The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [241]
During the summer of 1956, six Barefooters—known as the Fountain of the World contingent—left Canoga Park, California, for Homer, Alaska. They had been practicing the “beat” life years before the term was used. Word spread throughout the Kenai Peninsula that beatniks (a term coined in late 1957) were arriving en masse, hitchhiking along Highway 1 but looking too bizarre to get rides. (Alaskan lumbermen prided themselves on their own libertarian values. But what could they make of long-haired people in biblical garb walking barefoot in the snow without guns?) Krishna Venta had a vision of colonizing the Kachemak Bay area as Brigham Young had once settled Mormons around the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The Barefooters would protect the natural world of Kachemak Bay not as a possession but as a responsibility. All religions would be embraced; they weren’t dogmatic about reincarnation as the way, although the Indian religious traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and particularly the transmigration of the soul, seemed to be their prevailing ethos. Feet, however, were their fetish. They held ceremonies in which they marveled at the evolution of the foot’s anatomy: its thirty-three joints, twenty-six bones, and twenty muscles.
Acquiring three homesteads in the Fox River valley, about a half-hour drive from Homer, the Barefooters established a commune in 1956—when Ginsberg was in Point Barrow on the Pendleton. They named their land Venta. Although the Barefooters didn’t make elegant handcrafted chairs, there was something of the Shakers in them. What Krishna was trying to teach was avoidance of avidya (one’s true self), since the self led to ignorance and militarism. The Barefooters were more freakish than Ginsberg was in the late 1960s, when he wanted to levitate the Pentagon.
Krishna Venta (originally Francis Herman Pencovic, born in San Francisco on March 29, 1911) was a very popular leader. By the mid-1950s he had tens of thousands of followers. Venta had messianic blue eyes and a tangled beard like Charles Manson’s, and his favorite subject was himself. He stated matter-of-factly in April 1948: “I may as well say it: I am Christ. I am the new Messiah.” Angry that newspapers kept calling him Francis Pencovic instead of Krishna Venta, he had his name legally changed in 1951. When asked why he was the new Christ, Krishna Venta claimed that he had led a convoy of rocket ships from the burning planet of Neophrates to save Earth; even L. Ron Hubbard, whose first scientology writings appeared in 1951, thought he was weird.
Dormitories were built at Venta, along the Kachemak Bay mudflat on the far outskirts of Homer. The Barefooters became children of the Kenai Peninsula tides. Outside their front doors, glacial erratics dotted the flats. Driftwood and detritus hourly washed up on their beach. Mushrooms grew along the horsetail-fringed shore—not psychedelic ones, for the Barefooters were opposed to using drugs. Moose browsed around their acreage eating dwarf birch and willows. But being a Barefooter during the winter months was of course dangerous and nonsensical. “It wasn’t even the Alaska icy roads that stopped the Barefooters from going barefoot,” recalled a former state senator, Clem Tillion. “As long as they kept walking, when on the ice, they were fine. If they stopped, the heat from their feet melted the ice, and they stuck to the ice, so they didn’t just stand when they were barefoot. It was actually the sparks from welding in their shop that brought about the decision to clothe their feet.”18 Alaska’s weather had, alas, forced the Barefooters to wear thick leather boots.
Krishna Venta’s principal surrogate in Homer was Brother Asaiah (originally Claude Bates, raised fatherless