Leaving New Buffalo

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
New Buffalo was Arthur Kopecky's first look back to the heyday of one of the most successful of the communes that dotted the country in the 1960s and 1970s. Kopecky described the magic and wisdom, the mix of people, the planting and the hard winters. Leaving New Buffalo Commune completes the story of Kopecky's eight years at that "hippie commune."

Kopecky was a young man from New York City relocated to California. He dropped out of graduate school at UC Berkeley during the height of the Vietnam War. "My travels with the Pride family in our Wonder bread truck, 'the mind machine,' eventually brought us to the New Buffalo commune in the fall of 1971 where a group of 'back to the land' idealists had bought a 140 acre ranch in the mountains of New Mexico," Kopecky explains.

Leaving New Buffalo Commune continues the story after the group had been at New Buffalo for five years. They were focusing on dairy farming and raising alfalfa. In the intervening years many people had come and gone, but a spirituality and a closeness with nature remained. These journals--slightly edited--record events as they were happening thirty years ago. Then, as now, AnSwei Livingproof (Kopecky) is promoting the goodwill

aspects of human nature, the non-war solutions. He warns, "It takes more than fine words and heartfelt songs; you need a plan of action. It can't be violent action; there is already too much anger."
Kopecky offers a description of an ethical and economic revolution that is the new paradigm, the next great progressive movement.

This is the second book based on the author's journals about life at one of the most famous communes of the "back to the land" era.

Su Casa Southwestern Homes – winter 07

By Charles C. Poling

Leaving New Buffalo Commune, by Arthur Kopecky, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 213 pages, 29 photos, 2 maps, paperback, $19.95.
In this second volume of Arthur Kopecky’s journals about Taos commune life, the author’s bittersweet, starkly honest tale of the disintegrating hippie utopian dream reads with the narrative momentum and simmering conflicts of a novel. His first book, New Buffalo, also used the structure of daily journal entries to document the quotidian tasks and hard-earned, often ephemeral triumphs, the circle-room good vibrations and venomous spats, the lofty goals and gritty grind of the back-to-the-landers who settled into New Buffalo commune circa 1971. Energized by idealism, Kopecky and his compadres set about learning, in faltering, stumbling steps, how to be farmers, eventually settling by friable consensus on dairy farming as their cash endeavor.
The whole trip never quite worked out. Leaving New Buffalo shows why. The journal format, shorn of embellishment, excessive analysis, or the perspective of hindsight and maturity, simply unfolds the story frame by frame. Finally the moral of the hippie myth—if such can be distilled from that confusing, even chaotic historical moment—stands bare, and really it’s the moral of America: a perfect society will never form around imperfect people. And who’s perfect?
The narrator of the story, Kopecky is both observer and protagonist. His integrity and objectivity, writing as events unfolded 30 years ago, make him a reliable interpreter of this archetypal counterculture scene. Never quite the leader, Kopecky participated as a sturdy standard-bearer indefatigably promoting the vision of New Buffalo as a model community for a new Aquarian Age.
Anyone who thought all hippies were lazy layabouts need only read a few days of Kopecky’s journals to dispel that notion. He and a handful of other core members toiled away, day in, day out, like all farmers, from haying to irrigating by shovel, from the continual firewood runs in the mountains to solar construction projects on their “pueblo.” Still, dopers, alkies, wigged-out lunies, and freeloaders dropped out and dropped in frequently. The commune—really a leaderless, loose-knit affiliation of renegades—never embraced a fair or effective method for controlling membership and weeding out the slackers or—worse—the troublemakers.

Still, a sense of impending failure pervades. They lived in constant empty-pockets poverty. Fewer new, young, idealistic recruits dropped in. The “precarious perch” of subsistence farming always threatened to snap and drop the commune off the economic edge. At one point Sandy, now a mother of two, lamented that she and Arthur were “getting older and getting nowhere,” that New Buffalo was a “dead end.”
Despite well-intended but sometimes misguided efforts to implement their vision of a cooperative enterprise based on brotherhood, the jealousies, clashing visions, hurt feelings, and utter lack of a governance system began wedging into the tribal unity. Soon a disgruntled communard named Rebel and his lady split, but just far enough to sit on a hillside with his rifle and take potshots into the dirt around Kopecky. The end was near. Kopecky had become too dominant, perhaps too domineering, and the others expelled him and Sandy plus the kids in an ugly scene of thinly veiled threats and vindictiveness. They moved away, the dream over for Kopecky. A handful of years later, it also ended for New Buffalo as a going agriculture venture.
Kopecky, Sandy, and the two kids migrated first to a dairy in Nebraska, then to California, where they have remained. Kopecky now works as a finish carpenter. New Buaffalo itself has undergone various transformations. This past summer I talked to a Taos architect who said he had recently helped with the renovating and remodeling of the buildings for the most recent owner, a doctor from California.

JESSIE L. EMBRY
Charles Reed Center for Western Studies
Brigham Young University, Provo, UT

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failures at New Buffalo are instructive, and they are entertainingly and heartbreakingly described in these journals. Most important in the demise of New Buffalo was the lack of initial structure. But this book is not a primer on how to structure a commune. For that, google the 40-year-old Twin Oaks and hundreds more at the Foundation for Intentional Communities site. Read these journals for the joy of the ride: for the beautiful descriptive passages of the land and its inhabitants and the hilarious anecdotes, for the exhausting and elating interpersonal relationships, for the late night runs across the moonlit mesa, for a high-fashion Halloween party in the kiva after the day in the dairy, for the almost-forgotten appointment at the clinic kept covered with goat cum. Read it to your children to laugh together and give them hope for the future. Who knows what the future of Arthur Kopecky, a.k.a. Answei Livingproof, will bring? I can't wait to find out, and I hope there will be more journals to read. (You don't have to read the first book to "get" this one; it briefly recaps the first.)