Memories of

DROP CITY

The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love

A Memoir

by John Curl

Part 1: CURLY'S EXPERIMENT

Part 2: THE ROAD TO DROP CITY

Part 3: THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE

Part 4: BACK TO DROP CITY

Part 5: GETTING THE WORD OUT

Part 6: THE JOY FESTIVAL

Part 7: LIVING THE REVOLUTION

Part 8: THE COUNTERCULTURE

PART 4

CHAPTER 8

BACK TO DROP CITY

As we bumped up the rise in the gravel road over the irrigation ditch, the top of the Drop City theater dome appeared then disappeared behind a grove of cottonwood trees. My ride dropped me off near the big dome, which now had multicolored car tops covering the lowest circle. The metal zome that I’d seen at Bear’s in New Mexico was now erected on a rise not far away. Curly, Lard and Clard were digging into the hill near the center of the land, with a guy I didn’t recognize. Rabbit’s dome was complete, and sunlight glinted off the aluminum paint. Several more tents were set up near the kitchen. Poly Ester’s daughter Kaitlin was running around with a couple of small kids I didn’t recognize.

I walked down to the new excavation, my pack bouncing on my back, past an armless sculpture that stood on the hill like a sentry, a faceless head over a plaster torso painted aluminum.

Curly threw a shovelful of broken black shale into a pile, pushed his black-rimmed sunglasses up to his forehead. “Welcome home.”

I laid down my pack. “I’m really glad to be here.”

Lard swung his pick into the wall of crumbling shale. “What did you think of the Haight?”

“Loved it, but it’s still big city. I think I’m a country boy at heart. Bear’s zome looks great. Who’s staying there?”

“Me and Clard.”

“We’re turning the whole inside of the shell into a painting,” Clard said.

The new guy, who had continued digging, said, “These bozos got no manners. I’m Alteresio.” He was wiry, with deep black eyes and a big splash of black hair falling across his face. He cracked a smile. “I just arrived from Sicily.”

“Alteresio was a friend of mine,” Clard said. “He did the silk screens for that comic book we published. Rabbit knew him too.”

Curly raised an eyebrow, dropped his sunglasses back to the bridge of his nose and began shoveling again.

I picked up a shovel and joined him. “What are we digging?”

“The Hole.”

“A basement for Alteresio’s dome,” Lard said.

“Me and Crayola are going to be upstairs in a dome on top of the hill, and the kids will live down here in the bottom of the hole. They’ll have their own entrance. I’ll never have to see them, except at meals,” he chortled.

I asked Lard, “How’d your draft board go?”

“No prob.”

We dug straight into the hillside, into layers of wet rock covered by a thin inch of gravely soil.

“Look at this.” Curly held up a piece of shale. “Shell fossils.”

In the layered, black sedimentary rock was the outline of a scallop.

“We’re on the bottom of a damn ocean, a thousand miles from the coast.”

After a while I asked, “Where’s Rabbit?”

No one responded at first. Then Clard muttered, “In his dome, I guess.”

There was a funny awkward silence. A half hour later I said, “I’m going to say hello to Rabbit. I’ll be back.”

As I knocked at the door I heard typing inside.

“Ishmael! Great to see ya! I’ll be with you in a minute. Can’t stop now.” He typed away furiously.

It looked comfortable but a little cramped for a couple and a kid. I relaxed on some cushions on the floor.

He finally pulled the paper out of the carriage and read it, making notes in the margin.

“What you writing?”

“A novel.”

“That’s great. What about?”

“Drop City,” he chuckled. “How much bread did you bring?”

“You’re writing a novel about Drop City? Isn’t that a little premature? Not that much has really happened here yet, has it?”

“That don’t matter. I’m writing fiction, not history. Lies. I’m just making it up.”

“Why lie about Drop City?”

“I’m going to make us media stars. I’m going to make us a cultural icon. I’m going to get Drop City in Life magazine.” He let loose a huge guffaw.

“Maybe Drop City shouldn’t be in Life,” I said.

“You loco, boy? That California sinsemilla popped out your brain? I been in touch with people all over the country. We’re hot!”

“Does everybody else want that?”

“What does it matter? When it comes to media, just between me and you, some of these folks got their ass confused with a wet hole in the ground. They don’t understand what this society is about. They haven’t paid enough dues. I’ve paid dues. I know. When you got a hot item, publicity is inevitable. Either you grab it or somebody else does. Either you’re a winner or a loser.”

“That’s one of the things I came here to get away from.”

“You’ll all thank me for it someday. How much money you bring?”

“Just about enough to build my dome, I hope. Three hundred.”

“I thought you were going to bring five hundred.”

“I couldn’t save that much.”

He pulled out a cigar box, opened a plastic bag, rolled a joint, took a couple of hits, and passed it to me. “A visitor gave me this dope. Don’t mention it to anybody, okay?”

“Don’t mention that we’re smoking dope?” I blew a couple of hits. “Is there some kind of conflict going on?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Everybody’s acting funny.”

“They didn’t tell you what happened?”

“No.”

“Alteresio picked a fight with me yesterday.”

“What about?”

“I brought the sucker here. He owes me. That pisses him off. That’s his whole problem. He’s hard-headed.”

“I hope you two can work it out.”

“Some of them just don’t get it. They’re going to have to open their fucking minds. I’m real glad you’re here now. Maybe you’ll help pound some sense into them.”

We passed the jay back and forth. As I got higher, it seemed increasingly unreal. Something was very wrong. “Aren’t we all in this together?”

“Sure.”

“Then why don’t you put this grass in the communal stash?”

“They’d smoke it all up in a few days. It’ll last me a month or two. I need it to write behind.”

“I thought we were sharing everything.”

“Almost everything. Look, Ish, it’s great to see you. You and me, we’re buddies. Now I got to go write my novel.”

When I got back to the hole, Curly and Lard were gone. I quietly joined Clard and Alteresio digging.

A little blond girl ran up. “Mommy wants to talk to you.”

“What about?” Alteresio grimaced.

“She didn’t say.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well tell Mommy if she wants to talk to me she should come here.” He glanced at Clard, forcing a chuckle out of the corner of his mouth. The little girl ran away. Alteresio said, “Aw fuck it,” threw down his shovel, and sulked after her.

Clard and I dug for a while.

“What have you been you up to?” I asked.

“The usual. Painting. Living the revolution. Looking for a girlfriend. How about you? Any new writing?”

“I just couldn’t find the time while I was working at the Post Office.”

“Rabbit’s writing a novel. Did he tell you?”

“Yeah. About Drop City. What do you think about that?”

Clard rested his foot on his shovel. “Everybody should be free to do their own thing here. I don’t have a problem with Rabbit writing a Drop City novel. It’s all fiction. Drop City is fiction. It’s happening but at the same time it’s fiction. The only way anybody could possibly write the truth about this place is through fiction. Just don’t tell me that you’re writing a novel about Drop City now too.”

“No, I’m not. I promise. At least not for another thirty years. We’ll all be dead by then.”

“I don’t resent Rabbit’s writing, just his doing it at other people’s expense.”

“How’s that?”

“As soon as his dome was finished, he disappeared inside it. We only see him at meals now.”

“You mean he’s not doing his share of the work?”

“He thinks that sending out publicity is his share of the work. Nobody even wants him to do it.”

“Is that what the fight was about?”

“It was about nothing. Egos. Alteresio got tired of Rabbit telling him what to do. Rabbit said, ‘I’m going to have to take you out to the woodshed.’ They started pushing and shoving. Rabbit lost his false teeth.” Clard let loose a quick, pained smile. “It really wasn’t funny. They broke the kitchen wall. Alteresio threw Rabbit into the sheetrock, and it broke. That really pissed me off. We put a lot of work into it.”

“They broke the wall?”

“It felt like everything we were working for was being violated. The space was violated. Alteresio’s only been here two weeks. I’m afraid he’s not going to stay. I like him, even though he’s got a temper. He’s trying to control it. He says he believes in nonviolence. Rabbit pushed him over the edge. I’d rather have him here than Rabbit. So would Curly and Jo. That’s who the fight was really between: Rabbit and Curly. Alteresio was just standing in for Curly.”

The dinner gong rang. I saw Jo—Drop Lady—behind the screen of the A-frame porch, beating it with the hammer.

Clard tossed his shovel. “So far nobody’s fixed the sheetrock. C’mon. If you want to see the damage look at the west wall.”

Drop Lady greeted me with a big hug. Poly Ester smiled nervously. The air was thick with tension.

I felt shell-shocked. I had expected the same high spirits I’d found here, or thought I’d found here, only a few months before.

“Show him the plans,” Curly said.

Clard unrolled a set of architect’s plans on the table, a drawing of three intersecting domes, each about twelve yards across, built of large triangles, pentagons, and rectangles, one with an eight-foot square skylight.

“This is going to be our new kitchen complex. Designed and engineered by Luke Bear.”

“It’s a triple-fused rhombo-icoso-dodecahedron,” Lard articulated. “We’re going to cover it with cartops.”

“You’re really planning on building this? It looks huge. Where’s it going to go?”

“Right in the middle of the land. Pretty near Alteresio’s Hole. Bear’s coming up next week to get it started.”

We talked excitedly for a while. Then I said, “But Patt will be here next month, and I promised I’d have a place ready for her to stay. I’ll find time to work on the new kitchen complex, but I’m also going to be pretty busy building our dome.”

“You two can stay in the top of the hole,” Alteresio said.

“That would be great, but how could your whole family squeeze into the bottom?”

“We’ve been squeezed before.”

Clard jumped in. “Bear’s paying for the shell: the car tops, bolts, glass, tar, everything on the outside. We’re paying for the foundation and all the inside stuff. It’s going to cost us almost nothing. We’ve scouted out an old abandoned bridge upriver on the Purgatoire, where we can scavenge posts and beams for the foundation. The bricks will come from the old coke ovens. But we’ve still got to buy two-by-fours for the struts and the floor. We need five hundred of them. Then there’s the wiring, plumbing, insulation, sheetrock.”

“What’s it all going to cost?”

“Almost nothing,” Curly said. “At a dime apiece for culls that’s just fifty little ones. But the other stuff adds up. All told, about five hundred bucks.”

“How much do we have in the kitty?” I asked.

“At this very moment?”

“Yeah.”

“How much bread did you bring?” Curly asked.

“Just about enough to build my dome. And a little more. I’d like to put it up on the hill, if that’s okay with everybody. About three hundred dollars.”

“We thought you were going to bring five.”

“I wanted to, but I couldn’t save that much. How much do we have in the kitty?”

“Well, including your three hundred, we have exactly...three hundred smackers.”

“So you want to spend all my money on a new kitchen.”

“When the complex is finished,” Clard said, “you and your girlfriend can move in here, into the old kitchen. It’s a great dome.”

I pulled out my wallet and laid all the money I had in the world on the table, three hundred twenty dollars and the change in my pocket. Everybody left the bills and coins sitting there. We ate dinner, talking on and on about the new kitchen complex.

Finally Rabbit came in. Conversation dropped to muted tones. Poly Ester said “I saved you a plate.”

Nobody else said anything to him.

“How’d the writing go?” I asked.

“Just great,” he said with forced enthusiasm. Rabbit grabbed his beans and salad and leaned against the wall. He took a few bites, then said, “I know you all think the fight was my fault. But maybe if you opened your minds a little you’d see it wasn’t just me. If any of you got a problem with me, deal with me straight. Don’t play the pacifist while you get other Droppers to be the heavy for you. That goes for all of you. Anyway, I’m sorry it happened. I hope Alteresio is too.”

“Everybody knows how I feel,” Alteresio mumbled.

“Nobody knows it if you don’t say it,” Poly Ester snapped.

“I feel real bad that we got into a fight, especially here in the kitchen,” Alteresio said. “Okay? Now let’s move on.”

“Okay,” Poly Ester said.

Rabbit ate a few mouthfuls, then walked out carrying his plate.

Nobody said much after that. People straggled out one by one. I helped Crayola clean up. When I cleared the table I noticed my three hundred twenty dollars were gone. And the change. I finished the dishes, walked up to the new cartop dome.

Clard’s and Lard’s paintings were all over the place, and they had painted part of the ceiling with geometric patterns. Being surrounded by all these abstractions inside this oddly shaped room made me feel like I was in a world where colors took crystalline forms and hurtled in every direction through my mental space.

Clard and Lard were busily cutting out a circle about three feet in diameter from a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood with a sabre saw. “It’s going to be the Ultimate Painting,” Clard said. “Multidimensional. It’s going to move. We’re going to spin it with a motor.”

Lard continued, “Run a strobe light on it. Each time it goes around the strobe’ll hit it differently; there’ll be different stop frames. I can’t explain. You’ll see.”

“You can work on it,” Clard said. “It’s a group project. Everybody here can help paint it.”

“I’ve never painted much.”

“That doesn’t matter. The less you’ve gone to art school the better off you are.”

“Curly and Jo,” Lard said out of nowhere, “are going to tell Rabbit to leave.”

“That’s worse than a drag.” I said.

Clard put the sabre saw down. “They can ask him to leave but they can’t throw him out,” he enunciated slowly and firmly. “If they tell him he has to leave, then I’m leaving too.”

“Don’t,” Lard grimaced.

“Why does everybody dislike him?” I asked.

“I don’t dislike Rabbit,” Clard said. “But I can see why Jo doesn’t want to be around him. He’s always lying. He’s always telling stories. He makes things up and swears they’re true.”

“Well, so does Curly,” Lard responded.

“Curly does it as a joke, or to cool everybody out. Rabbit does it to make himself a hero.”

“To me it looks a little different.” Lard sanded the edges of the big plywood circle. “I think Curly and Rabbit are too much alike.”

The door opened and Curly poked his head in. “Am I missing the symposium?”

“I don’t want Drop City to become some kind of elitist club,” Clard blurted.

“This tension is destroying us,” Curly replied. “Rabbit is making us just like the straight world. We’re becoming like them. If Rabbit don’t leave, the whole thing’s gonna die.”

“I can’t stand it when a group gangs up on some poor little sucker.”

“Rabbit ain’t no poor little sucker. He’s probably up in his dome right now writing to all the world what a paradise we have here, at the same minute that he’s killing it.”

“I’m not going to demonize him,” Clard said. “I don’t want enemies. When there was just you and me, Curly, we saw each other as the enemy sometimes. Remember? If we didn’t have Rabbit, we’d be at each other’s throats again, or at Lard’s or Ishmael’s. It’s just the low side of human nature. When I’m alone I’m my own enemy.”

“Would you rather Jo and me left?”

“No.”

“Good. I care a lot about this place. I plan on being here a long time. I’m even planning on bringing my old mom out here to live. And I don’t need no publicity lunatic turning it into an ego circus. That’s against everything Drop City stands for.”

“The group ganging up on Rabbit and telling him to leave would also be against everything Drop City stands for,” Clard replied.

Lard cut in, “What if Curly or Jo or me went up to him one by one as individuals?”

“I’ve got no objection to that,” Clard said. “As long as you’re just asking him, not telling him. I wouldn’t do it but I’ve got no objection to all of you doing it one by one, as long as you say you’re just speaking for yourself.”

Later that night I wrote a letter to Patt, not mentioning the conflict. I was afraid if she knew all was not well, she might not come.

* * *

I spent the next morning working on the hole with Alteresio. None of the other guys showed up. Alteresio and I just chatted about the work. We didn’t mention Rabbit at all.

I wanted to talk to Rabbit. I wasn’t sure what I planned to say to him. Maybe just that I was sad that it hadn’t worked out for him. I hoped to catch him outside rather than having to go to his dome. But the morning passed and he never came out.

Alteresio and I were the only guys at lunch too. It was just us, his wife Crayola, and their girls, Elizabeth and Toby, four and five, who were sweet kids and best friends. We sat around tensely and didn’t say much.

Then Alteresio disappeared into his tent. I wasn’t about to work alone, so I walked to the river, about a half mile away. It was beautiful down among the cottonwoods; I saw tracks that I guessed were raccoon and possum. I used to see similar tracks in the woods behind my grandpa’s house in Jersey. I sat on the bank in the shade, took off my shoes and soaked my feet in the cool stream.

When I got back, I went to the cartop dome. Lard and Clard were building a stand for the Ultimate Painting and bolting the big plywood disk to a motor.

“They did it,” Clard said. “Did you hear?”

“What?”

“Curly and Jo and Lard asked Rabbit to leave. I really didn’t think they’d have the balls.”

I turned to Lard. “What did he say?”

Lard grimaced sheepishly. “He just stared at me like he was smelling a pile of shit.”

* * *

At the kitchen table everybody sat quiet and sullen, expecting Rabbit, Poly, and Kaitlin to appear any minute. They had to show soon, or go hungry. Finally Rabbit entered, very tense, letting the screen door slam. He sputtered, “Don’t worry. We’re leaving.” He spun on his heels and disappeared.

One by one everybody vacated the room. I dropped my plate onto the pile in the sink and walked to Rabbit’s dome. I found him as usual at his typewriter. Poly Ester was reading Kaitlin a book.

“I’ll be sorry to see you leave.”

“Me too. I was sure this place was going to work for us.”

“It probably still could, if everybody would step back a little and bend some.”

“I didn’t come here just to have to eat more of the same old bullshit.”

“You haven’t been entirely blameless in this, you know.”

“So you’re taking their side too?”

We studied each other silently for a moment. Then I said, “Where will you go?”

“Dunno. Right now we can’t go anywhere. We’ve got no bread. We’ll find some place to go. It might take a while.” He tied a blue bandanna around his head. “Do you want to beat down the sun with me?”

“What?”

“Beat down the sun. I started doing this a few weeks ago. Haven’t done it for some days. Maybe that’s why we had that problem.”

He picked up two small drums and sticks, handing me a set. His cowlick stuck straight up out of the back of the headband. I followed him outside to a spot on the hill near the dome. We sat facing due west. It was still light out, but the sun was quickly approaching the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo peaks.

“Beating down the sun is what makes it come up again tomorrow,” he said. “That’s what the Indi’ns do.”

It took me a moment to realize that ‘Indi’ns’ meant ‘Indians.’

The sun was less than its own diameter above the jagged Sierras. He began beating on the drum in a slow, even cadence. I joined him. It was hypnotic, watching the sun slowly touch the mountain. It hurt my eyes; I just glanced briefly now and then. It half disappeared behind the mountain; just a sliver was visible. A last flash changed abruptly to darkness.

We gave one more strong drumbeat, then stopped and sat silently. I felt awed by the whole celestial drama.

* * *

Chapter 9

A HOME IN THIS WORLD

The next day I went into Trinidad shopping with Curly and Drop Lady. We bought some supplies, then went to the bank, deposited what was left of my three hundred and put my name on the bank account alongside the others. It was a communal account, with everybody’s name on it. Any of the Droppers could deposit or withdraw money, and everybody was expected to put all their money into the common kitty.

For the next few days Rabbit didn’t even come down to dinner. Poly Ester brought him his meals. Nobody saw much of him and everybody avoided talking about the problem with him. It was as if the community was holding its collective breath, hoping we could put this behind us soon and move on.

Everybody tried to get back to normal, or as normal as we could get. Alteresio and I worked long hours to get the hole finished before the fall rains, before Patt arrived, and before Bear showed up from New Mexico to start building the kitchen complex. Everybody except Rabbit helped too. We frantically schemed on how to raise the rest of the five hundred dollars that Drop City needed for the complex, but nobody came up with a great idea. My three hundred disappeared fast, although we didn’t spend much money on survival. Our main monthly expense was utilities. We mostly heated with firewood in the Franklin stoves. Food was not a big expense. Our typical dinner was spaghetti or beans with some vegetables. Everybody was on food stamps; the women and children were also getting government commodities: flour, sugar, dry beans, peanut butter in big cans, lard and disgusting canned meat that nobody would eat.

We had a chicken pen attached to the hen house, next to the rabbit hutches, but a lot of the time the chickens ran wild all over Drop City eating grasshoppers. We had a big white rooster and a little bantam rooster. The bantam was king of the roost and had the big one terrified. Whenever he saw him, he’d chase him. From our dozen hens we usually got six or eight eggs a day. Tinker the goat was a hermaphrodite, a gift from the goat cheese farm down the road. They just wanted to get rid of it. We never ate the rabbits or chickens. The goat gave no milk. They were really pets. Drop Lady had the job of taking care of the animals, or at least making sure that somebody was taking care of them.

Between the chicken coop and the kitchen was the big old stump we chopped firewood on. Lard in particular loved to work up a sweat chopping wood, and was very good at it. It was rare that he didn’t split a piece in one or two chops. It really takes some skill, what with analyzing the grain, hitting it in exactly the right place with the right force, compensating for knots. Lard taught me how to do it without chopping my fingers, and I got pretty skilled at it too. It was good exercise and a pleasant daily ritual.

To speed the hole along, Alteresio bought some blasting powder and blew up the rock. It was exciting and scary. Alteresio got into it, and a devilish gleam would come into his eyes when he touched the wires. He and Curly filmed the blasts.

Curly liked to act out crazy ideas and film them. One day he bought an old cop’s uniform in a junk store. He dressed up in it, walked around Drop City barking orders, then drove a bunch of us into town, pushed Lard and Clard up against a wall, and was frisking them while Alteresio filmed the whole thing. By chance a deputy sheriff saw us, stopped and questioned us. He took it all in good humor though.

Back at Drop City Curly made a dummy, dressed it up in the uniform, stuck it in the driver’s seat of a junked car that we’d cut the roof out of, hooked up some blasting powder, and filmed the spectacle as he blew it up.

Although there was a craziness in Alteresio, there was also something endearing about him. He had a good self-contained spirit, and really loved his daughters. But his paintings were filled with exploding black pigments, guns, hurt, sad women, and body parts.

The flip side of Alteresio’s craziness was his wife Crayola, the mother hen of Drop City, always nice, kind, and a good mom. But she didn’t seem interested in much beyond her kids, a Dropper with the imagination of a secretary. Her interaction with Alteresio was usually mild bickering. They’d constantly complain about each other. She would say what a big baby he was and he’d say that she didn’t have a clue why they were at Drop City. She’d respond that she was there to keep her family together. Yet they also seemed very attached to each other. She kept him grounded and he sought that out. There was some of that grounding by the women in all the couple relationships at Drop City.

Alteresio wanted to line the hole with rocks, so we drove upstream on the Purgatoire, where feeder stream beds crossed the gravel roads, and filled the truck with the flattest river rocks we could find. We brought many truckloads down and cemented them up as walls. Alteresio left one stone loose with a hole behind it for a dope stash.

We finished the hole with a river stone floor, built a wooden second story floor above it with a trap door where Alteresio would put stairs eventually, and erected a dome on top. The dome was the easy part. Alteresio made a big compound window out of old car glass that we installed in a triangle with a great view of Fisher’s Peak. Alteresio and his family moved into the bottom, and I hurriedly got the top ready for Patt.

I met her at the bus station. I was really glad to see her; I’d missed her a lot. She seemed nervous and wary.

“Our dome’s pretty much ready. There’s still some work to do on it.”

“But we can move in, can’t we?”

“Temporarily. Eventually Alteresio and Crayola are going to take it over and we’ll move to a different dome.” I lifted her two huge suitcases into the back of the old red pickup.

“They’ll be our downstairs neighbors?”

“You’ll like them. Crayola’s very nice. Alteresio’s okay, a little moody.”

When we got there Patt looked stunned. “It’s so barren. It’s a desert.”

“I told you what it was.”

Jo took her right under her wing.

“Can I really just do anything I want all day?”

“Pretty much.”

“It sounds like being a kid again. I’m so used to working or going to school I won’t know what to do with myself.”

“You’ll probably go through culture shock for a week. We’ve all done it. Particularly if you’re used to being in a city.”

“What do you spend your time doing?”

“Water colors when I get a chance. I’m working on some children’s stories. Right now the baby’s taking most of my time.”

“So I don’t have any responsibilities at all?”

“Well, a few. You’ll be in the cooking rotation, of course. All the women share the cooking. And helping clean the kitchen.”

“So I have to cook for the whole group?”

“Didn’t Ishmael tell you that?”

“Not really.”

“He should have.”

“I’ve never cooked for a big group.”

“You won’t have any trouble. I’ll break you in.”

Later, up in our new home on top of the hole, Patt said, “How come just the women have to cook? I thought Drop City was trying to be different.”

“The men are out building all day.”

“That’s no different from anyplace else. Why don’t you cook too?”

“Do you want to be swinging a hammer? It’s hard work.”

“No. But I don’t want to be stuck in the kitchen either. I didn’t come here for that. All the time I was growing up my mother was groaning about being stuck with the house chores. That’s what she fought all her life to get away from, and now I’m supposed to think of it as advanced?”

“You won’t be stuck in the kitchen. You’ll just cook every couple days. I thought you liked to cook.”

“I do like it. I don’t like the idea that it’s the women’s job. You didn’t tell me that.”

“I thought I did. Can you just accept it for now? You can negotiate it later. I’ll cook too. We’ll cook together, okay?”

Lard gave her the Dropper name Patsy Pie. A little too cute, but she did look cute in overalls and hiking boots. Then whenever she cooked dinner was late, so she became known as Patsy Pie Quickly.

* * *

One day at dinner, Clard said, “I think it’s time to sign over the land.”

Everybody was there except Rabbit and Poly, who rarely ate with us now.

Curly almost choked on a piece of broccoli. “What’s the rush?” He seemed defensive, which was unusual for Curly. They looked intensely at each other.

“We need to be what we say we are. We’ve been talking about it long enough.”

“Talking about what?” I asked.

“The land is in Curly’s and Jo’s names. Legally that gives them control over the community. Even though Curly says that it doesn’t matter…”

“It doesn’t,” Curly interjected.

“… in reality it does matter. We all know it matters. We always said that eventually Curly and Jo would sign the land over to the group. We’d all own it together or nobody would own it. We’ve got to do that now, before things get even more complicated.”

“I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do, man,” Curly said, gesturing emphatically. “It’s risky.”

Lard jumped in, “We’re the ones who’ve been taking the risks. Legally you’ve got all the power. Do you want us to pretend that you don’t?”

“What’s the difference if one guy legally owns the land or a group owns it?” Curly went on. “A group can be just as abusive as one guy. Or worse. And what about newcomers? Do we just keep adding them to the deed? Where does it end? It’s what you do with the land that counts, not what’s on paper.”

“What’s on paper counts too,” Clard insisted.

“Okay, okay,” Curly said. “Let’s do it. What do you say, Jo?”

“Clard’s right. It’s time to do it. But how do we do it?”

Clard took a deep breath. “It’s easy. We file these papers, and presto, we’re Drop City, Inc., a non-profit corporation. Then you deed the land over to the corporation. We’re all on the Board of Directors.”

“I hate corporations,” I said. “Corporations are the enemy. Maybe we could become something else.”

“There’s nothing else they let you become, as far as I know.”

“Do we got to have a president?” Alteresio groaned.

“Maybe a board isn’t the way to go,” Curly said. “Nobody should own the land.”

“That’s great. That’s what Drop City is all about.”

“Legally they won’t let you do that,” Clard objected.

“Fuck legally. We don’t recognize their laws anyway.”

“Let’s write it into the deed,” Lard exclaimed.

“There we go!”

Curly pumped a fist. “I’ll write it up! From now on nobody can ever own this plot of land!”

“Nobody can exclude other people from it,” Clard added. “Write that too.”

“Okay! Everybody—or nobody—will own Drop City.”

The next day I went to town with Curly and Clard. We stopped in at the County Clerk and asked what papers were needed, then bought the forms at a stationery store. Curly drafted a set of by-laws. We, the Board of Directors, would elect outsiders as officers, friends who didn’t live at Drop City. We thought that would keep things cooler; we found some friends in Boulder to fit the bill.

That night Rabbit came into the kitchen and said, “Make sure you put Poly and me on that board of directors.”

“Why, if you’re leaving?”

“As long as we’re here we’re a full part of the group. We’ve as much right as anybody else.”

We hesitantly wrote Rabbit and Poly onto the Board of Directors.

Curly drafted a new deed gifting the property to Drop City Inc., writing into it that the land was “to be forever free and open to all people.” Hesitantly Curly and Drop Lady signed and filed it.

* * *

The artist couple living in the hills above Trinidad, Denton and Leeda, visited Drop City every once in a while. Marigold had gone back to Boulder. Patt and I visited them a few times and we all became pretty friendly. They also started to get tight with Rabbit and Poly. Denton and Leeda kept talking about raising money to start another community in the mountains.

I saw Marigold’s watercolors at their house, some brilliant and airy, some gloomily forbidding. A lot of crimson and black. I could see something a little scary in her mind. I was relieved that she wasn’t around. Since I had been on LSD that night with her, I wasn’t sure what had really happened. I didn’t want to shake up my relationship with Patt, which was already shaky. I had no reason to mention Marigold to Patt. It wasn’t quite dishonest, and everybody was pretty discrete.

* * *

The Droppers knew everything available in all the junkyards in town and were on friendly bargaining terms with the dealers. The only factory in Trinidad, really just a woodshop, had an Army contract making plywood footlockers, and had piles and piles of scraps they couldn’t use. They were glad to have us haul it away. We made occasional forays to the municipal dump, where people often threw away good junk. But most of our building materials came from scrounging the countryside. A couple of times a week we would scout through all the local back roads looking for abandoned houses, bridges, or any kind of building materials. There was a lot around.

We tore abandoned houses apart, places that were really crumbling. We did it on the sly, but most of the sneaking around was unnecessary. All the locals knew that we were scavenging, and if they cared, they never said so or reported us. People were mostly glad to see some of the firetraps disappear and the old materials being reused.

We got most of our big beams from abandoned railroad bridges along the road that followed the Purgatoire river up into the mountains. That’s where the one last working coal mine in the area carried on. There had been thirty mines up there at one time, a railroad, a lot of little towns and a large population. When most of the mines closed, the rail line was abandoned and the towns became ghost towns. A lot of the old railroad bridges had already been scavenged.

Since I was in the southwest I had decided to get cowboy boots. All the guys except Curly wore them. New ones cost too much, but I found an old pair in a shoemaker shop for several bucks. The problem was that they were too narrow. I got the shoemaker to put stretchers in them for a few days, but they were still pretty snug. I thought if I wore them they’d stretch. They’d usually be okay in the morning, but as the day wore on, my feet would swell and they’d start to hurt. I was always pulling them off to give my feet a break, then squeezing back into them. Since I’d used Drop City money to pay for them, and we had none to waste, I wouldn’t give up, even though I was limping all the time. I kept thinking that sooner or later they’d stretch and my feet would stop hurting, but they never did. I was in a state of denial over those boots. It was one of the many Drop City running jokes.

One day I drove with Lard and Alteresio along the opposite side of the river, looking for places to scrounge. We passed a big field lined with long earth mounds about six feet high. Through the tall grass I could see bricks and round openings in the mounds.

“We’re not the first dome city around here. Those are coke ovens,” Lard explained. “In the old days they trucked the coal here and made coke out of it.”

“What’s coke?” I asked.

“They use it to make steel,” Alteresio said. “It burns hotter than coal. Stop. Maybe there’s still some stuff left to scrounge.”

Lard pulled onto the shoulder. “It’s picked clean. We already pulled all the good timber out. There’s just thousands of bricks. We’ve already got more than we can use.”

We slipped through the barbed wire. There were rows and rows of brick ovens, at least a hundred of them, many crumbling, perfect brick domes about six feet in diameter with arched mouths, a little round opening at the top like a smoke hole. I climbed inside an oven. I could just squeeze through the opening and could barely sit up inside. My feet were aching and I took the opportunity to pull my boots off.

“There’s some big beams.” Alteresio pointed to a couple of six-by-eights lying in the deep grass.

“We must have missed them,” Lard said.

I left my boots in the oven, and stumbled over in my socks.

“Cool it. We’re being watched.”

A guy sat in a car down the road.

“Let’s skedaddle,” Alteresio muttered.

“I’ve got to get my boots,” I protested.

“We’ll come back tonight.”

We got out of there quick.

As we rolled into the Drop City driveway, Lard pointed out that the “Drop City Supports World War III” sign was gone. “I guess somebody got tired of looking at it,” Lard said.

Later, as we listened to the radio news filled, as usual, with LBJ's threats and escalations of the war, Lard, Alteresio, and I painted a new sign: “BOMB HANOI, LONDON, MOSCOW, ROME, CHICAGO, CANADA, NEW JERSEY,” and put it up by the road.

That night we went back to the coke ovens and appropriated the big timbers, and I retrieved my boots.

The next day a car pulled into the parking lot. The driver didn’t get out, but just sat there. The same man as at the coke ovens. I was about to go over, when I saw Curly approaching the car. They talked for a while. Then the man drove off.

“That was a railroad guy. They know we been scrounging their stuff.”

“Did he report us to the sheriff?”

“I don’t think so. He didn’t even say to give the stuff back. He just said to stop taking it. I think he digs us. He’s protecting us.”

* * *

The railroad guy wasn’t alone in protecting us. Local people often helped us out. The produce and dairy guys at the local Safeway saved old food for us. The manager was an Italian immigrant, and understood what it was like to be poor. He let us know which days there would be good pickings in their dumpsters by the back loading dock, boxes of moldy cheese and half rotten fruits and vegetables, and pretended to not notice us climbing in and getting them. They always put the scroungeable stuff on top. After a while they kept it all inside for us, in a corner of the walk-in refrigerator, and let us come in to pick it up.

Once a farmer came by with a half a pickup full of jerusalem artichokes. By chance, somebody else had just given us a big freezer. We filled it with the artichokes, and had them in every dinner for months. The electricity probably cost many times their worth.

Dr. Parks was Drop City’s physician. He worked out of the county health clinic, on the circuit of several towns. He was a very dedicated country doctor, the kind I thought didn’t really exist. He would come out to Drop City occasionally to make sure that we were all okay and that we were keeping the kitchen disinfected. He would set up a little clinic in the kitchen dome. Thanks in part to him, we never had an epidemic.

One day Curly and I were explaining our theories to him about how Drop City was part of a movement to change society. Dr. Parks responded, “I don’t see it quite like that. I think this place is really a retreat. People come here to decompress. You probably wouldn’t guess it by looking at me, but I burned out halfway through college. I was a dropout too. In a few years most of you will move back into society.”

Curly laughed. “I’m planning on being here a long time.”

We were blessed with good neighbors. The land south and east of us was owned by the aging Anglo couple that Curly and Jo bought the land from, really sweet and helpful. The land to our east was once part of the goat farm that still operated down the road, run by a friendly Greek family. To our north beyond the junk yard were the barns of the Italian-American cattle rancher, who was skeptical but tolerant. To our west, across the gravel road, were fields of wheat and sorghum, and El Moro elementary school, where Kaitlin was enrolled. She had friends in her class, and occasionally got together with them after school, but they never came over to Drop City to play.

Our junkyard doubled as a kind of sculpture garden, filled with many prizes. It was also the repository for a lot of really useless junk. Among the prizes was a “solar cooker”: twentysome rear-view car mirrors welded to an armature, positioned to reflect sunlight to a central hot point and attached to a steering wheel to follow the sun. One day when I was cleaning up the junkyard, I pulled out some unusable wood scraps and old paper and decided to burn them. First I put them in the solar cooker, which I’d never actually tried. It didn’t even get the paper warm, since the car mirrors were glare-resistant and didn’t reflect much light. A lot of things at Drop City were like that. So I used some matches to build a little fire. A sudden gust of wind made it jump to a clump of grass. Before I could stomp it out, it jumped again. Grass was burning in two places now and approaching the neighbor’s barns. I yelled for help. By chance the neighbor was working nearby, heard me, leaped the fence, and together we stomped out the fire.

In a cold sweat I thanked him profusely. “I really owe you.”

“It were nothing special, really. Those are tricky winds. Neighbors got to work together.”

That was the attitude of a lot of people around Trinidad.

* * *

Chapter 10

RABBIT'S GUN

One morning I was out chopping wood when Clard came up to me and said, “Have you seen the new saws?”

“What saws?”

“Look under the ground cloth in the tent.”

Two new circular saws, a couple of electric drills, a nice carpenter’s level, and a pile of other tools.

“Where did those come from?”

“Rabbit and Alteresio pulled a job last night. I’m really pissed off. They stole them.”

“From where?

“From the lumberyard in town.”

“The one we go to all the time?”

“It took a long time for people around here to start accepting us, and now they go burgle them. If they find out who did it, they’ll run us right out of town.”

“I thought Rabbit and Alteresio were still barely on speaking terms.”

“Not about this, apparently.”

I saw Rabbit up near his dome.

He shrugged. “What’s the big deal? We had to liberate those saws. We weren’t getting anything done with those old pieces of shit. We needed some new ones. That guy who runs the lumberyard will just take it as a tax loss. I don’t know why I’m getting all this shit about it from Curly and Clard and Lard and now you. This place is getting faggoty.”

I never spoke to Alteresio about it. I assumed he felt about the same as Rabbit, so what was there to say?

Even though the rest of us were pissed about it, we used the tools anyway. I don’t think the women ever knew it happened.

* * *

Luke Bear arrived, with a big nineteen-year-old kid named Ivan, his helper down in New Mexico. Bear hit the ground running. Within minutes he had us out there laying out the site for the new kitchen complex. He seemed to always be in a few places at the same time, or running between them, laughing and shouting orders. Everybody deferred to him because he was the only one who knew what he was doing, and he wasn’t oppressive about it.

Bear was a maverick. He’d grown up with more money than any of us, but had contempt for that world. He respected people who thought for themselves and who took the initiative to make their ideas come alive. He had no tolerance for bullshit, no matter where it was coming from. He had a fertile mind and was always throwing out a lot of ideas. We started calling him Luke Cool.

Bear’s helper Ivan was at least twice as strong as anybody else; when we were exhausted, he was just working up a sweat. He also ate as much as any three of us, and always polished off everything on the table. We gave Ivan the Dropper name Orval Teen.

We got the foundation posts set in and beams laid between them at floor level. It was over fifty feet from one end to the other.

Then Bear had to return home, but he said he’d be back in a couple of weeks, with a radial arm saw, so we could cut the struts accurately.

* * *

Patt was having a hard time adjusting; she still wasn’t sure that this was the right thing for her to be doing.

“I can’t stand not having any money. We have to answer to everybody for any little thing we want to buy. We can’t even go to a restaurant.”

“If everybody ate at restaurants, we wouldn’t be able to survive.”

“You’d have to get a job. Is that so terrible?”

“Yes.”

“And I’m not going to share my clothes. I worked hard to buy them.” She kept most of her clothes stored away and dressed in overalls and hiking boots.

“I think you just don’t understand what we’re trying to do here.” I sounded like Alteresio arguing with Crayola.

“You’re making yourself permanently poor. That’s all you’re doing. Don’t you want to ever have kids?”

“Someday.”

“How will you support them?”

“The same way the other guys are supporting their kids.”

“By welfare? You’re satisfied with that? You’re proud of it?”

“I don’t have any problem with it. There’s plenty of food in this society. It’s just being hoarded. Everybody should get a fair share.”

“Luke Bear or somebody gives us twenty dollars charity so we can get through the next week, and you seem to feel that’s an accomplishment.”

“It’s not charity. We give Bear a lot in exchange. We’re building his zome.”

“You go on Bear’s trip because he has money. Is that so different from working at a job? Everything’s so temporary here. It’s just... like an empty jar that you let people with money pour whatever they want into.”

“We’re not building Bear’s zome for the money. We’re getting sweat equity.”

“We’re getting a huge place that will be impossible to keep clean, and you guys will expect the women to do it. Maybe they don’t say it to you, but none of the women are happy with this. You guys act like you want us to feed you and clean up after you, and none of you is even willing to go out and get a job.”

“If you’re so hot on somebody getting a job, why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I have.”

Patt had volunteered as a teacher’s aide in El Moro school and began working there a couple times a week. She wasn’t paid, but just enjoyed working with the kids and getting out into the larger community.

She and I continued to have a stormy relationship. Now it was mostly little things about each other that bugged us. She was such a pack rat! She was so slow! My clothes were so messy! I was so impatient! Patt didn’t drive, so she always tried to get me to take her places. Her attitude was that she had to get to some store and therefore I had to take her. She was persistent. That was a source of frequent conflict.

Yet we were becoming very attached to each other. I’d thought that being in a commune would loosen the bonds of primary relationships, but that didn’t seem to be happening. Everybody still maintained or wanted a special relationship with one other person, just like in the big outside world.

* * *

One day the women and Curly came back from town with the news that we’d been cut off food stamps. The regional program director in Pueblo had given the order, with the excuse that we were “poor by choice.”

“I’ll bet you a million bucks to a nickel there’s nothing about that in the law,” Curly sniggered. “We’re taking this up to the Supreme Court.”

“No, we’re not,” Drop Lady said firmly, nursing Mae. “I’m not going to be humiliated by them any more. We don’t need them.”

All the women stood beside her. So we ate a little worse for a while, but adjusted.

* * *

On a shopping expedition in town, a familiar looking Chicano guy came up to Curly and me on the street. “How have you been, my friends?” He shook my hand eagerly. “Don’t you remember me? Me and my cousin gave you a ride last spring.” He turned to Curly. “And I helped you jump start that red truck.”

“I remember you,” I said.

“Oh yeah, you saved my life. T’anks a million,” Curly laughed. “You never came out to visit us, like you said you would.”

“I’m still coming.”

“Anytime, my friend,” Curly said. “Mi casa es tu casa.”

A couple of days later, about eight o’clock at night, he appeared at the kitchen door with his cousin, two girls with red nails and blue eyeshadow, and a case of beer. They squeezed around the table with us and passed out beers.

“I don’t drink,” Clard said.

The cousin pulled out a lid of grass and began rolling joints.

We almost never had alcohol at Drop City, so after a couple of beers and some dope I was flying. We got into a long, rambling conversation. They showed us pictures of their kids and wives, whom the girlfriends said were fat. Curly showed them his seaman’s papers and his union card, which he often displayed to guests, claiming to have been a merchant sailor, though he’d never been to sea. Curly was holding forth in good form and keeping everybody in stitches.

The visitor took a swig of beer. “All of North America should be like this camp.”

“It’s going to be someday.”

“Is it true that anybody can come live here?”

“Of course! Give us your poor and your hungry!” Curly spouted. “Your huddled masses! However the fuck it goes.”

“We’re thinking of taking you up on that,” the other said.

Curly backtracked quickly. “But we’re just a little place. Only so many huddled masses can fit in here, as is obvious.”

The visitor became maudlin. “I got canned from my job, kicked out of my house. Me and my wife and kids, we all had to move in with my cousin here, if not for him my family would be sleeping in a ditch. I love you, man. But we got him in trouble with his landlord too, and now they want to kick us all out. I been staying sometimes with this lovely lady and her sister here, but my wife she keeps threatening to scratch her face up, and her husband’s a crazy man too.”

“My ex-husband,” the girlfriend corrected.

“Anyway, we can’t keep on like this much longer. My cousin here, he’s got four kids of his own in that tiny little place. I’ll join you guys here. I’ll build me a little round shack like this, for me, my wife, and kids. Then we’ll build another shack for my cousin here and his wife and kids. We can be together again. This is all we need.”

It was hard to follow his confused story. Early in the morning they finally left, saying they’d be back in a couple of days.

Curly rubbed his bleary eyes. “Between them they’ve got seven kids. With their wives that makes eleven, not counting their floozies. They probably got lots of other drunk cousins too. They’ll all move in.”

Clard shrugged. “Maybe they can take over Rabbit’s dome, if he ever leaves. I can’t relate to them any more than you can, but that’s just a cultural gap. We need to get along with everybody. Those are the consequences of Drop City.”

However, time went by and they didn’t show up.

* * *

Months passed and we heard no more about Rabbit and Poly leaving. Nobody wanted to ask them about it, but it began to look like they were staying after all, though they never said so.

A lot of mail came almost every day for Rabbit, some of it from various news media around the country. We could tell by the return addresses, when we saw the envelopes. He often was the first one to the mailbox, and almost never showed anybody the letters. Every once in a while a letter would come just addressed to Drop City, but inside was a response to a letter from Rabbit. It became clear that Rabbit was not only staying, but sending off publicity about Drop City to anybody who would listen.

We kept getting underground papers from around the country in the mail with articles about us or mentioning us.

The underground publicity was pretty favorable, but we also got unfavorable publicity in the mainstream media. The Colorado Springs newspaper reported that a state senator had come by, seen us at dinner, and held a press conference. “They were eating spaghetti with their hands. It was the most disgusting thing I have ever seen.”

We got letters from people in little towns in places like South Dakota and Florida, who read about us in local papers. Some were just funny, like the lady who sent us the children’s cautionary tale, “The Little Red Hen.” Other letters were antagonistic and weird. Some of the media were branding Drop City as a haven of drug-crazed hippies bent on corrupting America’s youth.

“Rabbit’s still spending all day in his dome writing letters to the newspapers and to every media person he can think of,” Curly said.

“I’m against any more publicity,” Drop Lady enunciated resolutely.

Curly went on, “He’s still presenting himself as the leader of Drop City, our spokesman. The guy nobody even wants around any more.”

“I’m not thrilled that he’s still around, but I still kind of like Rabbit,” Clard said. “Anyway, guys that nobody wants around have a right to live too.”

“Yeah, but not sitting on my face.”

“Let’s tell him to stop writing to the papers,” I put in.

“As long as he doesn’t actually say that he’s speaking for us, and he doesn’t say he’s our leader, he should write anything he wants,” Clard insisted.

I went up to Rabbit’s dome, socialized a bit, then broached the subject.

“Too much publicity is going to backfire. We don’t want tourist busses coming here, do we?”

He guffawed. “Wouldn’t that be a laugh.”

“Aren’t you still planning on leaving?”

“You bet your sweet ass, as soon as I get it together.”

“If you’re leaving, then why are you still doing this publicity?”

“It can’t be stopped. This is not just about Drop City. This thing is big.”

“You’ll leave and we’ll be stuck with the mess. Can’t we just have a moratorium on publicity for a while?”

“It’s too late to stop now.”

“Don’t throw gas on the fire. We need to try to control it.”

“I am trying to control it.”

“Why not show your letters to the group before you send them?”

“So you can tear them apart and tell me not to send them?”

“So we can change something if we want to.”

“I’ve got to write what I’ve got to write.”

“But it affects the whole community. We’ve got to act together, like a family.”

“We’re all individuals here. We all think for ourselves here. We shouldn’t pretend that we agree about everything. I always say that we’re a leaderless community and I’m writing as an individual.”

“The way you say it sounds like you’re just being modest.”

“I don’t buy this collective identity bullshit. I’m not going to submit to any group identity. In all the history of the world, writing by committee has never produced anything but bullshit.”

“This isn’t poetry. This is publicity.”

“I’m doing this for all of us. I’m trying to get the word out. Peace, love, joy, all blessings.”

“But in reality there’s conflict here. We need healing now, not publicity.”

He shook his head. “People here just don’t see it. They don’t appreciate me. They don’t know what’s good for them. It’s like having to force feed medicine to a baby. I’m the only person here who knows how to communicate with everybody out there. Ask me anything else you want, but don’t ask me to stop writing. Writing’s my life. I can’t stop. I won’t stop. Without publicity it’s like nothing never happened. Whether anybody here appreciates me or not, I’m going to keep on doing what I do. Publicity is what America is about.”

* * *

Chapter 11

THE TRINIDAD WAR

Trinidad was a sleepy town of about six thousand. We didn’t know much about municipal politics until a local candidate, a Chicano who was running for City Council, came out to Drop City and solicited our votes. He explained how Trinidad operated. For the last twenty years a certain barber and a certain realtor took turns alternating as mayor. Everybody ran unopposed. Local politics was managed from the back room of the barber shop. But he was trying to shake up the establishment; our votes would make a difference since most locals didn’t vote, believing that voting never changed things they really cared about. We told him that’s why none of us voted either. In the end he lost badly and our votes wouldn’t have won him the election.

Trinidad was not exactly a cultural center, though it was a junior college town. There wasn’t even a cowboy poetry bar in Trinidad, at least not in those days. But it did have a resident artist laureate, Arthur Roy Mitchell, born on a homestead west of Trinidad in 1889. He became renowned for dramatic western and cowboy paintings that decked the front covers of hundreds of western “pulp” magazines in the thirties and forties. Mitchell founded the Art Department at Trinidad State Junior College, and still taught there, although he was in his dotage. Clard and Lard invited him out to see the work of the Dropper painters but the ancient laureate never made the trek.

One day Clard mentioned the Trinidad War. “You never heard of it? The Trinidad War is famous!”

It hit me just how little I knew about Trinidad and the whole area. If this was to be my home I wanted to understand it more.

Drop City was so anti-historical. That was a strength to the degree that history can weigh you down. But not knowing history also prevents you from understanding a lot. I realized I never heard Colorado Indians mentioned, as I’d expected in the west. I found out that there was only one reservation in Colorado, Ute, in the mountains southwest of Drop City near the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde. To the south the nearest Indians were in New Mexico, at Taos and the other Rio Grande Pueblos.

I asked the town librarian to point me to some local history.

The lower Purgatoire River Valley was once the hunting grounds of Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, and Cheyennes, who followed the buffalo herds. The tribal boundaries shifted over time. The upper Purgatoire, feeding down from the Rockies near the Spanish Peaks, was Ute country, as were the hills to the south, Fisher’s Peak and Raton Pass.

Beginning with Coronado in 1540, Spanish explorers pushed relentlessly north from New Mexico, and by the 1600s, expeditions crossed into Colorado, which they prepared to colonize. Early Spanish maps claimed the Trinidad area. Their first Colorado land grants were on the upper Rio Grande west of Trinidad. At first the Utes traded the Spaniards dried meat and hides for knives and horses, but eventually the Utes became raiders.

The French were also pushing into Colorado, claiming the Trinidad area as part of Louisiana, which wasn’t just today’s state, but a huge region. They moved west along the Arkansas river from the Mississippi, opening the area to fur trappers and traders, reaching the Purgatoire before 1700. Purgatoire was the French name, but sometimes people still called it the Purgatorio, its original Spanish name, which the river got because a group of Spaniards were killed there by Indians, and were considered condemned to Purgatory because they died without Last Rites. There were armed skirmishes between the French and the Spanish. This colonial dispute was mostly in their imagination, since southern Colorado was firmly Indian country during this entire period.

With their defeat by the British in 1763, the French relinquished their claim to the Trinidad area. They ceded it however not to Britain but to Spain. Napoleon grabbed it all back for France, then sold it to Thomas Jefferson. The French oire of Purgatoire took on the anglicized pronunciation of ore. Since the western boundary of French Louisiana had never been fixed, the Trinidad area was then a no-man’s land disputed between Spain and the United States. A treaty finally put it into New Spain, which became Mexico in 1821.

In that same year the Santa Fe Trail was opened, and American traders and settlers began pouring west. The trail swung south to meet the Goodnight Loving Trail coming down from Denver. It was at this crossroads that the first scratchings of Trinidad appeared, a supply center for the trails. However, Raton Pass was too rough for wagons, so for another half century the Trinidad area remained a backwater.

In 1843 the Mexican governor in Santa Fe issued a grant for the Trinidad area, along with over four million acres of land, to the justice of the peace of Taos and an American trading partner. The aftermath of the Mexican War left the entire northern half of Mexico—including Trinidad—in the hands of the United States. Although the treaty required that the United States honor Mexican land grants, in 1860 the US Congress sold off the Trinidad area, opening it to American settlement. Confusion reigned.

Soon after, the area became part of Colorado Territory. It was still just a few houses, a blacksmith shop, and a saloon. The question arose of a name. The only proposal was made by one Sr. Gabriel Gutiérrez, who suggested the name Trinidad in memory not of the Holy Trinity, but of a girlfriend he’d left behind in Santa Fe.

Meanwhile the Kiowa, Southern Arapaho, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanches were pushed out of the Colorado Plains toward Indian Territory (eventually Oklahoma). Much of the history wasn’t pretty. In November, 1864, during a snowstorm, without warning, soldiers attacked a Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek, east of Trinidad, killing about 650 Cheyennes, most of them women, children, and elders.

Trinidad became a typical western frontier town, the scene of numerous bar-room brawls, cattle rustlers, horse thieves, lynch mobs, inter-racial strife, and skirmishes with neighboring Utes and plains tribes. An ethnically diverse place, an early Trinidad directory listed Mexicans, Blacks, Italians, Germans, Jews, and Indians among those living and working there. Professions listed included barbers, cooks, jewelers, porters, laborers, lawmen, artists, and musicians. The favorite local lynching tree was in an arroyo still known as Hangman’s Hollow. Kit Carson was a frequent visitor, and his statue still provided a popular bird perch in a park named after him.

One building from this era still stood opposite the Post Office on Main Street, Baca House, a two-story adobe built in 1865. The downtown Historical District of Trinidad still tried to retain the old flavors, with brick streets and some faux Spanish-Mexican architecture.

In 1867 the Denver & Santa Fe Stage Line made the first direct coach connection between Trinidad and Denver, carrying the first direct mail run. The express trip took thirty-six hours. In that same year the first commercial coal mine in the area opened.

Though there was a large Mexican population, Anglos controlled Trinidad and there was often friction. On New Year’s Day, 1868, in a drunken brawl, an Anglo stage coach driver shot a Mexican. The Anglo was arrested but sixty of his friends stormed the jail and freed him. The Anglos barricaded themselves inside a hotel, while outside three hundred Mexicans laid siege. A gun battle raged into the night. The Army arrived and declared martial law. This was the Trinidad War. Tensions continued high but never erupted on that level again.

Many claimants to the old land grant around Trinidad stepped forward. A decade of confusion passed without it getting sorted out.

The Denver & Rio Grande Railroad began extending their narrow-gauge line to all the mining camps along the eastern foothills, and decided to build a terminal town at the future site of Drop City, where land was still almost free. In 1876 they named it El Moro, which remained the local designation for the barrio. The name comes from El Moro castle in Havana, Cuba, built in a Moorish style, which the silhouette of Fisher’s Peak reminded somebody of. At Drop City we incorrectly believed el moro was Spanish for moor or swamp, which we thought was aptly funny. We didn’t have a Spanish dictionary at Drop City.

El Moro sprang up at an incredible rate. Within months the depot and warehouses had been built, streets laid out, buildings constructed, businesses opened. By the end of the summer of 1876 El Moro was a town of two thousand people, a hundred buildings, with its own newspaper and coke ovens producing for distant markets. At this very time Colorado became a US state. With the coming of the railroad, commercial coal mining in the area blossomed. But El Moro and Trinidad were too close; one of the towns had to die; when a broad-gauge railroad line finally arrived in Trinidad from the north, it sealed the fate of the narrow-gauge road and El Moro. In 1879 the broad-gauge Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe opened rail traffic over Raton pass into New Mexico. El Moro became a ghost town, dismantled, scavenged, and eventually reverting to prairie, leaving almost no trace. However, the site remained laid out into small parcels, which is why Curly and Jo had been able to buy the land.

Cattle ranching and agriculture were the main pursuits of settlers around Trinidad at first, but huge coal deposits lay beneath the hills and mountains. By 1900 John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Corporation, CF&I, had acquired mineral rights to much of the land and had many mines in operation.

With the coal boom came a flood of new immigrants, many almost directly off the boats onto trains headed to promised work in the mines. They were from all over Europe, particularly Greece, Italy, the Slavic countries, as well as Ireland and England; from the west coast came Chinese and other Asians.

Dozens of “company towns” and mining camps sprouted along the Purgatoire valley west of Trinidad, including Cokedale, Sopris, Segundo, Tercio, Valdez. Most of these belonged to CF&I or one of the smaller coal companies. Wages were very low and the work, primarily pick and shovel, was brutal. The miners were often paid in scrip, redeemable only at the company store. Workers were shortchanged and subjected to daily racist abuse.

The mine workers began to rebel. In 1913-1914, the coal field strikes in southern Colorado led to armed confrontation between striking miners and the Colorado militia. On Sept. 23, 1913 at Trinidad’s West Theater, immigrant miners from twenty-six nations gathered and pledged to take no more abuse.

Governor Rockefeller’s family owned the mines at Ludlow, where the strike culminated in one of the bloodiest skirmishes in American labor history. The legendary Mother Jones was there, but was arrested and imprisoned for two months in the Mt. San Rafael hospital in Trinidad, and then again in the basement of the Walsenburg County jail. Rockefeller called out the state militia, under the command of veterans of the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee. The strikers and their families, mainly Greek and Italian immigrants, had moved into a tent colony near the mine. On April 20, 1914, the militia sprayed the tents with bullets and torched them. When she was finally released, Mother Jones traveled across the country, telling the story of the Ludlow Massacre.

The United Mine Workers of America finally succeeded in unionizing the Colorado coal fields in the 1930s. But by then mining in southeastern Colorado was in decline. The Trinidad area became very depressed, not only in mining but in farming and ranching. It was part of the Dust Bowl. The New Deal cooperative irrigation and electrification projects helped lift the region off its back. Then of course there was the Japanese internment camp. The decline in mining accelerated in the fifties and sixties. By 1966 only one mine on the upper Purgatoire was still in operation; all the other mining camps near Trinidad were ghost towns.

The descendants and ghosts of all those people and events still hovered over the whole area. I began to understand a little better who my neighbors were and where I was.

* * *

I drove with Clard and Alteresio up to Ludlow, about thirty miles north, scouting for good scavenging sites. We’d heard there was a ghost town there. We were in the old black pickup, which we always tried to park on a hill because you had to start it by pushing.

The Highway Patrol stopped us, as they usually did when they saw us on the freeway, always pretending to find something wrong with our vehicles. They never gave us tickets for our supposed violations, just warnings. We knew they were hoping to catch us smoking dope, but they never did.

Not far from the highway turnoff at Ludlow, right where the pavement stopped and the gravel began, was a plaque, set up by the United Mine Workers, AFL-CIO, commemorating the site of the Ludlow Massacre. I vaguely recalled a Woody Guthrie song about it, that Odessa used to sing at Ernesto’s pad back in New York. Abandoned mining equipment was everywhere and rusting.

The plaque said that during the long and bitter strike of 1914, the miners moved into a tent colony. The state militia shot into the camp with a machine-gun and burned it down, killing twenty, mostly children and women. Looking across a field with a few cattle, I could see the grassy spot where, according to the plaque, the tent city had stood.

We continued on along the gravel road until we came to a small boarded-up town. The road went right through the main street. It was all fenced off with barbed wire and posted with No Trespassing signs. Alteresio parked the truck on a side street and he, Clard, and I began poking around, peeking in boarded windows. A sudden honking made us almost jump out of our pants.

We hurried back to the truck. A big new white pickup was parked next to ours, a white-haired guy in a white cowboy hat behind the wheel, a younger cowboy next to him, and behind them two rifles on a gun rack. He nailed us a look as we sheepishly sauntered over.

“Okay if we look around?” I called from about twenty feet away.

He waited to answer until we got a couple of yards from the cab. “Where you boys from?”

“We live over near Trinidad,” Clard answered sheepishly.

“What you doing here?”

“Just looking around,” Alteresio said. “Who are you?”

“I control this land.”

“You own this town?”

“You have any business here?”

“We just wanted to see the ghost town.”

“Well, you seen it.”

As usual, the black pickup wouldn’t start. Clard and I pushed it, Alteresio jumped the clutch, the engine sputtered, died. But on the next try it caught. We beat a hasty retreat back to Drop City.

* * *

Next: MEMORIES OF DROP CITY, PART 5

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