Tehachapi’s Mind Trip : Small Town Warily Watches as the New Age Blooms in Its Midst

Walking into Jacquie Glasner’s store, Windows of Light, is an experience for all the senses. Incense burns at the door and wind chimes tinkle overhead. Pink and magenta feathered medicine wheels dangle from the ceiling. Books on New Age spiritualism are crammed onto shelves.

The location of this haven where “the inner child gets to play,” as Glasner puts it? Just off the main drag of this Kern County town, past the auto parts store and diners, in the Albertson’s supermarket mall next to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop.

“This is a mind trip,” Glasner says of her store. “And we’ve got a food trip next door.”

Tehachapi would hardly seem a metaphysician’s first choice for a spiritual mecca. The largest employers are a cement factory and a state prison nestled in foothills outside the town, and the citizenry leans to family-oriented Christians who think Tarot card reading is the work of the devil.

But the New Age, in every sense of the phrase, has come here to the hills 45 miles east of Bakersfield. By one estimate there are two dozen trained massage therapists in Tehachapi, a city of 7,000 surrounded by communities that add an additional 21,000 to the population. Herbalists and acupuncturists have set up shop. There are even a few folks who believe that a large slab of crystal under the ground in Tehachapi attracts alien spacecraft.

And every Wednesday night, Glasner’s store attracts a small “play group” that is part support group therapy, part New Age meditation.

One look at the wide expanses of land, wind-swept mountains and azure skies has been enough to convince some that they are in a zone of higher spiritual energy.

So far everyone seems to be getting along--with some glitches. Most people here simply dismiss the notion that Tehachapi qualifies as some kind of New Age center, some fledgling version of Sedona, Ariz.

“If you took most of the people involved in the New Age community and lumped them together, they would equal maybe one of our churches--and we have 15,” says Connie Lux, a devout Christian fundamentalist who has lived in Tehachapi for 26 years and who led a petition drive to keep in place a city ordinance banning fortunetellers.

A lot of them have only the vaguest notions of what New Age beliefs encompass. “It’s kind of like what Nancy Reagan and Hillary [Clinton] do, right?” asks City Manager Darrell Daugherty. “The stars and the heavens?”

Still, something odd--no, alternative--is happening.

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Most of the New Agers and healers come to town for prosaic reasons--family, jobs, an escape from urban ills. But once here they rhapsodize about the color of the sky and the starkness of the nearby mountains.

Acupuncturist Tawney Massie and her husband were fleeing the dreary weather of Washington state and heading for Kernville, a few mountain passes north, when a toxic spill forced them to take a detour off the highway. They wound up tooling through Sand Canyon outside Tehachapi--and decided to stay.

“It’s a good place. It’s got good energy,” says Massie, who has been here a month and plans to set up a healing center.

Muses Glasner: “I do believe in the long range a lot of old souls are coming back and collecting in certain areas.”

Well, that’s one explanation. More likely, ample land and a relaxed small-town atmosphere seem to have created a certain tolerance of avant-garde practices.

But that tolerance has its limits, and everyone from New Age practitioners and psychics to therapists who simply give massages--no religious strings attached--is aware of it. Even wary.

In a semicircle in the back of Glasner’s store, her play group exchanges news of families and books and problems sorted out. They light a strong-smelling thicket of sage to scent the air. But the women--and they are all women--are reluctant to put into the air too many details of their lives for a reporter.

“I keep my private life private,” says one woman who has lived here a long time and doesn’t want to advertise that she practices meditation.

Even Glasner’s store has a nondescript appearance from the outside. “I’m not sure that people just walking by wouldn’t think it was anything more than a little gift shop,” says Philip Smith, a Xerox customer service engineer--and the mayor in his spare time. “It’s not in neon lights: ‘Come and see the New Age bookstore, come and see the New Age bookstore.’ If they did that, they probably would get a little flack.”

Actually, Glasner put some calculation into her store’s benign appearance. The more innocuous angel and fairy items are in the front. The more hard-core New Age materials are in the back.

“I do not want to frighten away my mainstreamers,” she told New Age Retailer magazine in a recent write-up of her store.

Her store does attract an eclectic assortment of browsers. One recent afternoon, electrician Alan Dean, still clad in coveralls and dusty work boots, was fingering compact discs on a rack. “This one’s a good one--’Sacred Earth Drums’ ” said Dean, 42. “When I go camping I play it. It kind of gets you into a meditative state.”

Many of the artists and alternative healers who have settled in Tehachapi are not themselves exponents of New Age philosophy.

Massage therapist and herbalist David Hernandez says he’s a born-again Christian. “I love Jacquie, but she and I butt heads over healing,” the low-key, contemplative Hernandez says. “If people see me hugging Jacquie, people think I’m New Age.”

And appearances count in a small town, especially a small town still grappling with the notion of nonsexual massage therapy. “You tell men what you do and they say, ‘Oh, how many girls do you have working for you? Where do I sign up?’ ” Hernandez says.

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For Christian fundamentalists, as long as New Age is a small phenomenon in town, it’s not threatening--blasphemous, perhaps, but relatively innocuous as a force.

“I think the majority of people aren’t aware of it,” says Dale Sheley, the pastor of the Christian Life Assembly church, which boasts a sign at the side of the road proclaiming “God Wants Our Precious Time Not Our Spare Time.” But Sheley and his fellow ministers take the spread of New Age religion seriously, even forming a local prayer group to entreat “the Lord to break down the deception going on.”

When psychic Judy Prindle tried to get a city ordinance against fortunetelling (which was designed to prevent scams) removed so that she could practice as well as teach Tarot-card reading, citizens made their resistance clear. A petition with 150 signatures was presented to the City Council urging that the law remain in force. Prindle was denied a business license.

“The first time I saw Miss Prindle, she seemed like a very nice lady,” says Lux, who insists that the petition drive, which she led, was not a personal attack. “If she had started a school to teach that, you would have had more people drawn here to study, and we really don’t want to promote that.”

Prindle, who moved here in 1991 from San Bernardino after her husband died, didn’t fight her opponents. “I don’t want to create bad karma for myself,” she says.

Instead she set up a small, drab office in the basement of a building at the glider port outside the city limits. From there, she deals out Tarot cards and visions of a visitor’s future:

“Do you have knives lying around your kitchen sink? I see you cutting yourself. Maybe five stitches. . . . Did you just break up with someone? That was a good thing. Because Mr. Right is just around the corner. . . .”

Prindle lives on disability, not her psychic readings. She takes in stride any good-natured teasing she gets in town.

“People come up to me and say, ‘I’m going on a cruise, will I have a good time?’ I laugh and say, ‘Do you want to have a good time? Then you’ll have a good time.’ ”