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Commune Sense
Who's Kidding Whom? Sundancer Wintermoon Sweetpea with 5-year-old daughter Ashlie Carcanague and 4-month-old son Jules Carcanague. Sweetpea rebelled against the values of her commune and her parents when she became an exotic dancer for a while. She now wants to be a cop.
Raised at the epicenter of the '60s counterculture movement, the offspring of the Age of Aquarius have now entered the Age of Adulthood
By Kelly Luker
They share childhood memories a bit different than yours and mine. Zane remembers cruising around in the psychedelic bus with the rest of the Merry Pranksters. Tao Govinda thinks back and sees Pop leading Buddhist chants in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Ocean thinks of the log cabin in which he spent his formative years with his mother and father, whose name is a household word to New Agers. Superman The Aquarian, a moniker still found on his birth certificate, sometimes misses those sun-kissed days on the island of Maui, sharing life with about three dozen moms and dads.
These are the children of the counterculture, the spawn of alternative lifestyle's furthest reaches that blossomed a couple of decades ago. As the tightly girdled and buttoned-down '50s exploded into the no-holds-barred '60s, experimentation became the catchword of the era. Rules about sex, relationships, politics and drugs were thrown out the window as a new generation fumbled its way through a sea of changing values and beliefs. Yet people still did what they've done since the beginning--they were fruitful and multiplied.
Today the fruit, as it were, has matured. Toddlers whimsically named Sundancer, Rainbow and Panda have grown up and now have children of their own.
In a way, these children from the '60s are like aliens among us--young adults who quietly live next door or work down the street, but whose young years were spent in ashrams and communes, log cabins and teepees. In reality, though, are they so different from children of the 'burbs? Did this countercultural kickoff to life hinder or help the adults they are today? And with parents who dropped out, turned on and tuned in, what did these kids do to rebel?
The answer, it would appear, is as different as the children themselves.
On the Bus
Zane Kesey is the offspring of Ken Kesey, a living icon who carved out his niche in pop culture history. Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, the elder Kesey led a band of followers known as the Merry Pranksters from be-ins and concerts to LSD-drenched "happenings," a phenomenon later chronicled in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
The younger Kesey's formative years were spent on the Farm, a commune begun by his father and miscellaneous followers who found their way up to a small slice of rural Oregon. It was a childhood that Zane would describe as "growing up in a sandbox."
"Wavy Gravy [a legendary '60s figure who gained renown in the movie Woodstock] was around and he was a full-fledged clown," Zane remembers. "It took me awhile to realize that not everybody grew up that way."
Although the commune days were short-lived ("My dad said that the commune idea of sharing was great, but it all breaks down in the fridge"), Zane's later childhood still did not mirror his more conservative logger and farmer neighbors up in Pleasant Hill, Ore. "I remember when one of the kids called me a hippie," Zane says. "I cried and asked my mom what it meant. She said a hippie is someone who is closer to Jesus."
The freewheeling '60s have been good to the younger Kesey, quite literally. Now 35 and happily married with a child of his own, Zane and his wife run Key-Z Productions, a mail-order company that specializes in books, videos and memorabilia about those halcyon days.
"I kind of liked being different," Zane says. "But all through high school, I stayed really straight--I was class president, and stuff like that." For a kid with one of the era's most famous acid heads as a father, rebellion wasn't easy. So, Zane tried the traditional forms. "I'd go out and party and not come home till late."
While Zane looks back fondly at being raised with "lots of freedom," as he puts it, Brahmani was raised at the other end of the spectrum, yet holds just as many positive memories. The child of Hare Krishnas, the 24-year-old journalist who now lives in San Jose spent her first five years living in a Detroit Krishna temple. Her parents' marriage was arranged. "They only met once before [the marriage]," Brahmani recalls being told.
Rules regarding conduct and behavior were strictly enforced, leaving no room for drug experimentation or idleness. Brahmani remembers that everyone had to get up at 4am and, after a cold shower, spend hours in meditation. Brahmani and her family moved out of the temple when she was 5, but they all still follow the teachings of the Bhagavad-Gita.
Like Zane, Brahmani knows she was raised differently, yet believes "it was a really good experience for me." The key for her, she says, has been the strong guidance she received. "We were raised with a lot of morals."
If asked, both Zane and Brahmani would probably rate themselves fairly high on the contentment scale--few of their young years have been whiled away on the therapist's couch and neither seems to have bought in to the parent blame game, a velvet trap that would appear attractive to kids with these histories. However, Zane and Brahmani may have had better success at playing the colorful hand life dealt them than some of their peers.
Marriage Wows: Panda Kroll took husband Kevin Volkan to visit the commune where she was raised; he decided to stay for a year.
It Takes a Village
Although communal living situations from that era were built around a strong social or religious focal point like the Hare Krishnas, many more were not. The Village, like the Farm, fell in the latter group. Located on about 170 acres of redwood forest and river land near Point Arena in Northern California, the Village was co-founded in 1971 by the parents of Panda Kroll, an artist who now works and lives in Santa Cruz. The numbers living there varied in the commune's 15-year life span, recalls Panda, now 35, but she estimates that there was an average of three to a dozen families homesteading at any given time.
"My parents met some people at Esalen Institute and wanted to set up a retreat center," says Panda, who was named "for the cuddliest thing [my parents] could think of." Her father, now a professor of computer science at San Francisco State University, was "one of these exceptional people," his daughter says. "Setting up the community was a freeing experience for him, just as the Esalen experience was."
Her parents purchased the property, then asked other college friends and professors to join them. The Esalen tradition followed them. "There was a lot of group process at the Village," says Panda, who lived there from the ages of 10 to 17. Besides offering workshops for other couples, the Krolls would bring in New Thought leaders such as Fritz Perls, John Lilly and Carlos Casteneda to lead therapy sessions and seminars. Timothy Leary and Robert Silverburg dropped by. Panda remembers the time 200 Tibetan Buddhists arrived from Italy and another time a group of sexologists from France checked in with their 40 kids.
Like many of the communes at the time, the Village followed an almost neo-Luddite creed--"we had a conch shell to blow in case of fire"--which Panda and her peers both loved and loathed.
David Levine, who moved to the Village when he was 12, looks back on the five years he lived there as some of the best times in his life. With no outside distractions, summers were spent at the swimming hole or fishing and hiking. Now an actor and writer living in Manhattan, David also admits, "I think I'm the exception to the rule. My experience was really positive, but the girls seem to view it differently."
Panda would second that. As far as having no television and no phone, Panda says somewhat wistfully, "I wish I had something other than the conch shell to announce my 16th birthday."
Yet, both Panda and David, as well as another one of their childhood friends, Katrin Reimuller, agree that something more important than Saturday morning cartoons were missing from their formative years--guidance. A 32-year-old attorney who now lives in Berkeley, Katrin admits she has spent years in therapy making sense of the three years she spent at the Village.
"I have very mixed feelings," Katrin explains. "There are some things that I hold dear to me from that time, but there were some negative things and nobody talked about it." For her parents, whom Katrin terms "weekend hippies," moving to the commune with the Levines and Krolls was "a great social experience."
"There was a pressure to only see it as a positive undertaking and a great positive experience. But there were some damaging things, too," she says. For Katrin, exposure to sex, drugs and freedom came much too early.
The Naked Truth
UC-San Diego sociologist Bennett Berger spent six years studying the Ranch, a Northern California commune similar to the Village in structure and location. His results were published in the 1981 book Survival of the Counter Culture. In a section devoted to his research on the children and child-rearing techniques, Berger observed behavior that, by today's standards, ranged from liberating to borderline child abuse.
As Berger wrote, "Hippie parents ... have disavowed most of the dominant models of parenthood; they are not into 'growing up' to meet middle-class standards of maturity and responsibility .... Like the little kids who are their children, the big kids who are the children's parents are busy 'seeking their identities.' "
In other words, it was children raising children. As the dominant paradigms of family and society were discarded, new ideas were adopted. Native American ideology flowed through the names, which is why the Willows, Sparrows and Rainbows outnumbered the Debbies and Franklins.
Berger also noted a marked lack of "age-grading" or hierarchy assigned in terms of age. In tandem with the egalitarianism of the times, children were now peers to their parents in many ways. Kids were required to go to school (an alternative one on the property), but allowed to "follow their bliss" in what they studied. Children were left to make their own choices and decisions in many circumstances considered unthinkable today.
It was also assumed, according to Berger, Panda, David and Katrin, that sex was nothing to hide. As Berger explained, "marriage and family are supposed to mean a 'settling down' for spouses ... [but commune parents and members] are not 'settled,' and they routinely face the Sturm and Drang of courtship, coupling, uncoupling and recoupling as frequently and intensely after they are raising children as before."
Parents were grappling with their own beliefs about sexuality, attempting to forge a set of values through trial and error. Katrin echoes virtually every person interviewed for this article about their experiences in communal living when she says, "Sex was way too much out in the forefront. We knew too much--we were exposed to a lot of talk about sex, a lot of hearing sex, seeing sex, a lot of dirty jokes."
While her parents and their friends were busy shedding the mores of the 1950s along with their clothes, Katrin believes fragile boundaries important to children were trampled. "It's great that you shouldn't feel bad about your body," Katrin says. "But the flip side was to go naked all the time and to have no privacy."
David says he had his first sexual experience at 13 and also had sex with at least one of the adult women at the commune while he was a teenager. "It was an open time sexually," he says. "The adults were experimenting sexually, switching couples, and we would notice."
Hair Today, Hair Tomorrow: Superman The Aquarian (his real name--it's on his birth certificate) has never cut his hair but thinks it has probably reached maximum length because it falls out as fast as it grows.
Freedom's Double Edge
All three village alumni remember the brunt of decision-making being left with them, a duty that has since cut both ways in their lives. Katrin recalls a time her mother broke a collarbone and ribs in an accident. Her sister Zoey walked a half mile to the nearest neighbor for help while Katrin stayed with her mother, who was slipping into shock. "I remember David's parents praising us for our courage [afterward], and I remember feeling such a sense of pride and self-worth. We got a lot of validation, but we were given a tremendous amount of freedom and responsibility for taking care of ourselves. For me, it was too much. I was a little kid and I needed to be taken care of."
While Zane considers that much freedom a positive aspect of his youth, David would disagree. "We had too much freedom," he says. "I wish my parents would have pushed me a little harder."
Since drug experimentation went hand-in-hand with sexual curiosity through that decade, it is no surprise that children were introduced to mind-altering substances at an early age. According to Berger, children as young as 2 were given marijuana at the Ranch. Says Panda, "I was provided with LSD when I was 13 and told, 'You'll probably experiment, so you might as well have the best.' "
David started taking acid when he was 14, "but I got all that [drug use] out of my system early, too."
Zane started smoking pot when he was about 5 years old. He also remembers making some Kool-Aid and accidentally using the LSD-soaked sugar cubes. But earlier drug exposure stood him in good stead. "When I got to high school, the hippie Deadhead thing was making a rebound. I would show kids how to do acid right--you don't want to play with it, you know."
But some kids grew up doing more than "playing" with drugs. Tao Govinda Gurnoe's father led Buddhist chants in the Santa Cruz Mountains and partook of sweat lodges and yoga. Dad also partook of his fair share of cocaine. "I remember snorting dirt when I was 3, trying to imitate my parents," recalls Tao, now 24.
Tao started lashing out early. "I wanted to go completely against that hippie lifestyle," he says, "that's why I liked punk rock. I was pretty violent." He also was kicked out of the house at 15 for stealing his dad's pot and ended up living on and off the streets for the next five years, where his drug and alcohol addiction drove him to find solace through a self-help program. His spiritual beliefs hover somewhere between a Higher Power and the "straight edgers," a movement of punk rockers who profess abstinence from alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and one-night stands--"also, no abuse to animals, [and we're] anti-sexism, anti-racism and anti-organized religion."
Tao admits he's got a ways to go. "My goal is to be totally straight edge. In a way, we're going back to a lot of what people wanted in the '60s."
Like Tao, the colorfully named Sundancer Wintermoon Sweetpea also bottomed out with her drug addiction by the time she was 20. A resident of Davenport's Last Chance commune from ages of 6 to 14, the 24-year-old Sundancer still considers those early years among some of her sweetest memories.
Her father delivered her at home, then separated from her mom not long after. Sundancer says she is "more understanding" of others and life because of her unusual parents--"My dad is a gay black man and my mom was a hippie," she says.
Her mother also was an ardent feminist. "I remember being dragged around with the Nikki Craft [anti-pornography feminist] movement," Sundancer says. So, when it came time for youthful rebellion, she became a--what else?--exotic dancer.
Both the drugs and dancing are behind her today. Sundancer is a mother herself to 5-year-old Ashley and 4-month-old King. Her career goals also have strayed from her parents' anti-authoritarian creed. Today, Sundancer wants to be a police officer. "With my past it may not be feasible," she says. "But if they hired me, I'd be one of the best cops they ever had."
Rednecks in Left Field
Tom Tutko a professor of clinical psychology at San Jose State, sees both the strengths and weaknesses of being raised in a commune. "The kind of society we have today is self-preoccupied and narcissistic--everybody's concerned with their individual rights," Tutko says. "But the survival of the society is much more important."
Panda, David and Katrin attribute their social skills and thinking to those years of working for the betterment of the group. Yet, Tutko warns, "If the group was very sheltering and supportive, it may be a shock when the kids enter the 'real world.' "
David remembers fighting his way through his "redneck" school, and Zane remembers the way folks would stare at him and the rest of the Pranksters as they toured the land in that infamous day-glo bus with its destination as "Further."
"Then," Tutko adds, "there were those communes that were out in left field."
Superman The Aquarian might agree with that. Now 21, Superman, as he was named by the group's spiritual leader, spent the first several years of his life in a commune called the Source. Originally begun in Hollywood by the owners of the Source restaurant on Sunset Boulevard (made famous in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall), the commune of about 200 people eventually moved to Hawaii. Each member was required to legally change his or her middle name to "The" and last name to "Aquarian."
"The big thing in that commune was to stay the way God raised you," recalls Superman. As such, he has never in his life cut his hair, which flows to his waist.
New members were required to give all their belongings to the group and the Source also actively recruited new members and donations. The guru died in a hang-gliding accident when Superman was about 5, creating an irreparable fracture in the ranks. When people started going their separate ways, the interim guru anointed Superman with another first name, almost as obscure. It is the one he goes by today, though he does not want it published.
A personable young man, Superman reflects the embarrassment and unease that he and some of his peers interviewed feel about those years. He is, by his account, an "average hippieish" kind of guy today, who works as a baker and is earning his computer science degree at Cabrillo College. In between, he can be found catching the surf. But he doesn't discount how difficult coming to terms with "the real world" was.
"I went through this period of about 10 years of battling other kids when I joined mainstream society," Superman remembers. "I blamed my parents for it. Still, today he is "best friends" with his mom. "She's really sorry for putting me through a lot of that stuff, like the real fanaticism."
Superman, like the other sons and daughters of the commune movement interviewed for this article, took from that experience an advantage that has given him strength and self-esteem. "I had, like, 15 moms and 30 dads," he says. "I was never without love."
Trial Separation: Attorney Katrin Reimuller says the intense friendships she retains from her childhood at the Village are the most important things she took with her when she moved on as an adult.
From Ocean to Sun
Communes were perhaps the benchmark of countercultural lifestyles. Yet other young adults today look back on a less-than-mainstream upbringing that did not include the typical commune. Ocean Robbins was born in a log cabin off the coast of British Columbia without toys, TV or movies, "poor, but feeling rich," as he puts it.
Ocean's father, John Robbins, walked away from his family's dynasty built from the 31 flavors of Baskin-Robbins to follow this life of simplicity. The elder Robbins' book Diet for a New America has become a bible to the vegetarian and conscious-living movement.
Only 22, Ocean already has carved out a separate name for himself. At 16, he co-founded Youth for Environmental Sanity (YES), an organization that tours schools, educating children on environmental issues. He also co-wrote Choices for Our Future: A Generation Rising for Life on Earth.
It might be safe to say that Ocean's teenage rebellion period was relatively brief. "Kids sometimes get treated as 'part-people,' " Ocean says. "But, my parents really believed in me and gave me the chance to make my own decisions."
Ocean reflects a quality that both Zane and Brahmani claim as heritage from their very different childhoods. As Zane says, "We have values not based on money." They are the first generation raised to care about the environment--"values a kid could hold onto," explains Zane.
Perhaps the shifting mores of the '60s had less to do with the final outcome of Sundancer or Panda or Superman than one would imagine. Asked how the other kids from his commune turned out, David Levine replies, "Very successful, non-drug-taking, seemingly happy family people." Of his peers, Zane Kesey says, "If you don't look at their income, they're pretty satisfied. They're easier going and less stressed." Whether they rebelled or not, these kids learned from the cradle on that happiness had less to do with what they had than what they believed.
And for these parents, child-raising has come full circle. Asked what they'd do differently as parents for their children, Sundancer seems to answer for many when she responds, "I'll raise them much straighter."
As they move from young adulthood to parenthood and eventual middle age, each of commune kids has come to terms with those tie-dyed years. For Zane, his past is the ticket to his future. But for many others, a countercultural childhood has left a legacy of vulnerability.
Perhaps Katrin Reimuller says it best when she remarks, "I generally don't tell people about myself, about being raised on a commune. People find it interesting, and it makes great cocktail conversation. But, this was my life."
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Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer