Customer Reviews

Free Land, Free Love: Tales of a Wilderness Commune

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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.

This is a very heavy document. It is nourishing for me to read these accounts which cover many aspects of the year (Mar 1970-Feb 1971) when I lived there. Those accounts seem to be still relevant after I left. The voices that speak from the perspectives of the writers make it a full, rich testimonial of a special time in a unique place. I always felt that the Black Bear experience was not to be found anywhere, and now I don't doubt it! It amazes me how my memories of people, events, the land, and other details are confirmed by the stories and images brought to clear resolution by the anecdotes shared in this book. This is partly due to it being collective story-telling, which transcends the limitations of one person's conceits and prejudices. I now have something I can share with my friends, family, and lovers so they may understand part of my personal roots. Maybe they will BELIEVE me when I tell them my "stories" as some of them like to think of those experiences. This book also informs me of events in people's lives over the 30 years since I left there. Objectively, it is an excellent publication! It has to be respected as fine literature. It concerns a remarkable time and place, filled with people who chose to be with each other in a "petrie dish" (as Peter Berg once called it on a rainy day there). That culture is still festering and growing beyond its original boundries when we look at the lives of people after leaving Black Bear.

This book is a fascinating personal memoire of a number of individuals who banned together to create an extended tribal family living together in a remote area of the Klamath National Forest of Northern California. Highly recommended.

They say that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there. These guys can and were, and their book is a wonderful evocation of the era for those who lived through it, for those who can't remember, and for those who weren't there and wonder what the fuss was all about. tales of communal living, lazy days, stoned nights, and - yes - free love - are here, along with reflections on the way it was and the way it might have been. Enjoy!

This is one of the worst books I have ever read.I regret buying it.