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Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune
Tom Fels
By
Published: Feb 13, 2013
Category:
Memoir
In the fall of 1968, I was sick of writing, sick of Cambridge, sick of the war, sick of myself. I wanted clean air and a fresh start. An invitation to visit a communal farm founded by radical journalists in Western Massachusetts? Yeah, I’d buy the gas.
The farm was a few miles and a century from Amherst. The house was wood, painted red, architecturally undistinguished. The interior was worse: a warren of rooms with bare plaster walls, rough wood floors, a coal furnace. There was a wood stove in the kitchen that the residents admired as if it were the monolith from “2001.”
I moved right in.
Chopping wood was not my thing. I wasn’t amused when I left a glass of water in the kitchen at night and found it frozen solid in the morning. When the plumbing blew out, I failed to find the charm in the outhouse.
I didn’t last. But Tom Fels did. And he became to the farm in Montague what our friend Ray Mungo — author of Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times With Liberation News Service — was to our sister commune in Vermont: a reliable witness. A few years ago, he published Farm Friends. Now he’s back with an even more granular history of the Montague farm: "Buying the Farm: Peace and War on a Sixties Commune." [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here.]
This is not “Fifty Shades of Hippies.” It’s a densely reported account of a piece of property and the people who lived there. It spans 40 years. It is Proustian. That is: detailed, exhaustive. Will most of you care how Sam and Janice’s romance affected the future of the farm, or why Janice’s demands for her own space came to dominate that conversation, or why certain people you liked at the beginning seemed so much less attractive at the end? No. That’s another book, probably fiction.
What Tom Fels does is write a kind of slow-motion real estate thriller. A run-down farm in a nowhere town becomes, over the years, valuable real estate. But the man who bought it in 1968 killed himself in 1969, leaving the property to something he named The Fellowship of Religious Youth. Soon enough, youth aged. The trustees left the farm. Its mission became nebulous. Factions formed. “You don’t really know a woman until you meet her in court,” Norman Mailer said. Ditto a communal farmer who thinks he/she has a payday coming. Even more: a communal farmer who sniffs the prospect of power.
In its final chapters, “Buying the Farm” becomes a kind of boardroom drama, just played out in overalls. Fels writes: “The two people most invested in keeping the farm intact, and who had most expressly tied themselves to its history, values and potential future, were actually the principal cause of its eventual loss.”
This is not to denigrate people I once called friends. Or to point a told-you-so finger at dreamers. The farm was a grand vision in 1968. It became something else. Things change. Goals that seem forever vanish like morning mist. Why not quote Dylan: “It’s life and life only.”
