Story by Jordan Bentz
Photos by Alex Stoltze
Take a right off Oregon’s Interstate 5, past a strip of used car lots and a repair shop with a sign that claims to “make friends by accident;” follow the highway through a canyon, past the barbed-wire fences of the C-2 Cattle Ranch and onto a tapering gravel road; park at the Camp Latgawa turn-around and cross the wooden bridge over the Dead Indian River; hike through an oak swale and up the switchbacks leading to Eagle Point; find the trail marked with yellow ribbons and continue on the footpath until it splits around the trunk of a colossal tree: meet Grandfather, an elder of the Order of the Trees and gatekeeper of the Eloin Commune.
The self-proclaimed Abbess Anne Roberts, a wiry woman in a checkered plaid shirt and dirtied jeans, instructs her guests to remove their caps in the presence of Grandfather Tree. She mutters an incantation and runs her fingers down the rutted trunk. Sunlight filters through the vaulted canopy and falls on her close-cropped ivory hair; the backlit boughs of the trees above look like stained-glass windows. Anne breaks from her trance and asks Grandfather Tree permission to continue before turning down the path.
“You know, the sap of that tree is only one molecule different from our blood,” Anne says, keeping pace with a Golden Retriever-Great Pyrenees mix named Noodles.
Though Eloin members adhere to a peculiar set of beliefs, the idyllic forest retreat is a far cry from one of Oregon’s more notorious communes of the 1980s, the Rajneeshpuram community.
Rolls-Royce processions and brightly clad followers characterized the Rajneeshpuram commune, the cult-of-personality built around renegade Indian holy man Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on a 64,000-acre ranch in Eastern Oregon. The group sought to take over Wasco County by importing thousands of homeless to register as voters on the eve of commission elections and by sickening hundreds in The Dalles with salmonella poisoning. Rajneesh fled but was caught and deported back to India, and the group left Oregon after stores of assault weapons and a germ lab were found on the ranch.
The resulting newscasts vilified communes nationwide, and brought them back in to the public lexicon. Despite this highly publicized instance, Anne and the other Eloin live-ins have learned to deal with outsiders’ misconceptions.
“We’re very esoteric, weird, and out there,” Anne asserts with a puckish grin.
Anne is prone to such musings, usually interspersed in light-hearted small talk. Hiking with the former tennis pro and ski instructor is mentally and physically exhausting. Her stories are a series of eco-conscious manifestos, suffused with folksy sentimentality. The teachings of Lao Tzu, Henry David Thoreau, and Neil Young color her words. She talks extensively of the ecosystem being a living entity and of her inseparable bond with the natural world.
“The air contains every single mineral and nutrient we need to exist; so this world is us, and we’re it,” Anne says.
Anne and her housemates’ way of life harkens back to a bygone era, a time when the desire for a back-to-basics lifestyle prompted an exodus to undeveloped regions of the Pacific Northwest.
These disillusioned masses sought respite from the rampant materialism that accompanied the post-war economic boom. They turned their backs on the American Dream, abandoned the pursuit of a material comfort, and left in search of something more.
At Alpha Farm, an idyllic cooperative nestled in western Oregon’s coastal forests, achieving this ideal has been a constant pursuit for members of the small homestead.
On this particular Friday, the property bustles with activity. Outside the farm’s makeshift chicken coop, a young girl with wire-framed glasses and a gap-toothed grin scatters handfuls of feed. Under the nearby awning of the storeroom, a bearded thirty-something man quarters cross-sections from a felled tree. A man in a beret plans the once-weekly prix fixe dinner menu—Cornish game hen with gravy, sweet corn, and homemade apple pie—for the cooperative’s secondary revenue stream, a restaurant called Alpha Bit. A small fleet of vehicles sequestered in a muddy parking lot constitutes the community’s other revenue source: a mail route along the winding highways outside the town of Deadwood, contracted by the US Postal Service.
Alpha Farm residents volunteer to lead weekly tours of the property. Today, “Poz,” short for “Pozitivity,”—the name adopted by Kevin Raymond, a wayward environmental studies graduate and former bank teller—leads the convoy. He stops by Alpha Farm’s namesake patchwork of garden plots and greenhouses, where workers till an organic compost blend and smoke hand-rolled cigarettes in the drizzling rain. An old transistor radio plays Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Judy Blue Eyes”—a song that the folk trio debuted at the inaugural Woodstock Festival.
In many ways, Alpha Farm is a microcosm of a growing movement toward self-sustaining, interpersonal, hyper-connected communities committed to advancing the greater good. These are the new utopias.
The Communities Directory, a publication promoting intentional communities across the globe, has seen a steady increase in applicants over the past two decades. In the early 1990s, only 300 communities were listed. Today, there are more than 1,800. Like Alpha Farm, many of these communities have a stable source of income and formalized rules of governance. They strive for self-sufficiency, and work to lessen their impact on the natural world.
These communities are nothing like the image of hedonistic, cultish, drug-addled communes of old—a point emphasized by the Alpha Farm cofounders.
“We prefer the term ‘intentional community,’ rather than commune,” says Alpha Farm cofounder Caroline Estes from the living room of the house she shares with her husband Jim. “Intentional communities are long-lived; communes are casual . . . that’s why a lot of communes start here, because people come and live a short time, usually with very little commitment.”
For the past thirty-eight years, the couple have lived and worked on Alpha Farm. Jim and Caroline met while studying journalism and political science (respectively) at the University of California at Berkeley. They spent their first date at a Bay Area jazz club and dated on and off until marrying in 1958. Together, they were to advocate change in the burgeoning movements of the day, in marching with luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez. Jim served as an editor for the San Francisco Chronicle, while Caroline worked as an organizer with the National Student Association on the politically charged Berkeley campus. After leaving San Francisco, the couple migrated north in search of a plot of land, where they sought to establish a lasting community. They found refuge on an old Swedish homestead and named it after Alpha, the first homesteaders’ daughter.
“‘Commune’ also carries all the semantic weight, like ‘they’re just sitting around smoking dope all the time, not doing any work,’” Jim adds. “There were two or three such communes in this valley when we came here . . . they didn’t last.”
A dry-erase board in the living room of the Estes’s house outlines the weekly work schedule for the members of Alpha Farm. The list of workers is nearly twenty names long, and everyone here works in service of the community.
“Living in a community is hard work; it’s not this laid-back, peaceful, non-problematic lifestyle,” Caroline says. “You’re faced with problems all the time, many of your own making, and you have to learn how to live all over again.”
The Estes’s work to create an environment that is productive but also conducive to a happy, healthy lifestyle.
“There’s another aspect,” Jim adds. “I think the commune era was decidedly negative—people were just running from things, running from the city. People who come here are coming to something.”
This distinction is an important one for Alpha Farm members. The community strives for permanence. Meanwhile, the Eloin property offers visitors a chance for an escape from the modern world. While many members stay for months, even years at a time, Anne is the one permanent fixture.
Anne acts as the spiritual guru of the small woodland commune and steward of The Order of the Trees. Admittance to the Order requires a six-month trial period of living on the property.
Members accepted to the order develop deep-rooted connections with the natural world by attuning to the voices of the “Standing Nation”—a native colloquialism for the collective spirit of the forests. Some claim to speak the language of the trees, others simply find solace under the wooded canopies of the old-growth forest.
“You could say that the order is a legal umbrella that allows us to be an organization that has the validity to live and study the way we want,” Anne says.
For the past twenty-five years, Eloin’s holding organization, The Oahspe Foundation—a government recognized nonprofit organization—has worked to preserve the old-growth forests in the valleys of southern Oregon. When a timber company advanced to the edge of property, the community banded together, took a stand and prevented any further development.
“In a way, we’re the guardians of the valley,” Anne says, entering the commune.
The beaten dirt path opens to a piecemeal compound: a cluster of buildings made from various construction site cast-offs and on-site timber. A pair of miniature donkeys interrupts the procession. They are the first of a four-legged welcoming party that also includes two cats, three mares and Noodles, the Retriever mix. One of the commune’s “3,000-lbs poodles,” a mare named Leana, follows Anne to the planked porch of the headquarters. Eloin eschews a hierarchical structure in favor of consensus decision-making. Biweekly meetings held in a cavernous, columned, pink and turquoise hall address the concerns of the small community. Members share meals, incomes, common spaces and the considerable workload around the property.
They work periodically in the towns outside the commune to bring in additional revenue. Anne recently brokered a deal with the United States Forest Service to manage a thinning project aimed at fire prevention. Although the thought of the Eloin inhabitants brandishing chainsaws seems comical given their eco-centric lifestyles, Anne says she much prefers working in the forest to spending any additional time in “the other world.”
Presently, there are four people living on the property, though the Eloin facilities can accommodate as many as twenty-five people. In these washed-out winter months, the luster of the forested retreat is tempered by the prospect of toiling long hours for little more than a roof to sleep under, three meals a day, and the simple satisfaction of working to stay alive. Today, four of the houses built by the community are completely empty. The great hall, ornately built and furnished by the helping hands of several dozen former inhabitants, is cold and empty.
Although the membership rates for the community are lower today than in years past, Anne is adapting to the digital age by contacting interested parties via an online directory. She types these e-mails from a public computer in a nearby campsite. While seemingly a contradiction, Anne’s decision to “plug into the grid” is a visceral sign of the times, and proof that adaptability is the common denominator on the modern commune.
After a hearty vegetarian lunch, Anne reenters the forest to visit Grandmother Tree, the eldest member of the old-growth forest and leader of the Standing Nation—not to get confused with the commune’s guarding Grandfather. She enters a clearing and walks up to the base of the behemoth fir. She leans into a natural indentation in the base of the trunk and looks skywards toward the branches of the tree, eyes closed, completely immersed in her surroundings.
She wishes her Grandmother well and continues back on the path to the Eloin compound. She relates the story of when she first spoke with the great tree:
“I asked Grandmother Tree how she became bigger and stronger and wiser than all the other trees in the forest,” Anne says, “and she said that she simply reached for the sun every day.”
This sense of determinism underlies much of the work on the Eloin property—and to a greater degree, Alpha Farm—where idleness and individualism give way to the rigors of a community-oriented, subsistence-based way of life. And in a way, those living on the communes are also reaching towards the sun, forever in pursuit of a better and brighter future.
