What’s Left of the Back-to-the-Landers

The book is, among other things, a record of the beguiling hand-built structures that were a foundation of the movement. Some, like the finely crafted buildings designed by the architect Roger Somers for the now mostly abandoned Druid Heights community—where the writer and the self-styled “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts spent his final years—still shine as minor masterpieces, despite their almost complete dilapidation. (Ed Stiles, Somers’s friend and “woodmaster,” who was interviewed for the book, is the community’s last remaining resident.) Similarly ingenious are the works of Bob McKee, a Humboldt County builder and purveyor of construction supplies, whose strange and stunning Think Tank is decked out with psychedelic stained-glass windows and fitted with support pillars that recall both the biomorphic façade of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló and the gloopy strands of bubblegum stretched between a sidewalk and a shoe. The campus-like homestead of the self-described “tea guru” David Lee Hoffman features what may be Earth’s most elaborate eco-toilet (dubbed Le Grand Pissoir), and could almost be considered a kind of art project, in line with outsider environments such as Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden. The houses are not all architectural tours de force, but given that they were constructed by people who were, by and large, complete amateurs, on a budget of next to nothing, it is something of a miracle that any of them remain standing. As Kramer, the writer, put it to me, “You wouldn’t imagine that someone built this with their stoned friends.”

Kramer thinks of the houses as “living autobiographies,” inextricable from the eccentric individuals who built and inhabited them. Over the course of the book, you’ll meet Richard Evans, an innovator in elaborate, geometric stained glass, a founder of the Stellar Arts Collective, and one of the rare back-to-the-landers who was both Black and gay; Monty Levenson, a self-taught master maker of Japanese Shakuhachi flutes; Diana Wiedemann, an original member of the lesbian commune Trillium, which published an internationally popular magazine called Country Women; and Laird Sutton, a Methodist minister and sexologist who somehow got approval to set up a screening room for “sexual cinémavérité” in the basement of a church which he christened “the Fuckarama.”