If I’d had a blog in ’99, this would have been posted on it. Originally a rejected magazine article submission, what we have here should really be considered part of the never-finished epic YELLOWHAMMER FARM: An Autobiographical Trip from the ’60s to the Ozarks, which I hope to give you at least a taste of as part of the ongoing Digital Potlatch. The actual Yellowhammer saga as written so far is a glorious smorgasbord of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Now that I’m an official goddamn tribal elder, it’s way overdue for completion and unveiling. Pray for me.
The following piece isn’t part of the book, but what the hell. It’s a great true story, and I hope it rings a bell or two for you. Remember, this was written in ’99, before we moved to New Mexico. To my knowledge, this version of the tale has never been seen online before. As a special treat, I’m running a long-ago banner ad for the serialized ebook version of Yellowhammer Farm just below, assuming animated GIFs still work.
This is over 2,000 words. You’ll have to read all the way to the end to find out what happened when the Arkansas state troopers invaded, and just how they knew about us, too. There’s even a northern New Mexico connection, so relax and enjoy!
My Daddy Knowed Who They Was
[1999]
We’re moving to New Mexico with a few boxes of books, three computers, and a cat. My wife has quit the job that’s supported us for twenty years. We have little money, no jobs waiting for us, and I’m listening to voices in my head. The spirits say it’s time to pack up and go, and I’m in no position to argue.
(“It is a good day to die!”)
Much about this strongly suggests a relationship to my back-to-the-land adventures from almost 30 years ago, a trip that has never ended. A certain drama that took place at Yellowhammer Farm in northwest Arkansas in the summer of 1971 even had a bizarre New Mexico connection. It happened on a warm summer night, in a usually calm and peaceful valley, amidst great weirdness and terror, and it all had to do with LIFE Magazine and the Hog Farm…
Our 170 acres of Arkansas woods was bought and paid for at $50 an acre. Later we learned that people told jokes about us up and down the valley: something about “rich hippies from Texas” who paid way too much for land worth no more than $25 or $30 an acre, the going local rate for property this far back in the hills. A creek shown on most maps as “Painter Creek” ran north and south through the valley. “Painter” is however an understandable misspelling of what is actually Ozark dialect for “panther” (pronounced “pain-ter”) or mountain lion. On at least one map I’ve seen since, the tiny blue line is more properly designated “Panther Creek.” A neighbor said that “Panther Creek roars from end to end,” when asked how he knew what we had paid!
This same neighbor, a tall quiet-spoken farmer and part-time moonshiner named Hankins, drifted into our open-air kitchen in the woods one Sunday morning on a big grey horse while we were polishing off a rare communal breakfast. I say “drifted” because that’s just what he did: we never heard a sound, not even a twig snapping, but all at once there he was, not six feet away. This was his way of meeting (and checking up on) his new neighbors. We later realized with considerable alarm that he could have been watching us for weeks. Not that we had anything terrible to hide, just a great deal of casual nudity, which never seemed quite so casual after that.
We had no drugs at all except for coffee and a bottle of awful muscatel I bought but couldn’t finish. We did have five or six tiny marijuana plants, no more than three inches high, lovingly grown from seed and growing in small clay pots. This had more to do with religious conviction than anything else. We were doing what we believed in, but none of us had ever grown dope before. As it turned out, the collection of seedlings would never be anything more than that, but we carefully protected the little pot plants from deer and rabbits and dreamed of the day when we would have all we wanted.
Earlier that spring around Easter, one of the group, a wonderfully crazy artist brother of an old girlfriend, made his way up to the land and became the first one to actually build a place to live. I should say “dig” a place to live, because he excavated a long deep pit by hand and lined it with big flat rocks, then covered the whole thing over with a sloping tin roof. You had to jump down into a hole and then lift a plastic flap to enter, and once inside it was surprisingly cozy. At one end he had constructed a sleeping platform, and at the other end sat an old woodstove used for heating and cooking. There was plenty of light from the plastic-covered eaves, and the only thing wrong with his design was not discovered until after a long period of heavy rain.
This resourceful individual had moved up early in the spring in order to put in a garden that would feed the rest of us. It was a holy duty, which he took very seriously. By the time I arrived in late May there were already plenty of radishes and salad greens, and the other vegetables were coming along nicely. He had located the garden in the flattest spot he could find, about 20 or 30 yards farther up the hill, some distance from our kitchen area. The garden area happened to be alongside the old road (“Yellowhammer Road”) that we thought of as our driveway, coming as it did up from the “main road,” also unimproved, that led fifteen miles in either direction to the nearest paved highway. But the most singular feature of this artist’s garden was its shape: he had marked it out in a giant circle, with the different plantings occupying various pie-shaped wedges. I thought this was novel and possibly even healthily spiritual, and I was happy to weed and dig in the early summer sun wearing nothing but shoes and a hat, as was our custom…
During these first few months we lived fairly isolated from the surrounding communities. We were mostly living off supplies that we had brought with us or food from the garden, and no one had started any more construction projects, so there was little need to venture into town. Aside from the occasional carload of high school boys making the noisy, suspension-battering run up Yellowhammer Road to catch a glimpse of naked hippie women, we had few visitors. Life settled into a pleasant pattern of extended camping-out and bathing in the creek. We gave no thought to possible dangers, least of all to the infamous Arkansas state troopers of the day, feared in rural areas of the state because they operated with near impunity.
No one, especially a black man or an out-of-state driver, could count on any kind of constitutional protections when dealing with an Arkansas trooper. People could be taken into custody and never seen again. I had learned early on to recognize the big blue Plymouths and to stay out of their way. In the isolated part of the Ozarks where we now lived, there wasn’t a black person to be seen anywhere, which meant that “Texas hippies” could easily find themselves in danger of becoming substitute prey.
What did “hippie” mean, anyway? To me it was like belonging to a tribe. Our group consisted of a lawyer, an elementary school teacher, a junior college instructor, a dancer, and an artist. We were all in our mid-twenties and between us had seven college degrees. But we lived on the land, wore our hair long, went naked, and would have smoked dope if we had had any, so “hippies” we surely were to most folks. But the real revelation was yet to come.
One warm, quiet, partly moonlit night in June, very late, I sat up in my tent with a start: something far away had made a popping sound. The air was very still and calm as I listened more intently, wide awake now. There it was again: “pop,” or was it “crunch”? That was it! The sound of rocks being squeezed out from under a rolling car tire, quite some distance away, but not like the normal tires-on-gravel sound: this was slow enough to hear the individual stones, one at a time. Someone in a vehicle was creeping along very slowly, more slowly than I would ever expect, unless — oh no!
I was standing up now, my heart pounding. I stepped outside into the night and listened again: yes, definitely the sound of a car or truck, moving along the main road just south of our mailbox and Yellowhammer Road, about half a mile away. In a moment or two it would pass our road and continue its way north. I could hear a motor now… I began walking toward the sound in the dim moonlight. By the time I got to where I could look down onto our road, whoever it was should have passed the turnoff and all would be still again. But wait, what was that? “Pop-crunch-pop” even louder now, coming up Yellowhammer Road at two o’clock in morning! What could I do? I had to look. I found a spot just above the road and looked down the hill: once my eyes adjusted there was just enough light to make out the dark form of a big sedan with no lights creeping oh so slowly in my direction, one pebble at a time…
My God! I was frozen in place. The warm, still summer night was charged with absolute terror, at least for me, hiding behind a tree. All I could do was watch as what was now obviously a police car of some sort slowly approached a lane that would bring it right into the clearing in front of my tent. Suddenly I had a stupidly happy thought: maybe it was just the sheriff, checking up on us. He’d been around once before and seemed friendly enough, if a bit suspicious. Please God, let it be the sheriff, I thought. The car was almost at the lane! As it passed through a patch of moonlight just below me I could clearly see the big — blue — PLYMOUTH! An Arkansas state trooper!
At that exact moment I died — and the car rolled past the lane, continuing up Yellowhammer Road! I wheeled around, sprinted breathlessly back to my tent for a flashlight, and ran like hell over to where our few tiny marijuana plants were hidden. I hissed a warning to a couple of the others who had just been awakened by my hysterical dash, grabbed the plants, and took off up the mountain, running along the woods by an old fenceline that marked our boundary. Frantically, by leaps and bounds, clutching my armload of little clay pots, I climbed up to the end of the property and kept on going at least another eighth of a mile into the woods — finally I stopped and hid the plants behind a log. But what if someone had followed me? For the first time since I had recognized the big blue car, I stood and listened: nothing but stillness and a far-off night bird of some kind. I slowly and cautiously made my way back to camp, still terribly afraid and not knowing if anything else had happened while I’d been getting rid of the evidence.
As it turned out, nothing of consequence had occurred. The trooper must have gone up the road to where our garden was and taken a look around, because the next morning we found tire tracks inside the garden area. But that was all, nothing more. No one had been arrested or even hassled. This was the South, after all, and even an Arkansas trooper could tell the difference between cannabis and okra! After a day or two I retrieved the little pot plants from the woods. We planted them in a specially-prepared plot, where they were promptly eaten by rabbits, we figured.
About a month later, still very nervous at the sight of any kind of blue car, a friend and I stopped for lunch at a little gas station cafe back in the boonies, on the way home from a rare expedition into Fayetteville. The young boy behind the counter, finding himself alone in the empty cafe with a couple of obvious weirdos, immediately wanted to know if we knew anything about “those hippies” over toward Patrick.
We allowed as how we did, but before we could decide how much more to reveal, he astonished us by reaching under the counter and pulling out a recent copy of LIFE magazine with a cover story about hippy communes. “My daddy knowed who they was,” he said proudly, pointing to a picture of members of the Hog Farm commune working in — my God, a circular garden! Somebody, Hankins perhaps, had told his father about our own circle-shaped garden, and that was all it took to send a state trooper up our road in the middle of the night!
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