What’s Left of the Back-to-the-Landers
Who hasn’t, at some point in their lives, daydreamed about sloughing off the trappings of civilization and roughing it? Nowadays, this fantasy provides grist for the content mill, which churns out “trad” influencers, survivalist reality shows, and comically cozy “cabin porn.” But for a brief moment, in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies, huge numbers of mostly young people (roughly a million, by some estimates) attempted to indulge the urge by fleeing America’s urban centers and heading “back to the land.” Armed with issues of the “Whole Earth Catalog” and books on house-building and homesteading (including Lloyd Kahn’s “Shelter,” Ken Kern’s “The Owner-Built Home,” and Helen and Scott Nearing’s classic “Living the Good Life”), not to mention a fair amount of illicit drugs, these fresh-faced kids came together with one idealistic goal: to build a new and better world almost entirely from scratch.
In a hefty, ambitious new book, “Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California,” the writer and editor David Jacob Kramer and the photographer Michael Schmelling visited the geographic and ideological epicenter of the back-to-the-land movement to document what remains of that earlier era and talk to the hard-headed and hearty few who have stuck it out.
The book mostly covers areas of Humboldt and Mendocino counties, where new transplants found cheap land in the wake of decades of clear-cutting. What Kramer and Schmelling discovered there was certainly beautiful, but not always romantic. For every charming, whimsical house in “Handmade Utopia,” there is a clutch of once beautiful buildings moldering away among the redwoods. The exuberant faces and lithe bodies seen in old photographs that are included across the book have become weathered. The dwellings are homey but often cluttered, slightly shabby, and coated with stubborn dust. And have I mentioned the general lack of indoor toilets? But through hundreds of images, dozens of oral histories, and a healthy smattering of reproduced ephemera, Kramer and Schmelling manage to compose both a lament for a dying dream and a paean to the visionaries who dreamt it.
The book is, among other things, a record of the beguiling hand-built structures that were a foundation of the movement. Some, like the finely crafted buildings designed by the architect Roger Somers for the now mostly abandoned Druid Heights community—where the writer and the self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts spent his final years—still shine as minor masterpieces, despite their almost complete dilapidation. (Ed Stiles, Somers’s friend and “woodmaster,” who was interviewed for the book, is the community’s last remaining resident.) Similarly ingenious are the works of Bob McKee, a Humboldt County builder and purveyor of construction supplies, whose strange and stunning Think Tank is decked out with psychedelic stained-glass windows and fitted with support pillars that recall both the biomorphic façade of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló and the gloopy strands of bubblegum stretched between a sidewalk and a shoe. The campus-like homestead of the self-described “tea guru” David Lee Hoffman features what may be Earth’s most elaborate eco-toilet (dubbed Le Grand Pissoir), and could almost be considered a kind of art project, in line with outsider environments such as Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. The houses are not all architectural tours de force, but given that they were constructed by people who were, by and large, complete amateurs, on a budget of next to nothing, it is something of a miracle that any of them remain standing. As Kramer, the writer, put it to me, “You wouldn’t imagine that someone built this with their stoned friends.”
Kramer thinks of the houses as “living autobiographies,” inextricable from the eccentric individuals who built and inhabited them. Over the course of the book, you’ll meet Richard Evans, an innovator in elaborate, geometric stained glass, a founder of the Stellar Arts Collective, and one of the rare back-to-the-landers who was both Black and gay; Monty Levenson, a self-taught master maker of Japanese Shakuhachi flutes; Diana Wiedemann, an original member of the lesbian commune Trillium, which published an internationally popular magazine called Country Women; and Laird Sutton, a Methodist minister and sexologist who somehow got approval to set up a screening room for “sexual cinémavérité” in the basement of a church which he christened “the Fuckarama.”
The shoestring resourcefulness of the back-to-the-landers could be a blessing and a curse. Geodesic-dome houses, which were cheap and easy to build, were also prone to springing leaks; as Lloyd Kahn, an erstwhile dome evangelist, eventually concluded, living in one is “smart, but not wise.” The communes, many of which were kept afloat with money made growing and selling marijuana, became magnets for law enforcement and overzealous building inspectors, and at least some of the harassment turned out to be justified: Ken Kern, a D.I.Y.-building evangelist, was eventually killed by the collapse of a dome of his own design. When word got out that a particular community was thriving, it would become flooded with aspiring new members, straining hospitality and social equilibrium often to the breaking point. (As Sutton put it, “Bad roads make good communes.”) Ultimately, though, the biggest issue with the movement was the most obvious. As any subsistence farmer or jaded former communard could have presumably told them, the self-sufficient life style is much more easily dreamed about than lived.
Kramer told me that there is a sense among some remaining stalwarts that their lives no longer reflect the “hyper-communal, hyper-collectivized” ethos they thought they were signing up for. “They’re in their eighties, and they find that a lot of their friends have passed away, or have gone back to regular lives, and they find themselves isolated, and it’s hard,” he said. “Two hours on a dirt road to get to the doctor or visit their friend.” A number of the book’s subjects now jokingly call the movement “Back to Costco,” as many of them now rely on the chain store for supplies. Still, some of the innovations pioneered by the back-to-the-landers have endured. They were, for instance, some of the earliest and most vocal adopters of solar energy, and revived the use of recycled building materials in the age of the ticky-tacky suburbs. Kramer emphasized that “Handmade Utopia” is not a book about the failure of the movement. After all, long before the hippies, there were Theosophists, Fourierists, transcendentalists, and all manner of proud kooks and cranks seeking solace in the simple life, and our current age of eye-watering rents and astronomical home prices has a new generation of young people searching for a way out. Perhaps some will look back and feel inspired.
