on the cover / By Malcolm Terence

Return to Black Bear

1968 communards rejoin the circle for a 40th solstice

(July 10, 2008)  We had celebrated the seasonal holidays, the equinoxes and the solstices, from the time we started the Black Bear Ranch Commune in 1968. I thought about those early days as we navigated the tangle of log roads leading into Black Bear for what would be the 40th summer solstice this June. A couple hundred people were expected and it was hard not to dwell a little in the past. Salmon River country is forests, and steep terrain. It’s that way where I live these days, down near the bottom of the river, and it’s even more that way up at the commune. Even the dust and the bumps seemed familiar.

There were many communes in the ’60s, some spiritual, some with a wealthy sponsor. Black Bear was not against spiritual and we would have loved a wealthy sponsor. Most Black Bear people were Sixties-political and they were willing to live in the middle of northern nowhere. And there are still people living there collectively today.

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The first big celebration at the commune was the autumn equinox in 1969. Thirty of us had survived the first intense Siskiyou County winter and were swollen with rural bravado. We invited up all the extended family from the Bay Area and beyond. One day Richard Marley, who I always thought of as the founder of Black Bear, had called us together to plan for the expected onslaught of visitors. What preparations would be needed? We talked passionately, if inconclusively, around the circle for an hour or more and finally agreed that things would take care of themselves. No planning necessary. People used to think that way in the ’60s.

In some ways things did care for themselves at that first big celebration. The San Francisco Diggers by the score appeared in trucks and buses and gypsy wagons. They knew that hospitality was a two-way street and brought enough food, not just for the Equinox celebration, but also to carry us isolated Black Bears through the entire winter. By then everybody had heard that we’d been snowed in most of the previous winter — an epic like the Donner Party except with vegans playing all the parts.

Others came, too. Anarchists from Lower East Side New York via New Mexico. I think a few of the Black Maoists from the East Bay, with their golf bags full of rifles and shotguns. A handful of Hells Angels in a Chrysler convertible.

My favorite was Willis Conrad, a traditional dip-net fisherman from the Karuk Tribe and the first of the river area locals to befriend the commune. Willis arrived in a weathered pickup with gunny sacks full of fall-run salmon, just caught at Ishi Pishi Falls in Somes Bar.

Hundreds showed for that 1969 Equinox. There was food aplenty. But their vehicles broke down. Sanitation, which we then considered a bourgeois conceit, broke down too and there was an outbreak of Shigella, a dysentery. The mechanics struggled to find or order parts for the stranded vehicles. Finally, by the time the winter rains were starting, the last of the guests were gone. The vast store they had brought of winter provisions was mostly eaten and we began to get letters from the state department of health about our drinking water. It had been a great party.

So this time the current communards and a few alumni did some serious planning. New water filters. Provisional privies. Signs and parking areas. Supplies and cooking arrangements. Newcomer reception table. Traffic control and fire protection. Projects and workshops.

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