TWILIGHT OF HIPPIEDOM

Farm Commune's Founder Envisions Return to the Fold As Ex-Dropouts Age

Lewis County, Tenn. -- Stephen Gaskin, founder of the largest hippie
commune in America, had finished his tofu burger, eaten his stir-fried
veggies and was digging into a bowl of soy milk ice cream.

The former San Francisco State lecturer and freelance philosopher then
pushed back from the lunch table in his Tennessee home, glanced over
at his wife, Ina May, and issued a bold prophecy:

Millions of '60s idealists who "sold out" in the 1980s and 1990s --
the ones who went out and got real jobs -- are poised to turn on, tune
in and drop out once again.

And they're all going to need some place to live. Gaskin has a dream,
and knows that if he builds it, they will come.

Get ready for Rosinante, a retirement village for aging hippies.

"When they write the '60s history centuries from now, the hippies will
have a name like the Renaissance or the Reformation," said Gaskin, who
named his latest dream after Don Quixote's horse. "We did change the
world, and we're not finished changing the world."

To understand the dream, one must understand the quixotic journey.

Those of you who were hanging around in the late 1960s and early 1970s
may recall Gaskin, who led hundreds of hippies on an infamous 1971 bus
caravan across America.

Hippiedom had blossomed in the cool gray city of love, and Gaskin's
eclectic lectures on mysticism, politics, alternative lifestyles and
LSD took on a life of their own.

It was called the Monday Night Class, or "tripping instructions," and
as many as 2,000 stoned seekers followed Gaskin as he took his show to
the Straight Theater on Haight Street, the Oddfellows Hall and finally
out to Playland by the Beach.

The tribe eventually landed in the green rolling hills of southern
Tennessee, a magical place where the rednecks learned to love those
shaggy survivors of the '60s.

Dubbed the tie-dyed Amish, Gaskin and flock wound up in one of the
poorest counties in Tennessee, where it was easier to find cheap
moonshine than Orange Sunshine, where hillbillies outnumbered hippies.

But the land was $70 an acre, and the locals didn't shoot them on
sight. So they stayed and founded the Farm.

It didn't start out well. Gaskin and a couple cohorts got busted for
growing pot and did a little time in the Tennessee state prison.

Meanwhile, back on the Farm, there were some very lean, very cold
winters. But by 1977, the commune had grown in to a functioning
experimental community of a thousand men, women and children.

They had their own school, flour mill, cannery, medical clinic,
publishing business, and even their own telephone system -- "Beatnik
Bell."

They all contributed to a communal treasury, giving them the same tax
status as a Catholic monastery.

But the Farm was not just an economic and ecological experiment. It
was a spiritual community, forged in many cases by the bond of shared
psychedelic experiences.

"We were water brothers," Gaskin said. "We were collective in a
spiritual sense."

He said the same connection inspired some of the "four-marriages" and
other group living arrangements on the Farm.

"Some of the double couples were sort of a fallout from LSD. People
who tripped together bonded. Then we'd say, 'Let's just get a house
together.' "

Gaskin became a licensed Tennessee cleric, married many Farm couples
and led Sunday morning services.

They'd meet in a meadow on the commune or inside the schoolhouse.
Gaskin would draw from the mystical teachings of various world
religions -- a synthesis he called "the psychedelic testimony of the
saints" or the "totality of the manifestation."

The population peaked in the early 1980s with 1,500 commune members.
And then it all collapsed.

Faced with too much debt, radical poverty and too many mouths to feed,
the Farm stopped being a true commune where everything was jointly
owned and all took from a common treasury.

It reorganized itself in 1983 into a collective, where members were
forced to pay monthly dues and only the Farm's 1,700 acres were held
in common.

Most people here call those bitter days "the changeover." Gaskin calls
it "a coup d'etat followed by a downsizing."

Group homes and group marriages dissolved. Many members wandered off,
unable to make it in a community where they suddenly needed real money
to survive.

"As the kids got older, it was obvious that there wasn't the money
living communally that we needed for braces or other things you need
when kids got older," said Barbara Bloomfield, one of the surviving
members. "We were so busy being in community -- but that wasn't
generating any money, and we needed money to pay the bank for the land."

Those who remained paid off the debt. Today, there are only 80 to 90
voting members in this land-rich, cash-poor enterprise.

Gaskin, 67, is still here, but he's no longer seen as the leader of
the tribe. But he's still got one vote, lots of energy and even more
ideas -- including Rosinante, a kind of Sun City for the '60s set.

Yet even that master stroke had some quixotic detours. In 1996, he
published a book titled "Cannabis Spirituality," an ode to wonders of
getting high on pot. He said he hasn't taken LSD since before the
caravan left San Francisco.

"We don't do acid on the Farm," he said. "Peyote and mushrooms are a
matter of personal conscience."

A few years ago, Gaskin took the politics of pot national. He tried to
become president of the United States, running against Ralph Nader in
an unsuccessful bid for the Green Party nomination.

That didn't work, so it's back to Rosinante.

"When we first started talking about Rosinante, collectivity was not
interesting to people. They were in their peak earning years," Gaskin
said. "When they get a little older, collectivity will get interesting
again."

Donnie Rainboat, an aging hippie, is building one of Rosinante's first
homes.

"It ain't gonna just be a bunch of people just comin' 'round here to
hang out and smoke dope," said Rainboat, who is 58 and recovering from
a recent stay in the hospital. "If you want to come in here, start
building a house and show us you have some incentive to stay."

For his retirement village, Gaskin bought 100 acres of land adjacent
to the Farm. He has plans (but no money) to build an octagonal
community center with a clinic, kitchen, Laundromat and media room
with computers and Internet access.

Community residents -- like Rainboat -- build their own cabins on the
property, and agree to turn them over to the community when they die.

Other longtime Farmies don't put much stock in Gaskin's latest
project.

"Stephen likes to dream," said Joel Kachinsky, smiling. At the same
time, Kachinsky turned 60 last year, and suddenly, retirement and its
mixed blessings don't seem so far away.

Three decades have gone by since Kachinsky, a former Vista volunteer,
came to San Francisco and stumbled on Gaskin and the Monday Night Class.

"There were a lot of gurus around, and he billed himself as the
American guru," Kachinsky said. "He was saying heavy stuff that needed
to be said.

"When we were communal, our level of trust put us in an extraordinary
level of consciousness," he said. "There are about 4,000 members of
our tribe, folks who took the vow of poverty and were seriously doing
this thing. That body is our church, or group soul.

"Since the changeover, we've been in a dysfunctional state and back in
ordinary consciousness. We originally came here to decondition
ourselves from our capitalist conditioning and recondition ourselves
for a better society."

Now that the Farm is no longer a commune, all kinds of questions arise
about why it exists, who really "owns" it, and who can come back or
join up.

"We have to deal with that before we hand this over to the next
generation, " Kachinsky said. "If we don't, it could be a real mess
here in another 30 years."

Of the thousands of communes that formed in the 1960s and 1970s, the
Farm is one of the relatively few that survived -- albeit in an
altered economic arrangement.

And Rosinante, which may never be more than a collection of cabins
built by a spaced-out band of aging, unrepentant hippies, is something
of an inside joke to those who've watched the rise and fall of a
quixotic rebel.

Webster's defines quixotic as "foolishly impractical, especially in
the pursuit of ideals marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or
extravagantly chivalrous action."

That's Stephen Gaskin.

While he no longer calls the shots on the Farm, he's taking one more
shot at the dream.

His eyes twinkling behind his spectacles, Gaskin tells it like it is.

"I guess I wasn't quite done running something," he said.