A California Eden

IN MOMENTS OF CYNICISM, the dreams of the last decade sometimes seem naive to embittered children of the '70s. We've redonned three-piece suits and high-heeled shoes. Tequila sunrises have given way to vodka martinis, love beads to lustrous pearls. We buy lettuce and grapes either because we've forgotten that we shouldn't or because Cesar Chavez's cause seems hopeless or because we've ceased to care about California's farm workers. And when we scan a semi-crowded subway car, we unconciously choose a seat next to a member of our own race. Slogans linger but they no longer resound with passion. Instead, they splash across slick Madison Avenue advertisement. "Eat our yogurt. Rediscover nature."

The farm has everything a suburbanite dreams of. Nestled in a valley called "Paradise," a mile or so outside a tiny California town, its fresh air-pure water isolation breeds a hushed serenity. Six families live in the valley, families who left the cities and towns two or three years ago to build their own homes and grow their own food. The cow there is really named Bessie and she indeed has story-book big brown eyes. Roosters crow at dawn and pigs are even uglier and smellier than the ones you wrinkled your noses at in the children's zoo.

I'm not sure how the community started. I don't know who collared whom, who was seeking what or whether they all found it. I know they toyed with the notion of starting a commune and quickly settled for a community. Most of the collective or cooperative ventures failed or at least did not quite succeed. Political and philosophical intentions that bloomed in the late '60s did not overcome entrenched individualism. No one applied as much energy to assigned tasks as to personal projects. No one cared meticulously for the machinery the group held in common.

Today, the six families do not spend much time together, outside their weekly meetings. But their interaction is more than a peaceful rural California co-existence. They lease the land together, raise the money for the immense taxes together and share a belief in the dignity of their dirty nails and muddy shoes. They share a commitment to their land, although their garlic patches and herb gardens are now cultivated separately. They have signed a pact promising that if a family leaves the valley it will sell its home for only half of what it cost to build. If they do sell their land, they cannot make a profit. My contact there, the ex-wife of a Miami cousin, a not-so-active artist in her mid-thirties, seems not so much disillusioned with the community's failings as cheerfully resigned to its strengths and deeply satisfied with her hillside niche.

The evening I arrived there, we drank ale out of large goblets and I watched Harriet light the kerosene lamps. I tried to picture the upper middle class high school cheerleader my cousin had married. I remembered his spacious Coral Gables house with its electronic gadgetry and heated swimming pool and compared it to the room I sat in, scented with burning wood and plump pork chops, sizzling in the old-fashioned black oven. The small wooden farm house had neither electricity nor running water. One room served as the living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry. A ladder in the corner led to the unfinished loft where Harriet and the man she now lives with, an East Coast social worker turned hog farmer, sleep. Their three children have their own miniature house some 30 feet away. After dinner, we talked for several hours, attempting to sort out the four jumbled years since we had last met. Then I went down to the children's house, undressed in the chilly darkness and sank beneath a dozen blankets on a homemade goose feather mattress.

In the morning, I wandered up to the house, now vacant, and browsed through the kitchen. I was amused and pleased to find a can of Goodman's macaroons and three loaves of store-bought bread lying next to the organically grown fruits and vegetables. I have little faith in fanatical purists, and the stray bits of cellophane-wrapped junk food made the valley residents' convictions about energy and nature, waste and consumption emerge with more validity in my mind than if they were just the rhetoric of some perverse cult.

I thumbed through the journals the family kept during the first few rainy months there, when they were living in a sodden tent. Silly phrases, children's art work and Harriet's more sophisticated doodles interrupted the more serious accounts of battles with county officials and with the coast guard. Local bureaucrats had tried to halt construction in the valley, had subpoenaed the residents because they did not use electricity, had withdrawn permits because the group was building with recycled wood and had tried to arrest them without even looking at their blueprints for sanitary and ecological compost privy structures. But the warrants and injunctions now dangle inactively and lives in the valley continue with a quiet sense of victory.

I sat alone for a long time, trying to reconcile my life and thoughts with the lives these people are leading. A newspaper article, glued in the scrap book, called them "modern-day pioneers" --a condescending label that nonetheless contains an element of truth. When I left the house, I crossed the stream, walking over to the barn in search of a cousin. There I met Bessie, who kindly permited me, an awkward novice, to milk her. After the ceremony was over, I washed up in the fresh stream water heated on the stove, and drove into the town to meet Annie.

She is a 22-year-old writer who lives in a one-room cabin overlooking the Pacific. I warmed to her immediately, more spontaneously than I have reacted to anyone in months. The New Republic, lying next to a jar of honey on a checkered table cloth, made me laugh inwardly. But at the same time, I became defensive because this woman had done what I often dream of but will never do: dropped out of a respectable Eastern college. I borrowed her phone--only one family in the valley has one--and called the friend I would rejoin in San Francisco the next afternoon. The two women laughed as I prattled like an excited ten-year-old at summer camp. "Jeremy, guess what? I milked a cow." His reaction, a gentle chuckle, soothed me and my impressions of the last 24 hours tumbled capriciously across the telephone wires. The city sophisticate had discovered life in the country.

I SPENT ANOTHER DAY in the valley, taking walks to look at the animals and the crops and trying to ingest as much of the tranquility as my cells would absorb. I thought briefly about re-inviting myself there for part of a summer. Perhaps someday I will. But right now I know I would tire of the timeless hills and mountain brooks and would eventually wring the neck of a rooster that woke me on a sleepy Sunday. Summer camping never managed to accustom me to outhouses; I will never adjust to life without steaming baths. But when we drove to the bus stop, in a cranky Vega smelling strongly of Bessie, I had a little more faith in naive dreams and images of Paradise.