Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [13]
There were drugs involved but not nearly as much as movies about hippies would have you believe. It seemed like almost everyone smoked some pot, but it wasn’t an every-day or even every-week sort of thing. Even then, we knew there was something wrong with people who smoked pot every day. A great many hippies, myself included, managed to get through college without doing psychedelics. Cocaine and heroin didn’t become commonplace until the seventies and eighties. In general, we saw drugs as a possibly useful part of discovery and growth. We looked down on people who were just trying to get blasted.
I acquired a sophisticated appreciation for a few beers now and then, and an occasional bottle of bourbon. Somewhere in there I became a good cook and added knowledge of wine to the things to which I could introduce my friends.
At Swarthmore I majored in religion with the idea of going to divinity school and then maybe the Unitarian ministry, where I would be a comforter of the sick and disadvantaged but mostly a really good professional arguer who argued against war and materialism.
Our parents and teachers were demoralized by the war and how imperfect America, the world’s last best hope, was turning out. After the Ohio National Guard loaded up with live ammunition and killed four students at Kent State, no one knew what to expect or where things were going. Mainstream jobs and careers seemed beside the point, and how long was corporate America going to last anyhow? I and a dozen or so friends at college came up with the idea of starting a commune in British Columbia. We thought about it and talked about it and bought books about it and talked some more, and it seemed more and more like the best thing—maybe the only thing—to do. Parents, professors, and psychiatrists we consulted all seemed to think it was a reasonable idea. They had nothing better to offer.
We were going to take a shot at making of this world a paradise or know the reason why such a thing couldn’t be done.
So in 1971, along with a bunch of similarly idealistic, longhaired hippies, I traveled across the continent and managed to buy eighty acres twelve miles back from the coast. We camped out while cutting down lumber and building a shelter. It wasn’t as hard as we thought it was going to be. We managed to keep ourselves warm, entertained, and well fed. There were lots of people doing similar things in similar places up and down the coast and back East. Whether or not Western civilization was about to collapse, it had to be good news that setting up independent alternative communities was doable. We were proving it was possible to achieve escape velocity.
We ground our own flour, ate tons of wild fruit, caught a two-pound trout every cast, and bought some goats from a woman named Cougar Nancy. I shot a few grouse with my .22 from back home. We were almost self-supporting. We had living expenses down to sixteen cents per person per day, and we had enough money left over after buying the place to keep going for at least another year. Then maybe we’d have to draw straws to see who had to work at the pulp-and-paper mill to support the rest of us. We’d take turns. Maybe we could gather and sell smoked trout and some of the abundant wild fruit and chanterelle mushrooms and fiddlehead ferns.
“Wild is better than organic—don’t trust food that needs people” was going to be our motto.
Building buildings, cutting firewood, hunting, gathering, cooking, cleaning up—there was no lack of things to do. We were setting up a beachhead for all our friends and family who were for the moment stuck back East or in the cities. We were ready for the storm.
Most of us were in close touch with our parents. It’s a myth that hippies on communes like ours were at war with their families. Parents would have had to be nuts to look at the world