By Matty Timmis
I embarked on this degenerate pilgrimage in pursuit of a mercurial goal, strung along by reams of seductive yarns, from a previous visit Miles had spun me over the past year. This was the promised land of free food, free drugs, and naked women, nestled in some idyllic pastoral scene. This was a teenage eden. And Miles’ descriptions weren’t too far fetched, as it turns out, we had tracked down a sort of hippy commune reminiscent of the flower power ideals that proliferated in the 1960s, that I imagined had dissipated after Charles Manson and the end of the summer of love. This established an interesting binary for us – the difference between the hippy and the beatnik, something we considered in the haze of our languorous sojourn.
Our arrival was by increments; first having to sleep in the wooded area adjoining the place the cars were parked in, for fear of making the three hour hike up to the commune in the dark. The following morning, as we were slurping up our breakfast of greasy canned meatballs and pasta, and pilfering some naive hippies’ kombucha, we were approached by a smartly dressed journalist, wanting to ask us some questions and take our photos. We consented and were elated to find, a few days later, our scruffy faces on the front page of the local paper, beneath a headline warning of a “hippie invasion”. It amused us though to think of ourselves as hippies, surely a hippy would never pinch a comrades kombucha, or entertain the thought of ingesting such grimly processed food – these people were vegan almost by definition, in a way a beatnik could never be.
We had finally made it to this hallowed ground, tramping upward through seemingly endless coniferous forests, humming with the honeyed vitality of a summer morning. As we climbed further into the foothills, the landscape opened up in segments – little glimpses of majesty when the tree line broke and the country poured forth from the path. Vivacious bounds of swaying verdant hills and winsome chocolate-box villages stretching out to the horizon. Were we being immersed unknowingly in the hippy mindset? We were wholly beguiled by the flourishing countryside, its quaint details, and its vast scope enthralling our sundered minds. We later found out that beneath that specific area there was an enormous old Nazi munitions dump.
Such brutality was as far from my mind as is possibly conceivable on that almost pious day. I shan’t ever forget my first glimpse of the commune. A lake lazed louche in a large divot in the foothills, reaching out into its depth were numerous gaunt fingers, little spits and abutments jutting away from the shore, heavy with wildflowers and luscious perfume. Surrounding it a gentle pine forest swelled gently, lulling its way up the rolling hills that, far in the distance, turned into more rugged ivory capped peaks. And surrounding the listless shoreline, perched on the spindly abutments, flocks of unsullied nymphs frolicking in exaltation, in the euphoric torpor of the midday heat, jumping naked in the water as glimmers of diamonds arced across the unblemished sky. It was akin to the middle panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights – a naive but liberated image of emancipation from the stifling of the human spirit. Silvery wisps of incense drifted through the air, its languid smoke curling in time with the rhythmic pulsation of the strange instruments being played on the lakeside.
We stayed at the commune for three days, each one a kaleidoscopic tapestry we sunk further into, toward the flower garland centrefold. We floated through the rambling, ornate camp some 2000 people strong, stoned and inquisitive, around a strangely resplendent vision of primitive man. I cannot think of a site comparable – there was no money, nor modern technology, little clothing and, in its ideal state, no ego. Each day we would twice convene, in a communing circle round the peripheries of a meadow, to eat with our 2000 brothers and sisters. This woodland lea would then transform into a hive of activity as different people would set up workshops in their area of knowledge to collaborate on improving the body, the mind, and often the commune itself. We joined some fascinating and balmy workshops, from meditation to naked yoga to resisting policing, meeting some absorbing and unusual people as well; Dutch anarchist squatters, Google AI developers, Oxford phd students and people claiming to be in touch with cosmic vibrations and frequencies. Here we were not hippies but true beatnik, people besotted with the mere idea of living, wanting to be fully immersed in all the myriad ways one may go about that.
The dinner circle, often occurring around 10 or 11pm, was a much more spiritual experience, illuminated by the dancing licks of flames swirling through the cooling August air. It was here, before dinner, that we would take each other’s hands, forming a pulsating chain of 4000 hands, and ground ourselves before the sacred fire. On our final night we consumed the mushrooms we had smuggled and stayed by the fire, awe struck into the early hours of the morning. At 3 o’clock in the morning I found myself in a place I could not have conceived of existing were I not then there. The fire before so brandished with exuberance was now a pile of embers pulsating two metres across in the blackness of the night. Chiselled and sweat soaked hippies would occasionally strut toward the fire and throw large logs into it, in doing so illuminating their rugged visages with a cacophony of trembling embers bounding up into the night. Gliding in ethereal, seemingly timeless robes, men and women made fluid dancing moves round the outside of the fire, their strange positions quivering in the light of sparks. The 200 or so left of us all found ourselves playing some obscure Mediaeval seeming instrument or humming deeply along to shared, primal rhythms.
The next day, my UK passport now having run out of permitted days in Europe. I had to return home – a fraught process. Miles and Rory awoke at 11 in the morning to a large crowd control policing unit systematically dismantling the community, leaving in a mass exodus accompanied by men and women with shields and batons. We were each left with the distinct feeling that the strange paradoxical course of our journey was somewhat totemic, was as close to those kids’ original blindly dreaming adventures as we could hope to get.
So tomorrow night I will watch the long long skies and think of the raw land neath it, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and see the evening star drooping and shedding her sparkler dims, on the bristled forests and the rippling meadows, the shimmering lakes and the slender blackened scars of road that sweep this world, that contain within their gap infinite possibilities, a million ways of existing in the roaring vitality of life.
So I’ve ended back at my source, the last burst of Kerouac’s On the Road,
before darkness blesses the earth, cups the peaks and folds in the shores. I think of the road.
As a footnote I would like to add, and my friends will no doubt point this out, there is probably nothing less ‘beatnik’ than spending ages writing an article justifying how you are a beatnik!