Llano Eat Your Medicine
I have never read a good factual description of a peyote experience. Not everything that happens to you can be put into words. Like music, some sensory experiences give you powerful feelings and profound insights that evaporate when they are verbalized.
Peyote took hallucinogenic drugs in a whole new and much more profound direction. It was difficult to eat, and as we chewed the bitter buttons we chanted, eat your medicine.
You didn't have to believe literally in the stories of Carlos Castaneda, who wrote about fantastical adventures under the tutelage of a Yaqui Indian Shaman, to live through transformations that altered your understanding of reality. I have sat at night in the light of a full moon and stared into the eyes of a coyote not three feet from my face. Although it may only lasted a few moments, it seemed to go on forever as we shared some kind of wild recognition across species.
Late one afternoon, after taking peyote alone in a vision pit on the summit of Mt. Jicarita, I headed back to the valley five thousand feet below by a new and untried route, dropping down the rocky, talus slopes on the face, crossing the basin and the high meadows, and then plunging down through a steep aspen forest where momentum set me running. After a few steps I was out of control on the steep slope, careening through trees, leaping broken logs, dodging brambles and saplings with an instant awareness of the awful consequences of falling or colliding with a tree. My panic grew as the slope became even steeper and I was sure that I was about to crash.
The inevitable destruction would be a test of true manhood. If I survived the crash at all, I would be injured and possibly helpless deep in the forests, far off the trail. I saw myself emerging, after a horrendous ordeal, larger than legend, dragging my broken limbs to the campground road. As quickly as these thoughts raced through my brain the ground began to level. The trees were higher and the golden light of dusk filtered through the yellow leaves. I cleared the next fallen log like a deer and when I landed, thousands of small white butterflies like tiny angels rose from the undergrowth and surrounded me as I glided now gracefully through the trees, butterflies emerging on every foot fall. I felt blessed. I could run forever with complete confidence that each step would be the right one.
I have no idea how long I ran. I passed through the white butterflies in the aspen forest as the light was leaving the sky and entered a darker maze of tall cedars and pines, where I was running with my German ancestors in the forests of Germanica, outflanking the Romans, on the war path, warrior women at my side. I hardly slowed as I turned down the path of a mountain stream, bounding from stone to stone, with a touch so delicate that I maneuvered rocks slippery with wet moss, finding just the rock with enough stability to give me purchase. Now I was a hardy mountain man, with an Apache raiding party at my side, heading for Picuris Pueblo.
Peyote made one thing clear for sure. Our minds and bodies are capable of much more than we usually give them credit for.
Another peyote story. My large, stubborn mule named Sweetheart was reluctant to plough the backfield with me. I'd harness her up to the plow and start down the fence line on my first furrow and we'd do fine until we hit a rock, even a small one. Sweetheart would simply stop and refuse to go forward. She'd spent her early life pulling a lawn mower around oil tanks (mules were safer than tractors around gas fumes). Stopping at obstacles was a good strategy on manicured lawns, but it didn't help on the rocky soil of Llano. I tried to encourage Sweetheart in every way possible, including a short two by four, but she wouldn't go forward until I lifted the plow over the obstacle, and with great effort got her go forward again until we hit the next rock. Not only was the furrow a mess, but I had to go back and take out each little rock by hand. At the rate I was moving forward, it would take all summer get in two acres of alfalfa and oats.
I decided to see if peyote could help me out, and after chewing up several button and drinking a few cups of peyote tea, I walked out to the pasture and went up to Sweetheart explaining the situation. Sweetheart didn't like me getting that close, and I had to follow her around the field to stay right in her face, but this huge animal of muscle and stubbornness knew I had her number. I could feel it and so could Sweetheart.
She followed me to the barn where I harnessed her up and headed into the backfield. I tied a big rock to the harness instead of the plow, then I led her up and down the field and each time we got snagged I just pulled her forward until she gave in and tore the stone loose or rolled over it. She couldn't believe I had the staying power, and each time she moved again she looked at me strangely, but I just absorbed the dry, high-country air with its smell of pinyon and wild roses, watched the magpies landing on fence posts and kept forcing her forward. When I put the plow back on Sweetheart she took it through the stones like a champ. Oh, she’d still rebel after every row or so, until I dropped the plow and got up next to her and got right in her face.
Beyond individual experiences, what endured from the peyote trips was a new connection to everything around me. Watch infants exploring the world and you recognize your own psychedelic experience, where the tiniest detail is absorbing and everything is beneficent. It makes sense, because in the process of growing up we shut off connections with the world that don’t help us adapt to our environment. Peyote reopened all those connections.
We took it with others as an extended family in quasi-religious settings, with lots of drumming and ecstatic sunrises, sometimes sipping peyote tea for another day or so. We lived with our emotions on our sleeves, riding roller coasters of ups and downs with their intense, illicit pleasures and their staggering betrayals. We all knew each other so well, young people who had been feral kids on the streets of America’s big cities and PhD graduates from MIT, all trying to bond around a sacred medicine.
Llano the Second Year
Life in Llano was physically hard but mentally refreshing. That’s the best word I can think of. Our minds seemed literally cleaned out, in touch with the things closest around us, our fields and forests, our friends and our music. The inconveniences kept you in touch with the immediate. Crossing the acequia to use the outhouse in the dead of winter, the wind howling across the open fields of snow, required bundling up and a steely resolve. But I was so enamored with the newness of it all, that when I got there, the spectacular view seemed worth it. It was the same with tedious tasks, say irrigating a field. I became mesmerized for hours in the intricate puzzle of getting water to every corner of an acre.
With no electricity, our only entertainment was what we made ourselves. Almost everyone played a musical instrument, at least something percussive, and we’d get together with our neighbors two or three times a week to share a meal and play music.
By the second spring, I had a better grasp on what needed to be done. Before I bought Sweetheart that summer, I realized that if I wanted a decent crop of oats, I’d have to hire someone with a tractor to plough another field at $42 an hour. I bought the seed, planted and irrigated and in the fall I had a good crop of oats and needed help cutting, bailing and threshing. I had a good supply of oats for the winter at about twice the cost per bushel of buying oats from our local feed store. Which is why the Spanish farmers didn’t grow oats any more. Of course, my oats were organic.
I read about some amazing soil enhancement you could dig out of the ground on the other side of the Rio Grande. A soil additive called Humates was supposed to help productivity by increasing the water-holding capacity of the soil, making it easier to till and providing a carrier of plant nutrients including trace elements. I spread it on the part of the front field and grew a crop of alfalfa that even the Spanish admired.
To avoid the expense of having our fields plowed for cash, I bought Sweetheart and learned how to plow. I had dropped to about 130 pounds despite keeping my pockets full of nuts, dried fruit and cheese and I kept loosing weight. We were at the Hog Farm one evening when someone brought out a plate of raw elk meat sliced thin. They’d slaughtered a poached elk that afternoon. Without thinking, I reached for a slice and put it in my mouth. As I chewed and swallowed my whole body reacted, as if to a mild shock. Every cell seemed drenched in pleasure, screaming out for more. It was the end of my vegetarian phase. But I decided that if I was going to eat meat, I had to grow it myself.
We bought piglets to fatten for the winter. I’d grown a few discreet marijuana plants the first year. I put in a larger crop the second year, and unfortunately it got noticed by local kids. Usually, by 9:00pm when the last chores were done, I had enough energy left to read for half an hour before falling asleep. But my diary notes that on July 2nd, I sat out behind the house with a shotgun across my knee waiting for the thieves who had visited my garden twice in the last week. Our dog Magnolia scared them off, but I thought they needed something more threatening.
The moon was full, but little light came through the black clouds as I huddled in the deep shadows of the house. I stared at the stunted apple trees where I expected them to appear. Short, stiff gusts of wind tossed the branches back and forth and a sprinkle of rain rustled the leaves. No one showed.
Four days later, on July 6th, fourteen lawmen ranging from a tough highway patrolman to long haired kids from the Fish and Game Department, raided a neighbor’s house just up the road. We all went up to check it out. Most of the cops were waving rifles or holding them in readiness like the minute men at Lexington. Very seriocomic. They said they were on a sweep, hitting the Hog Farm first, eventually raiding seven communes that day. They were impressed by our neighbor’s clean house, impressive shop equipment and the general appearance of hard work.
“Your men must work real well,” one of the officers in command said to the woman of the house. “You should have seen the last place we raided.” After they found ten tabs of acid and a small bag of weed, they told her to come down to the Taos DAs office. They pushed a couple of men around but made no arrests. As they pulled out, they tossed an empty bottle of Jim Bean out the window of their long, black Cadillac. It landed, unbroken, in a lettuce patch.
On July 12th, my neighbor went down to the DA’s office in Taos. They threatened her with a misdemeanor punishable by a $100 to $1000 fine and up to three years in prison, but she pointed out that the search warrant was inaccurate, and they let her go. Asked why they bothered with the raids, one officer said they had a tip that a big dealer was in the valley.
I finished the barn before winter, and we had a sizable paddock for Sweetheart and the goats. We had a good supply of milk and eggs. The pigs were fattening up nicely. We still had a little money left. I didn’t miss the Bay Area’s mainstream culture. I thought I’d sloughed off city life forever.
Llano the Second Winter
Our house was tight and warm for the Winter. The barns protected our growing number of animals. The crops in the field were in but the place was a mess. In 19th Century horticultural magazines, there are sometimes pictures representing two farms. One of the farms looks like a Gramma Moses painting, the other is a run-down house with a sagging porch, tools leaning against the walls, an over-grown garden and broken fences. The pictures are entitled something like “The Good Farmer and The Bad Farmer.” And there in the Bad Farmer you pretty much have my homestead despite working from sun-up to sun-down week in and week out for two years.
We made nostalgic comparisons with America’s early pioneers. They carved farms out of the wilderness; we are trying to revive a farm from wasteful exploitation. They had the bounty of a plentiful wilderness, now gone, its remains tightly administered by the United States Forest Service. The local Spanish called the Forest Service Smokey Ladron (Smokey the Bandit). Licenses to cut fence posts cost $.20 to $.40 each, piñon was a dollar a chord, for home use. Commercial permits were too expensive for all but large companies that could operate on a small profit margin. Hunting was seasonal. Only skilled poachers could supplement their meals with wild game and there were few hides left to sell.
On the other hand, we had the material benefit of small government handouts, the poor man’s substitute for oil depletion allowances and defense contracts, USDA food stamps. We paid $0 for $150 worth of stamps, unless I earned money. One week I earned $100 and had to pay $50 for my stamps. Other than food stamps, which were given grudgingly and with as much humiliation as possible, the government did nothing to encourage our back to land movement. In fact, forest rangers greeted us with suspicion.
We slaughtered our first pig when the weather was cold enough. I asked the most experienced hippie in the mountains, a man named Preacher, to come by and coach me. Slaughtering a large animal requires a group of people, and we invited our neighbors for a celebration. Preacher told me there were two ways I could kill my pig. The preferred way was to stun the pig with a sledgehammer and then leap into the pit and slit its throat with a sharp knife. Or I could shoot the pig behind the ear and then jump into the pit with the knife.
I chose a twenty-two rifle. The pig was rooting around at the back of the pen. I didn’t know how to get a clean shot. Preacher told me not worry, and in a few minutes the pig walked over to where I stood and put its head down for a perfect execution. After the shot, I jumped into the pen with a knife and bowl, slip the pigs throat and collected the blood. We had called her Bacon, so as not confuse her purpose, and strange as it may sound this bloody ending in a muddy pig stye seemed almost spiritual.
After collecting the blood, a frenzy of activity commenced. Bacon was stretched out on a huge, low table. We poured boiling water over her and scraped off her bristle. Under Preacher’s guidance, I gutted Bacon and sent the liver to the kitchen where onions were already simmering in a sauce pan. The butchering took some time. People say you should let the meat cool over night before cutting it up, but it cooled quickly in the cold Llano evening and was cold by 10:00 pm when we were finished. The next day we began to cure the meat for storage.
We slaughtered a Turkey for Thanksgiving, using a Chinese method that Lucy Hupp had told me about when were videotaping her organic gardening show. Hold the turkey on your lap and stroke its throat. The turkey stretches out, and you can slit its throat with a sharp knife without the bird tensing up.
By the middle of winter snow lay deep over the land. Winter storms swirled around the mountain tops and swept down over the valley, and we felt snug and safe.
Llano The Third Year
My experience in Llano was like a love affair. At first very aspect of your lover is fresh, exciting, enrapturing, all consuming. But in time, as the passion wears off, there is the gradual accommodation to the flaws in everything we love. I’d rigged up a hand pump and a long hose to the acequia, so we could pump the water for cooking and washing, but it was constantly needing repairs and didn’t work at all once the ground froze. Crossing the acequia to use the outhouse still seemed acceptable, but breaking the ice in the winter and bringing in multiple buckets of water every day did not. We wanted running water.
There was a local well digger in Penasco who dug most of the wells in Llano, but I couldn’t get a commitment from him. He didn’t particularly like newcomers and he had plenty of business, so I kept getting pushed off. Perhaps I didn’t offer him enough money. By this time relations with the neighbor who gave us drinking water were so bad, that getting the water from him was a daily humiliation, and one he liked to use in his endless power games. “If you don’t do ‘whatever’ I won’t let you have any drinking water.”
When I read an ad in the Taos newspaper that a well digger was offering terrific deals on digging wells, I went for it. He was a rigger from Oklahoma, and we settled for a guaranteed price ... just about all the money I had left. I paid half up front and he went to work. There are two methods of drilling wells – a corkscrew that pulls out the soil and a rammer that hammers into the ground and pulls out a core of earth. What neither the Oklahoma rigger nor I knew was that a rammer wouldn’t work in the rocky soil of Llano. He couldn’t get through the boulders to the subsoil. The head kept twisting when it ran into a boulder, whereas the corkscrew could loosen the rocks, even large one, and pushed them aside or pulled them out.
I should have figured this out, but he was so confident that another try would do it and he kept working. It went on for almost a week and then one morning he was gone. I imagine he was as desperate as I was and half the money was better than none. I ended up with a big hole next to the house, no running water, and was the laughingstock of the valley. I was too broke to start another well.
That June, I went out to the barn to do the morning milking. Then I went to check on the Banty hen and her chicks, the first we had successfully hatched on the farm. I found them bloody and half eaten on the soft, clean straw of the goat barn, killed by a fox or raccoon. It was a normal rural set back, but on top of the well failure a wave of hopelessness swept over me when I carried them outside. The barn was already too small. The back acres of corn, beans, wheat and oats had not germinated well, because we’d planted too deep in a dry year. Everything was unfinished or yet to be begun. The three-room adobe house needed a new coat of mud plaster. The outhouse was full and I needed to dig a new hole before the ground froze. Fencing needed repairs around the 8 acres we owned. I needed wood for winter. Manure still had to be hauled for the vegetable garden.
Most troubling, we were far from self-sufficient and needed money for gasoline for the truck, medical supplies, supplemental feed for the animals and food for ourselves. I had to face what should have been obvious, 8 acres of Llano land would never generate a surplus. A friend in Dixon, with fertile land a couple of thousand feet lower than Llano, ran a small truck farm. He’d gone to the U.S. Agricultural School in Davis, apprenticed on a California farm, worked with a tractor and irrigation pipes, used chemical fertilizer and got a lot of free labor. He made about $3,000 a year.
Alexa and I discussed other schemes to make money. If a good goat gives a gallon of milk a day for 10 months, we should be able to sell the milk or cheese at about $2.00 a gallon, plus each goat bears two kids a year for $20 each, earning about $700 a year per goat. Six good milkers could give you an income of $4,000 a year. Ah, how marvelous is theory! We’d need at lest three acres under intense cultivation to feed the goats, a giant leap forward from the present garden plot of 30 X 100 feet and an acre of oats. And then, no goat we’ve owned has ever given a gallon of milk for 10 months. Nor have we ever been able to sell milk or cheese, except for food stamps, which we don’t need.
Another thought was raising Agora goats for their wool and weaving beautiful clothes to sell. But at 2 1/2 pounds of wool per goat, and five pounds of wool needed per vest with a selling price of about $30 a vest, we’d have to process some two hundred goats a year, feed them, sheer them, card and spin the wool and then weave the stuff into clothes to make $4,000.
I applied for grants to create a program in Taos to teach Native American and Hispanic youth how to produce radio and television news stories. No one was interested.
The first doubts began to creep in. My father-in-law had given us a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. I sometimes, on long winter nights, found myself thinking about my old friends: Dick Ellmam had published a new novel; Dale Minor had become chief writer for Walter Cronkite; John Leonard was off to The New York Review of Books. What was I doing?
The Third Summer
We went into our third Spring in 1975 on an even keel. We had survived the well disaster and told ourselves we had the ability to manage a small farm. The money problems, however, loomed larger than ever. But our goats had kids and the hens were hatching a new bunch of eggs. We jerry rigged a heat lamp over their straw bedding to keep the new kids warm in the cold Llano spring. Making the heat lamp permanent was one of a long list of things that needed to be done urgently, like mending the back fence so Sweetheart couldn’t get out, getting the truck running for wood runs so I could replenish our dwindling pile of firewood and cleaning out the irrigation ditches to catch the spring runoff.
Early one morning just as the sun rose over the mountains, while it was still cold enough to see your breath, I started a fire in the 1930’s Quick Meal wood stove. My son was playing on the kitchen floor with a block of wood and the worn out plunger from a Chevy master cylinder. I went outside and headed to the Acequia with two buckets for water when I saw flames coming out the barn. I was across the ditch in a heartbeat with the full buckets hastily scooped from the ditch, but it was already too late. The fire burst through the dry wood with awesome speed. The barn had been made from the outside edges of pine trees, sometimes the bark still on, and it was saturated in pitch.
A wooden corral enclosed an area in front of the barn where we penned in the goats at night. The whole barn was blazing by the time I reached the far end of the corral, and the heat was intense. The adult goats were running around in a frenzy. One exploded in a small, flesh bomb as the intensity of the heat and her lanoline-laden fur of late winter collided. I managed to open the gate to let the remaining goats run free, watching my arm on the gate latch begin to bubble like a well baked ham. I bore the scars for years.
We lost all our farm equipment, all Sweetheart’s gear, all the feed, the next generation of goats, twenty-five prime laying hens, our sow with two baby pigs and three adult goats. The charred ruins of the barn joined the gaping hole next to the house as another vivid sign.
Unlike the old days of the pioneers, or at least the myth of the pioneers, the community did not rally around me and offer to help rebuild and restock the farm. Nobody had surplus time, animals or crops to give. I let the fields go to grass and put in a small vegetable garden.
It was a chaotic time in Llano. The outlaws were still hanging on, cadging free meals and a warm place to sleep, drifters and drug addicts, macho tough guys with horses and guns, and one gangly young man with, I was told, a remarkable penis. Just as in the Haight Ashbury, heroin and speed had crept into the community. It was only a stage that Llano was going through, but it was difficult for husbands who took care of kids and kept the fires going.
The big song that summer came out on June 10th, 1975, Take it to the limit One More Time. It summed up that summer for me.
… the dreams I've seen lately
Keep on turning out and burning out
And turning out the same
So put me on a highway
And show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time
With the farm in ruins and dead broke we had few options. Alexa was taking it to the limit one more time with a massive penis while I was taking care of the kids. At this crucial moment, Fast Eddy made an entrance and my life veered off in another direction altogether.