Customer Reviews

Getting Back Together.

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My old paperback copy has a face price of $1.25, which tells you how old it is and how long it's been with me. I'm not likely to give it up soon.

There's no denying that some facts like altitudes, locations and names are wrong, but this is clearly deliberate. Houriet was a professional news reporter, and surely knew how to fact-check. I concluded long ago that he was blurring the identifying details of people and place as he wrote in order to protect those he had visited. Clearly, the delicate communities (and some delicate people) were all very vulnerable to excessive attention from both friend and foe.

For instance, I'm quite familiar with the area in SW Oregon (Takilma & environs) that he wrote about, and the hippie/redneck tension there is still quite uncomfortable. But despite knowing the area, I couldn't figure out just exactly where the places were that Houriet was talking about. Though Cave Junction must have been the "big" town with the market, he could also have been referring to the Holland store, where a friend of mine could be working at this moment.

So I have always thought that Houriet took factual liberties in a very deliberate way, blending facts and incidents into a coherent narrative. That way he could protect his friends and sources and still write insightful and illustrative stories.

Like Castaneda's, Houriet's stories may be more true than what a camcorder would have recorded. His tone in the book and his subsequent life (google it!) amply show his sincerity and his wish that he could have just *found* the perfect place instead of having to try to create it.

As someone who visited a few communes back then with an eye to joining, but who was put off by the same factors that Houriet cites as leading to their failure, I see what he wrote as valid and important. I also have a few other (but more limited) books by people who tried that way of life, and while all agree on the ways that small groups fail, few are based on the same amount of research or insight as Houriet's. Students of social psychology would do well to use him as a source, despite his blurring of the hard edges of the facts.

Still, by now I know well the lessons Houriet's book teaches. What keeps me rereading the book every few years is the depth and color of the picture he paints of the times and the people, and his viewpoint: from the inside. We all faced pressures and fears that I would not like to confront again. We also felt hope that I fear I will never feel again.

I don't know about accuracy, I suspect this book was based on diaries that were covered in all sorts of dirt and hallucinogenic chemicals. The tone of the book is very exciting for someone like me who missed the era completely but has always admired it.

The most interesting aspect of this book is the insight into the hippy world, it is a diary that has been entirely unchanged by 30 thirty years of media history re-writing. Contrary to what is believed a lot of hippies were meat eating and killed their own animals. They were not about peace and love - woodstock was peace and love communes were places that middle class dropouts bummed around in for a while most of them desintegrating into chaos, one commune he found deserted had 'forever change' written on the wall with a marker pen.

Sometimes he was happy and felt accepted but those moments were quite rare and I get the feeling he felt he was surrounded by immature teenagers. He gives a honest account of his feelings and how his personality is developing.

One part where I laughed and laughed was the following:

"One applicant not accepted was Crazy Paul, a spaced-out young man who had visions and who eventually found his way to New Buffalo. His membership, he was told, would be contingent on his taking a bath - something that evidently conflicted with Paul's principles. One member recalled that 'he stood there looking up at the shower head for hours.' Then, without turning it on, he left the community."

Had I had no previous knowledge or personal experience with the communes and people mentioned in this book, I would have thought the author had done a fine job of not only reporting on but also participating in communal life. Houriet has impressive narrative skills and some of his personal observations (both positive and negative) seem valid and interesting. But since I do have knowledge and experience of many of these communes and people, I am dismayed and disappointed with this "off the bus" report.

Houriet devotes considerable space to his stay at New Buffalo (in New Mexico) and right from the beginning the inaccuracies are evident. He says the elevation of Santa Fe is 1,000 feet when in fact it is 7,000 ft. (the capital city with the highest elevation in the country; Denver is only 5,000 ft.). He calls vigas "vertigas" and latillas "lotillas" and says the Sangre de Cristo Mountains are west of Arroyo Hondo (near New Buffalo) when in fact, they are in the East. He says that Santo Domingo Pueblo was one of the few inhabited pueblos left in the state. Not true. There's Taos, Isleta, Santa Clara, Laguna, Zuni, Acoma...just to name a few. A quick check of an encyclopedia would have set him straight, but he didn't bother. Irritatingly, he repeats these sloppy mistakes over and over. Unlike Tim Miller in *The 60s Communes* and *Hippies and American Values*, Houriet hasn't done his homework.

He shouldn't have changed some names and not others. He should have either changed them all or reported them accurately. Jane became "Mary" and her child, Sarah, became "Nancy." Joanne became Joanna while George and Joyce Robinson and Cowboy Bob at Buffalo, Byron and Jason at Morningstar and Jasper and Max at Reality Construction Co. retained their true names. Cave Dave became "Cave David." Apparently Houriet didn't get it that Dave was called "Cave Dave" because it rhymes.

These inaccuracies may seem unimportant, but when this author makes up incidents of violence out of whole cloth (like something from "Easy Rider"), the falsities become more seriously misleading. He has a reporter's instinct about what kind of material sells books but he doesn't seem to worry overmuch about telling the truth. When you find fabrications and inaccuracies in the parts you know about, how can you trust the rest of it?

Reporting on his one peyote meeting (at Morningstar - a couple miles from New Buffalo) he got his facts hopelessly confused. The water bird became a "mourning dove" and the dried cedar used as an incense sacrament became "cedar berries." He misreported the Indians and Hippies there and what they said (I know; I was there). The mistakes and misrepresentations involving Buffalo, Morningstar and Reality are too numerous to mention further.

Houriet's interview with Lou Gottlieb at the California Morningstar, however, as well as his conversations with Justin at Buffalo, sound authentic, but that was probably due to the unique personalities of these men coming through despite the author's embellishments and falsifications.

Similarly, I don't find as many breathtaking fabrications in his accounts of Libre and Lama (but that may be because I didn't live at either of these places - just visited and knew people from them).

Houriet only mentions The Farm (at Summertown Tennessee) in a footnote and he makes three mistakes in that footnote. This omission is odd because in his travels, the author was fairly near The Farm. It's one of the oldest and most successful of the Hippie communes and in fact, it is still going on today. It has produced doctors, lawyers, a school, a publishing company and several businesses and charitable organizations. Perhaps Farmies saw Houriet coming, knew he was likely to misrepresent them, and gave his his walking papers. We'll never know.

Most people I've talked to who have read *Getting Back Together* clearly recognize that the author had his own agenda. What they may not have realized is that the book has been through at least two editions and thousands of people must have read it and believed it.

In my opinion, this book is worse than worthless because it can't be trusted. I'm glad it's finally out of print.

pamhan99@aol.com

The 1960s saw a sudden resurgence of communes and other "utopian" intentional communities, that had otherwise been in decline since the early 20th century. There are a number of detailed books about such communities (e.g., The 60's Communes: Hippies and Beyond (Peace and Conflict Resolution); The Children of Prosperity: Thirteen Modern American Communes, etc.).

However, there is certainly room for a more subjective, less "scholarly" account, and Robert Houriet's 1971 is one of the very first books written about this exciting period. Houriet visits and chronicles such places as Oz, High Ridge Farm, Twin Oaks, Harrad West, New Vrindaban (of the Hare Krishna sect), Lama, and others. He says, "The people of the communes opened their homes and lives fully to me at the risk of allowing their fragile way of life to be distorted and glamorized by the mass media."

Houriet's description of Harrad West (inspired by novelist Robert H. Rimmer's novel, The Harrad Experiment) is one of the most detailed I have found. Houriet recounts that in a meeting he had with Rimmer (who hadn't visited Harrad West, interestingly enough), "Harrad West had failed, not for lack of sexual allure or sexual jealousy, but because they had nothing BUT sex to hold them together---no common culture, no nonsexual forms of communicating and expressing love."

Houriet has a realistic outlook: "Thus far, I have not found one rural commune that has achieved anything close to economic self-sufficiency. From the viewpoint of the economic individualist, communes are invalid." Nevertheless, he closes on an optimistic note: "We say good-bye for now. Someday I'll go on another trip to visit them and the other families in Oregon and New Mexico---all members of the new community taking roots over this, our land."

Houriet's book is engaging reading; if you want objective, detached scholarship, look elsewhere.