Visit To The CANADIAN Hog Farm

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They were quiet, strange people, spending most of their time in silence, reading or walking through the woods. They never bothered with where the others came from or where they could really go, now that it was ending.

The rent at Sahaghia was $75 a month and other expenses ran just a little more than that. It came out to about $17 a month per person.

That sum was provided by one of the girls, who worked as a supply teacher in the local high school an average of two days a week.

Back at the Hog Farm for another night. Outside the wind is howling and the farmhouse walls press you back 100 years to a time of oil lamps and smoking candles.

Like the residents of that era, the present ones must make their own amusements. We cluster around the stove and the topic of conversation is children's stories.

"Do you remember Edward Bear"

"How about Winnie the Pooh?"

"Hey," says Suzanne, "we have a copy for little Peter. Let's read it."

So we do. A chapter each in turn, aloud, and for two pleasant hours we delve into the magic world of A. A. Milne.

Rick is singing and playing guitar. We slap out the rhythm on our knees, the table, anything at hand.

Then it is over. Almost unnoticed, the residents have slipped away to bed. We city folk are left with the living room and our sleeping bags. We have things to do and places to go in the morning. I feel almost envious of the people upstairs who will repeat this scene again and again.

Barnie McCaffery does not live on a commune, not yet anyway, for he is still looking for the right place and the right people to go in with. But he is considered by all to be an integral part of the commune community.

He is also part of the local community in which he lives, being a supply teacher for the area high school in Barry's Bay and a leader of his town's little thea tre group.

Thirty-eight, and a graduate of New York City College, he has travelled with his wife Pat and four children through Europe and North and South America, studying and participating in communal living.

He recently spent two years in Peru with Emmaus, a French Roman Catholic worker organization, setting up self-help programs for impoverished peasants along communal lines.

He numbers among his friends such diverse personalities as the Roman Catholic bishop of Peru and New York pop artist Andy Warhol.

He explains something of the history and problems of communes this way: "Communes, in the sense of collective retreats from a larger society and its ways, are not new. The early Christian societies founded by the apostle Paul and others within the Roman empire were communal in nature.

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