Sunrise in Taos

THE SUNRISE COMMUNE

            Crossing the landscape toward evening the van pulled into Taos with Maggie steering it to a house in town where her friend Magic Maya lived. The house was full of musicians that night and Magic Maya was nowhere to be found. However, we were welcome guests anyway, as a party had been going on for more than a day. There was talk of how the communes in the area were faring, enduring their first winter in the high country around Taos. Some communes seemed to be thriving while others tended to be nothing more than crash pads for dopers: there was even one house in Taos where everyone called themselves Lords and Ladies. Every fantasy was lived out in this place. The Hog Farm and The Sunrise Commune were the most open to newcomers. The Lama Buddhist Foundation in San Cristobel was even more interesting but I was told that there was no tolerance for drugs, even mind-expanding ones such as LSD or Peyote, so I figured I’d be better off at the Hog Farm or the Sunrise. It was a choice that seemed right at the time. It would be another time I’d often wondered which way my life might have gone had I chosen Lama over The Sunrise Commune.

            We crashed there at the house as bottles of Red Mountain wine laced with acid and bowls of pot, were passed around. The accompaniment of acoustic guitars and homemade flutes played wordless rhythms to the vibe of the night. It was sweet and exotic to me to lay there and listen, getting a good night’s sleep, before embarking on my adventure the next day.

            That morning Maggie drove up the hill from Arroyo Honda, about eleven miles north of Taos, to the mesa that was accessed by a one lane winding washboard and gravel road. An even narrower dirt road that was recently cut branched off past a geodesic dome to several switchbacks towards the top. A makeshift parking lot was graded out at the end of the road where all trucks and autos were parked; as none were allowed past that point. At the end of the mesa, a hundred feet from there, I could see a small complex of newly constructed adobes in a triangle formed around a small courtyard. The top of a teepee peeked out of a ravine beyond the mesa. Apparently, these people had been busy before winter set in.

            There was a group of half a dozen men sitting at a fire pit by the parking lot smoking pot and drinking wine. I thought it odd to be drinking wine that early in the morning and was put off when a scraggly, red-bearded, hippy in a buckskin fringed jacket, partially concealing a bowie knife on his belt, approached Maggie for spare change. Norm told him to fuck off. I was pleasantly surprised when Bowie so readily obliged. Norm was even shorter than this character but his boldness got him through where superior size and a huge knife didn’t count for much.

            I noticed Norm wasn’t unpacking his own stuff. I knew before Norm spoke, “I’m not staying here, we're goin’ to Questa.” He was going with Maggie.

            “Great, I kinda thought so,” I was authentically happy for this odd Spring and Autumn coupling.

            We gave each other a warm parting and Norm and Maggie drove away. The characters around the fire pit told me that I could stow my stuff in the Kiva just past the adobe. A kiva is a circular building where native ceremonial rites are performed in the Pueblo culture of the region.    I climbed down a pole, with notches hewed into it for rungs. I adjusted my eyes to the dark. A kerosene lamp lit the interior but it still took a moment to adapt my eyes to the darkness. The forms of a handful of people in the dark began taking shape. I sat and opened my pack for a bag of Bugler and rolled one for myself, offering the pouch of tobacco to one of the forms. I didn’t speak but waited for someone to start off the conversation. A fifty-gallon drum situated on the opposite side of the center circle from the ladder pole had a stove pipe joined to it providing more than adequate heat for a fairly large space.

From behind the stove a shadow spoke, “What do you call yourself?”

I peered into the dark and made out a kind face of a blond, braided-haired, man with also a braided beard. Woven into the beard braids were turquoise beads. I hadn’t considered it but I figured I could call myself anything at this point; however, I stuck to my nickname, “Max.”

“I’m Mason. Pick a spot and roll out your bag.”

Mason did most of the talking. I wanted to know more about the place. I asked about the pueblo and Mason told me about how the local Taos Pueblo Indians came up and taught the basics of making adobe and that they’d put it up last summer. “I’ll show you the forms and where we make the mud bricks when you’re ready.”

“Who designed the kiva?” I was curious about the roof.

“It is mostly a traditional Hogan style built into the ground. Are you interested in building?”

I was looking up at the roof. Twelve inch diameter logs that tapered only slightly towards the center with notches cut out to lock each one crossing over the other. “Yeh, I want to know about that roof. Is that a traditional roof?”

“Naw, the way those logs are positioned was Barry and Brian’s idea. I mean, we were all sittin’ around trying to figure out how to make a roof for this place. Brian took some six-inch nails and laid ‘em out the way you see those logs. He set them up and challenged anyone to put enough weight on ‘em to collapse them. Barry knew it would work without bolts or nails.”

“So that ladder doesn’t support the roof?” I liked this Mason guy and I suspected that he was probably the brain in the outfit. I wanted to meet more of these characters.

“You’ve got a good eye, Max.”

 The pueblo consisted of three wings in a triangle open at two ends with about three to five small rooms in each wing. It sat at the end of the mesa pointing outwards over the kiva to the land beyond. Piñón pines and prickly-pear cacti along the edges of the mesa accented the mostly cleared grassy plane. It extended miles toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains crowned by Wheeler Peak against a wild sky of swirling clouds.

Mason explained the property (about 800 acres) that The Sunrise Commune was on. It consisted of three or four mesas stretched out like fingers from the mountains to the plane below towards the Rio Grande. The Sunrise Commune had one mesa and shared another with a commune called The Cosmic Construction Company. The owner of the property was Michael Dragon and his house was on the last finger above the Rio Honda. Mason, or the others in the commune, never told me much about Michael Dragon but, from what I’d heard… picked up from here or there, the guy inherited some cash and used it to purchase the land for the purpose of opening it up to experimental communities.

The Sunrise was begun by folks around a character named Lenny Goldberg. They’d left the Mahayana Ranch, The Sunrise, in California to try again in New Mexico after city freaks, and eventually the authorities, began to move in on them. I was curious about who it was that was “the leader” in New Mexico. It didn’t seem possible that there was no single leader or authority amongst the group.

“So, how does all this get organized?” I asked.

Mason laughed, “You’ll see.” Then after a long pause he offered, “Most of our decisions affecting the group are made by the group.”

I sensed that this was bullshit. I knew, from experience, that there is always somebody that comes up with a plan and then organizes people around that plan; that the chaos I’d witnessed at Altamont happened because there was no plan or leadership. The Hell’s Angels had a plan and leadership. A handful of assholes were able to cow three-hundred-thousand disorganized and dazed hippies.

“There are no Charlie Mansons calling the shots here… if that’s what you mean. We only have one rule and that rule is love.” Mason explained.

“So, no one gets ‘vibed”’ on or off the mesa… like Zardoz?” I worried about the way the most egalitarian societies exert power and control. I could live with it if there was such a structure but wondered how it would work if there wasn’t.

Mason grinned, “You are either ‘On the Bus or Off the Bus’, you stay or leave of your own volition.” Then Mason paused a moment and added as an aside, “Look, the guys at the parking lot contribute nothing and bum enough for a jug of wine whenever a vehicle arrives. They won’t be told to leave either. They’ll get bored and move on. You don’t look like a wino. You’ll be okay here.”

I was familiar with the Ken Kesey bus ride across America but I had misgivings nonetheless about how far one could go with this philosophy for any real results.

Mason was looking me in the eye to point out, as sternly as Mason gets, “Cosmic Construction Company … on that mesa,” waving his hand north… “They have an elected council. They are trying it that way and we’re trying it this way.”

…