Hippie trip

Jane Hoback, Rocky Mountain News "D

Published February 21, 2003 at midnight

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Drop City?" somebody asks in T.C. Boyle's new novel. "Isn't that where everybody's nude and they just (have sex) and do dope all day long?"

Pretty much. And the assembled "cats" and "chicks" do it a lot in Boyle's depiction of a northern California hippie commune in the early 1970s.

Boyle, whose earlier works - The Road to Wellville, East is East, Tortilla Curtain - are darkly comic and hyperactive satires peopled with oddballs and caricatures, has taken a serious turn in his more recent Riven Rock and A Friend of the Earth.

Drop City, Boyle's ninth novel, is grimmer still. And while it is replete with suspense and brutality, crises of ideals and conscience, lush imagery and even some compelling characters, it is, like one of the commune's meals of salmon mush, filling but vaguely unsatisfying anyway.

Drop City's leader is Norm Sender, who inherited 47 acres along the Russian River in Sonoma, Calif., and founded Drop City so like-minded brothers and sisters can "turn on, tune in, drop out and just live there on the land doing your own thing, whether that's milking the goats or working the kitchen or the garden or doing repairs or skewering mule deer or just staring at the sky in all your contentment - and I don't care who you are - you are welcome."

Among the inhabitants - Sky Dog and Mendocino Bill, Tom Krishna and Che, Rain and Harmony and Merry - are Paulette, who has taken the name Star, and Ronnie, who calls himself Pan. The couple have driven cross-country to escape straitlaced parents and predictable lives. When Marco, a draft-dodger from Connecticut, arrives, he and Star soon pair off.

This is, after all, the era of Free Love, which, as the men constantly remind the women, means "making it with anybody who asked . . . whether you felt like it or not," but which Star begins to suspect was "just an invention of some cat . . . who couldn't get laid any other way or under any other regime."

Star is a victim of her circumstance. Whether at home, where she taught school and wore Peter Pan collars and pantsuits just as her mother did, or at Drop City, where she milks the goats and prepares lentil soup for 100 and has sex with whoever asks, she acquiesces. Every culture carries its own expectations.

The women do all the cooking and cleaning and most of the gardening and other domestic chores in Drop City, but they don't mind. Nobody has a job, yet they always seem to have enough money for food and the requisite tie-dyed shirts and bell- bottoms and granny dresses and record albums and drugs - marijuana and LSD and heroin - that anybody could ask for.

But all is not well in Utopia. Disagreements fester. The gang rape of a 14-year-old girl led by the "spades" Lester and Franklin - Drop City's only black residents - causes a growing rift. The endless coils of human waste left around the ranch that nobody wants to deal with, the drugs, the procession of weekend hippies have finally prompted the authorities to condemn the property.

Norm proposes the tribe begin anew in Boynton, Alaska, where he also has inherited property and where everybody can "groove on the sky and the wildflowers and the river." They paint an old school bus in psychedelic colors and head north to Alaska, the "last truly free place on this whole continent," as Marco sees it.

Meanwhile in Boynton, the "dead and final end of the last road in the country," Sess Harder, a hard-drinking fur trapper "annealed by adversity," is looking for a wife so he won't turn into a squirrelly "coot." Sess, whose former girlfriend deserted him because she couldn't tolerate the isolation, finds the perfect mate in Pamela McCoon, who longs to return to the "beauty and the safety" of the Alaskan bush she loved as a child, and wants an experienced woodsman to share it with. "She'd always believed in the kind of probity that comes of sparseness and the ascetic lifestyle."

But all is not well here, either. Sess' savage feud with Joe Bosky, a bush pilot, threatens to reel out of control.

When Drop City's magic bus descends on Boynton, the two worlds collide. Friendships develop and hostilities flare as the two sides try - or refuse to try - to understand each other.

Despite the "solace of the Thirtymile River, the clarity of the air," living off the land of Alaskan winters is a far tougher experiment than in temperate California. When Norm abandons the tribe, the fantasy of communal nirvana fades fast and tests the resolve of those who remain as the book reaches its violent conclusion. Life might be a trip, but it's an unforgiving and cold and dirty and smelly one.

Boyle makes obvious the parallels. There are different ways to drop out. The opposing factions share a love of freedom to do what they want, to live off the land, to simplify life. Pamela and Sess don't understand the clothes and the drugs of these flower children. But they get drunk nearly as often as the hippies get stoned. Boyle's Alaskans are far more grounded and experienced. Star admires Pamela's strength and independence, but can't seem to make the leap herself. Marco is the breakaway, the moral center of the book. Caught between the two worlds, he alone seems to understand the consequences of each. He strives to strip life to its essentials and still find "human mercy in a place that had none to spare."

Boyle employs every cliché he can muster. The language is forced. In characteristic fashion, he repeats again and again scenes of getting high, preparing meals, swarms of mosquitos, human filth.

There is plenty of Boyle's caricature here. But he manages to dig deep, too. The central characters are driven by a determined desperation, plodding toward some inevitable disappointment. Yet they survive. When Marco, hunting for meat for the group, tries to shoot a moose, he gets a porcupine instead. And he has to kick it to death because he has no bullets left.

Boyle exposes the hypocrisy of the rampant sexism and racism of the era. But he leaves a disturbing and unexplained imprint. Why, in a commune of 60 people, where the men push themselves relentlessly on the women, does he make the only two black characters in the book the fall guys for the brutal rape of a 14-year-old girl?

Boyle is wholly unsympathetic to these flower children, depicted for the most part as immature, selfish, duplicitous and just plain stupid rather than simply naive.

But he turns surprisingly self-righteous, too. In one of the book's innumerable passages where everybody must get stoned, this time so do the children. When they beg unknowingly for orange juice that has been laced with LSD for the adults, their frustrated mother, releasing a string of expletives, concludes: "I don't care. Give (them) juice."

In the aftermath, one of the kids nearly drowns and has to be revived. Another, suffering from a paranoid drug trip, gets lost in the woods. "How could anybody be expected to do anything at a time like this? They were wiped, all of them. They didn't want to save children, they wanted to be children."

Jane Hoback is an assistant business editor at the Rocky Mountain News.

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