My dad recalls a long and, to my ears, tough road trip to find the right piece of land. There was much hitchhiking and sleeping rough, brewing tea by the side of the road over a little portable stove. He went to Ettersburg, Alderpoint, and Whitethorne before finally stumbling across a parcel of land for sale on a disused ranch near Garberville. A meeting was arranged with the land agent for a viewing. My stepmom came up, and together, they went to look at the plot. The land agent was as careful to match the buyers to the land as she was to match the land to the buyers. A deal was struck; deeds were drawn up.
The parcel is 60 acres of hilly ground, at about 900 feet above sea level, east of the coastal mountains, with mostly mixed old-growth forest — live oak, tan oak, madrone, fir, bay — a couple of streams that have cut deep gullies, and a small but reliable spring. There are some grassy clearings and a meadow of about 10 acres where there are scattered and sparse remnants of a house from maybe the 1930s. Telegraph wire, broken crockery, nails, a porcelain doll’s head. The remains of someone’s life, abandoned for whatever reason. Small but perfectly made flint arrowheads also appear from the ground, evidence of even earlier occupants of the land. Deer, turkeys, skunk, bears, and squirrels are frequent visitors, along with the occasional bobcat and mountain lion. It’s wet in the winter — reliable records show one year with more than 10 feet of rainfall — but tinder dry in the summer. Fierce fires are not uncommon in the summertime, and a volunteer fire department exists as the first line of defense.
“You see that tree over there?”
The road out to the ranch goes from adequate to atrocious in 10 miles — metaled county road for a while, then poorly maintained logging road up to the ranch entrance, and what could only be described as a dirt track, with boulders and potholes waiting to snag the unwary. ATVs and dirt bikes are the preferred mode of transport. This land itself has no buildings — my dad and stepmom would have to start from scratch, bringing everything with them along that track to create a home in the forest of the Pacific Northwest. The first few months were split between living in a tent and living back on the houseboat. It was, my stepmom tells, an interesting time. She remembers one evening alone with my sister, who was less than a year old, in a tent with one guttering kerosene lamp, the rain pouring down, and no one else around in the forest for miles.
Clearly, you needed to be somewhat hardy to keep your nerve in those early days. But they weren’t alone in that attitude. A large number of other back-to-the-land migrants from San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, the East coast, and all points in between, were coming to Humboldt County, bringing their ideas and dreams of a better life — a better world — with them. Soon, the other parcels of land on the ranch were bought up, houses were built, and maintenance of the terrible ranch road was placed under a road committee, whose responsibilities included removing the worst of the boulders, grading, and putting gravel down where potholes required it.
In the broader community, a school, a radio station, a healthcare center, a credit union, and a community center grew up, nurtured by the newcomers. Those who had been here already weren’t always welcoming — the community center was burned down by some locals who resented the influx of hippies, for example. The nascent “Reggae on the River” music festival, held at nearby Benbow, was treated with some suspicion by the locals, until concertgoers’ money started pouring into local businesses. One town councilor famously, and reasonably, spoke up in favor of the festival, saying, “Well, if you don’t like Reggie, just stay at home!”
It wasn’t just musical differences that caused friction, however. The environmental zeal of the newcomers didn’t always sit well with those whose jobs depended on cutting down the old growth forest, although the local logging companies, almost instinctively, had held to environmentally sustainable practices, such as not clearcutting, for example. That attitude changed when one of the smaller local logging companies was later taken over by a huge asset-stripping conglomerate, and common ground was found between locals and newcomers. What had been antagonism (perhaps more one way than the other) turned to a mutual, if sometimes grudging, respect. The “hipneck” — a fusion of hippie and redneck — was born.
I am blissfully unaware of local politics at this time. As a thin, pale teenager, I’m not good at team sports or running or swimming. I prefer programming my Atari 800 or soldering electronic circuits together or reading. Girls frighten me. Being plonked down in the sweltering mountain wilderness under an unrelenting deep blue sky is as different as it could be from cold, grey, flat England in the summer. I drive an ATV for the first time. With my dad and two neighbors, I go on a two-day hike to an old ghost town (now burnt down under suspicious circumstances) and catch trout in the stream, which we cook in tinfoil with herbs and lemon over a campfire. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I keep my shirt on all the time. Someone takes a photo of me by a nearby lake. Everyone else is relaxed and tanned; I’m buttoned up in a blue polyester shirt, sporting a pudding-basin haircut, the kind that was fashionable with the Beatles 20 years earlier.
One part of the original dodecahedral cabin can be seen in the center.
My dad and stepmom had been busy in the three years since they’d bought the land. There was a house, built as two side-by-side dodecahedrons, where one part was the combined living room and kitchen while the other was their bedroom. A roughly rectangular section joined the two, with the bathroom to one side and a tiny alcove to the other, which was nominally my sister’s bedroom, but which I commandeered for the summer. A 1,500-foot length of plastic pipe ran from the spring, at the top of the land, down to the house. The bathroom could best be described as interesting; to keep both costs and water usage low, the toilet was a composting one, where the waste, mixed with sawdust, is decanted, for want of a better word, into plastic barrels with airholes in them, which are turned periodically to keep airflow even. Aerobic bacteria breaks down the matter, rendering it into something like dark brown soil over several months. When it’s opened, there’s just a musty smell, like compost, and the intense heat produced during the decay has sterilized it. There’s a load of nitrogenous nutrients for your vegetable garden, and no risk of infection or illness. It’s free fertilizer; it’s like magic. The only downside, of course, is that you have to have space to store your rotting poop for a few months.
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