I wrote this book while I was recovering from an automobile accident in late 1975, as much as anything to explain to myself why two adults would take their two grade-school children away from a middle-class world of relative comfort and modest privilege to undertake, with little preparation and few resources, a life of subsistence farming on fifty borrowed New Mexico acres with ten other people even less suited to that life than themselves. And why this venture failed.

In 1970, Virginia Stem Owens, her family, and ten others set out for New Mexico. They sought to escape a rising tide of war and campus turmoil, and enter what they hoped would be a garden of delight.

We wanted something we called freedom. freedom from the kinds of time limitations ordinary jobs demanded, freedom from meaningless conventions and conformity, freedom from an unnatural, hemmed-in life. But most of all, freedom from emptiness.