Advertisement | |
Takilma resident Dave Toler beat an incumbent with 53 percent of the vote to win a seat on the Three Rivers School Board. He is the administrator of the Dom School, Takilma's answer to alternative education.
Photo by Jim Craven
By BETH QUINN
TAKILMA In the early winter of 1968, Southern Oregon newspapers reported "bearded, beaded, barefoot hippies" moving into the Illinois Valley and quoted a Josephine County sheriff's comment that hippies "were detrimental to any community." Signs soon appeared in Cave Junction store windows proclaiming, "We Do Not Solicit Hippie Patronage."
Despite the cold shoulder from the locals, the hippies stayed. And in the 29 years since the first long-haired and tie-dyed pioneers arrived at the dusty Four Corners that marks the entrance to Takilma, the community they created has become an important source of talent, creativity and energy in Josephine County.
Takilmans founded a medical clinic, a school, a fire station, an environmental organization and a classical orchestra that benefit people living far beyond their settlement.
Not surprisingly, the snarling signs have been gone for years.
"We started out as this sort of outside group and sort of worked our way in," says Jonny Klein, a Takilman since 1968. "Little by little, we were accepted."
Still, many people were surprised last March when Takilman Dave Toler took 53 percent of votes cast countywide to defeat an incumbent member of the Three Rivers School Board.
And although Toler took office with little fanfare, his election marks a watershed in Josephine County history.
Takilma has come of age.
TWO CULTURES, ONE VALLEY
A ring of jagged peaks, blue in the summer haze, surround the Illinois Valley, and within their embrace live many kinds of people millworkers and hippies, loggers and retirees, welfare recipients and small-business owners, ranchers and commuters but, as always, the hippies stand out.
"It's like having two different cultures," says Leonard Frick, owner of the Holiday Motel in Kerby and a past president of the Illinois Valley Chamber of Commerce. "They have a different lifestyle than the average people."
Counter-culture values remain strong in Takilma vegetarianism, Radio Free Takilma, solstice celebrations, food cooperatives, an all-comers newsletter with plenty of long hair and beards in evidence. But along with the odd dome or two and rooftops that jut at weird angles, satellite dishes now sprout from ridgepoles and roadsides, and many unattended phones announce the presence of "voice mail."
"Most people were dragged into the media world by having kids," says Jim Rich, a Takilman since 1974 who teaches music at Rogue Community College and founded the Jefferson Baroque Orchestra.
Underneath it all, Frick says, residents in the Illnois Valley have learned that no matter how different individuals may look, all people are pretty much the same: "Their concern is the upraising of their children just like anyone else."
Nowhere was that shared concern more in evidence than at last winter's basketball games at Illinois Valley High School, where work-booted loggers stood beside dreadlocked hippies to cheer their Cougars through a championship season.
"I don't know how many people we had in that gym for the last game. We had people from every walk of life in this valley," says Toler, who's lived in Takilma since 1989. "If we can figure out that that's a strength and not a weakness, then we will go a long way."
1987 A YEAR OF CHANGE
When lightning-sparked wildfires consumed 9,500 acres of forest near Takilma in 1987, Rich was station captain of the Illinois Valley Fire Dept. in Takilma.
"It's when we found out how many friends we had in town. The community at large just jumped in with both feet to help Takilma out," he recalls. "They would drive up, open their trunk, take out their gas cans and chainsaws, and just leave them. It was months
before we got all those pieces of equipment returned."
Even before the fire forced the relocation of the Takilma People's Clinic to Cave Junction, the staff had noticed that lots of patients were driving out from Cave Junction. After the move, patient numbers skyrocketed, and so the clinic has stayed in town with no complaints from Takilmans and plenty of praise from old timers.
A few years ago a Josephine County foundation received a grant application from the hippie clinic, and Selma resident and board member Kathy Krauss called around the valley to see what people thought of the idea: "Just almost unanimously they said yes."
The year of the fire, Klein donated some blood with the help of a nurse who had been "a notorious hippie hater" but suddenly proved very friendly.
"What I realized was that now we're their hippies and we're okay," he recalls.
"For the outside community, it was really seeing a lot of people who worked hard that exploded a myth," says Rich. "Once they saw that the work ethic was something they had in common, they were willing to let the other stuff go by the weird hair, the weird clothes."
FROM HIPPIE SCHOOL TO COMMUNITY SCHOOL
Perhaps no institution is more beloved by Takilmans than the alternative Dome School, situated in a handsome building crafted by community residents.
"That was a community effort to build that building. It's a straight-up-the-code proper school builing," boasts Klein, alluding to Takilmans' legendary battles with county building inspectors.
That pride extends into the wider community. Asked directions to the school, an old timer offers, "Oh, beautiful. They're wonderful people up there."
When Kristmas Baker moved up from Oroville, Calif., four months ago with her husband and son, she'd heard "mostly bad stuff" about Takilma: "It has a lot of remnants of hippieville. Maybe a lot of people had cash (marijuana) crops."
But after sending her son to the school's summer program, she's sold on the school and the community.
"For the most part, the people are really nice. And the community activities are really great," she says. "If we move to town, we'll send our son here."
The graying of Takilma means fewer students, and Toler, the Dome School's administrator, says the day is coming when the majority of students will live outside Takilma.
"We're constructing our curriculum so it appeals to a wider base of the valley," he says.
Frick has dropped by the school more than once and isn't surprised to hear that a growing number of students hail from other areas.
"I'll tell you, it's a nice operation," he says. "The people are very sincere that are teaching there. They look after the children."
PRISON ISSUE BRINGS UNITY
A year ago, state officials announced that a site near Takilma and Cave Junction was under consideration for a new 1,600-bed medium-security prison, rousing Illinois Valley residents to action. Takilmans took the lead in researching the issue and testifying about their findings at public hearings.
Recalls Toler, "What was so positive for me was that it melted that wall between some factions in this community, and it said, `Whether you've been here all your life or whether you're relatively new, is this what you want in your community?"'
With everybody in the Illinois Valley finally asking the same question, the answers created some new alliances, including hippie and old timer.
"They worked separately and with radically different agendas, but it turned out they were on the same side," says Pat Mersman, an 11-year Takilma resident who teaches piano and is a part-time librarian at RCC.
And when 600 people showed up at Illinois Valley High School last November and succeeded in making their case that the prison should be located elsewhere, most of Takilma and the Illinois Valley were united.
Not that all differences are settled. Environmental issues especially remain divisive. But the unified stand against the prison and Toler's election soon after signal that times have changed again.
NEWCOMERS TO OLD TIMERS
After 29 years in Takilma, Klein is no longer a newcomer and his community is clearly no detriment to the Illinois Valley or Josephine County.
"When I moved here, there was really a great flux for 10 or 15 years, and people used to float through," he says. "Quite a group was sieved out of those who floated through and have now been here a long time."
"It's kind of ironic that the hippies are among the more stable element in the community," Krauss says.
And now that Takilma has come of age, Toler predicts there may be great things in store for all of Illinois Valley's communities: "If we can respect our differences and use them as a community, then we will do wonders."
