Living in strange homes of their own creation, forever fearful of building inspectors and outsiders, they've kept these structures hidden and shrouded in mystery. Although the last holdouts within these fading utopias are all uniquely compelling characters, it's the question of what they'll leave behind that has drawn us here. For some, the isolation has become challenging due to medical needs, yet they continue to remain, some living like hermits, others as community activists. These residents are now in their 70s and 80s. “Walter and Tim came up here looking for a place to drop acid,” Berg explains, “to retreat from the city and do their thing.” A close friend of Timothy Leary's, Schneider brought the famed professor for weekend visits. Countercultural luminaries moved up from the Bay, like Allen Cohen, founder of Haight-Ashbury's foremost underground newspaper, The San Francisco Oracle. This was the vision of one of Table Mountain's founders, a former Navy pilot named Walter Schneider, who discovered the deforested property from the air and, according to Berg, purchased the plot with cash he made trafficking pot via plane-and with his friend's inheritance. The living was primitive: There was no electricity or telephone lines, and the toilets were compostable. Residents scavenged materials from an abandoned hotel in nearby Fort Bragg and chicken coops from a Jewish communist chicken farm a few hours' drive south, in Petaluma. It appears that before it became a commune, the 120-acre property had been a dude ranch, and the cabins and outbuildings were constantly being expanded in an endless ad hoc construction project. A circular window overlooks an empty field that had long ago been a playground.Īt one point in 1970, Table Mountain had over a hundred residents, some living in tipis, some in cabins, some crashing in the open air. It's a single room, the size of half a tennis court, with old class pictures on a corkboard. “It was disintegrating.” He takes us inside. “Nobody cared about this building,” he says. Fifty kids, from elementary to high school age, were enrolled here, but it's sat unused for decades-and now Berg is moving in. As we look on, he brusquely puts us to work, chastising Michael for snapping a picture instead of immediately helping with the load.īerg is restoring the Whale Schoolhouse, a progressive academy founded in 1971 that became the pride of communards across the Albion region of Northern California. Attempting to set the foundation for a second-story balcony, he struggles to balance on the ladder while positioning a two-by-four, an unlit roach in his fingers. Now in his mid-70s, he's wary of supplying his name, wary of being somehow “on the map” after so much time off the grid, so I tell him that I'll refer to him as Jack Berg. Ascetically thin, with long red hair and a patchy beard, he tells us that he's one of Table Mountain Ranch's last remaining members. Eventually, in the middle of an open field, we come upon a peeling wood building where a lone man is perched up a ladder. We pass tree stumps, logging equipment, and mounds of dirt. The entire expanse-which once was a kind of American Arcadia, home to scores of hippies who'd fled San Francisco to live a new, idealistic kind of life-now looks deserted. Photographer Michael Schmelling and I are in Mendocino County, about a three-hour drive north of San Francisco, looking for what remains of perhaps the most famous of the hundreds of rural communes established across Northern California in the late '60s and '70s: Table Mountain Ranch. Several miles inland from California's foggy coastline, we're driving down a single lane hemmed in by 50-foot fir trees and then turn onto a rocky dirt path, joggling our rented SUV. There was an aphorism in the movement: “Bad roads make good communes.” And the road we're on today is bad.
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