Chapter 9. Rising Star East (pt. 2)

Wheeler Peak sat to the East

as a mystical force

powerful enough to

entice me to stay.

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 westwards past the kiva over Arroyo Hondo and far beyond the Rio Grande across a broad landscape to the distant range of Petaca Peak. Piñón pines and prickly-pear cacti along the edges of the mesa accented the mostly cleared grassy plain to the east extending miles toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains crowned by Wheeler Peak against a wild sky of swirling clouds.

Risingstar was on one of three or four mesas; about 800 acres stretched out like fingers from the mountains. Two communes shared the mesas; the other was called The Cosmic Construction Company. The owner of the property, Michael Dragon, had a house on a field at of the northernmost finger above the Rio Honda. Mason, or the others in the commune, told me a little about Mr. Dragon and, from what I’d heard… picked up from here or there, the guy inherited some cash and used it to purchase the land and open it up to experimental communities.

Rising Star was begun in California by folks around a folk singer character named Lenny Goldberg. He’d owned a ranch he called Mahayana Ranch and, under the threat of eviction from Sonoma County, he ceded the ownership’s deed to the property to God.  The small tribe living there created a community of an array of sheds and shacks throughout the ravines and hills. They called themselves the Risingstar Commune. When the authorities forced them to leave, many of the people there picked up to try again in New Mexico. They settled on the mesa, naming themselves, Rising Star East.

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 of authority amongst the group.

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

He laughed, “You’ll see.” Then after a long pause he offered, “Most of our decisions affecting the whole 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 them cowed three-hundred-thousand disorganized and dazed hippies.

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

“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 pointed out, as sternly as Mason ever got, “Cosmic Construction Company … on that mesa,” waving his hand north… “They have an elected council. They’re trying it that way and we’re trying it this way.”

I took my time getting acquainted with the other members from the pueblo and explored the mesa finding several other living accommodations around the fringes of the property the first few weeks. There were a couple classic hogans: houses dug into the earth with few feet of adobe above ground to add height, and a wickiup: a native arrangement of saplings arched in a circle and covered with either thatched grasses or deer hides. One such wickiup was formed of saplings and covered with burlap soaked in concrete. It had a fire pit in the middle and the smoke from the fire went out through a hole at the top.

As on the streets, there were mostly young men on the fringes of the commune staying in the kiva or other temporary shelters put up before the Pueblo. Most of the women were already hooked up and I found it somewhat ironic that, even in this so-called egalitarian society, the men with the best nest seemed to draw the most attractive women. Of course, this didn’t bother me. In fact, it was refreshing to me that biological imperatives still functioned here as well as everywhere else. Men build the nest; the women decorate it, make babies and, from what would be potentially just a flop, turn it into a home. Despite of all the feminist rhetoric of the late sixties and early seventies, this is how it seemed to come down. I realized that I had to make a home for myself or go without female companionship.

Mason didn’t live anywhere near any of it yet he seemed to be one of the leaders, if you could call anyone that. I was later to find that Mason, and a wild looking woman that called herself Trina, lived in a cabin on an island in the middle of the Rio Honda a half-mile, as the crow flies, from the mesa.