Morningstar East: A Memoir

By G. B. Couper

The ruck sack movement with thumbs out and V-sign flashed on the highways of the USA at the end of the sixties and early seventies led the Vietnam Era Veteran to seek out an alternative in the hills beyond Taos New Mexico. His experiences there are related as accurately, affectionately and honestly as his memory can recall these 40+ years later.. It is a personal history but a history nonetheless.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. B. Couper
• Release date: Oct 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301897247

G. B. Couper

George Couper lives in Santa Barbara California and graduated from UCSB with a BFA in 1977. He has worked for the Arts in Corrections program as an Artist/Facilitator at Vacaville's Correctional Medical Facility for the California Department of Corrections bringing into the prison artists, writers, poets, musicians and ceramicists for workshops. He presently volunteers working with homeless addicts and alcoholics. A Time Ago and Then is his first Novel (published on Smashwords: Aug. 9, 2011). His second publication is an illustrated novella, A Taxi Romance, published Nov. 13, 2011 on Smashwords.

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MORNINGSTAR EAST

A MEMOIR

By G. B. Couper

SMASHWORDS EDITION

PUBLISHED BY:

George B. Couper II on Smashwords:

Copywrite 2013 By George B. Couper II

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook is not to be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Morningstar East is a work of non-fiction, names, and characters, are real but have sometimes been changed, or omitted, out of respect if I couldn’t get their permission; however, places and incidents are as true to memory as can be recalled.

Table of Contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Adventure Toward Depression

Chapter 2: On to the Mesa

Chapter 3: The Kiva

Chapter 4: The Pueblo and the Goat Pasture

Chapter 5: Ghost and Stanley

Chapter 6: A Personal Conflict

Chapter 7: Peyote Visions

Chapter 8: Sunflower and the Georgia Peaches

Chapter 9: Protective Spirits

Chapter 10: FBI, Undercover Cops and Various Mesa Characters

Chapter 11: Rent-a-Car Cop and Magic Mary

Chapter 12: The unraveling

Chapter 13: Departure

About the Author

MORNINGSTAR EAST

A MEMOIR

Introduction:

My time at Morningstar East in New Mexico was a short and powerful one. I was young, in my early twenties, and so were the others on the mesa. I don’t recall anyone over thirty but there might have been. The prism of time distorts it but I was trying to sort out the memory of that period when I was writing the novel, A Time Ago and Then. As I wrote I became curious about the people and the place that was so crucial to my spiritual evolution. Conversations are, of course, for the most part paraphrased but the vision I have retained and the compassion of that remarkable group of young people, whose creative vision put together such a remarkable and courageous attempt at an altruistic and free-form communal living, is still with me today even though I have moved on.

I didn’t consider going to the internet when I wrote this novel as a fiction. I was recalling that experience as I’d seen it without any outside input. I have no regrets about that because most of what I had written was true with only a few adventures exaggerated or completely made up in the interest of telling a story over a factual exposition. After I had written it, however, I searched for pictures on the internet of the adobe pueblo and fantastic kiva to no avail. I wanted to refresh my memory of the buildings these people had put together and to see pictures of the people that I had once been so fond of. I assumed that, because I am getting older, that some of these people were getting on in years too; my chance of making contact with any of them was getting shorter as time takes its toll. I hoped a picture, or a name mentioned, would refresh my memory and that I might recognize someone I knew from those days so very long ago.

I did find a website, the Morningstar Scrapbook, which had much of the history of the commune’s battles with Sonoma County and some of the people who’d founded Morningstar East near Taos New Mexico. After leaving a comment on Ramon’s site (one of Morningstar West’s original members), he passed it on to Pam Hanna because I’d mentioned the amazing roof of the pueblo’s kiva. Pam was the wife of Larry Read who’d come up with the design and made it happen and it was she who contacted me via e-mail correspondence. I let Pam know that my fictionalized, albeit thinly veiled, version of Risingstar was based on my experience at Morningstar. But, that since it (A Time Ago and Then; published as an E-book at Smashwords.com.), is fiction, some of it, while truthful, was not factual. Pam said that her reticence about fictionalized versions of Morningstar was caused by T.C. Boyle’s use of narrative skill to malign, characterize & misrepresent us. I am happy to have her blessing and this inspires me further to call this memoir a Morningstar Romance. It will have insights about the place and the people I met on that plateau of my own experience in Taos and I hope to be as honest and clear about my own experience there and little more.

Chapter 1:

The Adventure

I had just gotten out of the US Navy in the fall of 1969 and my heart ached to become involved in the San Francisco scene that I had left four years before. My experience in the Navy was mild compared to those who’d been sent to the front in Viet Nam but it was four years of a moral compromise on my part nonetheless. My first psychedelic trip had been taken while attached to the Medical Holding Company on Ford Island