On Strawberry Hill

The story starts with Army Bob. Bob Mathews arrived on the campus of the University of Maryland in the fall of 1969 after a tumultuous two-year stint in the US Army. Until he received his draft notice in 1967, Mathews had been a contented materialist, driving a sleek Lotus sports car to his job as a computer operator at nasa in Maryland. He disagreed with the war in Vietnam, but he had no time for the counterculture that actively opposed it. Why, he would wonder, don’t those hippies just get a job? The prospect of a tour of duty in Vietnam, however, abruptly changed his mind. He fled to Toronto, found a job, and received landed-immigrant status before his father persuaded the local draft board not to penalize Bob if he came back to Maryland and enlisted.

A few months later, driven to despair by boot camp, Bob Mathews attempted suicide. He survived, put his mind back together, and struggled through the rest of basic training. He moved on to Texas for further instruction as a medic and was scheduled to ship out to Vietnam until he persuaded the unit’s officer that he was more valuable working stateside as a mainframe-computer operator. And that was how, in the end, Army Bob avoided Vietnam. Also how, oddly enough, he turned into a hippie: working as a computer technician, he befriended a fellow soldier who introduced him to mescaline and psilocybin.

And it was this Bob Mathews — fresh out of the military, tuned in and turned on — who noticed an advertisement on the University of Maryland campus for something called the Timothy Leary-Alan Watts Clinic. A clinic, it turned out, that was being offered by Bill Irwin and Dave Buhrman and a handful of other participants in Leary’s rigorous curriculum of consciousness expansion. There were readings from Watts’s books on eastern religions and Leary’s interpretations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in The Psychedelic Experience. Acid was dropped, Leary recordings thrown onto the hi-fi, the unique vibrations of the Third Bardo of Re-entry contemplated.

Dave Buhrman graduated, and he and Joan got married. Dave had been rejected for conscientious objector status but got lucky with the draft lottery in December 1969 — his birthday was drawn far enough down the list that it was statistically almost impossible that he’d ever be drafted. In the meantime, though, Bill Irwin had gone to visit his sister in Vancouver — Irwin is a Canadian, the son of an rcaf officer assigned to the embassy in Washington for most of the 1960s — and he came back convinced that the doors of perception opened on a path that led straight to British Columbia.

So they split. Decided to go “back to the land,” to live together communally in a rural setting as the cosmic order surely intended. They rendezvoused in Vancouver, set out for the Slocan the following spring, and found their way to Strawberry Hill.

In those days there was nothing else around it, just the farms and some logging in the valley below. The hill property belonged to an older gent named Terry Bushell, an English expat who worked as an electrical technician in the Arctic for six months at a stretch. He had a wife, Vicki, and four children, and they were the only ones there when the American freaks arrived. Vicki was keen to have some people around to help her manage the property. The nascent communards pitched tents on the hillside above the Bushells’ log house — soon dubbed the “Electric House” in homage to the key advantage it had over the house they were about to build a few hundred metres up the forested slope. They decided on an A-frame construction. “We knew,” says Dave Buhrman, “that they were sound structures and easy to build, and we were worried about snow load.”

They lugged eight-metre logs and hundreds of cedar 1x6s up the hill by hand. Another local taught them to split their own cedar blocks in order to make shingles. They got some dynamite and blasted out a reservoir below one of the springs to gravity-feed the house with water, blasted out another hole for a latrine. They bought a wood stove secondhand in town, got another one for heating, kerosene lamps, a tub — they even had hot water. Buhrman, chuckling: “We were the envy of all the other hippies.”

They moved in late in the fall of 1971 — Dave, Joan, and Terra Buhrman in the top loft, “the bachelors” in the bunkhouse at the rear of the house with beds strung from the ceiling by logging chains and a trapdoor for easy access. They were joined by some like-minded souls they’d met in Vancouver and by late arrivals from Maryland. With money from part-time work and odd jobs, they bought bulk dry goods twice a year from a co-op in Vancouver called Fed Up — rice and beans, rolled oats and flour, thirty-pound tubs of peanut butter and honey. They tended a garden down the hill by the Electric House, kept chickens for eggs and goats for milk, and did their best to keep the animals from escaping and laying waste to the apple orchards down in the valley.

In the evenings, there was always music, and sometimes there were drinks at the Leland Hotel in Nakusp or social visits to the Crescent Bay hippie commune across the valley. On occasion they’d meet in one of the lofts to smoke pot and read from The Urantia Book, a thick tome purported to be the revealed wisdom of a race of celestial beings. Dave Buhrman: “There was a timelessness about it. We thought we’d go on forever.”

As with so many social experiments, the practice turned out to be quite a bit thornier than the theory. Frictions developed over chores and the Electric House’s long-distance bills. In the summer of 1974, Terry Bushell decided he needed more privacy and politely asked everyone to leave. The Strawberry Hill commune came to an end.