The mesa away from the pueblo had a magic of its own, especially in thunder storms. Storm clouds came directly at eye level dark and menacing… Zeus tossing bolts… a metaphor understood… I feared… knelt in awe… sheltered in the A-frame… nature was booming and there was a glory to its thundering. Hell, thundering is a mild word for it… the booming cracks of electricity… strobes flashing white light from heaven... hail stones staccato pounding the earth… all of this going on at once as I looked out across the pasture to see Charlie and his harem huddled together in the brush on the side. I was touched at how they held together and endured. It was as though they knew that this too would pass and life would go on.
After one such storm I had been sitting on a stump by my fire-pit cooking up some rolled oats when a bread truck pulled up on the parking lot. Two men got out of the van. The winos, who seemed to always be at the parking lot’s fire pit, immediately hit them up for spare change towards a jug but these guys were old hands at hippie-dom and, seeing me, passed by them and walked directly towards my place. I met the two at the gate along side of Charlie goat… greeting them, opened the gate, and offered a couple bowls of oatmeal. One was an older man with straight-grayish-shoulder-length hair in a fringed sleeve suede jacket who had been driving the van that stood by silently. The other was a younger man with jet black shorter curly hair… almost an afro… who introduced himself as Stan. He told me the other man’s name was Ghost. Ghost rarely said anything. Stan didn’t like the idea of oatmeal so he went back to the truck bringing a jumbo sized can of Government issued peanut butter and a loaf of white bread. I hadn’t had hydrogenised peanut butter in some time so I appreciated the gesture. We folded the white bread on sticks to warm them up and spread the peanut butter on it regardless of my efforts to eat only organic food.
Stan and I hit it off pretty good while Ghost sat quietly by the fire and just listened as Stan explained that they had heard about free land back in Detroit from an article in Newsweek or Time magazine. Stan had been a streetwise kid who’d met Ghost dealing pot and acid. Stan had no real desire to be a farmer or to join a commune. He had just come along for the ride. Ghost only stayed about a week but he was generous with what he had and a few times he loaded up the van with several of us for a trip into Taos and the General Store in Rancho de Taos.
Food was a constant problem until I applied for food-stamps. Just about everyone in Morningstar either had food-stamps or some other provision from families or, perhaps, trust funds. I don't know about that for certain about that but food-stamps allowed me to establish credit at The General Store down in Rancho De Taos south of Taos proper until I actually got them. I stashed a larder good enough… buying bags of brown rice and cracked wheat to share with the community and I kept for myself a large tin of tahini, olive oil, a five pound roll of cheddar cheese (it was winter and cheese kept well enough at the high altitude without refrigeration). Macrobiotics was the big topic among most of us then: brown rice and whatever other grains and veggies but… very few had actually read anything on it except for the folks I would call “the founders”. However, we all supposed that this was what we were doing and there was, among most us, a disdain for eating all processed foods, hamburgers, milkshakes and anything not grown organically.
On our trips into town almost all of us with any cash on us succumbed to temptation as we had to pass, on the way in and out of Taos, a fast food joint (Foster Freeze or Dairy Queen… I don’t remember which). As we entered town we sneered at the idea but on the way out… after we’d packed our bags in Ghost’s bread truck with organic lentils, brown rice, blue cornmeal, wheat grits (easier to grind), black eyed peas, rolled oats and so on from the General Store … we just had to indulge in "just one" milkshake or hamburger. There were only one or two holdouts able to resist... Ghost was glad to oblige us as he was most definitely not into this whole idea of vegetarianism. He even treated those who had no money… he was a demonic god to us.
The bread truck was where Ghost and Stan stayed. I showed them around the place and introduced them to people in the pueblo. There were some kind folks who were curious and open to meeting new people but there were some… only a few… who kept to themselves. A couple, Kathy and Joe, had the first door when approached from the pueblo via the parking lot and they invited us in their room just to get to know us. They were among the “founders” who came from California… Sonoma County… on Lou Gottleib’s (of the Limelighters fame) property he had deeded to God during a controversial court struggle to stave off the authorities from evicting his friends. These were the pioneers of a free land movement. It is probably hard to imagine a time in California when there were rural areas that people could build any structure without building codes and have as many folks on the property as they wished. There were no laws regulating such things until folks freaked out about this idea of communal living introduced it in the mid-sixties. While I was off touring the Pacific in the U.S. Navy, these people were building an adventure; an effort at creating something completely different.
There have been communes before in our history… mostly religious based ones, but this was different. Morningstar was a free land movement that supposed we all would get along better if there were no rules, leaders (i.e. enforcers), or ownership of private property. Mostly middle-class kids, had it made during the Eisenhower years, left for college, dropped acid, saw God, and played around the Haight Ashbury before the media picked up on it and called them Hippies it was invaded with pushers, runaways, speed freaks and junkies. Some tried to heal the city by organizing efforts creating a free store and providing improvised free kitchens... free food, clothing and health clinics services: they would be called the San Francisco Diggers.
Others escaped the city altogether in a back to the Earth movement. Morningstar was just one of these deals. Even in Colorado there had been a group of artists who’d left the academic art scene to build a vision of their own, building geodesic domes, Buckminster Fuller inspired, on the range outside of Trinidad called Drop City. I was a latecomer to all of this and was desperately trying to catch-up with what had gone down while I was away. After all, since joining the Navy from San Francisco in 1965, I had not been any closer to the mainland USA than Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Everything I knew of the so-called “Hippies” came from the little contact I had with pot-dealers in Waikiki and whatever the media of the times talked about. My new found psychedelic mind was in search of something like I’d found on my first “trip” and this was as close as I was ever going to get to “it”.
“It”: I had been burnt out by the dog-shit on the sidewalks, the decay of San Francisco since I left four years before and had been further disillusioned at Altamont Speedway… the street scene in Hollywood and the whole media frenzy around the Manson murders. Sidewalk gurus of every sort hawking wild-eyed visions of a perfection none seemed capable of besieged me everywhere I turned. I needed something to restore me and Morningstar fit the bill at the time and I'd hoped that Morningstar would have "it".
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