Southwest
Book Views, Summer ’04
New Buffalo: Journals
from a Taos Commune By Arthur
Kopecky
(University of New Mexico Press.
Albuquerque, NM, ISBN 0-8263-3395-8,
hard-cover. 294 pp., $24.95, 2004)
A custom woodworker in Northern
California today, Arthur Kopecky
recognized that he was in the
middle of an historical moment
in the American story when he
lived at the New Buffalo commune
in Taos in the late 1960s and
70s. No matter how mundane a journal
entry might seem—shifts
in weather, precise ingredients
of a meal, a commune guest giving
birth—the details themselves
build up a picture, a feeling,
the excitement and nature of a
time when a dollar could fill
up your gas tank and hope felt
genuine.
Kopecky, raised in New York City,
was a graduate student at Berkeley
when he first joined a beachside
commune in Bolinas, CA in the
late 1960s. In 1971, the commune
members piled into two buses and
drove in search of a place to
garden and farm. In Taos, they
found their way to the New Buffalo
Commune.
“Here is a small palace
of adobe and great beams, a desert
courtyard, and a family of freaks
just like us. There were about
20 for dinner last night. This
place is really functioning. There
are two horses, chickens, turkeys,
a metal shop, some machinery,
many things that need to be done
and the most fantastic housing
I have seen yet. This is my idea
of a together place.” Kopecky,
who adopted the name AnSwei (“On-shway”)
Livingproof, writes. He tells
us a professor of his gave him
the name, but he never explains
what it means.)
New Buffalo was started in 1967
by a group of peyote devotees.
By the time AnSwei arrived, peyote
church meetings attracted about
half the members, acid parties
were still happening, and visitors
were coming and going in huge
numbers. AnSwei becomes engrossed
in farming, throwing himself into
plowing, planting wheat and oats
and animal husbandry.
He also becomes involved with
the corporate and tax details
of running New Buffalo, taking
on the challenges and politics
of local irrigation by becoming
a mayordomo of the ditches
in the valley, a position that
makes him an official of the State
of New Mexico.
Kopecky’s younger self
brilliantly recorded everyday
details in this experiment in
living, including the misunderstandings
and occasional violence in the
valley between hippies and Hispanic
locals, especially about hunting
for meat to provide enough stores
to last the winter. As the 1970s
roll on, the reader senses that
the times they are a-changin—casual
passersby grow fewer in number
and commune members begin to discourage
drop-ins.
The power of the story told in
these terse, unemotional journal
entries sneaks up on the reader.
At first it feels like a non-stop
kind of Woodstock with lots of
parties, peyote meetings, acid-rock
dances and a parade of hippies
coming and going. Soon AnSwei
writes that he is “limiting
my marijuana—quitting beer.” The
men, women and children who stick
around, putting up with each other
as well as iffy plumbing and unbelievably
hard physical labor, become successful
farmers and true social revolutionaries.
“New Buffalo is looking
very good,” AnSwei proudly
records. “Every room is
occupied and well kept. The fields
green, pastures lush, work areas
clean and tools all put away.
Twenty-nine of us all together
here; a small commune. Only people
that we are close with—a
very good sign.”
Wallace Stegner referred to communal
living in his novel, Angle
of Repose: “I want
a society that will protect the
wild life without confusing itself
with it.” Such is the genius
of Kopecky’s lesson at New
Buffalo. A second volume of journals,
explaining the commune’s
inevitable decline, will follow
this publication.
—Georgia
Jones-Davis
