Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [50]
Meanwhile, Jobs, who was anxious to flee to Oregon, discovered that it would take two weeks before he and Wozniak would receive the seven hundred dollars they had been promised. Jobs persisted and was given the cash on the same day and disappeared to Friedland’s farm leaving the straitlaced Wozniak to nurse furtive thoughts. “I had no idea what they were doing.” There was one other result of the press to complete Breakout: Both Wozniak and Jobs came down with mononucleosis.
Jobs first started to feel the symptoms when he arrived at the farm. Friedland had applied dollops of mysticism and evoked the notions of universal oneness and the highest concept of being when he named his spread All One Farm. He also gave his newborn son a Hindu name and took one for himself. (“He was calling himself Sita Ram Das but we called him Robert,” Kottke said.) The farm’s location was published in “The Spritual Community Guide” and it attracted a variety of drifters, psychedelic beggars, members of nearby Hare Krishna temples, and on one occasion, some patients from a mental hospital. For the caravan of a dozen or so regular visitors that included Jobs, the farm became the setting for daily dramas and crises. They converted chicken coops into crude flophouses and funneled well water toward a wood-burning sauna. When Jobs installed electricity in a barn so that it could be used as a wood-stove dealership, Friedland was surprised by his alacrity with conduits and wiring diagrams.
For the visitors to All One Farm the lure of the East gripped tight. They held meditation classes, had protracted debates about banning marijuana and other drugs and about the possibility of adopting the purest form of life. Insecticides and herbicides were banished from the pastures and vegetable patches where they built beehives, planted winter wheat, and touted the virtues of organic farming. They also used chain saws to trim and prune an apple orchard that was full of badly neglected Gravensteins. “Steve,” said Friedland, “became one of the apple people.” The fruit was pressed into cider and left out overnight on the stone porch where it turned into applejack.
Jobs was so deeply wound up with his dietary experiments that, on occasion, he ate dinners that he forced himself to throw up. Years later he considered that the farm provided “a real lesson in communal living. I spent one night sleeping under a table in the kitchen and in the middle of the night everybody came in an ripped off each other’s food from the fridge.” Jobs felt that he was becoming a cog in a rural conglomerate and was a trifle disillusioned with his friend. “Robert walks a very fine line between being a charismatic leader and a con man.” Jobs was also upset with the general drift of life on All One Farm. “It started to get very materialistic. Everybody got the idea they were working very hard for Robert’s farm and one by one started to leave. I got pretty sick of it and left.”
BUCKETS OF NOISE
The end of the Menlo Park cul-de-sac looked like a sad used-car lot. Dented Volkswagen Beetles, sun-bleached vans and sagging Ford Pintos straddled the shoulders of the rough gravel road. The cars were parked at angles, squeezed up against a wall of ivy, drawn alongside a driveway where a couple of engines squatted on blocks, or left in front of an unpainted picket fence. Most of the drivers and passengers had either heard about or spotted an inconspicuous handbill pinned to notice boards at the Stanford University Computer Center, the Berkeley Computer Science Department, and the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park. The poster, which carried two headings: AMATEUR COMPUTER USERS GROUP AND HOMEBREW COMPUTER CLUB, fought for attention among appeals for roommates and lost cats. But the questions printed below provided some clues: