Horse Fly Column: “Child of God”

This is a different sort of Digital Potlatch, my latest submission to Horse Fly instead of something from the vault.

Taos is having a “Summer of Love” celebration this year to commemorate the hippie invasion of ‘69. Ironically, I almost ended up here myself a couple of years later, as you’ll see if you read through to the end. I’ll have more to say about the subject in coming weeks, so please stay tuned. For now, revel in the heady time of freedom and revolution that opened a door I’ve never closed.

Child of God

I almost made it here in time to be counted, that’s the wild thing.

Like millions of others in ’69, I was trying to keep from being killed. Nothing else could have made me teach at that stinking little Texas junior college in a place that wouldn’t have been so bad without the sheriff opening my subversive literature in the mail. It probably wouldn’t have been better without my wife, but we broke up anyway, and that made sense. I adopted a female white German shepherd puppy and survived by commuting to Austin on weekends. In those days, your friends were the people you dropped acid with. That’s probably why we pooled our money and bought 170 acres in the Ozarks without any plan except to go there. But I was in it for real, on a holy mission to discover joy and truth. America had abandoned us, and good riddance. The mountains were beautiful: I wasn’t dropping out, I was jumping in.

By the spring of ’71, I was ready. When the big day came, I tore out of Texas in a souped-up VW bus with Lady the Wonder Dog, 50 pounds of brown rice, two guitars, a hand-me-down tent, and a book by a yogi called How to Know God, which I never did read.

The place we’d bought was called “Yellowhammer Farm,” though there were no buildings and no one had lived there for decades. Here and there in the woods were old stone chimneys standing lonesome in the leaves, the only remaining signs of rotted-away log cabins. We rigged a tarp next to once of these that had a big stone hearth, and that became the “kitchen.” I remember sitting in a lawn chair under the tarp eating Sunday morning pancakes when a copperhead crawled right past my foot.

I may never have been so alive. We ate good food: rice, eggs, apples, wild persimmons, turnips, and squash, and virtually no meat. There were chickens running loose in the woods and a couple of milk goats – I used to call one over to give my coffee a squirt, right into the cup. We all sat naked in the creek together and lathered up to bathe. I spent day after day exploring in the woods and mountains. Eventually the others (except one) all straggled back to civilization, but I stayed in my 8 x 16 foot shack all alone well into the winter.

About a quarter mile away lived the other resident, a crazy artist friend who built his house by digging a long pit in the forest floor and lining it with stones, then covering the whole thing with a roof. He lived underground like a mole, except when we’d go to town in his VW Bug. There was no rear window (convenient for hauling 2×4s), and on the hood he’d epoxied a 10-inch tall plastic kiwi from a discarded Kiwi shoe polish store display. Everything was painted silver, including the tires…

This same friend met a fellow in Fayetteville who was getting ready to drive to Taos in his school bus and needed riders to pay for gas. We visited him one cold and rainy November afternoon to check it out: the inside was stripped, with a sleeping platform installed and a pot-bellied stove with a chimney running through the roof — straight out of the manual! Even with “Taos” shimmering in our thoughts, I thought the whole idea was insane and couldn’t imagine giving up my freedom to head off for New Mexico in someone else’s rig. The bus guy got his riders, though, including my friend, and they made it to the Hog Farm, where everybody almost froze to death. I stayed at Yellowhammer until Christmas, when the lure of Austin got to be too great and I was running out of funds.

It was an incredible time. I had an Earth flag on a tall pole outside my shack and a privy in the woods. Autumn in the Ozarks was astoundingly gorgeous, and I had everything I needed: a roof over my head, a hand-dug well outside the door, a fire to keep me warm, and a kerosene lantern to read by at night. The secret of existence, chilluns:

My teeth were clean, my belly firm, and I bounded up the hollers like a deer.

Related posts:

1. Horse Fly Column, 4/05: “Jesus Water-Skis in Waco”
2. Horse Fly Column, 7/07: “Message for the Fourth”
3. Horse Fly Column, 5/05: “Yells-At-Nothing”
4. Horse Fly Column, 4/08: “Nine-Year Itch”
5. Horse Fly Column, 11/07: “Home Canyon Security”