Twenty years after the Summer of Love, communal life not only flourishes but improves with age

Back in the '60s when Bob Dylan sang, "And you know something's happening, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" I usually identified with Jones.

     The summer of Love was not my season, and this is not the tale of a 40-year-old hippie looking back fondly on those wild and crazy days in the commune. Communes scared the hell out of me. The '60s scared the hell out of me. I remember how a friend of the family in Ohio won a scholarship to Columbia University and came back in a week because the SDS had beaten him up for refusing to attend a peace rally. I remember going to a play in New York called Dionysus in 69 and feeling sick. Nude actors smeared what looked like blood on themselves and ran through the audience inviting us to join them. A big hairy actor found me sitting in the packed loft of that converted warehouse theater and actually said, "Oh, wow." I smiled weakly, and thought, inexplicably, of that profound bit of wisdom from comic writer Jack Douglas: "Never trust a naked bus driver."

     But Secretarv of Defense Melvin Laird was even more bizarre. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were parodies of themselves. The war and Kent State were worse. Both sides of age 30 seemed terribly wrong. I was in my 20s and felt terribly out of it. A kid I'd grown up with was proud to go to Vietnam, and I understood why, but, at the same time, wanted him to say no. Unable to make a commitment to right or left, I went for a kind of amalgam - hair down to the waist, bell-bottom jeans, and a collection of Percy Faith albums.

     This, then, is the tale of a nerd, grown up, more or less, who decided one day to find out if anybody who had gone off to live communally in the '60s was still living that way.

     Why would a grown-up nerd care about such things? Call it the predilection of middle age to want to make peace with the terrors of youth. Call it a restlessness with all those recent reports on the '60s that describe the decade as though it is under glass in a museum, as though American pop culture actually does pop like bubbles and disappear. Now you see the headbands and long hair, folks, now you don't. If they're not trashing the post office, they must be working for Wall Street. Hello, goodbye.

     There was something else going on too - a growing need in my soul to learn about cohesiveness between people. There seemed to be so much separateness, so much "me first," so many lives locked in one-bedroom condominiums expending their energy on the commute to work. I wanted to talk to the people who did something else, and the only reference point I had in recent history dated back to the '60s, when people headed for the countryside to start a new life.

     So, I began calling the countryside and hit a wall at first. A lot of people thought this was a really stupid story idea, and some were downright ticked off. "Why do you want to do that?" they'd snap. "It's been done so many times." An editor of a paper in Vermont said, "I know a lot of people living communally, but I'm certainly not going to tell you where they are." A woman who had once lived in a commune said, "All my friends told me not to talk to you." And a man at the Fort Hill community in Roxbury said crisply, "We have absolutely no interest in being interviewed."

     Not sure what this was about. Maybe somebody told them about the Percy Faith albums. Maybe it was the usual hostility toward the media (often deserved) combined with leftover '60s arrogance combined with my own paranoia from those days. Maybe their way of life had become so routine to them that they didn't see why anyone would consider it news. But whatever it was, it eventually went away and the wall opened up, revealing what I'd been looking for: people living communally in 1987 who wanted to talk about why and how.

     It's not the same life that people lived in 1967 - but what is? These places aren't called communes anymore. They are simply "communities" or "intentional communities." There are far fewer of them than there were in the golden age of crash pads, when a long paisley line of vans seemed to stretch from Berkeley to Woodstock. But they seem more real - quieter, saner, more solid and mature. The old anarchy and turbulence have been replaced by a clearer sense of purpose, of what is possible and what isn't, and of people wanting to simply live their lives. They are nice folks, fascinating folks, and they were able to explain what was happening, is happening, and make sense. Some of them even sounded like Mr. Jones.

     The idea of community is vast and predates the '60s. It has long historical roots in our society, probably going back to the founding of America itself. After all, wasn't the United States based on the notion of a society apart, of a better place where people could realize their full potential? There followed Robert Owen's New Harmony commune in New Harmony, Indiana, in 1825; George Ripley's Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841; Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843; the seven Amana villages near Iowa City in 1843; and Oneida in Oneida, New York, in 1848. There were also the venerable Bruderhof, Hutterite communities that began forming in North America in 1874 and are still thriving, 250 societies strong today.

     In the '50s, Walt Disney struck the chord again in a different key as he began thinking about EPCOT - Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow - the visionary park that attracts millions of visitors to Orlando, Florida. And in the '60s and early '70s the communal idea flowered into thousands of living experiments, most of which failed for lack of organization, but which left fertile ground for the next decade. Groups that formed in the late '70s and '80s have become havens for a lot of '60s sojourners and have also attracted younger people, older people, families, and kids.

     Today communities come in just about every ideological stripe, from fundamentalist Christian to Buddhist to secular humanist. They are on the East Coast, the West Coast, and in the middle. The living arrangements range from very loose structures, with a handful of people sharing a house, to stricter setups, where all income is pooled. There are kibbutz-like societies, where adults live in one dormitory and kids in another, as well as communities with single-family homes scattered throughout acres of beautiful land that is jointly owned, worked, and managed. Although each community is unique, the glue holding them together is very similar - commitment to making the little society work, conserving natural resources, sharing the load, and helping the individuals within the group grow.

     It's not easy. Nobody says that living with human beings and all their inherent foibles is a romp. Differences are thrashed out at meetings and sometimes take weeks or months to resolve. People talk of having "attunement" sessions in which friction between individuals is smoothed out. No detail is too small to discuss. As one man put it, "You've heard of the two-bit issue? Well, we've got the 17-cent issue. We discuss everything." But that discussion, frustrating as it can be at times, leads to consensus, and dedication to reaching that consensus over the years has made the communities strong.

     "Community is the bestkept secret in America," says Charles Betterton, editor of Communities magazine - yes, there is such a publication. It’s been around for 15 years, has 3,000 subscribers, and is published in Stelle, Illinois, home of the Stelle Community. There is also a budding trade group called the Fellowship for Intentional Communities as well as a Federation of Egalitarian Communities and a National Historical Communal Societies Association.

     Betterton, who also publishes a directory of communities, says an exact head count is impossible but estimates that there are somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 communities in the United States today. In the early 1970s there were more than 20,000, according to Donald Pitzer, professor of history and head of the Center for Communal Studies at Southern Indiana University. He doesn't see the communal population getting that large anytime soon but notes, as do many people, an increased public interest in that way of life.

     "We've been getting more and more calls lately from people who want to do research or who are interested in joining a community," says Pitzer, whose center has archives containing documents on 230 groups that have formed since 1965.

     Betterton credits the interest in community to "millions of people looking for something more in their lives. Twenty years ago communal groups united together against something. Now the shift has been to cooperative efforts, to working for instead of against."

     "The problem with the '60s was that we all knew what we didn't like and what we wanted to get away from, but we had no clear focus of what we wanted," says Corinne McLaughlin, one of the cofounders of the Sirius Community in Shutesbury, Massachusetts. "Communes disintegrated drugs, and rock 'n' roll. It was `go with the flow and do your own thing,' with some of the people always cooking the food and doing the gardening and other people doing nothing. There was no commitment to the whole."

     McLaughlin, 40, has a calming, melodious voice that you could listen to for hours. She is a child of the '60s who has lived in communities for 18 years, starting in the old hippie pads of Haight-Ashbury. She has been involved in radical politics, followed gurus, gone to remote mountain retreats, joined group houses on city streets, and traveled to northern Scotland in 1975 to live in the Findhorn Community. Findhorn, which was formed 25 years ago, has 200 residents from all over the world, encompassing, as McLaughlin puts it, "everybody from American hippies to British aristocrats." The Findhorn philosophy is that within each person is a wise teacher, a better half, that can be reached through meditation. McLaughlin says this idea appealed to her because it combined "'60s power-to-the-people with '70s spirituality."

     "In the '70s people began to realize that politics only took you so far," she explains. "They started going on a spiritual quest. This was panned by the media as the Me Generation, but there was more to it than that. It was an inner journey to create a new society. In the '70s we stopped blaming everyone else for the problems and started looking to ourselves. We realized that our anger, fear, and negativism were adding to the problems of the world."

     After living in Findhorn for three years, McLaughlin and her partner, Gordon Davidson, whom she met in Scotland, began touring the United States and lecturing on what they'd learned there. They have also collaborated on a book, Builders of the Dawn, which is an extensive overview of communities in the United States and other countries. In 1978 they came to western Massachusetts, where McLaughlin says she was "guided in meditation" to the 86-acre farm in Shutesbury. She was able to borrow money from friends to buy the land, which was then priced at $70,000, and the community was born.

     Named for the brightest star in the heavens, Sirius began with a half-dozen people and now has 17 adult residents -15 full-time and two "exploring members," meaning they haven't officially joined. There are also a dozen people living across the street from Sirius in what's called "the village." They own their own land and homes and are not members of the community but participate in many of its activities.

     Like many communities, Sirius started out with a tighter communal structure than it has today. Residents discovered through trial and error that pooling incomes and sorting through individual preferences for how much should be spent on what is extremely difficult. So now each person keeps his or her own income and checkbook and pays $50 a month for mortgage, taxes, and insurance. "We've worked out a synthesis," says McLaughlin, echoing what her counterparts elsewhere say. "It's the best of community and independence."

     The land is held in trust as a nonprofit corporation with every resident on the board. People have a choice of renting, sharing community houses, or building - construction is done barn-raising style with everybody pitching in.

     Life in the community is dedicated to nonviolence, conservation of the Earth's resources, and to "bringing Spirit down to Earth," as a Sirius brochure describes it. The idea is to make the community a "center of light" and to "create a balance and focus on wholeness of the system rather than the separateness of the parts." People share evening meals, attend weekly meetings, and meditate regularly.

     Residents believe in supporting themselves in ecologically oriented fields or service industries. Many work in businesses started by community members, which include a publishing company, a solar construction company, an autoparts manufacturer, and a rugcleaning shop. In addition the community has a food co-op, raises many of its own crops, and runs spirituality workshops.

     While individuals become involved in political movements - the nuclear freeze or environmental causes - the community does not march or protest as a group. This is a key difference from communes of the '60s and is true of every group interviewed. The emphasis is on individual involvement, people themselves doing what they feel should be done rather than hitting the streets and demanding that society do it.

     "We feel we're doing research and development for society," says McLaughlin. "We're pioneers in community living, seeing what works and what doesn't. We're not saying everyone has to live this way. Cities can be a useful way to live. You can apply community ideas there. People can share meals in an apartment building. You can do a community garden anywhere. You can share child care. Community is an attitude, and you can take that spirit of cooperation with you wherever you go."

     About 17 miles north of Sirius, at the Renaissance Community in Gill, Massachusetts, Debbie Edson also talks about sharing and "creating centers of light." She sits on a log watching children play on a hammock because it is her day to supervise community child care. The sweeping green Berkshires stand out against the bright blue sky, and bees hum through the clover.

     "It is the obligation of every person to make more light than dark," she says quietly and simply as a slight wind blows wisps of her long, graying hair around her tanned face. "We have to send light up into the universe."

     She seems neither strident nor strange. At age 42 she is sure of who she is and what she believes and talks about the universe, her meditation sessions, and the guidance the community has received through a spiritual medium as though she is talking about planting a garden. Like McLaughlin she has been at this for nearly 20 years, hammering out a lifestyle cheek by jowl with other people.

     "It can be very hard," she says. "You have to be committed to making it work. I think the reason so many communes fell apart was that they didn't have this commitment, and when they hit the rough spots people just gave up."

     Renaissance was started in 1968 by Michael Metelica of Leyden, Massachusetts, who began meditating in a tree house at age 17. Friends joined him up there and would spend hours talking about the meaning of life and the problems of society. Metelica changed his last name to Rapunzel, taking it from an old German fairy tale about a dwarf who lived in the forest, not the story about the maiden with the long hair. He became a kind of guru to an ever-growing band of young people in the late '60s and early '70s and had a rock band called Spirit in Flesh. Edson joined the community in 1971 and recalled the days of "70 people in one house and wall-to-wall sleeping bags." Known then as "The Brotherhood of the Spirit," the group swelled to 200, living in various towns in Vermont and western Massachusetts and often being asked to leave, according to Edson, because they were "much more confrontational and into proselytizing."

     In 1975 the community purchased 80 acres in Gill and began clearing and working the land. "After the big media hype and all the moving around we said, `Let's settle down and tend our own garden,"' explains Edson. "It was kind of like growing up." She notes that the Vietnam War was over, the intensity of that time was evaporating, and the community began to grapple more seriously with its future. She also says that Rapunzel, who still lives in the community, is accorded the respect of being the founder but does not have the control over the group he once had. She describes this change as "a struggle and a growth process that is still going on."

     "Our practicing belief is that all people have the power of God within them," she says. "I think many communal groups have seen the strong leader replaced by more group control and shared responsibility.”

     Edson, her husband, and their four children share one of the five houses on the property with another married couple. This fall, however, they will move into their own home, which is now under construction. There are 30 adults at Renaissance, including three married couples, and 20 children.

     "We've learned that people need to have their privacy," says Edson. "People have different rhythms and can't be expected to live in the same room with each other constantly."

     Each person contributes $65 a week toward upkeep of land, taxes, mortgage, and insurance. They pay for personal expenses and utilities but are provided with housing and food, which is grown communally on their land. The community has started several businesses, including Renaissance Builders, the Screamin' Eagle bus company, which rents to rock bands, a recording studio, and Sakara Tile. Edson says the community has evolved into "traditional family roles." Men go to their jobs during the day and women work at home taking care of the children or staffing the community's office building, which handles business calls and inquiries about Renaissance.

     "We get a lot of letters from people who want to visit," she says, noting that a person who is interested in joining can come and live there for a while so that the individual and the community can have time to assess each other. Most communities have similar arrangements.

     The feeling at Renaissance and many places I visited is of being at summer camp - miles of woodlands to hike in, fields of wildflowers, farm animals in pastures, a swimming hole, and a sense that life doesn't have to go 100 miles an hour. These communities are also very tied to the surrounding community at large, pitching in when neighboring farmers need help, getting involved in local issues, and generally blending in rather than standing out.

     After Edson gives me a tour of the community, we walk back to the striking main house with its round tower and combination of round and elongated windows. People are sitting on the stoop talking, and a dog lazes in the sun.

     "There are lots and lots of communities like Renaissance in these hills, but you'll never hear about them," says a man who calls himself Blue Sky. He runs a tree service in Colrain and has stopped by to visit. He wears an aqua headband, rimless glasses, a T-shirt, and shorts, and he is barefoot. "Communal living connects people with their tribal roots. As a society we need to retribalize.

     I hadn't heard the word "tribe" since Woodstock in 1969. Not that I was there, of course, but people would often say it was "a gathering of the tribes," meaning communes from across the country, groups that had gotten, a bit of humanity back, all together around the fire. And what surprised me now was finding so many people still sitting around that fire.

     Steve Gaskin, 52, and one of the granddaddies of the movement, still wears his graying hair down the middle of his back and lives with 300 people on the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. The Farm, founded in 1971, nearly went bankrupt farming in 1976, but it is now making a go with a book publishing company, a solar electronics operation, a soy-foods business, a medical clinic, an ambulance service, and a midwifery program.

     "We've been here over 17 years," says Gaskin- "We've got our families and kids. It’s not a crash pad for the summer. The farm is a familyu person now. It used to be a wild teen-ager, but it has matured and settled down.

     “We’re together because we didn’t come into this with dogma,” he continues. “We were hippies who wanted to live together. We're all veterans of the spiritual movement. We're atheists, freethinkers, Christians, and Catholics. Like Buckminster Fuller said - man, you, gotta be a generalist!" The Hog Farm is still there in Berkeley, managing the Babylon answering service and running the Winnarainbow summer camp for kids in Laytonville, California. When asked how many Hog Farm members there are today, 43-year-old Little Richie laughs and says, "How many do you want? I can get you 100 Hog Farm people like that! Where are we? We're in one house, three houses, several states, and 20 countries.

     Little Richie lives in a big house in Berkeley with "14 of my friends," including the legendary Wavy Gravy, now 50, who was the "chief of please" at Woodstock. Wavy Gravy, who is listed in the phone book under that name and has ditched his original "Hugh Romney" forever, runs a program called "SEVA," which funds cataract operations for people in Nepal. These operations are only $15 apiece, but for the povertystricken people of Nepal this is an astronomical sum that few can afford.

     "We've calmed down some since the old days," says Little Richie. "The binding purpose today is to work on projects that help people. You might say that today we are beautifully our age.

     Earth People's Park, the land bought by the Hog Farm for "the people of the Earth" back in 1970, is still there in Norton, Vermont, all 592 acres on the Canadian border. It is probably the only place left in America where a person can still homestead - just go in, claim a chunk of land, build a cabin, and it's yours. But life is tough in this uncompromising bit of country where the winter temperatures often get down to 40 below zero. The park has 25 year-round residents, and, according to one of them, Linda Wigger, they get an undeserved rap in the press because the place is often described as a haven for drifters.

     "Nothing bad has ever happened to me here," says Wigger, 39, who shares a cabin with her teen-age daughter. "I used to be a chain smoker when I came here. I quit, built up some muscles, learned to chop wood. We're like a family." Kat Kinkade is still at Twin Oaks in Louisa, Virginia, where children are raised communally and residents work on perfecting a nonsexist lifestyle. Twin Oaks, founded in 1967, is part of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities, which includes six other groups that still believe in sharing income and all other resources. There's Dandelion in Enterprise, Ontario; East Wind in Tecumseh, Missouri; Sandhill in Rutledge, Missouri; Appletree in Cottage Grove, Oregon; Chrysalis in Helmsburg, Indiana; and Mettanokit in Greenville, New Hampshire.

     "You marry the people here," says Danny Solomon, a 30-year-old jazz pianist at Mettanokit, a community with roots that go back 15 years to when the farm began as an alternative arts and lifestyle conference center called Another Place. "I don't mean you marry people in a sexual way, but being in the group is like a marriage. The primary goal is to love the people here and to get as close to them as possible.

     He laughs at the old sex, drugs, and rock 'n'roll image of the '60s communes. He notes that the recording studio he built on the property near the farmhouse is designed for acoustic music, not amplified noise, and he says nobody in this community of 18 people, ages 6 months to 56 years, is into drugs.

     "We want people who are more advanced than that," he says. "We want people who are excited about being alive.

     "I hadn't planned to live in a community originally, but the awesome advantages became obvious to me over time. You can't help but have your awareness expanded living here. Our whole world is so oriented to scrounging everything for yourself. Here you give up your money, give up your car. You totally trust other people. And if you get an idea, you've got a houseful of other adults who can help you make it happen.

     Mettanokit, Wooden Shoe, Green Pastures, Abode of the Message, Light of the Mountains, Pendle Hill, University of the Trees -- start looking into communities and the list keeps getting longer, leading to other lists and more names and a road that would take a lifetime to travel. The '60s didn't die. They evolved as we all evolve, following different seasons and cycles and rhythms. As the wise man said, the only constant in life is change. Or, as Mark Twain succinctly put it in a telegram from London to the Associated Press: "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

     "Somebody wrote an article once that said I'd wimped out on '60s idealism, and that really made me mad," says Fred Carlson, a soft-spoken musical-instrument maker who doesn't look as though he gets angry very often. He sits on a lawn chair with chickens at his feet in one small corner of the 65 acres that make up the New Hamburger community in Plainfield, Vermont. "It's not a wimping out, but a maturing. The politics back then was to change the world right now. Everyone in his or her 20s thinks that way, and the war made it more intense. Today we talk of being in it for the long haul.

     Carlson, 31, came to New Hamburger at age 14, when his mother and a group of eight other people, mostly out of Goddard College, decided to form a community. Carlson says he's always been credited with thinking up the name, although he can't remember doing that. He says that "it must have just popped out of my mouth" and has no special significance.

     New Hamburger is one of those places that started idealistically, with everyone in the same farmhouse, sharing their incomes. Today it has evolved into separate houses and incomes, with people paying a set fee of $180 a month. New Hamburger has 17 residents who work as artists, potters, carpenters, and in other professions. They share the community work, with "shepherds" being appointed to handle various crops in the huge cooperative garden - one shepherd is in charge of tomatoes, another handles beans, etc. Residents meet once a month to work out such systems, conduct business, and thrash out problems. Decisions are made by consensus with each individual having veto power.

     "It's not always easy," says Carlson. "For instance, everybody has a different idea on how to garden. If it were just me I'd do it my own way. But I may want to do something with the rototiller that someone else would want to do by hand. We have to talk and work it out.

     Carlson takes me over to his house, which he shares with Suzy Norris, who also makes instruments. He and Norris built the house together. It is a cozy place that smells of pine boards and has a beautiful view of the fields and trees through a wall of glass. Like many community houses I visited, this one was bursting with projects and chaotic creativity. Eight guitar cases are lined up next to the door. Handmade masks hang from the ceiling. A typewriter sits on a kitchen counter next to a pile of paper and a sewing machine. A recording microphone is set up near the sink. A pet cockatoo, trained to squawk "Cheap guitars!" pokes his head down into the living room through a hole cut just for him in the upstairs-bedroom floor.

     "There are so many things going on," Carlson says, smiling and running a hand through his long red beard. "You get involved. The possibilities are endless.

     My father's theory was that if creative and interesting people get together, something will be bound to happen," says Ladybelle Fiske sitting in her rough-hewn home in Quarry Hill in Rochester, Vermont. The 200-acre community that her parents, Irving and Barbara Fiske, bought as a retreat for their friends from New York City in the 1940s expanded to accommodate hundreds in the 1960s and is a thriving society of about 70 people today. Irving and Barbara are in their 70s and spend most of the year in Florida, but they come up every summer to visit the land their family still owns and rents topeople from all over the world.

     "We've had flamenco dancers perform here," says Fiske's husband, Brion McFarlin, doing a quick Spanish step of his own in the dining area. "And we've had the Heidelberg Chamber Orchestra stay here.

     Why? "They needed a place to stay," says McFarlin, an enthusiastic 33-year-old man with red hair. He wears a Martin Luther King button on one of his suspenders and an anti-Ronald Reagan button on the other. He is surrounded by a cluster of community people who had come over to talk - a woman from Brazil, a man from New Zealand, a 20-year-old kid who is in a rock band, and a man wearing a "War Resisters League" T-shirt. People live in 15 houses on the property everything from a dilapidated A-frame to a modern passive solar home, all built from trees on the land and heated with forest logs in wood-burning stoves. Ladybelle Fiske says the community has no rules about who pays what rent and that it depends on what people can afford.

     "A procedure wouldn't work here," she says, folding her arms and leaning against the back of one of two flowered couches in the living room. An upright piano sits in the corner. A portrait of a Southwestern artist painted by Barbara Fiske hangs on one of the walls. Ladybelle, who is 37, wears a long flowered skirt, heavy walking shoes, and a pale yellow shirt. She has the bearing of an intellectual mountain woman.

     She explains that the focus of the community is children and that the one rule Quarry Hill does have is that a child must never be hit. The community runs its own private school, which is attended by 16 children who are taught math, Eng~ lish, creative writing, and computer science in one big room similar to the little red schoolhouse of long ago.

     "We believe children should have as much love and encouragement and individual attention as possible," she says.

     Her 15-year-old daughter, Joya, who is articulate, mature, and sure of herself, says that being raised in that atmosphere has given her confidence.

     "I never felt I had to rebel against anything," she says.

     Joya has friends outside of Quarry Hill and, like young people in other communities, has the freedom to interact with the world at large and to go and make her way there if she wishes. While some communities have their own schools, others choose to send their children into the local educational system, so there is no sense of closing them off from society. Most communities I visited have televisions and home computers and piles of toys in living rooms. Mothers talk of sometimes having to persuade their kids to eat yogurt and tofu instead of sugar-coated cereals and canned spaghetti, but in general children seem to take to the communal life, which gives them the advantage of having many playmates as well as an extended family of adults.

     At the Stelle Community, children are taught "a love of learning," according to Tim Wilhelm, and the emphasis is on education "from womb to tomb." Wilhelm is a manager at Stelle and is very relaxed about taking time to talk in the middle of the day. He has a friendly Midwestern accent and could easily be Mr. Jones, Mr. Smith, or any guy next door.

     He explains that Stelle has a learning center where adults are encouraged to take courses in everything from how to start a business to holistic health. The private school offers children a lot of electives, including aviation and film, and it has no grades. Students simply tackle a test until they understand how to do the problems, and then they move on to the next lesson.

     Stelle, which means "place" in German, began in 1963 when a group of people came together around the writing of Richard Kieninger, author of The Ultimate Frontier. They bought a 240-acre farm in Illinois in 1970 and moved there in 1973. Kieninger was not part of the hippie movement, but a lot of his ideas, such as the need to conserve the Earth's resources, the belief in spiritual guides helping man, and the notion of karma, or the fulfilling of one's destiny, dovetailed with the exploratory thinking of the '60s.

     Today Stelle has 125 residents living in what looks like a typical suburban setting of 44 houses. In addition to the emphasis on education, the community is also dedicated to becoming self-sufficient and being able to survive natural or nuclear disasters. Solar-heated homes are designed to take earthquake shock, and the community has its own water, sewage, and telephone facilities. "We want an uplifting environment," says Wilhelm, noting that smoking is not allowed in public and that people are expected to be clean and wellgroomed. "We respect the sanctity of individuals balanced with individuals respecting the space of everybody else.

     Not all communities are so formally organized. At first glance some places might not seem like communities at all, but rather just a few people living together on an old farm. And yet places like Red Clover in Putney, Vermont, and Packer Corners Farm in Guilford, Vermont, and Mad Brook Farm in East Charleston, Vermont, and Montague Farm in Montague, Massachusetts, are nerve centers for a lot of people who, though they are now scattered all over the country, are emotionally tied to that land.

     "I'm coming back here to live," says Peggy Leo, 50, as she sits at the long wooden table in the Red Clover farmhouse. She wears a "Wake Up the Earth Festival" T-shirt and purple pants. She is visiting from New York City, where she is a social worker. She says she plans to do that for a few more years and then head back to Vermont. Leo and a half-dozen other people, including Leon Cooper, who still lives on the farm and works the land with his wife, Debbie, moved to Red Clover in 1971. The 80-acre farm, named for Vermont's state flower, had belonged to another commune that formed in 1965 but disbanded. Cooper's group rented for 14 years while making regular inquiries into whether or not the owners wanted to sell. Two years ago the owners agreed, and Cooper and Leo and 12 other people bought the land.

     "Don't try to figure out how many people have lived here or who lives here now," says Cooper, 39, a tall, thin, darkhaired man who has just come in from riding the tractor. "It's too confusing.

     It is a typical comment at these places, which I came to think of as "home-fire farms" because a core of people either from the old commune days or very close to that core are still there keeping the house warm, keeping a light in the window. Teacher Richard Wizansky, sculptor Mark Fenwick, poet Verandah Porche, and her family live at Packer Corners Farm. Janice Frey and her daughter Sequoya share Montague Farm with six other people. Lisa Nelson is at Mad Brook Farm. And the Coopers are at Red Clover.

     Friends drop by the home fires for a vacation and bring the kids. They retreat there to write the book or the play or to rejuvenate the spirit. They come for reunions. They are connected to each other. And they attract new people.

     Peter Natti, who has been at Montague since 1975, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a letter that had come in the mail that day. It is addressed simply to "Steve Diamond or Anyone at Total Loss Farm, Montague, Massachusetts." The letter writer had his history a bit mixed up because "Total Loss Farm" is the nickname given to Packer Corners in Vermont and made famous by writer Ray Mungo. Diamond is the author of the book What the Trees Said, which is a history of Montague Farm. But the point is, the legends live on, if slightly twisted, and people still want to connect with them.

     Natti also says letters come addressed simply to "Sam" in Montague, Massachusetts, and get to the farm, which is still home to Sam Lovejoy, who became one of the earliest antinuclear protesters when he yanked the guy wires and toppled the Northeast Utilities tower in Montague Plains.

     Natti, who is 37, came to the farm while he was recuperating from a car accident that left him wheelchair-bound. "I was very lost and had no idea what I was going to do," he says, noting that he learned woodworking and has done much of the remodeling in the farmhouse. "This place gave me my sanity back, my life back.

     Verandah Porche at Packer Corners observes that "a lot of what goes on here is invisible. It served our needs in 1970. It serves our needs now, and it will continue to serve our needs in the year 2000.

     Dennis Michaud, who was one of the founders of Mad Brook Farm and now lives with his family in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, says that the community "started at a highly evolved place. Although it's dispersed, we know it's all still there.

     Cooper at Red Clover talked about "the magic of the land," even though he's been through 16 rough Vermont winters and has only been able to earn his living on it for the last two without taking extra jobs fixing cars or working in town. The farm's main crop is basil, and Cooper harvested 5,000 pounds of it last year and expects to harvest 10,000 this year.

     "Everyone who has ever lived here has gone through some sort of developmental fantasy with the land," he says. "They've connected with the landscape in some particular way. They'll have a mental image of what it's like to stand under the apple tree or how it feels to take the walk back to the quarry. The land has a fantasy aspect to it, and I don't ever want to let go of it or have it let go of me. It's magic, if you're open to it. It's always here to come back to.