Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Our next guests are the editors of

   FREE LAND: FREE LOVE: Tales of a Wilderness Commune

a collection of stories by the members of one of the oldest
communes still in existence, Black Bear.

Don Monkerud, Malcolm Terence, and Susan Keese, all early residents of
Black Bear, are the editors of the book.  Don is now a freelance writer
and editor, based in Santa Cruz.  Malcolm teaches math and Special
Education at Santa Cruz High School.  Susan is a freelance writer and
columnist living in Vermont.

The book is published by the Black Bear Mining and Publishing Company, and
contains stories by the three editors and about three dozen other Black
Bears, (including the WELL's own Mary Mackey), some of whom will
participate. (We'll introduce them, or they will introduce themselves as
they appear.)

The interviewer is Earl Crabb <esoft>, who's done a lot of strange things
in his life, but has never lived on a commune for more than one night in a
row!  He is a co-host of the News, Digest, and Engaged conferences on the
WELL, and has been online for thirty-five years.

Please join me in welcoming Don, Malcolm, Susan and Earl to inkwell.vue!
  

    
Hey, welcome to the editors, authors, and other Black Bears
and friends!  

The book is a collection of stories, poems, interviews, and drawings
about the Black Bear commune, which started in the '60's and
is still going!  

So my first question is, why now and how?  How did the idea of 
making the book come up, and especially how did the idea of having the 
contributors evolve?  Was it an open call to the Bears, or did 
you recruit writers?  Why is this the time to publish?
  

    

Just a reminder to those of you who are reading along on the Web, if you
have comments or questions for any of the participants, please send them
to inkwell-hosts@well.com and we will see that they get posted for you.
  

    
I have started reading the book and feel flooded with memories of
those times.  How has it changed so much in the last thirty years. I
didn't particiapte in Black Bear commune but I certainly remember the
desperate feelings of the time.
  

    

Hi, I'm Mary Mackey, a Bear (although of short duration at the ranch),
and very much a Well regular. My commune seems to be in cyberspace
these day, but I loved the summer I spent living at Black Bear
in the early 70s, and the experience has had a lasting influence
on my novels and poetry.

To the best of my memory, I got email from Don asking me to contribute
an essay. Also, he had found a sheaf of poems I had written while I
was living in a mosquito house (a tree house platform covered by
mosquito net). Black Bear was a wonderful place to writer. You
had both community and silence--a hard combination to come up with--and
I think the rhythms of the stream made their way into my poetry and
can still be found there.
  

    
I'm sure Malcolm will weigh in on this for he had the first idea of a
book to recount our experiences. Strangely enough, I sent a proposal
about a book on Black Bear around in 1973 or so, but there was no
interest from publishers. There was a previous book, January Thaw, put
out at the time, but was about what people were experiencing at the
moment. Malcolm mentions that he wanted to collect the stories for the
kids. For my part, I have a novel, Bear Dance, that I've been working
on for the past 25 years, as well as diary entries, short stories from
the time and other snippets of experiences. My stories come from my
notebooks of the time. 

I'm a full-time writer so I had more time to spend on this than most
of the other people. Susan, Malcolm and I divided up the writers to
contact, in addition to putting out a "lowering expectations" edition
at BB reunion. Entries began to flood in from people. It was a great
way to reconnect with people from then, and continues to be as I get
calls and emails from people who have been out of touch for 30 years.

Why now? Peter Coyote's book, "Sleeping Where I Fall," came out and I
thought there might be interest in this period. May people are trying
to forget the 60s and what they did then. Ronald Reagan and the right
wing reaction to almost everything we stood for has led quite a few
people to denounce their past, to hide under rocks or to simply keep
quite about the 60s. Newspapers and experts offered advice a few years
ago to lie to your children about what you did then, so your past
behavior wouldn't give your children cause to do things that you dont'
approve of. 

Producing the book now is a way to take back our history.
  

    
How many Black Bears are there, in all?  How many are you
still able to reach? 

The book _seems_ like it is more heavily weighted toward the earlier 
years, the late sixties and early seventies...is this true, or is
just that at Black Bear it is still like the sixties/seventies?
  

    

And I would like to know why you left!
  

    
Hi. I'm Susan and I live in New England now, but during the late
sixties and early seventies I was part of a farflung alliance, mostly
up and down the California coast, of people who were trying to
re-invent society. At the core (tho even this is subject to debate, we
were so anarchistic) was a group called the diggers, who tried to
organize a new society called Free City in San Francisco -- free
stores, free food, free fishing commune, free bakery commune, outposyt
communes up and down the coast. Black Bear was the farthest outpost,
incredibly remote. We were mostly middle class people but our vision
was that we would be classless and forgo whatever privelege we were
born to, and this I (naively) believed.
   When me moved up to Black Bear Ranch in the late summer and fall of
1968, I think most of us believed we were going to throw out all
the rules of a messed-up society, and create a new one that Made
Sense.  That first winter we also had a bunch of black militants from
Oakland with  us who thought they were going to have to learn to 
survive in the wilderness when the revolutionary shit hit the fan in
the cities.

 Working on the Black Bear Book, editing the pieces my fellow
communards wrote, confirmed my sense that many of us came with quite
differing visions of what our new society would look like -- some
amongst us were political, some ethereal, some were artists, some
thought art was frivolous. Though we talked ENDLESSLY, we put
 a lot of faith in unspoken communication in those days, and I think 
we used catch-phrases Like "yeah, man, I dig! "-- to fool ourselves
into thinking we were all on the same page.

   I believe me made some of the most interesting mistakes in 
history, and that society has benefited in many ways.

 I had been out of touch with Black Bear for many years when I 
visited some old friends in Calif while taking my daughter to look at
colleges in 1990. One old friend said I ought to try to write the
stories of Black Bear. I came back the next year and started taking 
oral histories, but the project never took off. Then Don and Malcolm 
hit on this idea of having everyone write their own story. I was 
happy to be invited to help, and to be put back in contact with so 
many old friends.

  To answer one other question -- I don't think there is any one
person who spans the whole life of the ranch, tho many come closer 
than me. Black Bear ended up being a place where people go to learn 
something  --a lot of practical skills, but more than that -- and 
then move on. A new group of young people are doing that now, while 
some of the old hands (working our gigs wherever) debate at annual 
meetings whether we ought to get insurance in case there's an 
accident!
    Guess that's all for now. Susan
  

    

Life was very hard at the ranch, but very exciting. All sorts of
strange and wonderful (and sometimes strange and not so wonderful)
people managed to make it down the road. Many things we take
for granted first surfaced strongly in places like Black Bear:
the women's movement, gay rights, ecological awareness, herbal
healing, natural childbirth. I'm sure other Bears can add more
to the list. I particularly remember my experiences with the
communal child-rearing. It was never completely communal, but
in many ways every child at the ranch had dozens of adults who
were (at least in part) mothers and fathers (maybe aunts and
uncles would be more accurate). Children had more contact with
their parents and their parents' lives at Black Bear than
most children in ordinary American society could imagine.

In some ways, living there was like living in a small village
in, say, 1420. Except, of course, that our political and
intellectual discussions had little in common with those
of the 15th century.
  

    
To answer Earl's questions... the early years were certainly the most
exciting with from 50 to 150 people at BB at any given time, depending
upon the season. People coming and going for eight months out of the
year; the roads close due to mud and snow the other months. Why people
stayed and why they left goes back to individual stories. No followers
were allowed! That thinned the groupies, but also left us with many
people with strong opinions. Throw that into the mix.

When we turned BB into a land trust we were inclusive rather than
exclusive and came up with a list of around 500 people who had lived
there or had an interest in the place. The list has grown with time...
needless to say there aren't 50 people living there now, but the
population varies. 

Why more writings from people in the beginning? Good question. Maybe
we're more settled than the younger people, maybe in closer connection,
at least with each other. The children born there now are having
children so the list grows. People who lived there recently are now
having children. These stories, I suspect, will be more personal than
covering a swath of 50 to 100 people sitting down to dinner, or
roasting a goat or all going out to plant the gardens.
  

    
When you first started Black Bear, did you think it would
last this long?  Would you have set things up differently 
if you had been as wise as you are now?
  

    

I think we were very apocalyptic, tho it wasn't necessarily stated
overtly. I don't think most of us could imagine ANYTHING lasting 30
years, including ourselves. If we had been as wise as we are now we
would probably have convinced ourselves is wasn't possible to buy the
ranch,let alone make it through the winter on the resources we had. 
That kind of youthful ignorance is very valuable in its power to
stretch a culture and its paradigms.
  

    

>     I believe me made some of the most interesting mistakes in
>  history, and that society has benefited in many ways.
>             -- Susan Keese

What do you mean by "interesting mistakes," Susan. Can you give some
examples? And will you elaborate on how society has benefited from them?
  

    
This interview has my rapt attention. I'm grateful to the hosts, and
<esoft> of course. Play on.
  

    
Questions for Mary, who spent a summer at Black Bear
well after it was established:  how did you know about
Black Bear, what attracted you to go, and why did you
stay only for the summer?  Do you think staying for
a winter might have affected your novels?

And for anyone/everyone:  How would you characterize
the people that have been living on the ranch in
recent years?  Are they the young idealists of early
years?  Middle-aged escapists?  
  

    
Black Bear was like grad school. Many people need to go but you
shouldn't stay there forever.

At the time we thought the ancien regime would come crumbling down and
we would be called on to help establish the new order. Our models were
Mao and Che, you remember. You think to yourself that neither of them
exactly had a society crumble for their convenience. Our brethren in
the underground understood history better than we did. 

But the impact of black bear is durable and can be measured in ways we
could not anticipate. 
1. It changed each one of us. Few of us left as we came. (That's the
grad school part.) 
2. The property has been continuously occupied by our successors
trying in their own way to define community. It is to their credit that
they don't try to have 60 people living there at once.
3. It built a community the sustains over space and time with hundreds
of us still in touch. Our children continue the community on their own
momentum, a rarity in our age-ist culture. 

I have one question: What of the title, Free Land: Free Love? It
provoked more criticism among the contributing writers than any other
issue. It was the Free Love part. Certainly we never would have used
the phrase in those long-gone days. It was something a visiting logger
might have said in hopes of finding a little. I confess that I like the
title with it's soft cascade of irony. 
  

    
I'm with Bud.  This is a find discussion and I'm enjoying myself while
reading so far.  Please keep it up.
  

    
Just wanted to say that I've been reading _Free Land, Free Love_ for a few
days now, and it is a VERY interesting book.  Not having been alive in
the 60's and 70's, I'm finding the book to be a great window into that
culture.  Truely enlightening!

Just one question right now: How were the inhabitants of Black Bear viewed
by society at large?
  

    
I did live through that period, and can tell you that that is a question
with no simple answer -- people involved in communes and other serious
counter-culture vortices were viewed with everything from envy and
admiration to hatred and contempt.  With a lot of general puzzlement
floating around too.
  

    
Straight people viewed us as complete freaks! Scary! Etc. We have an
article in the book by one of the local women about when a bunch of us
came down to the Sawyers Bar school and everyone said they weren't
hungry anymore because they were afraid that they would get sick from
our food. Imagine a bunch of folks who show up together, have a
reputation for sex, drugs and rock and roll and the viewer steps back
and looks at them. They all have hair down to their waists, they wear
boots, the women in long mostly handmade skirts, and the men with torn
and ripped jeans, feathers hanging from their hair, ear rings! and a
knife hanging from their belts. They laugh a lot, touch each other a
lot... get the picture?
  

    
I know this is an interview topic, so I'll shut up after this, but when I
was riding around the country on my bike with hair down to here (in the
company of a bunch of equally odd-looking companions), I had straight people
invite me into their homes, cook me meals, give me rides when I got lost...
and I had people threaten me and throw things at me.

I don't doubt that small-town Northern California folks thought commune-
dwellers were weirder than shit, but the response of straight America to
hippies in general was very complex, and not always negative.  Except in
Wyoming.
  

    
A comment about the effect we had on the society…. Malcolm listed
several things and I could list more but I’d like to mention something
that most of us take for granted today that didn’t exist then. Part of
it grew out of the women’s movement and part from living so closely
together. Before I went to BB and well into my stay there, I could
argue with the best of them. Debate. Shout others down. Talk over them.
Denounce them in the most unpleasant terms.

Over time these responses changed. Rather than saying, "You’re
completely f***ed for doing that," we learned to say something like,
"You know that really bothered me." A concern for other’s feelings that
didn’t exist before? A respect for each other that wasn’t as common in
the society at large at the time? 

At the last reunion, we had several discussions where 50 people sat
around in a group and let each other finish before speaking. I don’t
think that would ever have happened before BB, but I think that it
evolved. Not that we were the only ones to do this; it was happening in
other places too. Just pointing out that a sense of community, of
respect for each person was fostered then and allowed to exists. The
Reaganite hordes, of course, are turning this back and we’re seen as
freaks for our sensibilities in California, but I think this was a
contribution to society.
  

    

While I was typing my response to an earlier question, some other
conversation came in -- I agree with what Don said  regarding how
people learned to listen and hear one another out, and live together
with real respect. 

In answer to the question, what did I mean, we made some of the most
interesting mistakes in history.... 
   Operating under the premise that we were throwing out all the old
rules and reinventing society, we followed many different ideas out 
to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. IT was a radical
no-holds-barred time and we buoyed and challenged one another to take
things to the limit. Through our experiemnts, we threw ourselves into a
future that didn't exist until a bunch of brave fools put themselves
out there
   Ideas came and went. For a while commuinalism was taken to the
limit -- for a time personal living spaces were considered burgeoise
and everybody moved into the ranch's big main house together.  For a
period of time (after I was gone) you couldn't even lay claim to your
own blue jeans.... if you found a pair you liked, once they went into
the communal wash, they were fair game for anyone.
   Things like this couldn't last for ever but  a lot was learned in
the process.  WE learned that you couldn't build a shitter upstream
from your drinking water. We experimented with sexual identity and the
nature of the family. Why not have two partners, or more? Why not raise
our kids communally? There was a male chauvanist period (which
couldn't last)where the women were doing communal diapers and the men
were out shooting deer and playing paul bunyon with chain saws... then
there was a winter when the men were all off doing one thing or another
and the women took over the ranch ("Hey," said my friend Gail "This
winch is wound all wrong!")
   There were was a time when art was looked down upon as a frivolous
affectation; There was a time when the dreamers and the doers split up
into separate camps; there were experiments with food sources and power
sources and healing, and many things were learned. There were mistakes
made slaughtering animals, flirtations with cults -- you name it.
There was the the first winter when the black militants moved up from
Oakland and we were faced with clashing notions of what it meant to be
a revolutionary. There was the illusion that we could disavow our
privilege and separate ourselves from the culture that gave rise to us.
But so much was learned!
  

    

How much different was BB from Olema? Were differences based on proximity
(and lack of same) from town? I assume it must've been a pretty big deal,
emotionally, to move so far away.
  

    
Having lived at Olema too, after Black Bear, I can say that pro-ximity
to town was a big factor in the difference. Once you negotiated that
nine-mile road from Sawyers Bar (the town itself was unimaginably
remote) to Black Bear ranch, you were In There, with all that might
imply./ Getting out was a project.  Olema was half a mile off the
highway the passed through Marin to the coast -- It was a place where
all sorts of Zu Zus and Wham Whams (as Coyote used to call store-bought
treats) were available. Though our goals -- of creating our own
society -- were the same, or almost the same, there were many more
worldly distractions at Olema..  
   I do think most people visualized Olema and BB ranch as two pieces
of a network of Free City outposts up and down the coast, but the ranch
was definitely more removed from Amerika. Coyote sometimes called 
Olema "Olema Waystation." Black Bear was definitely the end of the
road.