The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 30 March 2016
by Margaret Grundstein
Would you like to live in a rustic cabin in the Oregon woods? Pee in a tin bucket? Eat the herbs that grow under the fir trees? Live off the land, making your own clothing and surviving on whatever castoffs you can get from the mainstream culture outside? At this late date, the hippie back-to-the-land movement can look a little like the survivalist movements that followed. It was a rustic life, challenging to social traditions, personal freedoms, and to those who found living in groups to be a social experiment that succeeded or failed to varying degrees. It is an experiment that gets short shrift all these years later, and it is an experiment that gets tried over and over again throughout American history. In the early decades of this 21st century, there are elements of those counterculture values that have become mainstream, from holistic health to corporate organic markets. There are countless stories from that era, but there are common themes. A few communes yet survive, somehow. The vast majority are gone, leaving abandoned shacks and broken down buses rotting in the woods. It's an almost romantic image.
Romance was, indeed, a major component of the image the counterculture warriors carried with them to the back woods in the late 60s and early 70s. Margaret Grundstein was one of them, going from graduate school at Yale to a remote hilltop near the Oregon coast. She married a determined Indonesian radical who, with several friends, many of them architecture students, drove across the country, escaping the growing radicalism to begin the experiment in alternative living. What unfolded is largely familiar. Free love that is freer for the men than for the women. Gender roles that resist change. Women having to fight for their right to equality and independence. The conflicts of self-sufficiency largely financed by government largesse and the inheritances of middle-class families. The child-like notion of absolute freedom, and the challenges faced by the children of the hippies. And, ultimately, the struggle for control over the experiment, between those who were able to finance the land and those who have come to live there in presumed freedom. In the end, as with many of these communes, the notions of power, control and money were hard to escape. True cooperation and freedom ran up hard against the inertia of human nature.
None of that means that it wasn't a worthwhile experiment. People genuinely and sincerely believed a better way of living could be brought about. And, maybe that could still happen. Humans have an untapped ability to fundamentally change how they live together. But it isn't easy, and it takes discipline and a true common purpose. Grundstein knows this. Her book is a present-day look back upon her life on the commune. It isn't wistful or rose-tinted. One can see she regrets some of what happened. And there is a lot under the surface that remains unexplored in this short memoir. But, her recollection is well-told and matter-of-fact. She recognizes the conflicts and accepts the winds of change. She values the changes the commune brought about in her, if not so much in the world at large. Recommended.
[Other books of the 1960s and Counterculture]