June 27, 2001

 mfinley.com   

"THE JACOB'S HILL RECOMMUNION"

A remembrance from 1980
For a more recent description, go to this page

by Michael Finley

To the tune of "Ta da da boom-deyay":

Morgan is sad today, sadder than yesterday.

The tune is from an old Carnaby Street art film about genius youth, and it reminded all of Ernest Morgan's friends of him. Ever after he wasn't Ernest any more, he was Morgan -- Morgan the exalted; Morgan the poet.

Morgan is sad today. Today is the tenth solstice anniversary for the communal tribe of Jacobs Hill, high in the Rocky Mountains near Alamosa, Colorado, at the edge of the Rio Grande National Forest. And Morgan -- Ernest -- is full of the sense of something having passed.

"I work in Maine now, in a sardine cannery," he says. Pause. "I'm not boasting about it," he adds. "That's just the way things are for now."

Morgan had been one of the wunderkind hippies; not the louse-infested long-hair but a bright and decent fellow having a go at his visions. He and the rest dated back to a college on a hill in Ohio, where the idiom was folk music and spiced teas, earnest protest and arty happenings.

Looking at Morgan now, nothing seemed changed: when the decade-clock struck '80, he did not suddenly button down. Beard is still where it was, only more salt and less pepper. No patches on his blue jeans now. Deep in the eyes is the subtler change, where the innocence has been dimmed to disappointment.

"People always thought I was in charge, and I wasn't," he says. "People coming to me with hats in hands, 'Can we ride in on your trip?', and some did, they went up into the hill and put up a roof or dug a hole. They thought the land would save them, and it didn't."

Morgan picked at his mesquite roots. "A bad thing happened to me, and it took me a while to see that is wasn't all bad. I got busted for bringing wet-backs across the border in my pickup. I thought I was doing a good thing, and I was -- the workers made a little money, the farms here got the work done in time, and I got some for me and my family. No harm done.

"You know where they got me? Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico."

The ten days he spent in jail wasn't what changed Morgan. "I couldn't believe how much a simple thing could hurt, just finding out I wasn't magic any more. Just another guy. That was a lot of notches for me to come down."

Remember that song by Bobby Fuller? "I fought the law, and the, huh, law won."

An admirer changed the words to the McCartney lyric just for her:

"Marcia McCree, you have always been my inspiration.

Please remember me.

Don't forget me, Marcia McCree."

Cree was a pixie princess who would rather have been the faerie queen. In 1967 she was a major date at the college on the hill. In 1970 she had greeted visitors to Jacobs Hill with invitations to the skinny-dip. Now, in 1980, she denies everything.

"Really?" she asks, wrinkling her nose and smoothing the dress she bought this afternoon at a second-hand shop in Alamosa. "That really happened?" Incredulous grin. "Really?"

At the college on the hill she preyed on the young, one of them a melancholy poet named Aaron who alone of the raging beatnik mob wrote of sentiment, of romance; who alone was rewarded in kind; who alone for the edification of other eyes feigned acid flashbacks, fingers stiff at the sides, eyes bugged like twin rhymes to the three-quarter moon.

"You mustn't be cruel about Aaron," Cree says wistfully. Then less wistfully: "Oh, you might as well. He screwed me over good."

Now she has an older man, forty-threeish, a poor man's one-man renaissance -- poet, musician, sculptor, entrepreneur, twiddler -- and he owns a red van with a waterbed. Together Rolf and Cree foment art and new notions throughout New Mexico and the Southwest, Rolf having a hand at every trade, Cree nightmares of drowning in a flaming crash.

Today Rolf is concentrating on coffee, but snubbing the solar stove set up for such things.

"Bunch of bullshit," he says. "Like all the rest of that New Age hippie bullshit." Rolf enjoys appearing contrary, yet he walks warily across the outcrop. He stops by one of the half-dozen children and shows her a trick, earning the child's smile. Like Cree, he feels trapped in the wrong role.

Fuming and fretting, he paces the campsite. In an old unwired shack is a broken-down electric stove. He piles kindling on top, lights it, sit successfully over coffee. "Now I'm myself," he says.

At night Rosemary sprains her ankle stepping off the tailgate. Rolf parts the crowd and proceeds to give an exhibition of twiddling. "Twiddling," Cree explains, "is a form of healthful massage that involves, not kneading, but as you can see, 'twiddling' the muscles." Rolf and Cree claim credit for bringing twiddling to humankind; at the same time, even they do not know its full medical potential.

Tonight there is the obligatory bowlful of marijuana here and there, and the obligatory sniffs and gasps, but nothing like the old days. A few look longingly in the direction of smoke. More common is the six-pack of Coors, or the gin and tonics dispensed from the bar in back of Rolf and Cree's van.

Tonight Cree dances to the guitars and rhythm boxes the Mexican boys brought. And again she is no pixie, tonight she is dancing like a whore. Bumping, grinding, leering to a disco bass above the tree-line. And the old friends regard her and help her along. Marcia, it's OK.

And when it is late and the party pared down to a handful of locals arguing about chromework on a cycle, Rolf and Cree will feel their way back to the red van, leaning against one another in the dark.

Where's Tim? Is Tim coming? Sure hope Tim makes it.

It isn't entirely affection causing this concern about Tim. Tim Lord, years before, had been the designated bag-man, tambourine-man, mushroom-man. If a certain scent were in the air, then Tim was too. Straw-bearded and -thatched, Tim was the hippiest of the crew and looked the part, bibs bursting with jasmine and patchouli. Tim looked like he could really commune if it came to that; the embodiment of ego-death and the mellow soul of simplicity; his was the non-ado that lent the quality karma his offerings had.

One of the rites was trash-tripping. During the lean years of 1970-72, before and after the winter the police had to climb up and thaw them out, the group earned a $175 monthly stipend for cleaning up after fishermen up at the reservoir.

Ordinarily it would have been unpleasant work, slopping fish-guts into plastic bags and heaving the bags over the garbage and dead deer at the dump. But once the doors of Tim's medicine chest swung open, the work took on powerful new dimensions. The pack took care not to be witnessed by the fishermen in campers: their euphoric pantomime on the wind-lapped edge of that sky-high lake would surpass understanding.

So where was Tim? The youngest especially seemed on the prowl for him. Tim would reestablish continuity, they said. Hell. Tim -- plus Tim's toys -- would establish continuity that wasn't there to begin with. The looks in the young eyes spoke of a preternatural nostalgia: Make us high, Tim. Remind us we're young. Return with us now to that sky-blue dreamscape of yesteryear.

Red Datsun sports car pulls up. It's him, Tim. Friends cluster about as Tim emerges, abashed in his Sassoon jeans and $70 haircut. Smiles freeze, fade. Hello Tim.

"It's super to be here," says Tim. "I get so tired of New York. Can you dig it, me an analyst at the Fed? Yeah, the big one. Is that so? Well for Christ sake, look me up next time. We'll have lunch."

Cree at Patti and Elise huddle all day in the red van. When someone puts a head in the welcome is chilly, the intruder backs out. Cree and Patti and Elise drive into Alamosa and return with armloads of funky old clothes. Cree and Patti and Elise sit in a booth of a Capulin tavern, sipping Scotch and affecting distraction.

Didn't there use to be four? Yes, then there was Becket. Becket was Rebecca, tiny madonna of the college on the hill, aquarian homecoming queen of almond eye and sleek tress, the know in every freshman throat.

Cree, who loved Becket dearly and envied her bitterly her better grace with beauty, stirs her drink and nods her head to some internal saxophone run.

Patti draws on her cigarette and lets the smoke out again with an air of heavy-lidded ennui. She is concentrating on making the silence be a frame for her personality.

And Elise, struggling to match the indifferent pace, is unable to sip from her straw without her eyes widening and drawing together.

They are all over 30 now and the fine-etched lines have gone to work in the corners of eyes, unevenness of complexion, tissues relaxed beyond youth.

The princesses are aging.

Cree's lips tighten as she explains: "They killed Becket. I don't know how, the whole thing was covered up or something. This dude she was with was into some big drug thing and she knew too much. The autopsy was never released. Nobody knows anything. That's just the way they want it."

"That's the thing that burns me," Cree says. "We got to keep going, being here and everything, and Becket doesn't."

It isn't Patti's style to overstate. There is a part of her which is blazing in its determination not to be made a fool of, not by Becket and not by Cree. Someday she might meet someone extraordinary enough to really embarrass her. Failing that, Patti holds her counsel, chooses grainy silence and throaty humor for her backdrop: Mona, wipe that smile off your face.

She too dwells on Becket's death, without requiring a conspiratorial tone to give it significance. Becket and she were the dolls of the hill, good friends, perfect sisters. Now Becket would be forever chiseled perfect as ever in a dozen good minds. While somewhere down the line, for Patti, the usual insults of time and circumstance lay waiting.

"You look wonderful," says Joe Velasquez, the rancher from Capulin, pulling her across the campfire to dance to the country-western song. "And so young." Patti smiles sorrowfully, to give him something. "You make me feel ten years younger just looking at you."

"Hey man, where you going? To Jacobs Hill? Hey, we'll give you a ride. Whatsamatter, you never got four guys on a cycle before? Come on man, get on."

It wasn't just that it was four on a cycle, but four on a very small cycle. These kids are all about sixteen, except the little one on the tail-end of the chain might be fourteen, and smoking diligently to make up the difference. They are all Chicano boys from Capulin, too young to know about Jacobs Hill except by local legend and older brothers.

"You was one of those people that lived there, man? Far out, I heard all about the stuff that went on there. Too much. Is all that stuff true?"

Well, some things might be true. About five or six people at a time were there for a long time. And the people changed over the years, different people took their places. It was an interesting group. Rosemary, she was the daughter of the famous Dr. Menninger, the psychiatrist. But you guys never heard of him I bet. Rosemary was nice.

Well, that was a long time ago, and in a different -- context. It wasn't a wild bunch really. Really rather conservative in a way. It wasn't a ten-year orgy.

"That's what I thought man. That is what we want to do too. Get some place where you can go and get as high as you can, you can really get loaded and no one will care. I mean fucked up man. So you pass out, so what, who's going to point the finger and say, No, you, bad boy."

They were always reading up on the latest idea about building and recycling and health and psychology. One became an editor for the Whole Earth Catalog. Because if things were to get done, it figured bright people like them would have to do it.

"That's far out man. And now you're all going up to party again. Old times all over again. All right."

All right.

From an old Jefferson Airplane song:

"Lather was 30 years old today...
And I should have told him
No, you're not old...
And I should have let him go on smiling, baby-wise..."

The night is dark, the only light the Milky Way sprayed across the blackness above, and the glint of coals dying in the pit. Cree is grinding out her last bumps of the night. Patti sits alone by the fire. Morgan has gone off the sleep up on the rocks. The three Chicano boys have showed up uninvited, drinking and whooping in strange defiance of the gathering's somber mood. Generational disdain between the groups sets in.

How strange it seems, to huddle together with the immensity of the Rockies sprawled out around. Gradually the fire is vacated as two by two or one by one they saunter off into the dark.

Bobby Dunsmore, who works nearby as a forest ranger, and who has acted as host for the Recommunion, wants everyone to write a few words in a group spiral notebook journal. As encouragement he has even written a poem for the frontispiece, full of lovely and arcane abstractions about affection, self, and the great quest. Very sixties. No one has taken him up on his invitation. No one has written a word in the book.

Except one, toward the back, in a feminine hand. "When we knew each other before," the entry said, "I used to be so afraid. I wonder how many of you knew that when I wasn't talking to you I was off somewhere bursting into tears. It made me said to be sad when all this was happening.

"I think we came to this mountain because we ourselves were our own great treasure, and we wanted a background for the way we imagined ourselves: immortal in the way that young people live forever, visionary, and holy because we knew nothing that would wound us or drag us down.

"That was why I was afraid. We were headed for some kind of fall, a different fall for each of us, like that chill breeze coming down from the mountain at dusk. And now time passes and here we are, gathered again at the tribal trough, and look at us. Have you noticed how good we are trying to be with one another? I think we are getting smaller and smaller and more and more we're shaking off the old dream, less a dumb bunch of gods and more like regular people.

"You know, this is the last Recommunion. There won't be another, I can feel it. I know it. I want to say something no one of us has said, as a secret here for all of us.

"Dear friends, I have loved you with all my heart. We should be grateful for each other for ever."

July 1980

More recent description of Jacob's Hill is at this page. 
And be sure and read Ernest Morgan's critique at right.

Stimulate the economy, give a poet a dollar.

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by MICHAEL FINLEY}

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