Flashbacks
Voices from the epicenter of ’60s communes,
which flourished like wildflowers in the hills of New Mexico.
s tory By Charles C . P oling | photos by lisa l aw
With its history of blending
cultures and accommodating newcomers willing
to take the place on its own terms, New Mexico
has long tolerated outsiders and refugees from
mainstream America. The state’s reputation as a
bohemian haven dates back at least to the artist
colonies and literary circles of the early 1900s,
when painters and authors seized on New Mexico
as a place where they could shuck cultural bonds,
try on new identities, and experiment with new
artistic and social paradigms. The Taos Society of
Artists, founded in 1915, the Santa Fe painters
who started the Cinco Pintores group in 1921, and
the vibrant salon created by Mabel Dodge Luhan
in Taos in the ’20s and ’30s are only the most
prominent examples of counterculture cells that
experimented with unconventional living arrangements, liberated sexuality, and voluntary simplicity.
No wonder the counterculture movement of the
1960s expressed itself here in full-throated chorus.
“[New Mexico] had a reputation as being an arty,
spiritual place,” said one hippie habitué. By the
late 1960s, according to one count, the state had
25 communes, and perhaps another dozen alternative communities. At the Woodstock festival, in
1969, the Hog Farm’s Hugh Romney, aka Wavy
Gravy, took the stage and announced the group’s
commune in Llano, near Peñasco. After that, New
Mexico became a mecca for hippies seeking a place
to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” in the immortal words of Timothy Leary.
Although the commune era peaked in the
early 1970s, many of the so-called communards
and others with sympathetic sensibilities remain
in New Mexico today. Key tenets of the hippie
credo—back-to-the-land agrarianism, organic food,
traditional healing, alternative education, artisanal
crafts, solar power, and what’s now called green
building—have become, if not mainstream, then at
least widely accepted in New Mexico. You can see
these threads in the shops around Santa Fe and the
farms scattered across the state, in the home-builders associations and alternative-energy enterprises,
the food co-ops and alternative-medicine schools.
And many of the commune members keep the
flame burning. “People ask, what was the demise
of the commune?” says Hog Farmer Jean Nichols.
“I’m sorry—it’s still alive!”
In this oral history, several former—and current—commune members recall the ardent idealism, the sometimes-outlandish happenings, and the
day-to-day doings of New Mexican commune life.
In 1969, photographer Lisa Law’s husband, Tom Law (in
white pants), leads a Hog Farm yoga session as daughter
Pilar approaches. The commune’s NM base was in Llano, off
the High Road to Taos.
40 NEW MEXICO | MARCH 2013
nmmagazine.com | MARCH 2013 41
l dem bsk i
COU RTE SY Pau
Clockwise from right:
Early New Buffalo
members building
the communal adobe
house, 1967. New
Buffalo memoirist
Iris Keltz in 1973. Rick
Klein (left), founder
and financier of New
Buffalo commune, with
members in 1966.
New Buffalo thrived, struggled, and survived as a commune from
1967 to roughly 1979 in Arroyo Hondo, north of Taos, enduring the
complete turnover of its residents a few times. It also inspired the commune scenes in Easy Rider, though Dennis Hopper didn’t film there.
Robbie Gordon, originally from the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area,
recalls the early days.
Robbie Gordon
My older brother Dave, his friend Rick Klein, and the poet Max
Finstein ended up together in El Rito in 1966. Rick Klein had some
money, and he said, “Look, let’s get some land,” so they scouted
around and bought this land in Arroyo Hondo for New Buffalo.
After I graduated from Princeton in ’67, I got this letter from
Dave written in all different color crayons on paper towels. He
said, “Hey, Robbie, we’re in New Mexico forming this commune.
Why don’t you come out and join us?”
So I hopped on a Greyhound, and I got off in Taos at dusk, and
there’s Dave and a couple shaggy guys with a VW Microbus. We
get to New Buffalo, and it’s dark, and all I can see are these trees
on the hillside and these flickering lights, and suddenly a shadow
shaped like a human being goes by the lights, and it hits me, Those
are teepees! Dave takes me to the smallest teepee I’ve ever seen,
and that’s where I spent my first night in New Mexico.
There was no structure yet. We had a kitchen outside with just
a fire pit. When it rained, we’d go inside this pickup camper that
42 NEW MEXICO | MARCH 2013
was set up on posts, not on a
truck. There were five or six
teepees, and about 15 to 20
people there.
The communards made
adobe bricks, stacked them,
hoisted vigas, and built doors
and windows for their new home. They moved in during November
1967, “just as it was getting cold,” Gordon recalls. “The west wall
wasn’t finished, so we just stacked bales of straw to make a wall.” That
wall caught fire the following summer, burning down the whole place,
but Gordon says they rebuilt it before winter.
Iris Keltz
Keltz, author of Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie—a must-read if one is
aiming to understand commune life—first visited New Buffalo in 1969,
then returned in 1970.
The first time I visited, the initial founders were there. They had
a vision. It was definitely back to the land. That’s how they took
the name, New Buffalo. The land was going to sustain us [as the
buffalo sustained the Plains Indian tribes]. The people who were
there were writers and artists, a lot from New York. They wanted
to get out of the cities.
A year later, when I came back, just about everybody I’d
known was gone. Once [the members] got into a more stable
relationship, a nuclear family, the commune didn’t support that.
They wanted to have their own scene. The people I’d met the previous year who still lived at New Buffalo were either lost to drugs,
or searching for a stable relationship, or a calling, like fishing,
becoming an artist or a professional. The back-to-the-land vision
was still there, although somewhat foggy.
Members of the Hog Farm gather at Frijoles River camp near Cundiyo, in 1971.
Right: A young mother and her baby at Long John’s Valley, a community near Ojo Sarco.
The founders left for a variety of reasons, some because of divorce, others
because they wanted more privacy for their families. Robbie Gordon
left after he broke his back, thinking he could no longer productively
contribute to the group effort.
Taylor Streit
By the time Streit, a well-known fishing guide who has written several
books about trout fishing in New Mexico (and an article on the topic
in our October 2012 issue), arrived at New Buffalo, many of the commune’s founding members had left.
When people ask how I got to Taos, I tell them, “In a turquoise
station wagon that was aimed westward from upper New York
State.” It was 1969. I had a girlfriend, and we ended up in Colorado in a freak fall snowstorm. We came south and saw a bunch
of these weirdos and said, “They’re all like us. We must be where
we’re supposed to be.”
We ended up renting a house across from New Buffalo. We
were just dirt poor—no job—and I was tying flies for Sierra Sports.
Then I started catching fish and trading them to the people at
New Buffalo for the fine grub they had—sticks and rocks for
dinner. The frugality was incredible. Beyond imaginable. We were
neighbors for about a year, and I ended up living there. I procured
meat. I’d go shoot jackrabbits. We ate prairie dog. There was a
dedicated kitchen staff, thank God, with a lot of very motherly or
domestic-minded women, very caring women. It was very much
a gender-biased place. Women were in the kitchen, men went to
the woods, usually without power tools, usually in some kind of
half-assed vehicle like a bread van, to get firewood.
Art Kopecky
Kopecky arrived at New Buffalo in 1971 with his small band of
hippie companions after traveling “gypsy style in our Wonder Bread
truck” around the country. A young woman at the hot springs near the
commune “invited us up and we never left.” Kopecky worked hard to
reinvigorate it, and even began a family, before leaving under duress
in 1979. In those years, New Buffalo continued growing much of its
own food and operating what became a small-scale commercial dairy.
Kopecky’s books, New Buffalo and Leaving New Buffalo Commune,
provide invaluable insights into commune life.
I was really wedded to the land. Once we had some cows, I would
milk them and feed the animals in the barn. I was also very
involved with the irrigation. We grew green beans, chiles, acorn
squash, zucchini, yellow squash, winter squash, and sweet corn.
We had greenhouses where we grew tomatoes in the winter. We
grew our own wheat and we had our own grinder, so we were
always making tortillas. And we’d almost always be cooking pinto
beans on the wood stove. We were also a hunter-gatherer people.
If there had been a deer or elk killed, that would provide dinner.
Streit moved out in the early 1970s. After Kopecky left, in 1979, New
Buffalo carried on for several more years before Rick Klein, who had never
relinquished title to the property, reclaimed the land. He operated it as
a bed-and-breakfast for several years before selling it to Bob Fies of California. Fies has substantially renovated the buildings, and today operates
New Buffalo with something of the original communal spirit.
nmmagazine.com | MARCH 2013 43
“You’re either on the bus
or off the bus,” Ken Kesey
famously declared, referring to being part of the
Merry Prankster family. The
Hog Farmers and friends at
left rode the Road Hog bus
in El Rito’s Fourth of July
parade in 1968.
A larger-than-life figure in the 1960s counterculture scene and beyond,
Hugh Romney/Wavy Gravy had been associated with Ken Kesey and
the Merry Pranksters, of Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
fame, then branched off with his own cohort to form the Hog Farm in
California. This commune, which settled briefly in New Mexico before
moving back to California, focused on socially conscious and political
entertainment—“letting the people know that they were the star of the
show,” he says today, from the Hog Farm in Berkeley.
Patrick Sullivan
In California, we were hippies in the foothill area of Los Angeles
when I met Wavy Gravy and [his wife,] Bonnie [Bonnie Jean
Beecher, now Jahanara Romney]. We fed and cared for hogs in
return for the rent. That’s how we got the name Hog Farm.
In 1968 we left California and came to New Mexico to do a
Summer Solstice celebration [the first of two] in Aspen Meadows, off Ski Basin Road, above Santa Fe and Tesuque. Tom and
Lisa Law took us there. We rented the area from Tesuque Pueblo
for $200 for the weekend.
After the solstice, we did shows around New Mexico. We
would do a multimedia show without drugs. That was the
essence of the Hog Farm. We’d set up a 30-foot dome with a
cover and a 60-foot, partially covered dome where my wife at
the time and I projected the light show. We had a rock band,
too, that traveled in the band bus, so we made a caravan as we
traveled around. It was the extension of Wavy’s improvisational
theater with a bigger group. That was his vision.
Wavy Gravy
We had a vision of the Southwest. The I Ching said the “Southwest furthers,” and we were going for it. Tom and Lisa Law
lured us to New Mexico—and the land and the sky. We really
44 NEW MEXICO | MARCH 2013
craved it. All that time, going from state park to state park, we
saw so much beauty. We first set our bead on some land in Black
Mesa, but once those people saw who and what we were, they
didn’t want anything to do with us. So we ended up going from
campground to campground while looking for land until we found
the place in Llano [in 1969].
Jean Nichols
According to Nichols, who joined the Hog Farm in New Mexico in
1968, the Llano property “had a couple houses and a barn on it. We
paid $7,500 for 13 acres, with a down payment and about $50 a
month in payments. Everyone just put their money together.” They
moved onto the farm that summer.
We were rejecting the American Dream as it was. We thought that
it was hypocrisy, the whole capitalist thing. It wasn’t “everyone is
created equal with equal opportunity,” like we’d been taught in
school. So we were going for peace, equality, and justice in practice.
We’re all one family—everyone in the world is connected. We were
trying to stop the war machine by creating a culture of peace—that
was a big part of it. We were also having fun. The stereotype of the
Sixties is “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” There was that, but there
was a lot more—good hard work. A lot of us had rejected the social
mores, where you go out and get a career and live a comfortable life.
So living communally was a real practical thing. We didn’t want
to compete and have more than our neighbors. We wanted to live
simply and with respect for the earth.
The Hog Farm’s high profile at Woodstock in 1969 would have farreaching implications for the New Mexico hippie scene, as people flocked
to Llano and other communes. “When we arrived back at Llano, it
looked like a displaced-persons camp with a view—all these hippies had
come to live with us forever,” says Wavy Gravy.
Clockwise from above: Hog Farm mascot Pigasus
squired by Wavy Gravy and actor John Phillip Law at
El Rito’s 1968 Fourth of July Parade. Photographer
Lisa Law (right) made Pigasus’s outfit, as well as her
own. Jean Nichols (commune name: Oxygen) with
her horse at a gathering in Long John’s Valley, 1976.
John Stearns
A New Mexico native, Stearns transferred from
the Colorado School of Mines to the University of
New Mexico in 1968. He visited several of the area
communes.
Shortly after Woodstock, late September, when
it was getting cold, a friend of mine and I visited
the Hog Farm. My friend wanted to move there.
The Hog Farm was such a compelling group—
they were so visible and charismatic, you could
see where they’d pick up people along the way.
We got to the Hog Farm about sunset. They
were inundated with people. It seemed like 300
people were living on that [13] acres. People
were cooking around the clock. There were
literally lines of people in the dark waiting to get into the kitchen
to get some food. I remember eating my brown-rice goulash out of
a hubcap that night. People were sleeping in their cars, their VWs
and pickups and school buses.
They had just built a big A-frame building and they had a
meeting the next day in it—the subject was what to do with all
these people, because they obviously couldn’t spend the winter at
the Hog Farm. They had to get to a manageable population to get
through the winter.
Jean Nichols
Wavy Gravy and most of the Hog Farmers eventually left New Mexico
to work on rock festivals and pursue antiwar activism and other
causes around the country. Drawn to the rural lifestyle, Nichols stayed
in Llano.
I decided to stay here and take care of the land. Some of us were
farmers, others hunter-gatherers. I was really into horses. A lot of
people were. We thought nothing of jumping on our horses and
riding everywhere. For a while, in the summers, we lived mostly on
horseback in the mountains, only coming down every few weeks for
supplies. We hunted and fished, tanned hides, made our own utensils,
saddles, and clothes. We plowed with horses, and sometimes I’d drive
a wagon down to the laundromat with all the kids.
We also had carefree days and celebrations. There was always
a fire circle and people playing drums . . . the drumming never
stopped. We built labyrinths, did sweat lodges, had baseball games
and horse races. We delivered each other’s babies.
I guess we may have been known as the party commune—that’s
what someone told me later—because we really knew how to create celebrations at the drop of a hat. And we would think of great
nmmagazine.com | MARCH 2013 45
DOU Gla s MAG NUS ,
courtesy palace of
gov ernors archives
#hp. 2011.28.19
COURTESY POLLY RAyE
Lama Foundation
members carry a viga
destined for the roof of
one of their buildings,
1976. “Lama was quite
different from most of
the communes in that it
had a clear mission (the
expansion of consciousness) and a wide range
of spiritual practices and
nationally known teachers from every spiritual
tradition,” recalls Polly
Raye, now a Taos businesswoman. Below:
Douglas Magnus, today
a well-known Santa Fe
jeweler (he created the
Centennial Medallion,
featured on the January
2012 cover), took this
photo in 1970, capturing
a moment between two
“Solstice Lovers.”
events and celebrations around the solstices, equinoxes, the
full moons, Gonk Day [in honor of the first moon landing,
July 20, 1969]. On Gonk Day, we piled three TVs on top of
each other so that we could watch the moon landing.
The Hog Farm ceased to function as a commune in New
Mexico the early 1970s. Later, they traveled through Europe,
ending up on a humanitarian mission in Nepal. They
ultimately settled in California, but have kept up ties with
the New Mexico contingent to the present day. Wavy Gravy
and others continue to operate Camp Winnarainbow (campwinnarainbow.org), a circus-arts summer camp for children
in California. “We have a deep warm spot in our heart for
the Land of Enchantment,” Wavy says. “I miss it a lot. We learned so
much there. A lot of the roots of what the Hog Farm is—a piece of it is
in New Mexico.” In 1973, Nichols bought the place next door partly so
she could keep an eye on the Hog Farm and take care of the fields. The
Hog Farm eventually sold the Llano property.
In 1970, several couples left a troubled commune called Lower
Farm, along Las Huertas Canyon, in Placitas, to form Tawapa.
Porter Dees
In the fall of 1971, Dees transferred from Indiana University at Bloomington to UNM. He rented space in a Placitas trailer park. One day,
he and a buddy went hiking to explore the area north of the village.
We found this beautiful valley and spring and this beautiful
naked girl. She said, “Hi, how you doing? I live in this commune called Tawapa. Why don’t you come down and have
dinner and hang out?” So we did.
46 NEW MEXICO | MARCH 2013
The impact on me was huge. I didn’t even know how to nail
a nail, at that point, so to see what these couples were doing was
amazing. There were maybe five or six houses, including a round
adobe with a thatched roof. This one guy, Terry, if he broke a
shovel handle, he’d just head off into the hills till he found a
branch on a tree that he could use, and he brought it back and
fit it to the shovel. He had made this whole house by hand. They
were living a totally self-sufficient life. I said, “I’ve got to be a part
of this alternative life.” So I just kept going to communal dinners
at Tawapa, dropping by and hanging out, and Terry said, “Here’s a
spot you can build a house on.”
For my Tawapa house, Terry told me how to do a dugout, how
to use the excavated dirt for the walls like rammed earth, where
to get the wood at the Bernalillo mill for free, where to get the
windows. I had to buy four vigas to support the roof. It had no
phone, no running water, and an outhouse. Two of my buddies
came out and helped me dig a hole, and we put the house around
the outside. I spent about $300 on it.
Janis Joplin came to shoot a cigar commercial on the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge and
visited the Law farm in Truchas. The photo,
with horse trainer Tommy Masters, was
taken in 1970, the year she died.
Right: Most commune members moved
on to private life, but many kept the spirit
alive. Tom and Lisa Law found a piece of
land in Truchas, where they grew most of
their own food and raised animals—and
reared their four children. Here, Tom and
Pilar mow alfalfa.
It was a lovely winter. I’d get up
to haul water from the spring and get
firewood in the hills. That idyllic thing
came to an end shortly. That summer,
Tawapa was breaking up. I went to Montana with a girlfriend, and when I came
back, someone was living in my house. I
was probably the last one to build a house there.
At some point, someone in California published a hippie map
showing where the communes were, and people just came to
Tawapa in droves. They’d camp. The folks who started coming
were way more into drugs than we were, and ruined it. The core
group was gone by ’72. Everyone started scattering. I gradually
started getting back [to conventional life]—I got a job, went back
to school—but I stayed in Placitas.
To me, it was idyllic. I wish it had lasted longer, but it was kind
of the end of an era. That era was probably the happiest time of
my life. ✜
Charles C. Poling is featured in “Storytellers,” p. 5.
Santa Fe–based photographer Lisa Law’s career has spanned five decades
and includes musicians, actors, artists, and other figures from Haight
Ashbury to the Woodstock festival to the New Buffalo Commune. She
hopes to open the Lisa Law Museum of the Sixties in Santa Fe. See more
of her work at flashingonthesixties.com
WEB EXTRA: Iris Keltz’s poem “Make Soup” is a poignant companion
piece to this oral history. You can read it on our website at http://
bit.ly/12LWudS. Keltz is the author of Scrapbook of a Taos Hippie:
Tribal Tales from the Heart of a Cultural Revolution (out of print).
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