peter. And he and Shannon resent the resentment, and rightly so. It is a wicked cycle, this complex emotional and judgmental web we have woven and enmeshed ourselves in. It is not as if they’ve gone off to purchase personal goods, or are out for a leisurely lunch at a restaurant. No one does that. And it amazes me this is so. There are so few personal indulgences taken … ever. Everyone appears to have simply given up their very individual wishes or impulses toward bourgeois preferences. And it appears to have happened without much struggle, dialogue, or obvious intention. I do not remember the last piece of clothing that has been purchased by anyone. No one ever eats out, or goes to the movies, or buys a coffee to go. We barely permit ourselves a soda and certainly no candy bars. This parsimoniousness, this Puritan ethic, is something that has not even been discussed; it just emerged from the comprehensive worldview that has come to define this collective and from our terribly tight budget, one where we frequently appear to have no cash at all. We do not fight about money. We have few organizational precepts. Much of what the commune is in this regard appears to have emerged of its own accord. And it defines us. We don’t spend money when we don’t have to. We prize self-sufficiency and independence. We have long said that everyone must learn every farming family skill, that there can be no specialists. That means that even though Peter is the most skilled carpenter he must still spend one day a week caring for the kids and preparing meals in the kitchen like everyone else. It means that even though Linda has never swung a hammer in her life she is expected to pound nails like everyone else. If you give a person a fish, we like to say, you feed her for one day, but if you teach a person to fish, you feed her for a lifetime. I think we culled that from a poster we once saw
We try to produce all the food and feed that we can from the land. We do manage to raise a fair share of vegetables, eggs, meat, and much of the food for our animals. We supplement their diet with grain we buy in bulk on the Canadian side of the border, less than two miles as the crow flies from the farm. We dry mullein leaves as smoking tobacco, or buy tins of coarse ground tobacco and roll our own. We always have rolling papers. We grow our own marijuana, not as a cash crop but as a pleasure giving necessity. We make our own beer. And as for those material needs about which we cannot be totally self-sufficient we try to live off the largesse of others, following which we steal, following which we purchase the necessities, food first. We have even figured out how to steal electricity, the little that we use, by disconnecting the big meter from the pole it is mounted on and short cutting the circuit so that the electric flows through it but the meter counter doesn’t cycle. We leave the meter not running for three weeks and then connect it the last week of the month, before Roger Younger, the meter reader comes out to take its pulse. “You people hardly used any electric this month,” he says. “Yes, we’re trying to be as self reliant as we can,” we say. And we mean it.
The women in the garden have taken off their shirts in an unusual display of confidence and relaxation. It is a declaration of autonomy, freedom, confidence and carelessness. Lou even takes off her dungarees and underpants. Her pubic hair is sparse. I try to keep my admiration and interest to myself. It would be politically incorrect and impolite to comment or respond to their nudity. The women are laughing and joking, excited to be in the garden, to be free of the children, to be experiencing the sensation of liberation. There is nothing more important to us than liberty and freedom. I take off my shirt, my pants and my underpants. Why not? Am I not as free as the women to be comfortable in my nakedness and in my body in nature?
And this is how we find ourselves of a hot summer afternoon in the garden in Vermont. I am not exactly one hundred percent comfortable, but we are nothing if not experimental with our lives and feelings. It is tremendously quiet in the garden, and that too is a rare sensation. Vermont can get really quiet, but the commune doesn’t have many quiet moments. It is something about the heat of summer and the lazy thickness of the air that contributes to the sense of stillness. There is no breeze. Insects are working floridly in the fields. The four of us are weeding. Very little is being said or needs to be said.
The impulse to come to the garden and spend the afternoon weeding was born of a desire to accomplish something tangible. It was discussed in morning meeting as responsibilities were assigned and priorities discussed. The weeding has gotten away from us and the garden is important. It is over two acres in size, which is quite substantial, and has been planted in waves and bursts of over enthusiasm with tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beans, peanuts, potatoes, squash, eggplant, watermelons, marigolds, and corn. It is easy to plant vegetables on a large scale. The horses and the old plowing and harrowing equipment make preparation of a good-sized field quite easy. The work of planting is easy too; it is an act of creativity and hope. And it is physically easy as well. Once the earth has been plowed, fertilized, harrowed, and ground smooth the act of actually planting seeds or seedlings, depending on the crop, is an act of inspiration and creativity that goes easily and which everyone, even the children can do. Create furrows with hoes or sticks or fingers or the toe of your boot. Drop in the seeds or seedlings at agreed upon distances apart. Cover them or their roots with dirt. Pat the earth down around them. Say something kind and positive to your babies. Pray for rain and then sit back and watch them grow. Weed them. Thin them out occasionally. Eat the edible cull.
So too harvesting is easy. Rewarding. Productive. Abundant. And also something the kids can be part of. Oh, it does get laborious and repetitive, everything about farming, taking out the manure and spreading it, chopping wood, washing sugar buckets, is laborious and repetitive, but nothing is more instantaneously gratifying than the harvest. Notwithstanding these romantic notions, the glory of productive labor has not come to be assigned to the task of weeding. No one likes to weed the garden. It is scut work, not sexy or significant. But those of us in the garden this afternoon have put on our most earnest, down to earth Chinese peasant hats, and, determined as we are, and hoping to be energized by each other, have proposed making a real dent in the overgrowth competing with, obscuring, and crowding our three or four hundred tomato plants, one hundred yards of carrot tops, and incipient eggplant parmesean. Imagining the future is important. We have set aside three hours, which we think is realistic. And with four of us working steadily as we occasionally do, mechanistically, mindlessly, diligently, and efficiently we hope to make an impact on the garden, as well as a statement to the collective.
And there we are, bent over, on our knees, or squatting on our haunches, weeding, cleared to do this work, with no distractions, the kids cared for, and no crisis looming.
We have been working in this manner for all of twenty or thirty minutes when we hear a car coming down the driveway. It does not sound like one of our cars, we are anticipating no visitors, and since the garden is a good two hundred yards beyond the house, and we are hunkered down behind some decent sized tomato plants, the car is not of particular concern. Most cars that come down the driveway stop at the house. It is the logical, respectful, and polite stopping place. You just don’t drive onto other folk’s land in Vermont, nor drive beyond their homes out onto their property. But this car we can hear has continued on passed the house, and although moving slowly, as every piece of equipment must when approaching this part of the rutted property, we hear it drive past the hay mow on the side of the barn, hear it clearly as it comes to the first open gate of the unused cattle run where all our old equipment is lined up, drive right past that gate, right out the other side of the run where the gate has also been left open, and out onto the edge of the field that is our garden.
There used to be a road here, an old logging and hunting road that connected our farm with the Spooner property about two miles away, passed the Red Creek swamp, through the woods, and over a few good hills, a road that ran past the house and through this one-time hay meadow we have turned at least partially into an organic vegetable garden. The car stops. The engine is idling. Men are talking. I stand up naked in the field. There doesn’t appear to be any choice. Barbara, Libby and Lou walk back to where they have thrown off their clothing and slip back into their shirts and shorts and stand there together. Barbara and Libby are glowering. They are good at glowering. The car is just idling about 20 yards from us with four men seated inside. There is a thirty-thirty hunting rifle in a gun rack in the rear windowsill. I walk over to the car. I feel foolish and confident simultaneously. I can’t just stand there and I can’t ignore them. I get as close to the vehicle as I possibly can in an effort to shield my genitals from their glances, but I also want to talk, to look inside the car, to act assertively, and carry on a conversation. It’s hard to do while standing this close to the front passenger side door.
The car is an old black Chevy that has been over its share of dusty country roads. I do not recognize any of the men inside it. There are six or seven open beer cans on the seats and floor of the car. There is a shotgun propped up between the two men in the back seat of the car. The men appear to be in their mid to late twenties, slightly younger than me. They are dressed in dirty overalls, jeans and tee shirts. One is smoking a cigarette. They’ve been drinking for a while and I can smell it. Christ, what time was it, one P.M?
“This the road to the Spooner place?” the driver asks.
“There is no road through here to the Spooners’,” I say.
“Used to be,” says the driver. “We were hoping to hunt us some bear up in those woods.”
“Sorry, we don’t permit hunting on our property.”
“Well we used to hunt bear in these woods.”
“Maybe, but we really don’t permit any hunting here.”
“Well then maybe we’ll just have a walk through them woods. Don’t mind that do you?”
“Yes, we do mind, as a matter of fact. Nothing personal, but you gentlemen just have to turn around and get off our land.”
This is ridiculous I think. It’s like a scene out of some bad movie. I suspect they’ve merely come here on a lark, or to ogle. And they’ve gotten an eyeful and will have plenty of stories to tell their friends. I just can’t read how innocent or dangerous they are.
“Not too neighborly,” says one of the guys in the back seat.
“I guess some might say that, but we have work to do and would appreciate it if this visit was just a short one.” I look the driver in the eye. I’ve been leaning down peering into the car window. “You fellows have a good day now.”
“Want a beer?” the passenger asks.
“Don’t mind if I do, thank you,” I say.
He passes me a sweaty cold can of ale. I put it up against my forehead. The three-legged dog Kisha limps up to the car and leans into me. “Good puppy,” I say.

“What happened to your dog there?” one guy in the car asks.

“Deer hunters,” I say. “You fellows be good now.”

I turn and walk with my back to them the twenty yards or so to where the women are standing. Lou has gotten my clothing. I slip on my jeans while staring at the car. I close the buttons on the fly of my pants one at a time, as if I’ve just taken a piss. It is a relief to have my pants on. The men in the car are talking among themselves. They are laughing softly. Barbara asks me what they wanted. To hunt bear I tell her, to drive up the Spooner road, to ogle hippies, I don’t know rightly. The men wave at us. “Want a beer, honey,” one of the guys in the back seat yells. “No thank you,” says Libby.

I see the men looking at Libby. She is a stunning woman, tall, with pale skin and wavy blonde hair. She is the only native Vermonter in our commune, a woman who understands car engines and small machines. Her father was a preacher and philanderer. Her mother has become a true friend. Libby dies of cancer well before her time.

The car backs up and turns around. It drives back out the driveway the way it came.

“What the hell was that about,” demands Barbara.

I honestly don’t know. I pop open the beer. I pour a little onto the ground as a libation. I take a sip. I offer the can to the others. Barbara shakes her head no. Libby shakes her head no. Her eyes are firing darts. “I hate that shit,” she says. Lou takes the can and takes a sip of beer.

“You were quite brave,” she tells me in a lilting tone, not too serious but serious enough.

“I was scared shit and didn’t have any ideal what the hell would happen,” I say. “I hate feeling so vulnerable and powerless.” I want to talk about it.

“I’ve got vegetables to weed,” says Barbara, who doesn’t want to talk about it. “I’m glad the kids weren’t here. What should we do if those men come back?”

We’ve had discussions around this issue many times before. Many times. FBI men, border patrol, state police, and oglers have all dropped in to say “hello” to us. We once stopped at the state police barracks in St. Albans on the pretense of asking a question about something or other, our opportunity to check them out and say we also knew where they lived, when we noticed an oversized map of north western Vermont roadways hanging on the wall with a red pin in it right at the beginning of the driveway to our farm.

“What’s this pin here for,” I asked the sergeant behind the counter.

“Damned if I know,” he said.

We had erected a quite substantial chain link barrier across the driveway when we moved onto the farm. Two eight inch round fence posts sunk into four-foot deep concrete filled holes we’d dug on either side of the driveway, but we never used it, it just appeared too unfriendly, was so unheard of in Vermont, and was such a hassle for us to open and close on our many trips up and down the driveway each day. Maybe we should use it after all.

“Well I’m right mighty pissed off,” says Libby, “right pissed off,” she mutters as she walks back toward the house, her weeding over for the day.

“I wish I’d had a gun, I’d feel better” I say.

“Me too,” says Lou.

“That would’ve made it ten times more likely something nobody wants to happen would’ve happened,” says the ever practical Ms. Barbara. She is right.

“I’m going back up to the house to see about the kids,” I say, forgetting for the moment they’re at the lake, wanting to make sure they are okay, wanting to feel connected. I pour the rest of the beer onto our good earth.

“I’ll go with you,” says Lou.

We leave Barbara in the garden. We tell the story that night around the communal fire. Once. We never talk about it again. We never see the men again. No one in town ever says anything to us about it. We never ask.

Our house burned to the ground the day before Thanksgiving, November 23, 1971. Moon in Sagittarius. Given we had moved in on Feb 2, 1970 this was barely the beginning of our second Vermont winter

The charred structure and all its incinerated contents spread ashes, soot, and cinders over a blanket of four inches of freshly fallen snow. Because we had successfully stored so much chopped wood in the old carriage shed attached to the house for the winter heating season (just beginning in earnest) the fire smoldered and smoked for literally three weeks.

After the fire an incredible sense of desperation befell us. We had, of course, each felt deep despair at the foibles and failures of our endeavor before, but this was different, not the individual dismay or neuroses we knew and loved, but a unified, sustained, collective moan that hung in the air relentless as thunder. We did not panic, surprisingly, but there was no way to minimize the very pragmatic real world concerns we felt about the meaning and impact of our loss and about the frightful prospects it augured regarding our very survival.

How else could it be?

A fire had destroyed the home of nineteen human beings, seven of whom were under ten years of age. Fire had consumed their winter food supply stored in mason jars and specially designed curing racks and storage bins in their root cellar. Fire ate their bedding and furniture, their towels and toothbrushes, like a swarm of locust devouring all plants in their path, a voracious insatiable unified beast. Fire tried on and threw away every piece of clothing, every tool and every trinket, except those we wore or carried when fire began its ferocious visit.

Fire destroyed virtually every material thing we had ever worked for, cared for, carried with us, or brought with us onto the farm; photographs, cameras, guns, tools, scrapbooks, hand made baby cradles, prized and not so prized possessions, things we never thought we relied upon until we looked for them, everything.

Neighbors we never knew of were generous and kind. Nature was not.

We had long abandoned our dependence on fossil fuels to heat our home in winter and had been solely dependent on our wood burning stoves for heat and cooking from the beginning. This kind of self-reliance we reasoned freed us from dependence on others and on the need for cash. And while we knew the entire world could not be heated with wood, given how vast the Earth’s population had grown to be, at least for us, here in this corner of the planet, wood was a renewable and ecologically sound resource. We had also finally gotten the winter wood harvesting, chopping, and storing thing down to a science. It was part of our daily practice. Harvest downed trees and thin the forest where necessary. Skid the logs using our horses into the side yard. Cut the logs into stove lengths. Split and chop the logs. Throw them into a big pile. When the pile was big enough get everyone outside to form a line running from the split log pile into the wood storage shed. Pass the wood along, hand to hand, as we filled the shed from earthen floor to rafters. It was one of our pleasures. It was so tangible and productive. It was a time when we looked just like we wanted to look. And the woodshed, an immense outbuilding, had been filled that year with perhaps thirty cords of wood. Surely enough we believed based on past experience to heat our home and cook our foods well into the late spring.

We were such diverse people, so different from one another, with as many differing notions of how to proceed after the fire as there were people needing to make that decision. It was the vision thing, and in this participatory democracy everyone had one.

Some people wanted to disband the commune, to call it quits, and it seemed there was absolutely no way or reason to preclude them from doing so. Indeed, in that sense, it seemed like the ideal time to disband, which was an idea that was always not so far from anyone’s mind anyhow. Other people wanted only to close up operations for the winter, or to cut down to a rotating skeleton staff that would keep the farm animals together and try to build again in the spring, maybe coincidental with the start of maple sugaring, after the first thaw. And there were those, of course, the view that prevailed, and, in truth, the overwhelming majority of us, who wanted to forge ahead, then and there, damn the Vermont winter coming. We were warriors weren’t we? Revolutionaries? Hippie fools? Subsistence farmers? Communists? Guerrillas? Models? Exemplars? What did Vietnamese warriors do against the imperial might of the genocidal United States government when their villages were bombed and burned to the ground? What did the American Indian people devastated by raids and disease do? Were we quitters or were we fighters?

So even though there was something truly desperate about our circumstances, it was also so terribly romantic and real. I mean, if things had been hard before, just how much harder were they now?

The first concern was for the children, and that was as it should be. As romantic, idealistic and delusional as we might be, the children were very real and there were good fathers and mothers amongst us.

It’s funny, there was always a sense that although we were fiercely committed to attaining our vision, no matter how committed we said we were or how we behaved, there was always an escape hatch, except as regarded the children. We worked hard. We voted with our feet. We lived and bled on this land. But still there was a sense we could walk away from it at any time. We didn’t feel that way about our children. After the fire we had a desperate sense there was nothing else we really could do, nowhere else we really could be. We would die and be buried here, fertilizer for the trees we planted in the woods we loved. I’d never known so much love for anything that was not human as I did for those trees.

editor’s note — to complete this entry I’d have to talk about Philo … the Kidz Collective … Nori, Andrew, Mullen Hill, Craig, Barbara, Peter, Libby, The Wormans, George Truax … the “town” … and more … maybe someday I’ll get to it …maybe