by Peter Coyote
Being “bothered” is what the responsibility of living together is all about, whether in a family, a commune, or a village. Extending the standards of care and support you hold for yourself to others requires a lot of energy and commitment. It involves increasing rather than diminishing your sense of responsibility. The leap from our heritage of single-family homes to intense communal living was an extreme shift, and we often discussed the fond hope of establishing a small village, where each family might have its own household and maintain its personal environment to its liking.
But the struggle with these issues, enervating and irritating as it sometimes was, felt like necessary work. We knew that if we were to build a new culture from within the old, it would require time, patience, and practice to resolve obstacles and create habitual responses that were based on community well-being rather than merely personal preference. We were in uncharted territory, and for better or worse, the people working with you were your tribe. There did not seem to be any better place to be than with them then at the edge of the world.
But by 1971 the only people remaining at the Red House were those with nowhere else to go. The place was degenerating. Ron and Marsha had moved away and into the city sometime earlier, having gone to live with Ciranjiva, an eccentric, silver-haired, dope-smoking, coke-snorting Indian holy man who insisted that he and his followers were immortal. Lou Gottlieb, founder of Morningstar Ranch, a famous local commune belonging to a parallel tribe to the Diggers, had met Ciranjiva in India, been impressed, and brought him home. Chanting “Bom Shankar Bolenath” at the top of his lungs, Ciranjiva would inhale huge draughts from a chillim, a small clay pipe for smoking marijuana and hashish, and then, wreathed in smoke, would begin lectures saturated with impenetrably baroque Hindu imagery. Although I was not drawn to him, Ron and Marsha adored him, and his followers were a lively, intelligent, energetic, and happy bunch, still interconnected and mutually supportive today.
At a certain point, however, the communal chaos of the Ciranjiva community must have grown somewhat tiresome, because Ron and Marsha moved back to Forest Knolls and decisively claimed the Red House as their own. No longer sensing a contradiction between ownership and freedom, they filled a fifteen-ton dumpster with garbage from the house, jettisoned everyone and everything, and assumed personal responsibility for their home. The failure of collective discipline allowed privatization to invade the heart of the counterculture. “I had always been off the hook before,” Ron said. “It wasn’t my house so I never had to be responsible for it. As it degenerated, I suddenly understood something about freedom leading to responsibility.”
They cleaned, washed, and scrubbed the house, creating there a model of the luminous, orderly universe they perceived. “I had learned a lot from communal living,” Ron admitted. “A twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit is a cooperative agreement. It is a tool designed to do certain work. You can’t exceed the nature of the tool and call that freedom.
“‘Do your own thing’ made authority impossible, even legitimate authority,” he continued. “We reacted to false authority, which demeans true authority. True authority is skill, insight, and knowledge.”
For the rest of his life, Ron’s political activities centered around his home and community in the San Geronimo Valley. He maintained a subsistence wage as a cab driver, raised his children and grandchildren, and became a respected participant in local issues. In 1995 he was diagnosed with a small cancer in his liver, which failed to respond to treatment. He grew thinner and visibly weaker, but never complained, fretted, succumbed to self-pity, or stopped enjoying his life. The Red House became a festive center as people dropped by, partied, discussed politics, kept company, and contemplated future plans while Ron awaited what he called “my passage.”
A week before he died I paid a visit. Ron was sitting in his pajamas before one of the wood-pellet stoves his brother Jay manufactures. Food was being readied, women chatted amiably in the kitchen, and occasional laughter tinkled like wind chimes. Small groups of visitors dropped by, and the breadth of care and concern for this wonderful man was movingly evident.
Ron told me he had no regrets. “I’ve been so surrounded by love and care,” he said. “I’ve had such unbelievable good fortune.” He was thin and yellow as a pencil except for the swelling in his stomach where the tumor gave him the appearance of a malnourished child.
He died March 19, 1996, on the eve of the vernal equinox.
A month later there was a celebration in his honor in the Redwood Grove in Forest Knolls. Three or four hundred people showed up: politicians, family, friends, some I had not seen in twenty years. The day was sunny and leisurely, redolent with pot smoke and the sound of popping beers, laughing kids, speeches that few attended, good music, and the solid coherence of a community honoring itself by honoring one of its stalwarts. There was no more appropriate way to honor Ron Thelin than with a party.
My contribution to the event was an original song performed in his honor. It was called “I’ll Be Back as the Rain”:
My friend and companion went out to go walking.
He didn’t bring his shoes, he didn’t carry a cane.
He passed through the gate on the day the plums blossomed,
Said, “Don’t you wait up, I’ll be back as the rain.”
The tobacco smoke’s cleared and the wineglass is broken.
The ashes are cold where there once was a flame.
Outside in the green hills a wild bird is calling,
Singing, “Don’t you wait up, I’ll be back as the rain.”
Chorus:
So dust off the keys of the upright piano.
Slap tambourines while the saxophone blows.
The blossoms don’t mourn in the ices of winter.
We don’t mourn for a man who lived life as he chose.
There’s a new glass in the roof and the light comes in streaming,
You can lie in the bed and see star-shot domains.
In the dreams of the wife, he’s there fair and handsome
And his children are singing, “He’ll come back as the rain.”
Fog is the breath of the mountains at morning.
We’re passengers all on a runaway train.
The buck in new velvet and the baby a-bornin’—
We’re all standing in line to come back as the rain.
14
black bear ranch
The Red House was one among many Free Family camps, shaped in large measure by the character of Ron and Marsha Thelin. The most remote of our community houses was Black Bear Ranch, and its particular culture was always the most extreme. While it would be inaccurate to say that Elsa Marley’s personality was emblematic of Black Bear, it is fair to say that Black Bear was the perfect place for a woman as talented, eccentric, and free-spirited as Elsa, and so I’ll tell the Black Bear story through hers.
Elsa Marley’s life has embraced enough avant-garde movements and events, from friendships with abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline in New York to painting in China during the demonstration in Tiananmen Square, to fill a small library. I met her shortly after she married Richard Marley, the merchant marine who instructed Sweet William not to patronize the Manila whorehouses. Elsa was a founding member of the group that created Black Bear Ranch.
Black Bear was at the dead end of a nine-mile-long dirt road in the Trinity-Siskiyou Wilderness, one of the most remote habitable places in California. The goal of this group was to create a commune and “family trust” there, and they did. It exists to this day, and I am still one of about two hundred owners.
Elsa is Canadian. After a prolonged and colorful youth that included time in New York, Majorca, Yugoslavia, and London, she found herself in Berkeley supporting her two kids by modeling for the Art Institute. One day, she had an epiphany that linked her “quick-action posing” for artists with an idea she felt might make her some money. She designed a series of veils to wear while dancing nearly nude under psychedelic lig
hts as someone read aloud from the Book of Revelations. Revelations was a smash hit, featured in Playboy. It played every Thursday night for almost a year, and people traveled to Berkeley to see it from all over the Bay Area.
The show’s popularity made it a successful agent of cultural cross-pollination. Through it Elsa met Bill (Sweet William) Fritsch and Lenore Kandel. Peter Berg, John Robb, and Lynn Brown came by from the Mime Troupe, and by that happenstance Elsa entered the gravitational field of the Diggers.
Elsa began to see a great deal of Lenore and Bill at this time, and Bill’s friend and former brother-in-law, Richard Marley, came around often. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. Ideas flowed as copiously as wine and as ubiquitously as marijuana smoke, creative projects were engendered over lunch, and the world appeared waiting to be reconceived.
Elsa glows when she remembers these times: “I was interested in seeking out people of creative genius. Imagination could solve anything. Everything was possible. Potential for instant change—always on the edge of illumination. It was like standing on line in the post office and suddenly someone says, ‘You’re next.’ It was even more exciting than actually doing it. [That feeling of] being Next! And suddenly, too, your heroes are interested in what you’re doing!”
A friend of Elsa’s gave up all his worldly possessions. (In this materially fixated time, people might be surprised at how often such things occurred during the sixties and seventies; when I moved to Olema, for instance, I gave away 1,200 lovingly collected records, convinced I would never again live with electricity.) Elsa moved into this friend’s Victorian house full of furniture on Eureka Street when he abandoned it to pursue some spiritual path. “Another perfect street for another ‘Eureka!’ experience,” she laughs. Her roommates included her two kids and Richard Marley’s girlfriend, Eva.
Shortly after moving into her new digs, Elsa performed at an artist’s party at the home of Margo St. James, a big-time San Francisco madame and something of a performance artist herself. Margo went on to form the prostitutes’ union, COYOTE—an acronym for Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics—and later ran for political office. Richard Marley was in attendance, and when Elsa performed Revelations, he fell in love. The next day he called on Eva, his girlfriend, who was out, stayed for a cup of coffee with Elsa, and then another, and Eva was history.
The day after the party, Elsa took a trip to Sonoma with Janis Joplin to help Janis discuss some problem she was having with her band. Adhering to contemporary psychological protocols, everyone took acid—including Elsa’s two-year-old son Aaron and the dogs. She and Aaron spent a glorious day together chasing wild horses and braiding daisies, until they stumbled on Janis sitting near a large pile of cow shit humming with flies, utterly bummed out.
Elsa laughs and reminds me, “That was so like Janis. Out there in the middle of glory, sitting in the shit. I moved her next to some flowers.”
When Elsa and Aaron returned home exhausted, she found a small shoe box on top of her bed. On top of the shoe box was a tiny pair of earrings and inside the box were Richard Marley’s worldly possessions. He stayed until 1980.
Richard and Elsa had not fully entered the Digger community yet, but their domestic arrangements were definitely in our style. They were sharing their house with the Bat People—Billy, Joanie, Jade, Hassan, and Caledonia (this was before the Bat People moved upstairs over Hell’s Angel Pete Knell). Friction due to differences in temperament and internal chemistry produced an anarchic boil. Richard ran around upstairs wired on speed, while Billy Batman stayed downstairs, zonked on smack, immobile as a table, while their children raced between the two levels like fluids in a heat exchanger.
Peter Berg focused his persuasive powers on convincing Richard to join the Diggers, a tall order. Marley’s natural cynicism led Peter to award him the uncannily accurate nickname of Harpo Bogart. His curly blond hair greatly resembled Harpo Marx’s, while his raspy, deadpan voice and unflappable attitude were pure Humphrey Bogart. “I don’t get this free shit” was his litany in response to Digger theater. Richard was still employed as a longshoreman, taking speed to wake up and go to work on the docks. He would return at night worn out and enter a house full of babies, flutes, feathered fans, lace, bangles, beads, crystals, and Elsa and her friends stoned on grass or acid. “It’s a good thing we were in love,” Elsa observes drily.
Tracy, the only name I ever knew her by, and Scott Hardy, a psychedelic light-show artist, joined the Marley circus that winter. The two lived on the road, perpetually in transit among New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, crashing with friends. Kirby Doyle, a mad Irish poet, moved in. He had just published his novel, Happiness Bastard, and although not yet certifiable, he was working toward his credential, shooting speed and spending his nights discoursing in erudite, epic rambles. Before long he and Tracy were keeping company and Scott had moved on. Ten years later, after Tracy died of an overdose from swallowing her stash of drugs while she was jailed for a minor traffic infraction, Kirby went to pieces and disappeared for a time. He was seen preaching on street corners in San Rafael, calling himself Radio Doyle. By 1985 he had pulled himself together again. I encountered him last in 1993 at a poetry reading in San Francisco; he was fit and hale and just beginning a series of readings that would hopefully introduce a new generation to his wondrous, wild, and funny poems. Experience has taught me never to write people off; there are second and sometimes third acts in America, and each trough of a wave is seamlessly attached to a crest.
Peter finally convinced Marley to help Sweet William hauling the garbage from family houses in his truck, to save the fees for city service. Richard’s contribution was minimal, however, because he was never overly keen on manual labor. Elsa was expecting their child, Indira, and the two crossed the line into the Digger fold at the “Invisible Circus” event at Glide Church, where Elsa appeared as one of the nude (and, in her case, pregnant) belly dancers. From that time on they were family.
In the late spring of 1967, Elsa and Richard left their house in charge of Digger friends (a big mistake) and headed north to the Klamath River to have their baby. They settled into a little cabin with friends and had not been there ten days when Elsa went into labor. An hour later, the police broke down the doors. The cops found some raspberry-leaf tea, a long-muscle relaxant very useful for childbirth, and assumed that it was marijuana. They found a birth kit, given to Elsa by her doctor, containing a syringe and some powdered vitamin C, which the cops assumed was cocaine. They arrested Richard and Elsa and took Elsa’s children, Yoni and Aaron, to a foster home.
Elsa was sent to jail, and her water broke twenty minutes later. When the other inmates informed Elsa that the baby would be taken away from her, she was shocked and sat bolt upright in her bed. Her contractions stopped. She remembers thinking, “They already have two of my kids—they’re not getting this one!”
In the meantime, all tests of the police seizures proved negative, and the charges were dropped. Richard was released and managed to free the children. Elsa was released. Indira (named after the East Indian queen of the gods) Star (scientists had recently discovered a new star) Marley was born on December 27, much to Elsa’s disappointment. “We wanted the first Christmas baby, to show those fuckers,” she said.
The authorities did not want hippies in Siskiyou County. They could not know that within ten years northern California would lose its logging industry and be crushed by the national recession and that yesterday’s upright local merchants, vociferously supporting the harassment and expulsion of hippies, would be today’s welfare clients of the billion-dollar market in illicit marijuana. It is, in fact, California’s leading agricultural cash crop, produced largely in the deep woods and hidden recesses of the northern counties. Soon, those good ol’ boy sheriffs, merchants, and supervisors would be soliciting campaign contributions from the hippie growers even while they were milking Uncle Sam for federal handouts from the CAMP program (Campaign Against Marijuana Production) in order to eradicate the s
ame marijuana that was underwriting the local economy.
Richard and Elsa left the hospital and returned to San Francisco to find that the Diggers had not only liberated their house but all their personal possessions. This was a definite downside to life in a free family, but they took it in stride and moved in with Sweet William and Lenore.
Black Bear? We’re coming to it. Elsa’s meander takes us there.
A lusty, voluble Italian from Los Angeles named Michael Tierra—trained in classical piano and composition—had moved north and taken a place on Rattlesnake Hill in Dunsmuir, California, where he met John and Inga Albion. Richard and Elsa arrived to visit him in the spring of 1968 in search of a country base, bringing with them the motto “Free Land for Free People” emblazoned on mental banners.
Driving around one day, they passed the Big Sky Realty Company, and on impulse Elsa said, “Stop the car.” She gave the realtor their criteria: eight to one hundred acres, isolated, good water, a house and outbuildings. The realtor did not hesitate; he went directly to his file and pulled the information on Black Bear Ranch, an abandoned gold mine in one of the area’s most remote canyons.
The ranch and mine originally belonged to John Daggett, lieutenant governor of California during the gold rush. Appropriately, he was also director of the San Francisco Mint. Due to his exalted political position, he was able to enlist three hundred indentured Chinese laborers to build a nine-mile road from the nearest one-store town up to the crest and then down three hair-raising miles of reverse-camber switchbacks, dead ending at the ranch: eighty acres of forest, buildings, gold, rushing trout streams, and a few spacious meadows.
