Conception

In late May, 1968, literally running from the college where I’d been teaching, running from the local police, and from hosts of other unknown and unnamed demons, I fled to the Highland School for Exceptional Children in rural Paradox, NY, where I reconnected with Mary Pat, a woman I had had a deep, torrid, love relationship with in 1966, who was herself running from her mother’s suicide in Big Sur.

From Paradox we traveled together across this amazing huge country, listening to news of the police riots at the Democratic Party Presidential Nominating Convention in Chicago, concerned for those in the Black liberation struggle, excited and trepidations that revolution was becoming more real by the moment, and eager to find our place in it.  We were desperate and wildly enthusiastic about our union, the revolution, and having a child.  We lived from September 1968, to September 1969, in California, mostly in Sebastopol, in the redwoods, enjoying Mary Pat’s pregnancy, occasionally visiting San Francisco and Berkeley and the cultural/political revolutionary scene there.

I worked part of that year as a maintenance man at the University of California Marine Biology Laboratory in Bodega Bay where I met Jim and Barbara Nolfi, discussed plans for forming a commune, convinced their friends, the Jungian therapists Jane and Jo Wheelwright, to fund our venture, slept out of doors under the redwoods in the mist with our baby Maia, and then drove back across the continent to buy the old Magnum farm in Franklin, Vermont, all 330 acres of it, lock, stock, and barrel, for under $50,000.  We moved onto the farm February 1, 1970.  February Fools Day we called it.

It was an intense experience, that first year and a half, really two years if you consider sugaring seasons and summers as the year markers.  We were highly political in our orientation, but also fundamentally agrarian.  We fancied we were living a post revolutionary life style in pre-revolutionary times.  In hindsight we were a bit of a nativistic movement, desperate, idealistic, and courageously experimental.