THE GROUP

Enlarge Image Image Gallery ONE MEMBER'S DEBTS ARE THE DEBTS OF ALL AND EVERYONE WORKS FOR THE COMMON BREAD IN THIS ARKANSAS COMMUNE.

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by THOMAS BEVIER

Reprinted from MID-SOUTH MAGAZINE, The Memphis Commercial Appeal

The commune is beside a stream called Big Piney, in the hush of worn Arkansas mountains and fully five hours from the pace and pavement of Memphis. It is a place without address, unless you count the one assigned to it by the wife of the county sheriff. The commune is at "Four Two Plumb," says Mrs. Walter Looper. "It's over four hills, through two gates and plumb out in the damn sticks."

And so it is. To reach the commune, you drive down a rocky, packed-clay road five miles from Lamar, in Johnson County. You cross a long, complaining bridge of railroad ties and then turn into Big Piney Guest Ranch.

Preconceived notions suggested by the word "commune" lead you to expect long-hair youths in outlandish costumes, rebels who argue without reason, weaklings with drugs and sexualists without propriety.

But you are met by a neatly dressed woman, full-bodied and olive-complexioned, with a curly haired child at her hand. She walks to the car and greets you with . . .

A smile.

I t is a smile that a Puerto Rican hair-stylist, dulled by her family's status struggle from the Bronx to Long Island, might have given her brother. Such is the case with Lyn Alvarez. She is 23, she joined the commune six months ago and now she grants her smile to strangers.

"Dixon Bowles, our leader, is not here now," she says. "He'll be back soon. His brother, Clayton, is here."

She stands near a large, log lodge. Nearby are two house trailers. Down by the river are four cabins and off in the distance, beyond a foot-bridge over a rivulet, is a barn converted to living quarters.

Clayton Bowles, who is 24, is wearing insulated overalls and a day's growth of beard. He leads the way to one of the trailers, the mass-produced residence of his brother.

"There are no drugs or sexual promiscuity here," he says. "Beyond that, we'll discuss anything."

As he outlines the history of the venture—its pragmatic beginning and philosophical evolution, the tragedies which have visited it—you decide that these young people might represent the precedent to the current phenomenon of the commune.

Not that they are really a part of that phenomenon, the groping out of hippiness which began in the second half of the 60s, after Haight became hateful. They were, instead, before that and through it and still in business—pleading hope for the future, invoking the dream of Utopia and earning their daily bread in common ways.

It is an unproven idea in this country, a radical idea without the harshness radicalism usually supposes. It is, in a word, a gamble, and the odds are not good. Those at Big Piney have accepted the gamble without pretention. In fact, they strive for simplicity. They call themselves . . .

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