Early Arrivals: Interviews by Paul Modic About the Back-to-the-Land Movement, Barbara Stafslien (Mousie)

When the Back-to-the-Landers showed up in Southern Humboldt over fifty years ago, they were met with suspicion and hostility.  Today, many are pillars of the community–starting health clinics (Redwoods Rural), gathering places (Mateel Community Center), and businesses. But then…well, they were young and the following are stories about these much wilder times…

Paul Modic has been interviewing some of the folks from 50 or so years ago and he will be sharing the stories he gathers with us.

Below, Barbara Stafslien (Mousie) reminisces. Please remember that her experiences and memories are hers and may not necessarily coincide with memories and experiences of others at that time.

Tim and I met at the University of North Dakota on the Red River. He was from 28 miles NE into Minnesota and I was from 80 miles north on the Canadian border in North Dakota. Christy Orion came to UND with her boyfriend who had registered as a student. We all became great friends. Ona was born in Grand Forks and Christy babysat her a lot. After Christy went back to California, got together with Ray Balliett, and landed in a tipi on Bill Wallace’s land in Whale Gulch, she wrote to us encouraging us to move out there. Ona was one. It was 1968. Neither of us knew how to drive and I was pregnant with Jeb. Ona and I flew to San Fran with a friend and her year-old boy and Tim and her husband drove to Berkeley in an old 1950s pickup with both families’ worldly possessions. 

Christy and Ray were in Berkeley packing up his old black 1949 Ford pickup to move to the Gulch and dropped us off in Fort Bragg. We were their shower connection for six months. They’d travel down Usal road to Fort Bragg. Jeb was born in January 1969 in Fort Bragg. By March we’d met Richard Skelton and his first wife Susan and toddler, Jessica. Tim and Richard took forays south to Santa Cruz and north to Southern Humboldt looking for a place to live. They settled on a house in Whitethorn we could share for $50 a month, and so it began. 

We moved there in March 1969. Lorraine and one of Ginger Baker’s lovers with little son lived in Whitethorn. Shortly, Gentleman Jim Lynn and Judy, who later called herself Wind, and her little year-old daughter Hannah moved into the apartment back of the old library. You could still check out books from the library once a week. 

Then the Walter Mitty family moved into the cabin on the flat where the fancy house with the big wall is now. We rented the original shotgun where DePerna’s is now. Eventually Julie, Marco, Della, and Raymond moved into the old place across the street. Later Bobby Norris moved into the big house there and Blue Eyed John rented a shack on that same property for awhile. (Blue Eyed John was later married to Susan Akselsen and had two sons with her. My daughter Ona was good friends with his daughter by another marriage and Susan’s older kids.)

It was crazy times in the area then. Two high school kids, Micheal Etter and Ross Radcliffe, showed up in Whitethorn and met Tim walking up to Marker’s store with his second joint of the morning. They jumped him and were threatening to cut off  his long blonde hair. Damon Floyd, a musician from Texas, saw what was was happening and ran to the Walter Mitty house to get help. Maggie Carey’s first husband John Carey and friends Tello and Julian Stone, all well over six feet, came running pronto. (Ross Radcliffe had drowned in a rip tide at Black Sands a year or so earlier and was rescued and brought back to life.)

They immediately began deescalation tactics, of which Julian was a master. BUT Damon Floyd was the fly buzzing loudly in the ointment trying to keep things going; he liked the excitement and wanted to see some action. Cooler heads prevailed and all parties had a beer under the stump. Oh the stories that stump could tell, even way before the hippies came. When we got there the mill was still running and mill workers flocked there after work.

 The mill closed about a month or two after we arrived. I think Ray worked there briefly. A lot of the little mills were going when we arrived and shut down one by one. Jack Ass Creek off  Usal Road, I forget the name of the town, had a hotel and a few other things and shut down a year or two before we arrived. We had a net and went to Jack Ass to surf fish. The Walter Mitty Family camped down there for awhile at the time when we first moved to the Gulch with Robbie McKee. He drove us down there to camp with the Mitty’s for a few days, play music etc. I remember someone in the crew got a feral sheep caught in some brambles and we had mutton for a few days, mostly stew.

Play groups happened spontaneously as did music. Our place in Whitethorn had electricity and hot water so we were a shower stop for people we knew in the Gulch. It wasn’t like home, the flat midwest, neither geographically nor culturally. I felt like I’d been dropped into a Snuffy Smith cartoon of Appalachia and did a lot of exploring on ridges back of Whitethorn with baby Jeb on my back. We went up Harris Creek then cleared the top to come down Stanley Creek. May was very hot already and we started swimming in the cold Mattole, lots of people hanging out naked swimming in the heat of the day. This was the midday to 5 or 6 pm ritual for years. The Dump hole, Deep Hole, Airport Hole, and Nooning Creek. 

It felt like we were trying to recapture something we didn’t quite know how to go about, a tribal thing. I know one thing: I liked being nomadic keeping bought necessities on my back for us all for a few days of wandering. I liked squatting by a fire sharing whatever was the necessity at hand: food, drink, smoke, music with whoever was around the fire. That was what felt like home the most. There was a lot of the surreal attached to this Southern Humboldt Hippie thing then, especially with Captain Trips dosing everyone with Crazy Richard’s liquid LSD. 

Tim and I followed the music parties a lot, they were often and often impromptu. Sometimes it was a birthday or some occasion. One time a banjo player showed up that was such a mind blowing artist that people talked about the experience for months. Nobody got his name: he appeared, blew our minds, and then was gone.

We got our land and cabin in the Gulch from Bob McKee in 1971. In ’71 or ’72 I helped deliver Alder at Potter’s place halfway to the mouth of the Gulch. There was no road yet so we had to walk from our place. Ray Fitch and I were attending cuz Hoy, the midwife, couldn’t make it. Potter was reading an emergency how-to manual in Spanish from Puerto Rico where he grew up.

Tim sold his first pound that came from our land as Panama Red down in Berkeley for $800.  He and Rock & Roll Steve went down there to sell that and jewelry and buy silver. (Tim was a fast and persuasive talker.) I was still pregnant with Sam.

When we became farmers it was work early morn late afternoon and evening, heat break in middle of the day. Otherwise things happened when they happened: kids ran in little herds and later on bicycles. When we lived in the Gulch I walked with Jeb and Ona as toddlers all the way to Whitethorn many times. Always had a crocheted twine bag full of necessities. We kept a wagon at the top of the Yellow Dirt Road to haul kids and groceries home. Sometimes we had a ride with Michael Potter to town and back but sometimes his truck was broken down or out of gas. 

Michael and Bonnie lived a quarter mile below us on foot. Arnie and Jane were below them almost at the mouth of Whale Gulch Creek. Yerba and Ray Raphael and Frank and Andrew and Sue and Kathy were just up across the road. Andrew came down to play with Ona a lot and often they walked all the way to the meadow to play with Jessica and Anna. Sometimes Jessica and Anna arrived around breakfast to play with Ona and get Andrew too.

Rudikazudi came by when I was very pregnant and overdue with Sam and decided he had to do a Tarot reading in exchange for the supper he shared with us. He predicted a brain problem with a child. Sam was born in January 1973 in the cabin and Ona got sick in early spring ’73 and had to have brain surgery. After we got her home from Mt. Zion in San Fran we moved out and sold the place.

After the land was sold to Mary prices skyrocketed around ’75 and’76 and we couldn’t afford to reinvest until we farmed for awhile. We were guerrilla farmers all over the place cuz we didn’t own land anymore. 

My view, based on actions and lines dropped here and there, was that we all were outsiders to the main culture and that drew us together, but some of us were outsiders by choice and others outsiders by birth or circumstance.

Part of the reason I left the area for awhile was for my kids to experience the wider culture, there were positives and negatives to that move. It eventually led to my returning to school at age forty to get my credentials. I was applying to the few remaining one room schools left anywhere in the country in any state and ended up back in Southern Humboldt by chance. I came back to visit and Maggie Carey, who was on the school board, stopped me on the street to chat. As we talked she got me to agree to come in for an interview for a K through 6 school at the old Harris school. I was hired and so returned to Sohum. 

My classes turned out to be mainly growers’ kids so I knew something of the stresses that population endured and easily made connections with the families I served. In the many talks with my kids about their life growing up, the two who made lives out of this community said that when growing up (going to junior high and high school then off to entirely new communities, La Grande and Ashland OR) they were always conscious of the secrecy involved with farmers in Sohum. When they did trust a friend enough to talk about their childhood they were met with disbelief, that their childhood sounded like something from another century. I experienced that too as I made friends in my classes in Oregon–the people I got closest to were from Mexico or the Marshall Islands.

Previous Chapter:

• Part One (Frank Kanig, “Bubba”)