Introduction
My time at
Morningstar East in New Mexico
was as well-spent as it was a short and powerful one. I was young, in my early
twenties, and so were the others on the mesa. I don’t recall anyone there over thirty
but there might have been. The prism of time distorts the memory but I was
trying to sort out the memory of that period when I was writing the novel, A
Time Ago and Then. As I wrote I became curious about the people and the
place that was so crucial to my spiritual evolution. The vision I have retained
and the compassion of that remarkable group of young people, whose creative
vision put together such a remarkably courageous attempt at an altruistic and
free-form communal living, is still with me today even though I have moved on.
I didn’t even consider going to the
internet when I wrote this novel as a fiction. I was recalling that experience
as I’d seen it without any outside input. I have no regrets about that because
most of what I had written was true with only a few adventures exaggerated in the interest of telling a story over a factual
exposition. After I had written it, piqued by curiosity, I searched for pictures on the
internet of the adobe pueblo and fantastic kiva to no avail. I wanted so badly
to refresh my memory of the buildings these people had put together and to see
pictures of the people that I had once been so fond of. I assumed, because I am
getting older, that some of these people were getting on in years too; my
chance of making contact with any of them was getting shorter as time takes its
toll. I hoped a picture, or a name mentioned, would refresh my memory and that
I might recognize someone I knew from those days so very long ago.
I did find a website, the Morningstar Scrapbook,
which had much of the history of the commune’s battles with Sonoma County
and some of the people who’d founded Morningstar East in Taos New Mexico.
After leaving a comment on Ramon’s site (one of Morningstar West’s original
members), he passed it on to Pam Hanna because I’d mentioned the amazing roof
of the pueblo’s kiva. Pam was the mate of Larry Read who’d come up with the
design and made it happen. It was she who contacted me via e-mail
correspondence. I let Pam know that my fictionalized, albeit thinly veiled, version
of Risingstar was based on my experience at Morningstar. But, that since it (A Time Ago and Then;
published as an E-book at Smashwords.com.), is fiction, some of it, while
truthful, was not factual. Pam expressed to me that her reticence about fictionalized versions
of Morningstar was caused by T.C. Boyle’s use of “narrative skill to malign,
characterize & misrepresent us”. I am happy to have her blessing and this
inspires me further to call this memoir a Morningstar Romance. It will have
insights about the place and the people I met on that plateau of my own
experience in Taos. I hope to be as honest and clear about my own experience there and little
more.
Chapter 1:
The Adventure
I
had just gotten out of the US Navy in the fall of 1969 and wanted badly to rejoin the San Francisco scene that I had left four years before.
My experience in the Navy was mild compared to those who’d been sent to the
front in Viet Nam but it was four years of a moral compromise on my part nonetheless.
My first psychedelic “trip” had been taken while attached to the Medical
Holding Company on Ford Island in Pearl Harbor while recovering from surgery on
three crushed vertebrae. It was on the beach in Waikiki that I had gone through
a powerful eye-opening spiritual transformation. Every lie I had ever
told…lived… or otherwise convinced myself of, was revealed in stark detail.
This was not a disturbing revelation because, after ceding to this spiritual
void I had been living in, I was able to transcend guilt and shame to actually
see a harmony and sense to it all… whatever “it all” was. It was one of those
mountain-top experiences that so many people had undergone via the vehicle of
LSD, peyote or psilocybin. I saw my alcoholism as a silly obsession… a diversion…
a clouding… that kept me from living fully in the light of what I understood to
be God… the creative energy… the Heart of Compassion… that was The Reality. It
was like being able to see music… every note of an orchestra in the rhythms and
harmony… colors and forms… patterns really… than it was a vision of God. But I
saw God in “it all”.
Having had that mountain-top experience, I
hungered to find people to share it with. After I was discharged, I hung out in
North Beach selling underground rags (the Berkeley Barb, Good Times, Berkeley
Tribe and so on) at the hub of Columbus, Grant and Broadway, down the street in
front of the topless bars. It gave me enough money to eat and enough contact
with others, but the scene in San Francisco was going to the dogs: street dogs,
runaways, heroine addicts, speed freaks, and those who preyed on them. The
psychedelic revolution I’d hoped to become a part of had moved elsewhere and I
had almost given up that hope when the Rolling Stones came to Altamont
Speedway. That gathering turned out to be a fiasco almost directly opposite of
Woodstock, even though it was touted as Woodstock West by the “underground”
press. I saw the whole thing through the lens of LSD and it was not anything I
wanted to have anything to do with. I stayed on there with a rag-tag group that
had been foraging for whatever was left in the field… at first it was
sandwiches and pot… later we were the clean-up crew and lived in the race-track
tower. My experience there is covered with detail in A Time Ago and Then and
I see no purpose in describing again those ugly details of that eye-opener here.
I left there for Hollywood to see what that
scene was about but it was decaying faster than San Francisco. It was
depressing and, when word got out that there was a Free Land movement in Taos
New Mexico, my road-dog buddy, Norman, and I put our thumbs-out. I was
introduced to the magic of New Mexico on a ride that picked us up at a corner in
Las Cruses we stood at for hours. A woman in her forties (which was an ancient
age to us then) told us of the mystery and power of the landscape. She had been
a Black-Jack dealer in Vegas who one day packed up and moved to Questa. She was
familiar with the communes in Taos and encouraged us to find one we liked and
explained the history and philosophy of each that she knew of.
I
wish I could remember that wonder woman’s name; I think it was Maggie, but time
has clouded the old muscle between my ears. I do remember being dazzled by her
spiritual awareness as she drove that Volkswagen bus, weaving back and forth
over the center line, gesturing with abandon and shouting over the rattle of
the engine so affectionately, the sights and history we passed through.
We
came to Taos where she had friends that were mostly musicians. I have no idea
where it was or whose house it belonged to but we sat and talked, played music
into the night as a pipe was passed around to the light of a small kerosene
lantern common everywhere. There was no electricity and a sort of flatbread chapatti
was, almost universally, cooked on the top of a fifty-gallon drum made into a
wood-burning stove. Those drums too would be common everywhere.
One
of these folks explained that New Buffalo and Morningstar were the closest and
most open communes. However, New Buffalo, being the first commune in the region,
was pretty much full-up and harder to get into. It was explained that
Morningstar and the Reality Construction Company were on the same property owned
by Michael Duncan and close by. Of the two, Morningstar was friendliest to newcomers
and allowed anyone to join… if join is the right word… it was more like
welcomed in. There was no visible leadership and the only rule was Love. It
sounded like the kind of place I needed to air out in because I had enough of
authority in the Navy… and seen street corner gurus of wild enthusiasm and
conviction, cultish Christian preachers, and manipulators of every sort in
Hollywood. The whole bit about Charlie Manson had gone down already by then and
the wild chaos and disappointment at Altamont had sucked my soul dry of what
little hope I still desperately held on to. I had to check it out. It sounded
like the vision I had for the future on the beach in Waikiki. I wasn't at all sure but, if there was
hope, perhaps I might find it at Morningstar.
