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(More customer reviews)Communal living has been a social experiment rooted firmly in the American landscape since the New England Transcendentalists and the Brook Farm community. Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau are names familiar to every high schooler, but few have read more than the usual Walden Pond excerpts and perhaps a poem or two, and most of the other Transcendentalists writings were concerned with their social philosophy.
The power of Free Land, Free Love is in the polyphony of very personal voices, weaving a portrait of experiences in communal living at Black Bear Ranch. We are treated to first-hand accounts of mostly middle-class Americans diving headlong into this unknown adventure, and surviving. It was the sixties, after all. Personal politics, sexual ethics, psychology, morality -- the Black Bear experience brought these ingredients into a cauldron seasoned with incipient radicalism, multiculturalism and a romantic idealism so far removed from the present it is an artifact. Try to imagine even discussing free love today in the era of AIDS. Yet once upon a time, free love seemed not only possible, but, well, socially advanced.
If their views on life seem to have little to do with life as most know it today, it is instructive to listen to these voices and hear the way that they (and perhaps we also) used to think. Though idealistic, these communards were also practical, down-to-earth, and undaunted by the many challenges they faced from Mother Nature, from society and from each other. Like the Diggers, their urban antecedents, the Black Bear tribe were scroungers, hustlers and Robin Hoods at heart. Ironically, their own naivete often proved to be a saving grace.
This book is filled with marvelous anecdotes. Burned an American flag at James Coburn's house. The Great Tomato Plant Bust. A standoff at gunpoint with a Black Power brother from Oakland. Fishing with the Karok Indians. Love triangles, quadrangles and other polygons. Discovering and using herbal remedies before there were health food stores. Encounters with wild animals like mountain cats, bears and snakes.
The reader is invited into the Black Bear reality one voice at a time. You can read it straight through and get the feeling of a connected narrative. Or you can drop into the book here and there, and graze. Free Land, Free Love is testament to a kind of human courage that is in short supply today. This is a wonderful book that documents an amazing era in which everything seemed possible and nothing was too great to fear.
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