Despite Gaskin’s wholehearted endorsement of tantric sex and the bountiful supply of homegrown hallucinogenic mushrooms, Michael learned that the Farm was not a place where anything goes. Behavior was always policed, often by Gaskin himself, who would complain that all he had time for all day was settling everyone else’s conflicts. And for a bunch of anti-authoritarians, the Farm’s inhabitants had one leader whose rule was never called into question. Gaskin controlled what drugs people took, who slept with whom, and how money worked in the community (whose members relinquished cash, cars, property, even inheritances to the cause). Gaskin became known for meting out banishments called “thirty dayers,” during which the Farmies were supposed to get their heads right. “A smart horse runs at the shadow of the whip,” he once said. He required some people to take a vow of chastity, even as he had three wives of his own that he shared with two other men—his own “six-marriage.” One of those wives, Ina May Gaskin, would revolutionize natural childbirth in America with a book published in 1975, Spiritual Midwifery. Four or more babies were born at the Farm every month, keeping Ina May and her trainee midwives busy. “Farmies,” she would say, were “a special kind of hippie: they worked.”
Michael found that he didn’t mind the work. In a weird way, he kind of craved it. Gaskin had always insisted that the Farm was not a cult but a collective—a demonstration project for a different way of living. His lectures touched on the teachings of the Tibetan yogi Milarepa, whose own master cast him into the depths of despair in order to mold his character. The key wasn’t to tune out like a stereotypical hippie, but to notice what was happening around you—to hear the signal. “If you get too used to it and don’t pay attention to it, it’s like living by a waterfall,” Gaskin said. “People who live by waterfalls don’t hear them.”
Gaskin’s Sunday morning talks, mass meditation sessions attended by the entire Farm community, were more meaningful to Michael than any Catholic mass he’d ever attended. Michael received validation and confirmation of things he had only suspected—that science only describes the physical world, not matters of the heart. He loved how Gaskin always said “keep closure”: If you leave someone hanging, be sure you go back to them and make sure everything is understood between you both. On Hidden Valley Road, there had never been closure, just sibling rivalries layered on top of one another. Even his father’s attempts to get everybody to live in harmony never worked. Instead of clearing the air, they’d watch a football game. Could it be there was another way to live?
The most intense moments for Michael took place in a tent called the Rock Tumbler. Set off away from the community, the Tumbler was where men whom Gaskin considered too oppositional were sent to dissect one another’s troubles—We need to talk. What are you doing? Why are you doing that?—until, so the theory went, their rough edges were smoothed out. Gaskin doled out “constructive feedback” for Farm members who were “on a trip”—too uptight or angry, or not empathetic, or too lazy. “You are the only variable in the situation you have control over,” he would say. “If you’re not grooving all the time, find out why you’re not grooving and fix it.”
Michael had never experienced anything like this before. Everything in his own family had been so top-down, so dictatorial, with a pecking order that invited the older siblings to victimize the younger ones. Here there was a leader, sure, but the community acted on consensus to hold everyone accountable, and to dig and dig until the subconscious issues at the root of the problem became known to everyone.
This was a Watergate-style inquiry: The denial and suppression and cover-up of a problem were as bad as the problem itself.
Michael ended up loving the Tumbler. Everything about the Farm felt wholesome to him—progressive, well-intentioned people being good to one another. But while he was there, his contempt for his own family only intensified, sometimes even overpowering everything positive he was feeling in the moment. He hadn’t gotten over how his parents once wanted him committed. He knew he wasn’t insane; what system, what family, would send him to the hospital that way? Don and Mimi were so repressive, he was convinced that they were part of the problem.
At the end of eight months, Michael and his Tumbler-mates had become isolated—so much so that Gaskin commanded them to disband their tent and come back to live closer to the heart of things. Michael went under the tent to grab a bag he’d left there, and when he opened the bag at his new quarters he saw thousands of tiny bug eggs, spilling out of the opening.
Michael took that as a sign that his time at the Farm might be winding down. He went to Gaskin and said he needed to get away. There happened to be a bus leaving for Albuquerque, so he took it, taking a new set of tools for living with him.
* * *
—
HE WAS NOT ready to go home just yet. An old friend was heading to Hawaii. Michael tagged along, finding a $130 air fare from L.A. He stayed for about a year, finding short-term work hanging drywall, living off of food stamps, being out on his own completely, without his family or his surrogate Farm family.
He moved a little bit further through his grief. And he was about to move on to the Philippines with a new friend when his mother, on the phone, told him that she missed him and that she wanted to send him a plane ticket.
Here was the chance to put the Farm’s lessons into action for the family he’d left behind. Michael came home to Colorado Springs and enrolled in a community college to learn mechanical drafting. But he had returned to even more conflict than he would have anticipated. Donald was there, and Michael found himself infuriated by him—why wasn’t he making choices that were helpful to him? Was he too far gone to be saved? Things were even worse now than before he left. Peter was sick, too. Their father had his stroke. Everything seemed more out of control than he’d remembered it. And no one was taking any of his advice. He wanted them all to eat brown rice and meditate, and they wouldn’t have any part of it.
Michael came away dejected. What would it take for his brothers to do what he’d managed to do? When would they learn to get out of their own way? When would they notice the waterfall crashing around them?
DON
MIMI
DONALD
JIM
JOHN
MICHAEL
RICHARD
JOE
MARK
MATT
PETER
MARGARET
MARY
CHAPTER 22
Mary never stopped campaigning to visit Margaret. Her parents let her spend weekends in Denver every few months, when the Garys hadn’t jetted to one of their other homes. When summer came, the Garys also paid for Mary to spend two weeks at Geneva Glen, a sleepaway camp that ran its campers through a number of elaborate imaginary scenarios—the Knights of the Round Table, Native American traditions. For the first time in her life, Mary, away from her family and away from Jim, had permission to let down her guard, remove her mask a bit, and forget about what was going on at home. At the end of her first session in the summer of 1976, Mary called home, begging to stay. The Garys paid for her to stay the full eight weeks. She went back every summer until college.