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"Up the Country: Five Communes in Vermont"
by Andrew Kopkind Working Papers, Spring 1971
Life in the woods of New England, and some thoughts on the future of the rural counterculture.
There were a score of farm communes in the corner of Vermont where I spent my own communal year. Five of them I know well: four in "our town," one in the next town north along the Connecticut River Valley. Together, the five represent only a segment on the range of communal styles, politics, backgrounds, and activities seen in the country these days; and they express very little of the situation of urban communalism, the more prevalent strain of the phenomenon. But there are some good lessons to be drawn from the experience of these country communes, and some indications, too, for the future of a commune movement.
First, instead of definitions, a description of my commune and briefer sketches of the other four:
Mayday Farm was in many ways a synthesis of-or perhaps only a compromise among-all the others. It occupied a comparative middleground between the austere and the amenable in style, between the revolutionary and the psychedelic in politics, between the farmers and the hangers-out, between the lower and the upper in class background of' the members. The Mayday house was a shell of a 200-year-old farmhouse surrounded by some 250 acres of open land and wooded hills. It was owned by an absentee friend, who let us live there rent-free in exchange for making such improvements as would render it habitable for a winter. We did that in three months before the first snow in a crash program of electrification, plumbing, insulation, carpentry, well-drilling, and firewood-chopping. Heating and cooking were done with wood fires (15 cord of firewood the first winter). Still, Mayday had more conveniences and amenities than some of the other communes (we had a telephone, an extensive stereo sound system, electric water beating, a home-built sauna), even if it was less "suburban" than others. In that aspect, differences had as much to do with style as with the content of the amenities: our cheap used refrigerator with a makeshift latch ("$10 Works Good" crayoned on it through the years) and our ceiling, with the insulation cover showing, helped create a "funky" atmosphere somewhat dissonant with the $2,500 artesian well and pumping system we bought and the abundance of automobiles in the parking area.
In the year I lived at Mayday; there were six hard-core members; others would come and go for shorter or longer visits, and there were several circles of "friends of the commune" radiating from corecousins to outside acquaintances. The three men and three women in the core family had all come from white upper and middle-income/class backgrounds; all had some higher education; four held bachelor's degrees, and two of those had graduate degrees as well. Only two knew anything at all about farming, construction, or country living. One of the women had lived for a year on a commune in northern California; the others had no real experience in communal living. Two of the six had "some money" readily available from trust funds, inherited estates, generous parents. Others would occasionally receive small amounts of money from home. From time to time, someone would land a job in the rural neighborhood or in the market town about ten miles down the road. One woman worked in a book-bindery, another woman did part-time baby-sitting, a man did odd-job carpentry and house-painting. In the spring, we advertised ourselves as a "labor pool" and we had as many calls for work as we could handle, although the pay was small. For a while, two of the women were receiving a considerable amount of "cash" in the form of food stamps, but a state government crackdown ultimately disqualified them from the program.
All the Mayday communards felt attached to a vaguely defined left political movement, and vagueness was its chief characteristic. Only one-myself-had been active in the movement of the I 960s; others night have gone on demonstrations from time to time, but did not consider themselves "political." By the end of the first year, however, all the others were ready to go to the May Day 1971 action in Washington (the name of the commune preceded the naming of that action). As the year progressed, we began to develop a politics of communalism that, after all, was part of the generalized commune movement. We could tell that others somewhat like ourselves were replicating our struggles, trips, discussions, activities, anxieties, problems-in rural communes all over the country.
But the Mayday "family" never had a clear idea of what it wanted to do, what it wanted to become, or how it was to define itself. One of. the other neighborhood communes very clearly thought of itself as a political organizing cell for a Vermont revolutionary movement; another was committed to a program of internal development-farming, construction, food production. As it happened, I think, the Mayday people were more interested in "exploring" themselves as individuals and as a group than in doing externally defined "work." And when that process had reached the end of its first phase, the first Mayday family dissolved.
Packer Corner was one of the first "New Age" (as people there called it) communes in New England, and one of the longest-lived. Of the five in that area, it alone to this day contains many of the founding members doing pretty much what they had started out to do. "P.C." is the story-book rural communeprobably because so many of its members write story books about communes. A small library has been or is being produced by P.C. writers like Ray Mungo (Famous Long Ago, Total Loss Farm, etc.), Peter Gould (Burnt Toast), Verandah Porch, Marty Jezer, and the group-as-a-whole. The commune began in 1968 as a ruralization of the first Liberation News Service, of which Mungo was a founder; there was some hope that the Service could be continued from the farm, but that idea was soon discarded. Instead, books and articles having to do with life in the country and the "commune trip" began appearing from the farm, and occasionally a magazine called Green Mountain Post is published from P.C. and associated groups in Vermont and western Massachusetts. The sale of all that literature helps support P.C.
Packer Corner is more homemade than Mayday, with fewer store-bought amenities and much more crafts production. Many of the members (a dozen or more live there at any given time, although twice as many are considered to be in the "family") have become first-rate artisans and carpenters. Most of the commune's energies go into the production, preservation, and preparation of food, and the physical development of the buildings and grounds. There is little interest in existential or movement politics, and very little self-conscious struggle around sex or authority roles within the group. The secret of Packer Corner's longevity is much speculated on in the communes of Vermont, and there are theories ranging from "good vibes" to good food. My own impression is that P.C. is very much like a successful nuclear family, in which members accept certain well-defined roles, don't argue much about them, and concentrate on external work. The content of the roles is vastly different from those in a conventional family, but the process of interaction is similar: a lot of tolerance, not very much change.
Red Clover was the last name of a commune that was much more a retreat from the city or an organizing project than a farm. After being called by names denoting its location or its founding member, the commune settled on a name associating it with post-Weatherman militant revolutionary collectives (as in "Red Family," "Red Mountain Tribe," etc.). The commune was begun by a group of people who had done radical filmmaking; they had nurtured somewhat sketchy plans for radical political organizing in Vermont as a "red base" if the political movements of the sixties developed into a revolutionary territorial campaign. Naturally, those plans went through many changes, and in the last stage Red Clover began working to develop a radical/alternative infrastructure of institutions in Vermont built upon a network of like-minded communes. There was an organic food restaurant in Brattleboro, a children's school-commune near Mt. Mansfield, a co-op garage, a "free farm" on land demanded of and given by Windham College in Putney, and a loose association of "tribes" or communes that was to meet at the beginning of each season. One by one, these institutions were organized and went through their brief life cycles to dissolution, at which point Red Clover broke up, too.
The founders of Red Clover were highly sophisticated political organizers and media figures who never rested easily in the country. The original owner of their house and land was the heir to a large foodmarketing corporation, and he subsidized the operation through the years. Red Clover was clearly the center of radical politics in Vermont, such as they were; and as such, the commune was evaded by the apolitical Packer Corner, and held at some ambivalent middle distance by Mayday.
Johnson's Pasture was the very first commune in southern Vermont in the "New Age," and although there are still people living at "the Pasture," there have been a half a dozen generations of communards there without much continuity save the name and locale. It is by far the most remote, inconvenient, down-at-the-heels, homemade of the five. It is a half mile in from the nearest all-year road, and the going (on foot) is arduous in winter. The ramshackle buildings at the Pasture have no electricity or plumbing; there is no running water or telephone. One night in March 1970, a building at the Pasture caught fire from a leaky stovepipe and four people sleeping in a loft were burned to death. Most of the Pasture people had no money and few resources; they did odd jobs in town, got some welfare payments, and generally lived from hand to mouth. Most fit the category of "working-class freak," although many came from small-town or rural backgrounds. Communalism was not highly developed as an intellectual art or political strategy at the Pasture, but the several generations of communes were no less stable than Mayday's, for instance. The Pasture land had belonged to an early communard who no longer lived there. In 1971 he sold it to a group of New York City graduate students of sociology who were doing dissertations or research projects on rural communes. Of course, most of the communards deeply resented their status as studyobjects, and, last I heard, the Pasture was depleted of residents.
Tree Frog Farm was considered the most "bourgeois" of the five by people at the other communes. The principal owner was another young heir-of a steel fortune, this time-who loved expensive gadgets, from kitchen appliances to bulldozers. The Tree Frog house had everything, even an enormous pipe organ in a barn where genteel concerts were held on certain holidays. During the year I spent in Vermont, several new people came to Tree Frog Farm who had a certain amount of antipathy to the established life style there; there were movements reported to proletarianize the commune. But after a few victories in that direction, the communal spirit began to deflate, and members spun off: three to southern Quebec, others to one or another city. At last report, the owner had evicted the other members of the commune.
Filling a Need
Despite the fact that four of the five communes I know had relatively short lives as a coherent family, I've never heard anyone from them regret their experience, or rule out the possibility of re-entering a communal arrangement in the future, armed with the knowledge gained from the time spent on the farms in Vermont. The break-up of Mayday was particularly painful to everyone: it involved recognition of the irreconcilability of tensions over sex, work, authority, and money. Yet all of the ex-communards at Mayday have gone into other communes in the brief period since its dissolution. The same is true at Red Clover and probably holds for the others.
There has been a critical backlash to the communal movement seen in the past couple of years. The prudent and scholarly approach to communalism is to point to the impossibility of the whole thing. Most of the current crop of books on communes fall either into that category of cynicism, or into its opposite number, naive enthusiasm. (The latter error is both caused and compounded by an overreliance on the history of nineteenth century utopian socialism and communalism as an immanent force in the "New Age" communes.)
My own feeling is that communes obviously fill a need for "commitment and community" (the title of Rosabeth Kanter's recent book) felt by many people. Not all of them are young, white, and middle class, although people from those groups are most likely to float into communal situations. Once people are inside, a tenuous balance is struck between the fulfillment of those existential needs and the pressures of the non-communal world's values. It's not surprising that the world often wins.
I'll relate that statement to the experience I had at Mayday and the other four communes in our extended "tribe."
None of the Mayday communards had enjoyed conventional family life; none had been married. One was homosexual; the others were, for the most part, heterosexual. But all missed the promise of loving and fulfilling couple-relationships that we had once been told were possible and even likely in our lifetimes. So a commune for us was an available alternative to the failure of traditional living arrangements. Within it we could love and be loved, teach and learn, fulfill responsibilities to other people, abandon egos, do satisfying work, "make a future." There might even be "communal" children some day, as there were at Red Clover, Tree Frog and Packer Corner. Of course, there was a tendency to view the communeespecially at Mayday-as a perpetual therapy group or a 24-hour-a-day encounter session, a ready-made crucible in which to smash all the defects that flesh and bourgeois society are heir to. But by and large we recognized the totality of the communal experience as a place to work and live, and we began to identify ourselves by our participation in the new communalism. Mayday changed from a crash-house to a commune sometime just before the first snow, when we suddenly realized we had committed ourselves to staying the winter-which in itself was a commitment to something longer. The commitment had a liberating, joyous effect. None of us had ever felt quite that quality of joy before.
The unreal/real world imposed itself through ourselves: the way we had internalized standard values and ways of thinking about money, sex roles, leadership. Those without money could not easily accept the fact that a few were paying most of the bills; those who were paying had subtle ways of asserting their authority along with their checkbooks. The struggles between men and women were so predictable and are so often replicated these days that they don't need much mention; everyone learned a great deal about sexual identity, but we could never "solve" the outstanding tensions any more than anyone else can. Mayday's second incarnation, logically, was as a women's commune.
The standards of authority prevalent "out there" were not entirely abandoned inside the commune. Age, class, and capacity to conceptualize still amounted to power. Personally, I went through a rather vigorous (and unplanned) process of deprofessionalization: I had been a journalist for ten years prior to going to Vermont, and by the end of the year I was scarcely thinking of myself as a writer or a journalist anymore. I think that the others at Mayday thought of me less and less in that professional role; still, many of the ways I learned to treat other people from my days in a journalist's role could not so easily be discarded, and I know it was the way I "organized" Mayday around my needs. Others did it in their own ways, of course. The point is that all those ways were Old Age ways, the "outside" ways, pre-communal ways. The cultural revolution had not completely changed our consciousness: it just made us aware of how far we had to change. We-and others in the five communes-weren't ready for the life we had chosen.
The overreach of personal expectations and communal ambitions runs through the histories of failed communes. Mayday expected a utopia of love and harmony and unalienated work; we couldn't accept the realities of interpersonal oppression. Red Clover expected imminent political upheaval. When that failed, they took one step back to a position of widespread local-issue organizing. And when that seemed out of reach, the coherence of the collective disappeared.
As far as I can tell, some of the same problems of overreaching expectations afflict urban communes, just as the struggle over sexual identity, authority roles, and work definitions are common to rural and urban communes. There are, however, some issues that seem particularly important to the future of rural communalism:
Economics. Although living is cheaper in the country, outside jobs are harder to come by, and less attractive to communards. In the city, it is normal for members of a commune to hold down regular jobs. In the country, work-around-the-farm is demanding and often much more satisfying than work in town or on someone else's farm. After all, people flee to the country to escape the work alienation (the "rat race") of city life. But self-sufficiency is difficult and for most communes still a dream not likely to come true. I've heard of a few professionalized communes that make enough money for their own support through crafts and agriculture or other farm-related production (bee-keeping, poultry raising, sheep shearing). But none of the communes I knew in Vermont was close to autarkic self-sufficiency. Red Clover, Tree Frog, and Mayday were subsidized in large part by private wealth; Packer Corner produced much of its own food, but was heavily subsidized by the income of some of its members who taught at schools and colleges in Boston or who wrote books. Mayday also got money from "collective" magazine articles the members wrote. A commune in the northern Vermont town of Franklin projected a vast plan for agricultural self-sufficiency, involving cattle-raising, maple sugaring, grain production, and many other enterprises. The commune was given thousands of dollars in "seed money" by a wealthy philanthropist. A series of reversals, culminating in a catastrophic fire, seems to have indefinitely delayed the implementation of their plan. But natural disasters were not the only problem. The Franklin people were experiencing the same kind of anguish over authority and sex issues as the other communards down south in Vermont, and when several "important" members left, the economic base of the commune began to crumble. There are endless discussions about money in every commune (as in every home) and there is no end to the schemes people imagine as they chat around a kitchen table. But by and large the economic problem admits of no obvious solution, and rural communalism remains either a luxury for the children of wealthy parents and their friends, or a hardship for those who must make it financially by themselves.
Isolation. There are some who seek the hermit's life in the country, but most rural communards are looking for a "community" apart from the centrifugating, atomizing pressures of city life. Transplanted city folks, especially, are used to the distractions of a multitude. Even if a communal community were "perfect" in composition, the isolation inherent in a rural existence would bother many communards; and no community meets everyone's needs. An obvious problem is sex. Many communes (Mayday and Packer Corner, for example) go through long periods of intra-commune celibacy, which may stretch on indefinitely. In the lovely and insightful book called Great Gay in the Morning (Washington, N.J., Times Change Press, 1972), one member of a commune of homosexual men and women concludes by offering some "Notes on Loving":
Commitment. Formation of a country commune seems to require a long-term commitment on the part of the members. Large investments of work, interest, and money are often necessary to get it together in the country, as opposed to the city. Both the economics and the isolation of the rural situation tend to concentrate energies and to demand a certain seriousness on the part of the communards. Naturally the commitment is hard for anyone to make-especially the products of hip alienation who have to make it. Packer Corner people say that the permanence of their commune was "touch and go" for the first year, until members realized that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together and they could "relax" and "take our time" working out problems. In a sense, members must make a contract not unlike a marriage agreement, though it takes less legal manipulation to break the communal tie. Emotional ties remain strong, however, whatever the force of law may be. Packer Corner's commitment involved agreements to live, work, and love among the members, but there are other kinds of contracts. Red Clover members were committed to political action and to a plan of political projects. When the projects were no longer viable, the other commitments-to each other and the personified group-were broken, though not without some pain.
Revolution. The new communes are, among other things, an event in political history. The migration of individuals and couples into communes cannot be abstracted from the radical political experimentation of the last five or ten years. The growth of rural communes is a subsection of that generalized phenomenon, involving the development of the antiurban, organic foods, ecology, crafts, back-to-nature consciousness that has invaded other movements as well. Most communards I've known have a sense of themselves as "revolutionaries," although the content of that category varies widely according to taste. Still, the future of communes is inextricably tied to the future of the larger radical consciousness that encompasses many movements and a range of politics. The feeling of support which that movement gives communards-especially in the country-is an antidote to isolation and a tonic for vitality. I know I went to live at Mayday, in part, because it was an available alternative within a social context from which I could draw support. I wasn't particularly aware that I was going off to join a movement when I wandered into the farm in Vermont, but I'm not sure I would have been drawn-or pushed-to do it if there were no movement at all.
I have no way of knowing how "successful" the commune movement will be over the next decade, just as I don't know what forms the other radical political movements will take. I think communal living will continue to be an available and difficult alternative to more conventional styles because the collectivization of experience offers real support to people who find a life of competitive individualism unmanageable. I learned more about myself-how to love, learn, and relax-in a year in a commune that I ever had done in three decades of non-collective experience; and I was able to change in what I consider positive ways as that self-understanding progressed. The others at Mayday had similar "results," even though the commune eventually dissolved.
What's more clear than the future of communalism is the future of traditional families, which is bleak indeed. Communes at least will teach people some of the lessons they need for enjoying the next kind of family life.
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