http://www.reformer.com/localnews/ci_15509617
By JON POTTER
July 14, 2010
BRATTLEBORO -- After 2 1/2 years on the Tree Frog Farm commune, Peter
Simon had had enough.
He had grown weary of communal living and dismayed by the squabbles
people were having. He left after the winter of 1972 and went on to a
successful career in photography and photojournalism.
Charles Light's couple of years in Guilford were touched by the
tragedy of the Johnson's Pasture fire, which killed four people, and
by the intrusive arrival of busloads of hippies in the summer of '69.
He went on to a career as a filmmaker and activist.
Rebecca Lepkoff had photographed the families who followed Helen and
Scott Nearing to the Pike's Falls area of Jamaica in the 1950s as
part of the back-to-the land movement. They left, and the young
people who moved there in the '70s did too.
The current exhibit at the Vermont Center for Photography, "Vermont
Hippies from the Seventies," takes a celebratory and nostalgic look
at a bygone era in our area's history -- at one point, there were
eight communes within 15 miles of Brattleboro. The exhibit also
features poems by Verandah Porche, who still lives at Packer Corners
in Guilford, and a demo reel of a documentary on the farms by Light.
It runs at VCP, 40 Flat St., through Aug. 1.
Highlighted by some 40 photographs by Simon and Lepkoff, the exhibit
shines a smiling light on this brief but significant time ... and
inevitably begs some deeper questions: What was the significance of
the communes? How should we look that them today -- a failed
experiment, a rite of passage and a springboard to greater things?
"I think the whole area has been influenced by the back-to-the-land
movement. I think it has manifested itself in many ways, from
cultural, artistic stuff to the political culture," said Light, who
objects to any notion of the communes as a failed experiment. "It's
certainly not the right way to look at it from my point of view.
Those relationships continued for 40 more years. ... All these people
are still like family."
"Family" is a word that will come up a lot when you see the exhibit.
While there are unflinching images of the iconic excesses of the time
-- drugs, sex, nudists running in fields -- most of the photographs
are more clearly tied to simpler pleasures of home and hearth. There
is a amiable shot of a crowded Thanksgiving table; there are outdoor
dances and games; people dutifully tending goats and chickens and
proudly harvesting vegetables.
There is also a captivating portrait of a very young Carly Simon,
taken in Guilford in 1970, months before she launched her career as a
solo musician. The photographer is her brother, Peter, who was in
Brattleboro to christen the exhibit during Gallery Walk on July 2. In
a telephone interview, he recalled his family's reaction when he told
them, after graduating in 1970 from Boston University, he was going
to move to Guilford to live on a communal farm.
"They all thought I was nuts. They wanted to see me pursue a
burgeoning career in photojournalism," said Simon.
But the urge to move was strong -- a bunch of friends from college
were making the move, including his girlfriend. Plus, he was
suffering from an ulcer friends attributed to his hectic urban
lifestyle. Besides, he had been taking part in and photographing the
anti-war protests and was dismayed at the increasing radicalization
and violence.
"I became disillusioned with that. I just wanted to drop out," said
Simon. "A whole bunch of my friends urged me to give up the ghost and
move to Vermont where the action was."
With an inheritance, he and a friend bought 100 acres of beautiful
rolling hills in Guilford, next to another commune. He moved to Tree
Frog Farm in fall of 1970 and stayed through the winter of 1972.
"The highlights were the sense that we were doing something totally
unique and different, rebelling against society," he said. "Being in
the hills of Vermont ... it just seemed so idyllic. Getting away from
city life was one of the ingredients. I always liked walking around
barefoot and going around naked."
As time went on, life at the commune changed. Some of the people
Simon moved to the commune with moved on and were replaced by people
he didn't know as well. There were squabbles. He and his friend were
"basically bankrolling the place," and ultimately, the very dynamic
of living closely and intensely with a group of 10 or so people proved trying.
"The normal boundaries that people put up are changed. Everything was
shared. We shared food. We shared sex. We shared clothing," said
Simon. "Ultimately, it was the downfall because I started getting sick of it."
So Simon moved out and moved on to a career in photojournalism that
included photographing rock stars. He lives on Martha's Vineyard, but
he still travels on assignment -- most recently, he's been asked to
photograph Lady Gaga. He left the commune, he moved on, but he never
turned his back on it. He still visits and talks with Ray Mungo,
Verandah Porche and others from those days.
"I think everyone feels the same way I did. It was a wonderful
experience. Time came and went. No one regrets it," he said. "I think
people, when I say that we tried that experiment, are very intrigued
by it. ... They say 'God, I wish I had lived during all that.' I say,
'But you've got cell phones and texting,' and they say, 'We would
trade all that in.'"
Light, too, appraises his time on the farms with candor but still with warmth.
"To me it was a special time ... some of the best years of my life.
I'm nostalgic, but it wasn't all peaches and cream," he said.
He moved there with other Liberation News Service exiles to sister
farms in Guilford and Montague, Mass. He still lives in the area and
the Green Mountain Post Films production company he runs with Daniel
Keller is based in Turners Falls, Mass. He's been trying to make a
film about the time for nearly 40 years -- the project began in the
early '70s, when Ray Mungo's book, "Famous Long Ago" was optioned as
a feature film by Robert Redford. Through various ups and downs over
the years, the project has never let him go. His documentary, "Far
Out: Life On & After the Commune" needs just a few more months of
work to complete. You can see a demo of it at VCP.
As for why he left, Light said it was simply that he and the other
people there were "drawn back into the world." Watergate and the
proposed nuclear plant in Montague, Mass., were what drew Light back.
He made documentary films about the anti-nuclear movement, one of
which was shown during the No Nukes concert communard Sam Lovejoy
organized in Madison Square Garden.
"It didn't go away. It's an intense experience to live in a community
with eight to 15 people," he said. "In our situation, I think it was
successful."
But, he adds, the middle class college kids who made up most of the
residents on the farm "weren't really good farmers."
The hard realities of life, Rebecca Lepkoff said, were probably what
drove the young people away from Jamaica, just as they had for the
people who moved to the area to be near Helen and Scott Nearing a
generation before.
Still Lepkoff, who had bought a house with her husband near Pike's
Falls in 1950, genuinely like the young people who came in the early
'70s. Her fondness for them is evident in the way she still calls
them all by their first names -- Gusta, Steve, Wendy, Christy.
"I think they were quite poetic. As an artist, I always felt that you
should be an individual and a very free spirit," said Lepkoff, 94,
who now lives full-time in Brattleboro and is an acclaimed
documentary photographer, who began her career in the late 1930s. "I
admired their spirit for being able to leave conventional life and
live within their own spirit. That's very courageous. ... They hoped
to change things with all their new thoughts about life. Things are
very scary today."
Ultimately, the harshness of winter, of life in uninsulated hunter's
shacks and the hard ways of subsistence farming drove Gusta, Steve,
Wendy, Christy and others to new ventures. Lepkoff hasn't kept touch
with them, but those friendships become real and present-tense again
as she looks the photographs she took. She wonders what connection,
if any, those times have to ours.
Simon, too, feels a gulf between then and now.
"People were a whole lot less greedy then. There was much more a
sense of idealism then. People are more jaded," he said. "I remember
the innocence. That's what I like to remember."
So, maybe there's a twinge of the bittersweet in all this, but what
"Vermont Hippies from the Seventies" kindles is sweeter -- more
celebratory and fondly reminiscent.
"I did get nostalgic. It triggered a lot of memories, most of them
good," said Simon.
The public seems to agree. The Vermont Center for Photography guest
book has these entries: "Hip, Hip, Hooray Hippies!" and "It's time to
drop out ... again."
Instead, why don't you drop in.
--
Copies of Simon's book, "I and Eye," documenting his career from
1961-2000 are on sale at VCP, as are copies of Lepkoff's books, "Life
on the Lower East Side: Photographs by Rebecca Lepkoff, 1937-1950"
and "Almost Utopia: The Residents and Radicals of Pikes Falls,
Vermont, 1950," with text by Greg Joly.
This Saturday, Porche, an original member of Total Loss Farm, will
give a poetry reading at VCP at 4 p.m. It's free and open to the public.
For more information, call 802-251-6051 or www.vcphoto.org.
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