New Hope Revealed
Keith took me immediately from the travel trailer to the mine. A heavy oak door that was steel clad opened easily on well used hinges. There were signs that bullets had hit the cladding but didn't penetrate and looked quite old. The mine entrance, Keith explained, "Was boarded up with old timbers and a prominent, but very old, sign that read, 'No Trespass,' when Pete and Darla found it while hiking looking for a place to build a commune.
"They admitted tearing down the timbers and exploring the mine before deciding to settle on this place as squatters. Fortunately, no owner came forward to challenge them. Later, they found out the land was part of state forest when the police came around several times looking for contraband or fugitives. They got to know the police quite well… State and local." He laughed.
"But I wouldn't know if they hadn't told me. When we got here there weren't any police anymore. Just marauders that scared me with all the shooting and beating, people screaming and crying. Dad and Mom had guns and were shooting to help protect the place. We kids all hid in the mine until it was safe to come out. But when the weather and air got too bad to breathe, the bad guys disappeared and we all had to get in the mine to breathe—just survive."
Keith flipped on a switch and the interior ahead of us lit up brilliantly with LED lights. Up ahead I could see that the main tunnel open up into a very large area that had been excavated and reinforced with redwood beams.
Impressed, I exclaimed, "Wow, this doesn't look like a mine to me. A whole lot of work must've been done."
"Pete and Darla knew immediately that the mine would be useful, so one of their first projects was making it bigger to accommodate the whole growing commune in times of crisis. Gradually, they put in piping to bring water from springs up on the mountain. Created shafts to the surface to improve ventilation and lighting. The original gold miners lit up the place with oil lamps that used up oxygen, were foul-smelling and gave little light. It was a tough existence. The first lighting that Peter and Darla brought in from a powerline down below, was a string of extension cords to strings of incandescent lamps similar to Christmas tree lighting that they used.
"Pete and his fellow diggers found some gold in side veins that came off the main vein that the original miners left. Traced them all the way till it petered out. They used that gold money to help develop the commune, eventually putting in solar power up on the mountain, and two large windmills to completely power the commune and mine. A few years before everything fell apart they had already changed out all the lighting to LED and other efficient appliances and systems were installed. When things happened, they tell me this place was already fully prepared and self-sustaining.”
The large room contained a kitchen on one side that was vented to the surface and looked like it could cook food for a large group. There were tables and benches in that area that served as a meeting and dining room. From there, tunnels branched off in several directions leading to small rooms dug off on the sides that contained bunkbeds, dressers and wardrobes for clothes as individual living quarters.
One tunnel off the main room turned downward toward the entrance again. There, an ingenious shower was constructed and a communal latrine that was piped all the way to a septic system down the mountain--all underground. I was amazed at the work that it took to put in those facilities, including composting toilets that enabled them to fertilize plants that they grew inside in two large grow rooms off the main room that were originally used to grow marijuana and still grew some.
Keith offered me a joint. "This is some of our best grow."
I gave it a try, although it had been years since I smoked. I found that it was righteous and immediately felt the effects. Charlie was curious, and wanted to try it out, too. I blew a little smoke in his face. He jumped and looked at me like, "What did you do that for?" He probably was getting some, secondhand.
Keith continued his tour talk as we walked. "In this area we kept goats and chickens… Even a couple of pigs. As if they knew what was happening, Pete and Darla had stored enough food to last for a couple of years. I was just a kid then and don't really remember, but they tell me they had to ration food the last few months and were so glad when the skies cleared and they could go out of the mine and start restoring the commune and get food. It was tough times for adults and we kids were pretty confined in our play.”
"I can only imagine. I had a well-equipped and stocked resort to myself. It was a lot of hard work to keep up, but I did a lot of relaxing and enjoying entertainment, too. I worried constantly about my folks and my sister. Never reconnected again with them."
Thoughts of those days flooded in on me and I felt bad. Keith saw my gloom and snapped me out of it with another offer of a toke as we headed for the entrance again and outside. He turned off the lights with that single switch again and the mine went dark.
Once again out in the bright sunlight of the commune, it seemed hard for me to imagine them staying underground for over two years. But they had done it and done it well. All around was a busy group of people working on various projects that were never-ending in a place like this.
Keith took me to the very large garden that encompassed about a half acre with most of the produce for the year already harvested and a few things, like pumpkins, still on the vine but ripe and ready for Halloween celebration and pumpkin pie.
Beyond that were fenced in areas for goats, cows, horses and the like along with gates that allowed the animals to graze outside the commune before being called back at night for protection.
Keith continued his tour. "If you look up on the mountain above us, you can see where the fire a month ago came at us from the west. It was unusual because the winds this time of the year usually blow from the east, the Pacific. We had to set backfires and temporarily remove some of our solar panels to keep them from being consumed. We couldn't remove the windmills, but we were able to save them because they were already clear of underbrush and were made of steel. We herded all the animals down to the main road and generally had to fight the fire that almost made it to our buildings with everything we had." Keith's face told me that they had narrowly missed a catastrophic event.
"Anyway, the mountain above doesn't have protection like it had from all the brush that grew up there for the past 20 years since the great fires. We have to take shelter in the mine every time it rains heavily now because we don't know if there's going to be a mudslide as a result of there being nothing left to hold this California clay on the mountain. New Hope is now a very dangerous place without the mine.
"Let me show you…" I followed Keith as we took a well-worn path to the side away from the main collection of buildings. Off in the distance was a small hilltop, a level area off the side of the mountain. In the distance, I could see the simple wooden crosses. It took us about 10 minutes to get there. There were so many graves they were hard to count… Over 300?
"This cemetery was started by the commune when some of the early members died from injuries, overdoses or disease. At the time I arrived with my parents, they were burying people without caskets almost every day, there was so much violence and death. During the two bad winters we had to wait till mid-summer to bury those that starved, froze to death, or got the cancers that seemed to be attacking almost everyone. We have Jimmy Stetson, an army trained paramedic turned surgeon, and a former nurse, Jill Compton, helping out, but we still experience unfortunate death way too often." Once again he looked down and spoke low in reverence.
I concurred. "I know what you mean. Most of the bodies that I've seen never got a chance to be buried, and I've had to bury three people I cared for myself." Tears came to my eyes. We left before grief overcame us.
The place was so extensive the tour took most of the afternoon. When we passed people working or kids playing, Keith would call out to them and tell me their names. I tried to remember the faces and something about them to remember their names, but it was difficult like it had been when I first saw them altogether earlier.
Late in the afternoon, we joined many of the others at an outdoor dining area where the menu included fish, beef stew, chicken and rice, and a few other sundry meat and vegan dishes that provided the main meal of the day. There were only two, this one and a large, hearty breakfast featuring eggs, sausage, bacon, cereals, and any fruit that was in season, along with milk and coffee that had been salvaged from town or San Francisco. I knew how hard it was to find coffee, and appreciated savoring it that afternoon.
The time after dinner turned to talking with many of the residents and discussing how they did things to keep the commune lively and growing. The hope was that they would be able to move some of the people down to Petaluma before long and reestablish communities in California by having large families and providing the best education they could provide to the kids.
Charlie stayed close to me but was curious enough to allow the kids to pet him and the occasional cat or dog to come up to him and give him a nose. Rocky settled in with the other dogs quite well after the usual sniffing each other out. The kids were quite impressed with Rocky and his very healthy, young strength. I explained that he was probably part wolf, to their delight.
Pete presided over the whole scene. He was getting too old to do a lot of the heavy work, but constantly people came up to him and asked his advice on this or that. Likewise, Darla was in the kitchen, making sure that the people there cooking and serving were taking care of everyone that came to eat in an efficient way.
Pete explained. "This is the best time of year for us. Our crops are in, irrigation saved them. We've had a relatively dry spell where we could hunt and fish. We've got about a year's worth of food in the mine always ready in case we need to spend time in there. It wasn't always like this. There were periods of time where we had to ration our food, we didn't have the tools we needed and things got pretty rough. But we just thought about what we were doing, changed our ways if necessary, and persevered. I'm proud of what we've done. We are not without our squabbles, mind you, but I try to keep things as peaceful as possible. It's highly unproductive." The twinkle in his eye said it all.
I had to give him credit. "I'm amazed at what you have accomplished. I've traveled the entire country these past 20 years and haven't seen anything like this, anywhere. I do believe we can start over from here the way you and Keith have been describing it to me."
"I couldn't have done anything without the little woman. There were so many times I just wanted to quit and the two of us run off together. But she told me the others needed us, so we kept on working. I'm curious. In your travels, did you ever get to Wisconsin?"
"That's where my sister retreated to stay with my uncle in the Indianhead country. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, all of northern Wisconsin had burned and there was no sign of them at the place my uncle made for himself in his retirement."
We both fell silent for a while as we both thought about what we lost and how that beautiful country had been ravaged by fire. To break the melancholy, Pete asked another question. "Did you get to any other parts of the state?"
I've been on Interstate 94 several times. Picked up my main means of transportation, a Peterbilt 579 sleeper that has carried me many a mile just outside Madison. But I had to leave that back in Palm Springs last spring because the military truck I'm driving is much better with all of these damaged and destroyed roads.
"Well, if you don't mind, maybe tomorrow, a few of us can take our trucks and make a run into San Rafael, Sausalito and the City to see what we can find and bring back before we hole up for the winter. You can leave your rig here. The route in there we've opened will only accommodate small trucks. In fact, you can stay with us the whole winter if you like."
That kind of took me by surprise. I had to think a moment… "Well, I hadn't thought of it. I will think on it. I already have a lot in my truck to take back to Palm Springs for the winter, so I wouldn't be a burden to you. Your offer is tempting… I'll think on it."
