Page 25 - C.A.L.L. #41 - Summer 2016

two children in this
cabin, and with whom I
chatted about recent
New Yorker articles and
long-ago peyote
circles.
She and the others had
all come in their early
20s, from lives in quiet
East Coast suburbs and
California college
towns, to this place that
Robert Greenway, a
psychology professor,
had purchased with his
companion River. It was
not ‘‘dropping out,’’
argued River, in her
1974 book ‘‘Dwelling,’’
but an active search for
‘‘a new pattern of -
living’’ that does not
‘‘rip off the planet or
any of her inhabitants.’’
Haeg in an outdoor tub at Cedar Cabin. Photo: Andres Gonzales Her son, Salmon, built
his own cabin here at
age 13.
In the 1960s and 1970s, this area north of San Francisco had the country’s densest concentration of
communes, both because of the proximity to countercultural hubs and its mild climate. Mendocino
County became pop-cultural shorthand for a longhair Shangri-La, while the area near Salmon Creek was
so thick with communes it was half-seriously referred to as ‘‘Albion nation.’’ Over time, people slowly
moved away, drifting into more conventional living arrangements. Yet the impulse has not entirely
vanished; in addition to Haeg’s project, a new ‘‘Radical Faerie’’ commune named Groundswell has
opened nearby, in a former Catholic boys camp.

Later that evening, we sit in Haeg’s cabin, listening to the local station KZYX — the only one that comes in,
and for Haeg, who grew up in a Midwestern radio family, the virtual town square knitting together the
dispersed community. With its placidly voiced surf reports and announcements of local lost and found
pets, it is at a soothing oneness with the snapping fire and Ivy curled at our feet. Haeg mentions the
Scandinavian propensity for this kind of coziness, exemplified in abstruse Danish concepts like hygge. In
his stark modern cabin he says, ‘‘I was always jealous of the coziness of other people’s houses.’’ Not any
longer.

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