Well, It’s No Walton Mountain

“Mommy, what’s a hippie?”

Like certain aromas, guitar riffs and hard raps to the head, Emily’s question dislodges from memory a term that was hip about the same time as hippies were: deja vu.

Maybe way back then, as a long-haired adolescent wannabe hippie hitchhiker, I watched a magic bus roll by and figured someday I’d have an old lady and a passel of flower children and we’d roam the backroads in an endless quest for peace, love and self-realization.

As it happens, my wife, Pam, and I are touring the United States this summer in the sort of bourgeois rental RV we used to disdain, accompanied by three children who got their idea of hippies from old “Love Bug” movies. Our mission is to unearth some insight into families of the ‘90s. Right now we’re highballin’ through the rolling hayfields of central Virginia.

We’re headed toward Twin Oaks--a genuine commune born in the late 1960s.

What’s odd is how hard it is for us to pin down a definition of our own generation’s key cultural archetype. When Emily asks, “What’s a hippie?” we resort to the parental dodge: “Wait and see.”

*

We pull into this 450-acre “intentional community” after sunset. Our escort, a charming long-haired man who goes by the name Nexus, leads us up a dark trail to the rustic visitors’ dormitory. Immediately, we face a conflict that is at the heart of child-rearing: To what extent do we entrust our children to others?

With some hesitation, we leave Ashley, 12, and Emily, 10, in a room with plywood bunks and we retire with Robert, 7, to a second room down the hall. Unacculturated, though, I awaken often and tiptoe past the doors of our snoring co-inhabitants to keep a paternalistic eye on our daughters.

The next morning, we join Nexus and a cluster of men, women and children for a breakfast of whole wheat waffles at the group dining hall, a pleasant multipurpose building that spills into the trees. We will eat three fine meals there.

Back in high school, my friend Greg and I hitchhiked from Southern California up to the Bay area. “I think I’m a hippie at heart,” I said one day as we absorbed the Berkeley ambience. “You’re a tourist at heart,” Greg replied.

Thirty years later I feel the pain of that cut as my family sits at a table outside the dining hall.

“Are you thinking of joining the community?” a young woman asks, sliding her plate in among ours.

As Pam explains our mission, I think glumly that a journalist is really just a perpetual tourist. But wait, I think, trying to cheer myself: Stuck as we are in the status quo, we’re also pretty sick of it. Who’s to say this place won’t impress us so much that we’ll chuck it all and make the big commitment?

As Nexus guides us down Twin Oaks’ flower-lined paths, framed by forests and fields, I watch my family closely for signs of what attracts and repels.

Over there, Nexus says, is the community’s tofu plant. Emily grimaces.

Adults swimming nude in the community pond? The kids’ faces contort in horror, if not nausea.

But Angora rabbits get their heads nodding enthusiastically, and when we pass gardens swollen with cabbage and broccoli, the children--who themselves toil in Los Angeles’ harsh soil--offer respectful appreciation. The community, Nexus says, grows about 40% of the produce it consumes and produces 100% of its dairy products.

*

Most ‘60s communes blossomed in hippie-freak pipe dreams and promptly evaporated. Twin Oaks was hammered together from a more disciplined vision.

In 1967, eight founders, mainly academics, bought this swatch of farmland and went to work. “The idea was to create a real-life utopia based on B.F. Skinner’s novel ‘Walden II,’ ” Nexus says. “They planned to have 1,000 people living here. Behavioral psychologists were going to run it.”

But as our tour progresses, Nexus--at 24 the youngest adult member of the community--seems hard-pressed to suppress his gently sarcastic take on the founders’ Skinnerianisms.

Today, he estimates, fewer than half of the community’s 105 residents (90 adults, 15 children) have even read “Walden II,” and “only a handful believe in its principles.” Indeed, Nexus tells us, other than shared beliefs in nonviolence, total equality and income sharing, no overriding philosophy binds the community.

At the start, Nexus says, economic self-sufficiency was problematic. Then a resident who knew how to make rope hammocks started knotting, and over the years the commune has fashioned its sustenance from an over-stressed nation’s longing to hang out: With Pier 1 Imports as their main customer, residents steadily, and sometimes in around-the-clock production parties, crank out hammocks and suspended mesh chairs.

The tour of the hammock shop captivates our girls. They watch intently as a handful of residents cut and weave, and when it becomes clear that these “hippies” are harmless, the girls pepper them with questions about the hammock-making process.

My attention, I must admit, is captured by Tanya, 25, who appears at various steps on the tour, making hammocks here and sawing massive logs into lumber elsewhere, always with the cheerfully sweaty glow of a social realist painting.

Tanya, who grew up in Santa Rosa, Calif., says she became a resident of Twin Oaks “because I wanted to be more intimate with more people. I tended to feel that traditional coupling was limiting.

“Community,” she says, “is a way to have all kinds of relationships with various people that don’t become isolated or insular.”

Tanya leans back over her work, and I glance at Nexus, wondering if his thoughts are confined to the glory of the community’s labor credit system.

For my part, though, I’m horrified to find this question springing from my lips: “What does your family think?”

Tanya smiles. “Everyone’s pretty interested in my happiness, and if I convince them I’m happy, they’re pretty supportive.”

So far, she’s pretty happy, she says, even though Twin Oaks has fallen short of her ideal. “Trying to be intimate with 100 people is a problem. The expectation for me was that everyone would feel like family, and it doesn’t feel like that.”

As several longtime residents of Twin Oaks tell us, the whole notion of family has changed radically over the community’s history.

In the hammock shop, Pam chats with a 37-year-old woman named Cleo who sits in a chair at one of the hammock stations, breast-feeding her 4-month-old son, Adrian, while her husband, Craig, draws strands of polypropylene rope past a red hot wire. Cleo--a former San Pedro resident--says she used to manage the community’s rope shop. When the baby was born, she traded that demanding position for the flexible schedule of hammock making.

Other residents sometimes care for Adrian, she says. But the community considers the care she gives her child as valuable as her time at a loom and credits her accordingly. That wasn’t always the case.

Children under age 5 used to be raised communally, sleeping on the floor of one large room with an appointed adult caregiver. While parents were allowed to work as caregivers, they couldn’t live with their own children. As Nexus and other residents explain, the commune’s founding philosophy held that nuclear families were an impediment to children’s realization of their potential.

“The idea,” Nexus says, “was to downplay the bond between children and their particular parents, to raise them in groups rather than think of them as a part of nuclear families.”

He pauses for effect, then adds: “It didn’t work out well at all.”

For one thing, Nexus says, as child care workers left the community, the children got “abandonment complexes.”

Over the course of the day we meet children from the community reading intently in the dining hall and making popcorn in the child care center, playing in one of several play areas or working with a parent in the wood shop. Several say they were born at Twin Oaks or on other communes, and while none is effusive, they uniformly express appreciation for the close ties and open environment that Twin Oaks offers.

I find the views of certain parents more unnerving.

I ask the parents of a young child born at Twin Oaks how they would feel if the community still raised its spawn communally. “It’s hard to say,” says the mother, who did child care duties back when the community still stuck to Skinner’s plan.

“Then, I really liked the system. . . . By the time we had [our child], it was gone. I wonder, if I didn’t have the option, if it would have been OK with me.”

Her husband, though, says unequivocally that he would have abided by community policy: “If that was the norm, I would have [agreed to it]. . . . It would have had pluses and minuses, like anything else.”

*

Later in the RV, our visit to the commune triggers a discussion of such depth with the kids that Pam and I are forced to confront the relative shallowness of our standard conversations.

“It would be neat having friends so close all the time,” Ashley says. “But I wouldn’t want to live there. It’s too confining.”

“I couldn’t live there,” Emily adds. “I like having my own things.”

Before we leave, we return to the dining hall to indulge in one last helping of the community’s astonishingly good food. Pam and a resident strike up a conversation. The young woman tells Pam about a suicide that racked the community a few years back. It seems no one could quite agree on how to integrate an increasingly depressed young woman into the community while offering the help of the outside world.

Pam’s new friend remains sufficiently pro-community that she offers to take Pam on another tour while the rest of us head back to the visitors’ residence to pack. The tour lasts a long time, and after a while I start to fidget. Pam has been doing most of the driving and dishwashing--hardly an egalitarian set up.

I’m about to assemble the offspring for one of those “kids, Mom just needs some time to find herself” lectures, when our beloved wife and mother comes strolling out of the woods, smiling.

Utopia has failed to seduce her. A collective sigh of relief ensues.

We load the family-sized hammock we bought into our magic bus and hit the highway.

* Thursday: New York City and family freedoms.