In the spring of 1968, the counterculture movement was in full swing. Lloyd Kahn, who had been teaching at Pacific High School, an experimental school set in the Santa Cruz mountains of California, recalled how the school evolved into a communal settlement housed in geodesic domes. His account gives a fine sense of both the frustrations and exaltations of the counterculture.
Three years ago Pacific High School was probably one of the freest places around. We had forty acres of beautiful land, a lot of close friends, some money, a daily influx of students, and no idea of what education meant or was for. Almost everyone lived in the flatlands and came in busses every day; it was like coming to a little haven of comrades, getting stoned and playing at everything from submarine building to James Joyce. In the winter the rain kept us inside and drove us mad with lack of space and dirt. People started hating each other. It didn't seem worth driving for 45 min. to get to a lot of intense conflicts.
Everyone had plans to make the school better…and all the plans involved firing someone or changing the government or embarking on some sophisticated program of cognitive development. The students fired all the staff, totally reorganized, restructured the educational process, and went steaming off for a good three weeks of scheduled classes and work lists.
Things started to pick up when the weather cleared and we ran out of money. The staff (we had all been rehired) that didn't care stopped coming, the rest started camping out and sharing food expenses. There were less people around and less conflicts.…
People had toyed with the idea of making it a live-in school but we … could barely keep the buses running and everyone out of jail, much less feed and house 60 people.…everything we were trying to do to give students a sense of independence and autonomy was contradicted by their life at home.
By the end of the spring there were about 15 people living on the property.… [S]tudents and staff living in a community was the next step. We had a small kitchen running with a new cook every night. People lived in tents, parachutes, trucks, trailers and one beautiful house. The school was really on the edge of disaster.…
[After seeing a geodesic dome at Big Sur] we decide to build some. … Martin and kids made a conduit frame dome, put together on a hot day with funky ladder and beer. School meetings are held outside, under that dome framework.… Sarah and I getting more and more attached to the people and the place, despite no place to live, no water, hot and dusty dry climate. We pitched a tent…, looking about 20 miles through rolling hills to the summer ocean fog. Martin lived…in a pup tent, reading late each night by kerosene lantern. Fresh ground coffee and schemes at Mark's house each morning, swimming in the lake on hot afternoons. Problems seemed insurmountable, but we had nothing to lose. No water, no money, no unifying principles.
Kids and lumber for the first domes arrived about the same time. Fantastic vitality. Energy, movement.…We held an impromptu dome class; everyone came.…Many people got in on the building, if they wanted to build a dome they'd come around and watch. We went into operation in an old tin building that had housed a horse, and was full of horseshit. We cleaned it out, ran in electricity, saws and drill press went into operation. As struts were being cut, kids would look in to see how. Everyone rushing to get their dome built. Things moving along of their own accord, no one directing. When I look back I see that what happened was a community forming itself, created with no real plan other than the need to live together. No grand design, no master plan. Joys, tension, both with the vitality implicit in beginnings.
We somehow governed ourselves enough to jointly survive. Community more economical way to live than single family. One sink, washing machine, kitchen for 50 people. An exercise in expanded awareness. Many problems. Your consciousness will change, or you'll leave the group. Your consciousness may change and then you'll leave the group, but if you can ride with it for a while, you'll learn a fantastic amount about yourself, and others. So different from anything you've done in the white middle class trip with all roads open to you from birth, color and poverty not wrecking your chances to do something.
2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education