As the Pile Turns

Words from daily commune life:  Goats… Shit… Protein (or lack thereof)… Zu-Zus… Bugler… Brewers Yeast… Powdered Milk… Power Wagon… “the trail”… Marigolds… American Pie… God’s Hand… Harold and Sylvia…

Let’s take shit…

black bears communal pooper

Human Waste disposal was one of the energy areas at the Ranch.  Black Bear Ranch was founded on the premise that everything was turning to shit so we’d better get our shit together.

We all came to love Redwood’s methane digester.  A world class hole done the old fashion way… by hand.  It was a lovely hole.  Not quite to China; not quite ever used.

The first years of the current human occupation, people spread out, with notable exceptions, usually with some distance between dwellings.  Thus necessitating a number of small shitter sites.  Quality varied to reflect the personality of the “digger”.

Came the second winter and pressure from the Red Brigade eventually had the whole population of the Ranch living in the two rooms of the MainHouse.  How many?  Sixty adults?  Thirty kids?  The Main room and Music room of the MainHouse, there used to be a wall there, became our home.  Two rooms, bedding rolled up against the walls every day.   Even Gail and Michael move in after the birth of Senta; “Martín!  Don’t sit on the baby!”  Mark remained the one hold out.  Anarchists were everywhere.

Shit… We had to do it somewhere.  It had to be close and deal in volume.  We had to do something with it after we had captured and contained it.  And if we were anything, we were world class compost pile proselytizers.  It didn’t take a Ph.D. in sociology to make the next connection.

One thing we had an abundance of was empty five gallon honey cans.  We cut the tops off, fabricated a wooden seat, erected a small A-frame and cover with everyone’s favorite, 6 mil plastic. We put it up on the small knoll behind the house.

I remember heading up to the shitter the night of Danny’s beer tasting, a break-out party late that winter on one of the first evenings that we could be outside.  I believe that it was because I tasted too much beer that night that I needed to make my way honey cans with some urgency.  Setting out I was the riddle of the Sphinx in reverse, walking on two, then three, then finally going quadruped.  Other things happened that night…

One of the few undisputed ideas that winter was a five gallon piss can (also a honey can) on the back porch near the shower. With that kind of population concentration it didn’t take long for the honey cans in the A frame to fill.  One night filled the piss can.

In the tradition of the Chinese peasant collective, we decide to create a “night soil” pile at the bottom of the MainHouse Garden, by the driveway, across from the barn.

Ingredients contained, it was time to mix in the straw and allow to cook.  The pile consisted of layers of honey can contents layered on beds of straw, with a daily application of piss can.  That was my duty, I was the tallest with the longest arms and as the pile grew it was just practical.  At the time I joked that I should tattoo PCM on my arm… Piss Can Man. We always had at least one or two barn piles of goat shit working as well.

We had some regulars in the compost pile creation and turning work.    Others were seen much less regularly at the business end of a pitch fork.  On this sunny late winter morning Meredith and I had guest turners in the persons of Peter and Richard… “night soil” then being a culturally chic item for the radical résumé.

Let me emphasize at this time, how important it was to know where to stand when forking the pile to its new resting place.  The reason should be obvious.  With the pile over six feet tall, things could get toxically malodorous.

Turning a pile of that size was a shitload of work.  The job of turning the pile took about two hours. You didn’t just pick around the outside, you had to wade in and get to the center.  This was a bit more than our guests had bargained for.  Image versus content, ever a nasty conundrum for the culture.  About half way through the pile turning Peter and Richard were fairly swooning.

The next two things happened simultaneously; Judy and Elsa came out of the house with mugs of restorative green tea for their fallen gallants and a Forest Service truck came driving down the road and pulled up and parked in front of the barn, in those days that was usually a cause for concern.  Meredith and I stopped working, then breathed a sigh of relief as we recognized Freddy Coleman, one of the few locals who wasn’t afraid to be openly curious about those crazy hippies while being friendly and informative, too. Malcolm walked out of the MainHouse to jaw with our talkative trove of local wisdom.  I suspect we entertained him greatly.

He got out of his truck and said a few words to Malcolm then caught the scent of the active “night soil” pile.   There’s Peter and Richard being ministered to, Freddy suddenly reeling at the “odor de la pile.”  Meredith and I took in the whole scene, knowing that “this was entertainment”.  Freddy meanwhile, suddenly looks around, grabs his nose in one hand and inquires brusquely, “Whataya got in there? Dead bodies?  That’s  awful!”  Since it was against the law for shit to be detained in anything but a sewage system that no one has to know where it goes, we were suddenly on guard.

Nervously Meredith and I looked at each other not sure what to say but I think we both hoped to say nothing.  Malcolm, as usual rising to the occasion, quickly reassured Freddy that that was exactly what was in there.  Freddy laughed (he had a quick laugh); we all laughed; with no little relief.

That pile was to ultimately serve as plant food for the “Lower Garden” where we grew the “marigolds.”

When you look at the rose, you see the compost pile.

When Ya Gotta Go, Ya Gotta Go

The Domes was a collection of mostly plywood and plexi-glass structures that were across Black Bear Creek by way of a felled fir tree (un-railed until the day two year old Shasta walked down the road and across the tree-bridge alone.  Michael arrived the next day and chicken wired it) below the confluence of Black Bear and Callahan Creeks, near the old Black Bear Mine foundry.

Myeba, Milagra and I shared Myeba’s dome earlier in “the winter of the MainHouse.”  The dome leaked.  We had dry islands of floor space in a general sea of soggy everything.  The bed was dry.  (At least until the night that a massive icicle fell from one of the overhanging firs and shattered the shatter-proof plexi-glass skylight.)

Abdul, I think, had dug the shitter down creek and up the hillside from the dwellings.  Two wooden rails over an open pit, with a roof.  One of the better shitters of my extensive experience.  Kinda gnarly little path up to the structure, but a rather peaceful view.

The “Winter of the MainHouse” was a beautiful, snowed-in-since Thanksgiving kinda year.

One morning I woke about dawn with the urgent need to take an immediate dump.  I leaped out of bed to the nearest island of less soggy floor and grabbed my blanket lined Levis jacket and pulled on my Wescos and laces flapping, trudged, bleary-eye, not even close to being awake, up the snow covered trail to the shitter.

Even through the haze of unwilling awareness I knew that this was spectacular morning.  Snow muted all sounds, so there was a distant quality to the muted babbling of the creek below me and the tree boughs hung heavy with the weight of the night’s deposit of fresh snow.

So there I sat, chin in hands, too quiet even for thoughts, staring at the creek and the shake-sided gypsy wagons tucked into the big firs on the other side… when without warning or sound one of the big trees began to fall.

Question:  Can a tree falling in the woods make a no sound if there is someone there to hear?  A variation of the classic Zen koan.

Here’s an answer:

With majestic grace the tree began its fall to a snow covered forest floor.   I watched with wonder as the fir, about two feet in diameter and seventy five feet tall, just missed the gypsy wagons, settled on the earth and did no more to disturb the silent prayer of that morning than stir the kiss of winter’s breath on my cheek.  A cloud of snow rose equally silent and settled like the passage of a ghost.  Nothing but a jagged stump marked tree’s former place.  That, too, was soon obscured by the light snow that continued to fall.  Nothing but my accidental presence was there to record it.  No record but my sense of vision to attest to it.  And that faint whisper winter’s kiss on my cheek.

BBR Geba and Kids 1970's

by Malcolm Terence

(Malcolm Terence, a river resident since the start of the Black Bear Commune in 1968, published this story in the anthology Free Land, Free Love four years ago. Terence is now a high school teacher in central California. The story, he notes with some chagrin, uses a little coarse language that he would never allow nowadays in his classroom. He apologizes for the way he used to talk. –editor)

Different people brought many things to Black Bear. Michael Tierra, who had seemed crazy in LA, brought incredible music. Myeba Mindlin and Susan Keese, awash in patchouli and tie-dye,  brought the links to the earlier Digger family with all its Byzantine and poetic grace. Calvin Donelly and the other Black militants brought Chairman Mao. Kathy Nolan, who understood sin as only those with Catholic upbringing can manage, taught me that you could do anything.  Most of us brought great notions of freedom and fantasy. I never brought much but I brought the recipe for Chimichangas.

Some would say the essence of those early commune years were about art or style, about politics or spiritual growth, but I was there the winters of ‘68, ‘69 and more. We all knew that Black Bear was about food. We would sit there in the wintry evenings fingering a copy of Julia Childs’ first French cookbook, lusting over dishes that took ingredients we knew we would never see. “Divide ten eggs and set aside the whites,” they’d all begin. “Add a gill of thick cream,” we’d continue, reading  to our companions, with the breathy hushed voices of people reading good pornography aloud.

I admit I was tricked. At first I thought the food was good, but that was only because I spent my first two weeks at Black Bear in a jail cell in Yreka.  Even lentils tasted good for a while when I got out. That’s a whole other story but let me brush on it. I’d met Rose Lee at the Digger base camp in Dunsmuir. Still years ahead of the women’s movement, Rose was tall, confident and assertive–a regal woman. I was especially impressed that she had a huge, warm flannel sleeping bag, big enough for two by contemporary standards.

Anyway, Rose Lee and I somehow were hitch hiking up to Black Bear along what is now Eye-Five when a young, well-scrubbed hippie couple picked us up in a new model van, the perfect ride. They were easy to talk into a side trip to Black Bear, where we’d never been yet. On the way, we stopped for gas in Etna. (In a sound track, ominous foreshadowing music would swell at this point.) While the kid was pumping gas, I went exploring in an old Victorian house that was getting demolished next door to Corrigan’s Bar. The place had been stripped but good. All that was left was an old kitchen sink tossed in the corner and some broken pipes. I remembered that John Albien had sent word that the main house plumbing wasn’t too good so I asked the gas pump kid if I could do some salvage. “Why not?” he said. “Everyone else does.”

We threw it in the truck and headed up to Black Bear where only a few people were living so far. They were delighted to see us. “We brought groceries,” we boasted.

“Did you bring any weed?”

We trudged up to the house with barely a hug when they heard we were herb-free and Martine dredged out an old box of stems and seeds, to try one more time to winnow out enough green for a welcome-to-the-commune smoke. Just then one of the women said, “Jeez, here comes a cop car! How did they know?”

Martine told me to stall out front while he slipped out the back with the shoebox. I confidently walked out to distract these simple rural constables. “How are you fellows?” I said. Big smiles all around.

“Doing fine.” they said in unison. These guys are really dumb, I thought to myself.

“Were you in Etna today?” one of them asked.

“Yeah?”

“Did you do anything while you were there?” he asked.

“What’s there to do in Etna?” I said. They didn’t get the joke. “No, I didn’t do anything.”

“Didn’t you do anything?” he tried again. “You know, like take anything?”

“You mean the sink? You want it back?” These cops had to be the biggest hicks I’d ever met.

One of the hicks pulled a card out of his pocket and read in monotone, ”I’d like to advise you of your right to counsel, your right to remain silent and your right not to be questioned without an attorney.”

Maybe they weren’t the jerks I’d thought. While I was revising my opinion, my hands were behind my back in hick handcuffs and I was being ushered into a hick squad car. I spent the night (and the next 14 nights) in Yreka jail. “Whatchya in for?” asked the inmates, who’d never seen a hippie up close. “Possession of hair,” I grumbled.

But this is the story of how I saved the commune with the recipe for chimichangas and I’m getting lost in self pity. I hardly heard from the ranch in lockup. One night the jailor we called Turkeyneck yelled back to us, “Hey, Terence. Your friend Michael called and said he had a baby girl. He also said he can’t make your bail.” Everybody in the cell block laughed for a while. That was his daughter Shasta Free. Welcome to this world, Shasta.

It was a lousy time to have long hair. I’d already been in jail four times that year on trumped up this or that and it wasn’t even September. I was starting to compare the cuisine of the different jails. Yreka was way better than either San Francisco or L.A. But two weeks of corn meal mush and peanut-butter-jelly sandwiches on white bread took their toll. Every morning, just before I woke, I’d have a dream that I was in jail. They’d wake us by clicking on very bright lights. As I woke, I’d think, it was all just a dream. Then I’d wake some more and be in jail. Suffice to say that the days in jail flew by like years. The public defender couldn’t remember my name. The trial got put off until the following spring so I was stuck at the commune over the winter.

When I finally got out on O.R., I decided the ranch was the safest place to wait for my trial.¹ Fresh air, Rose Lee’s sleeping bag and no more white bread. I thought I was in heaven. That was early September. By mid-October there were 30 of us and some of the romance was disappearing. So was the food. One afternoon a handful of us came in for lunch and it was brown rice served on white rice. And winter had barely started.  This was a crisis. We decided to take the Coors truck, all I had left to show for a year in show business, and headed out to Eureka. (I know you want to hear about the year in show business but this is really a short instructional piece on making chimichangas so it isn’t the place. It is true, though, that story that I once danced with Tina Turner.)

“We” in this case, anyway,  was John Albien, Richard Marley and me. We had the truck. We had the need. We didn’t have any money. I kept asking John and Richard how we were gonna fill the truck with food or even the gas tank with fuel to get home when we didn’t have a cent. I guess they couldn’t hear me very good over the roar of the truck. We spent the night at the house of Mike Mullen, a longshore friend of Richard’s. The next day we ran around meeting all the local bohemian artists who wanted all the stories about the new Black Bear adventure. And then that afternoon we met a man named Merlin. Merlin had done well in the chemistry business and was impressed by our plans. He sized us up, to see if urban hippies could survive in the woods, and I think we passed the test when we crawled under the truck in the Humboldt County mud to readjust the baling wire that held up the muffler. He passed more than a $1,000 to Richard, a huge sum at that time, and asked if we were interested in a back hoe. I didn’t know what one was and thought he said “some tobacco” so I couldn’t understand why Richard and John got so excited.

Anyway, we hit every food wholesaler in town and two days later returned to the ranch with a full load of provisions. That was the first food run, a theatrical event that was eventually elevated to a fine art. This is important because the ingredients for chimigangas are the following.

• 4000 lbs Tule Lake Wheat.
• 1000 lbs pinto beans.
• 55 gal. Vegetable oil.
• 300 lbs onions.
• 20 pounds garlic.
• 5 pounds chili powder.
• 1 pound cheddar cheese. (Optional)

This also happened to be the contents of the larder.

Start by dividing the wheat. Feed half to the chickens. Grind the rest into flour.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Not much happened at Black Bear for those first couple of years. It was not until 1970 or so that I remembered chimichangas. It had been better than brown and white rice but only a little. Sometimes Glenn Lyons and John Salter got a deer but that would be gone in two days. Willis Conrad, one of our first friends on the river, was one of the traditional Karuk fishermen and he’d sometimes bring up sacks of fresh-caught salmon. But mostly it was beans and rice. For variety, some nights the beans would be undercooked. We tried cooking things by substitution. Maybe corn starch would substitute for eggs? So Zoe Leader tried baking Adelle Davis brownies without eggs. They came out of the oven smoking, black, with a texture like some roofing material. She’d just used up the last chocolate and took off for the woods in disgust. Redwood Kardon came by and tried one. “Not bad. Tastes like really good burnt chocolate.” Efrem tried some too and nodded with approval. Not bad at all. Word spread. By the time Zoe returned, the burnt pan was licked clean.

So it was, anyway,  our day to cook. Doug Hamilton. Mark Gabriel. Me. We reviewed our choices. White beans and brown rice. Brown beans and white rice. We were artists in our souls but without much palette. Then I remembered chimichangas. They were in those days only found in Sonora and in southern Arizona where I’d been a kid. Now days you find them in the frozen grease section of every Seven-Eleven in the world. Right next to the microwave. But in those days they were a well kept secret. What they were was a deep fried burrito.

So we hauled 20 pounds of wheat up to the Corona Mill grinder in the attic and Doug started grinding. Mark started a long painstaking round of guitar tuning. I started telling a story about when Linda Ronstadt was my house guest. After about a pound of wheat, Doug rebelled. “Howkum you azzholes are just standing around and I’m getting stuck with all the work?” So I started trading off with him and also held the small table steady which made it go faster. In guilt, Mark started actually playing guitar and also took turns at the mill.

At that point, Gail Ericson came through, looking for her daughter Shasta. She gave us an uncharitable look and asked how many grown men it took to grind wheat. We all tried to look as busy as possible. Gail could be awfully ungenerous in those days. I remembered months earlier, when there was some wine and everybody was in a frisky mood, I came over to Gail and quietly asked if she wanted to slip off and make love. “Oh, you mean fuck?” she said in a voice that carried across the room, and walked away laughing. People turned to me with smirks and then turned away.

When the flour was done,  we fired the great US Army stove, started the beans and started making flour tortillas for 60 hungry communards. The beans were already soaked and we started early. I hated them undercooked. Cover them barely with water. Add onions, garlic and chili powder. Are you writing this down? When the skins of the beans wrinkle, pour in some oil. Never add salt until they’re done. Don’t add too much water and don’t cover the pot. As the stack of tortillas grew, a sense of excitement spread through the main house and then across the ranch. Something new for dinner. We began rolling the tortillas and dipping them into the hot oil where they sizzled the same way I remembered at the little place across from the Greyhound station in Tucson. Carol Hamilton and Geba Greenberg began helping us. Michael Tierra slipped away to get elderberry wine that he’d already aged for a week. Then he started playing music with Kenoli Oleari and John Cedar, who were visiting from the Free Bakery collective in Oakland.

Some nights there just wasn’t enough food cooked. On nights like that, the big eaters like Redwood or Martine would sit near the children in case one of them fell asleep with their food unfinished. Everyone of us would have starved before we shorted the food to a child. But it’s also a sin to waste food and they wanted to be first in line to head off any sinful moment. Everybody in those days was so thin, it was a little scary. We’re much less scary now.

It was a culinary triumph. We’d made way too much and every morsel was eaten. Some were a little burnt, most were perfect and not one was undercooked. They made a crunchy, resistant noise as you bit them: hot and dry on the outside; spicy and juicy in the center. “These chingyjamas are great,” Elsa said and gave me an affectionate kiss. More music. More wine. Tommy Drury, best of the Black Bear cooks, praised my invention. Praise from Tom was praise indeed.  Smokers slipped outside to light up and tell much better stories than the non-smokers ever told. I watched Catherine Thompson whisper something to Danny Guyer and they slipped away.  Another couple left, arm in arm. Buoyed by my new celebrity, I edged over next to Rhoda, a beautiful friend of the Marley’s and in my most suave voice, asked her if she wanted to fuck. She turned and stared at me. “I don’t fuck. I make love,” she said, and so there could be no doubt, she turned and walked away.

Copies of Free Land, Free Love can be ordered from Black Bear Mining and Publishing Company, 2220 Pleasant Valley Road, Aptos, CA 95003. Send $22.50 including sales tax and shipping.

should we shut the bbr tribe down?