From The Road Back and Hitchhiking overview

Leaving the Farm was the beginning of my transition out of the counterculture, and it was not easy. Here’s a table I developed recently to help me untangle the two times I left the Farm. The first time was December 1971, the second time was January 1972.

Here’s what I wrote about about leaving the first time in my Antioch portfolio of 1976.

…looking back I think there was a major flaw and that was that everything had to be cleared through one finite individual. In purporting to speak for all of us, Stephen could do whatever he wanted on a whim and everybody would follow. It was too much power for any one man. Especially when we moved out to Tennessee, and isolated ourselves from sophisticated criticism, Stephen became more and more an autocrat. But people within the community did not see it that way. Every so often somebody would leave and stir up a few waves, but by this time Stephen had consolidated so much power that I never felt, let alone heard, any doubt expressed about his role in the community by members of the community.

For almost the whole time the feedback was that whenever you believed in the agreement of the community you were OK. There was total validation for agreement. Only toward the end, when I started to want to honor my own inner voice, did I start to get negative feedback. Stephen’s partner Michael told me that I wanted “infinite elbow room.”

I heard Michael, as Stephen’s ‘enforcer’,  telling me to shape up or ship out. I decided I would leave in the morning and hitchhike to San Francisco to study with Suzuki Roshi. I read the Diamond Sutra and went to bed. In the morning I hitchhiked. The first ride was to Nashville. Maybe I got a ride to Dallas. I called my parents for a bus ticket home. Dad told me yes, but this is the last time.

When I got home I read Freud’s Civilization and It’s Discontents in my old bedroom, about the horde killing the primal father. I talked  with my old friend Bill Welch who had been “excommunicated” by Stephen, and borrowed money from him for a plane ticket to Tennessee.

I returned to the Farm thinking I wanted to be there but I was deeply ambivalent and confused. Stephen held a public meeting shortly after I arrived and basically told me to leave immediately, and don’t come back until I paid back Bill Welch. The idea was Stephen would “assign a yoga” as a teaching device for somebody to clear up their individual karma so it didn’t affect them or the community.  What it immediately meant for me was that I was put out on the road in a ten degree Tennessee winter with no money or pack and a pair of old overalls, picking icicles out of my moustache.

My first thought was to get out of the icy weather and head toward Orlando, where a Farm crew was picking oranges, and the weather would be warmer. Somehow I got a ride to Birmingham Alabama, where somebody pointed me toward the Jimmie Hale Rescue Mission. There I had a warm meal and a warm night’s sleep on the condition that I go to the chapel service. I was almost converted by the intensity of the preacher. His shout of “Not too many people believe in Jesus the way that AAHHHH  believe in Jesus!!”, still resounds in my ears 44 years later. I knew I had really hit bottom.

After Birmingham, my next ride toward Orlando took me as close as Tampa. It was warmer, but I still had no money, nothing to eat, and no place to sleep. I think I saw a note on a wall about the Holy Order of Mans, saying they had free room and meal for somebody in my situation. I walked over to the place and stayed the night. It was not nearly as memorable as the Jimmie Hale Mission, but since those two days I have appreciated places that take care of people who have totally fallen through the social safety net. They saved my life. 

The next morning I got myself over to Orlando. In the meantime I had learned that the orange picking crew had finished their work and gone back to Tennessee. I went over to the Orlando Manpower office and got a job for the day working in the huge industrial laundry at Disney World. Then with my money for the day I got a room in a depressing seedy flophouse and called my Uncle Marsh in Malibu to send me the money for a plane ticket to San Francisco.

I knew this was really the end of the line because the last time my father sent me money for a ticket home he said no more after that. Now I was hitting on his wealthier brother for the first time. When I had the plane ticket I called Tom Hart, who had been my drumming partner in the Phoenix in 1969, and was now a San Francisco cabbie, to pick me up at the SFO airport so I could crash on his couch. I would somehow try to re-establish myself in San Francisco without a band. Maybe find a way to study at the SF Zen Center, which is where I thought I was headed when I left the Farm the first time.