-- By Fred Owens
Illabot Creek
I was in Marblemount, Washington, in
70 and 71. By 1972 I was living in Manhattan and selling balloons in Central
Park. Then I worked at a mental hospital for teenage children outside of New
York -- I did that for nine months, then I hitched down to Texas and partied in
Austin for the spring of 1973, then I got in with a gang of hippies wandering
around Mexico in an old school bus.
I came back to Marblemount in 1978
with a pregnant wife and two kids. I did not have any fun at that time in my
life, but I am glad that I had the children.
By 1979, I realized I could never make a
living up river so we moved to LaConner. .... I should write a book ---- oh, I
have written a book.
That
was the email I sent to Young Dave. He lives somewhere in Oregon and I get a
nice greeting from him every New Years with news of his family.
We
called him Young Dave because he was only 16 or so during the Commune Days…. when
we all lived in a heap up in Marblemount, way up in the Cascades, pitching
tents in the forest, cooking over a fire, not bothering to clean up. What I
remember about cooperative living is nobody wanted to clean up. The garbage
piled up in plastic bags, but there was no take it to the dump committee. And
old cars that barely made it up from Seattle came to die on the very end of
Clark Road where the commune settled.
The
commune started with the best of intentions in late 1969 when a van load of
hippies, following a star, came upon a fairly nice log cabin at the end of
Clark Road in Marblemount. Someone --- I know who, but there is no reason to
tell here – someone had money from a family fortune and the cabin was bought
and occupied.
First
thing they did was tear out the plumbing and electricity – they were gonna live
off the grid, and that first winter it was fine. People stayed warm and
well-fed and played guitars and danced with tambourines. Glenn and Sheri had
their baby born naturally by candle light, and fifteen people shared the
upstairs sleeping places.
By
spring time word got out and people flooded in. Everybody from Los Angeles to Seattle
who wanted to live in a commune got on a vehicle of some kind and rode up to
Clark Road and by the dawn of July 12,
there were easily a hundred hippies camped there – July 12 being a memorable
day, the day of Henry David Thoreau’s birthday.
Thoreau,
if he had been alive to see one hundred hippies crammed into ten acres of
second-growth cedar and alder forest, playing with nature, and pretending to
live for free – if he had seen it, he would have fled all the way back to
Walden Pond.
But
as it was, that day was the high-water mark for the Marblemount Commune. Randy
Oliver – more or less the leader – filled a large pipe with an ounce of
marijuana and passed it around the one-hundred strong circle. It all went up in
smoke.
It
was just too crowded. The outhouse overflowed and nobody washed the dishes. Once
the food stamps ran out, the lightweights hitched a ride back to Seattle and
left their debris and sodden sleeping bags piled in heaps.
But
a few of us were more serious and that included Young Dave and myself and Larry
D’Arienzo, Steve Philbrick and one or two dozen steady hands who actually wanted
to make a life of it, and not just a game.
The
woods caught on fire that summer and we all got hired for fire crews. Kindy
Creek was ablaze and Jordan Creek was a blaze, and both fires were close to the
commune. Back then you didn’t get trained for fire crew. If you showed up at
the fire camp, sober and wearing a decent pair of boots, then they gave you a
shovel or a pick and sent you down the trail, earning good wages, fighting fire
12-14 hours a day. With those fires and several others, we made enough money to
get through the winter.
My
girlfriend and I did not pitch a tent at the commune like so many others did.
We rented a house because we were high-class hippies, with hot running water
and a roof that did not leak. We lived in the house that first winter, until
January of 1971 when it caught fire and burned to the ground due to the idiotic
unskilled attendance of – actually it was my fault – for letting damp kindling
dry out too close to the wood stove and then leaving the house to visit some
friends.
I
remember hearing Mike Stafflin chant a Buddhist prayer as we all held our bowls
of rice over at the commune – while he chanted I heard the fire sirens calling
the volunteers. Someone’s house was on fire, and I wondered who could that be,
and I found out soon enough it was my rented house. I never did meet the owner.
I paid the $50 month rent to Ernie Green who owned the Log Cabin Restaurant.
After
the house burned, not Ernie nor anyone else gave me a hard time or asked how it
happened. It did happen and that was that.
So
we pitched a tent somewhere, but we pitched it in a wrong place and a heavy rain
sent a gravel stream into our teepee
living room. Then we moved down the valley to the Old Day Creek Road Commune
which was more solidly structured in that they didn’t let just anybody live
there,
We
lasted two months at Old Day Creek Road, but my girlfriend didn’t like it
there, so we got another teepee and pitched it by Diobsud Creek on property
owned by a dentist from Bellingham. We should have asked his permission, but we
thought he wouldn’t mind. He did mind and he asked us to leave.
Now
we were stuck. We never thought to ask Gordy Campbell for help. Gordy was a friendly Upper Skagit
Indian and he was always drunk. He would take a quart of whiskey and just drain
it until he keeled over and passed out. You might find him passed out asleep
somewhere with a sweet smile on his face.
We
liked him. Everybody did. But we didn’t know that his family owned twenty acres
of land on Illabot Creek.
“You
can live on our property if you want to, “ Gordy said, like a miracle.
So
my girl friend and I cut a path through the bush to the property on the creek,
followed by at least fifty other hippies who wanted to camp there too -- leaving all the junked cars that piled up
on the end of Clark Road, leaving all the soggy sleeping bags and heaps of
garbage and going to Illabot Creek which may have never been occupied by any
person on earth – known all the time to the Upper Skagit Indians, but they had
other places to live.
That’s
a speculation anyway. We pitched our camp there and hoped more fires would
start in the woods somewhere so that we could work and make money.
But
there were only one or two small fires in the summer of 1971 and we made little
money and I broke up with my girlfriend. I was so unhappy about that that I
left Illabot Creek and rode all the way down to Taos, New Mexico. I didn’t stay
there long. I kept going.
Seven
years later I was married to a woman from Oklahoma. She was pregnant, we had a
one-year-old boy and we had her son, my stepson, who was 8 years old -- the
full catastrophe.
We
had been living in a school bus parked in the back yard of my sister’s house in
Venice Beach, California. I had a full-time job as a shipping clerk, and when I
earned enough money to rent an apartment, we went looking and ran into “no pets
and no children.” To this day, because my sister still lives on California
Street in Venice Beach, I can walk by the modest bungalow that we might have
rented except the landlord said too many children, sorry, no deal. I walk by
that bungalow and think how my life would have been different if that landlord
had taken my money and let us live there.
But
I got mad at this and we headed back to Marblemount – which was an over-reaction
to that problem. We went up to Marblemount in June of 1978 and decided to go
back to live on Illabot Creek. At least until we could find a place to rent.
The other hippies living there didn’t want any newcomers pitching tents. “I can
understand that,” I said to them. “But I have never left a junk car at the end
of the road. I have never left a pile of beer cans and garbage or soggy wet
sleeping bags. I have never stolen from other camps. In short, I have never
been the kind of trouble you don’t want. In fact, I don’t want those kind of
people either. “
They
weren’t quite ready to take my word for it, or my pledge of good conduct, and
they said they would think about it and maybe I could live there and maybe not.
“It’s
not your property,” I said, “and it’s not for you to say if we can live here.
Seven years ago Gordy Campbell said I could come and live on Illabot Creek any
time I chose to and until he comes by and says no, I’m planning to camp here.”
Which
is what we did.
To be continued
I’m
not saying when I will continue this story. I don’t like to spend too much time
thinking about the past. It was only hearing from Young Dave that got me
started.
It
would take me about 500 pages and a hundred thousand words to tell the whole
story and bring in all the people in Marblemount in those days -- Glenn Mazen,
Ralph Dexter, Plunker Barry, Chuck and Annie , Pete Cuthbert and so many more
people.
Maybe
if I just wrote about Glenn Mazen….. The last time I saw Glenn Mazen was maybe
twenty years later, maybe in 1998. It was down in Seattle. I went to the
Central Tavern on Pioneer Square and had a beer. I heard this guy pounding the
pin ball machine, shaking it and cursing. Not cursing hard, but cursing methodically,
like what you do if you’ve been playing the pinball machine all day, and the
day before and the day before that.
It
was Glenn Mazen! And I realized it was him and I decided to leave him be
because he never looked up and did not know I was watching him. Even if he had
looked up, he would scarcely have recognized me after twenty years….. I don’t
know ….. I just had this feeling that he would not care to talk with me…. So I left
the moment pass…. And that was the last time I saw him.
Glenn
died five years later, in 2003.
thank you for reading this story,
Fred
--
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