Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture

By: Roberta Price

Narrated by: Roberta Price

Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

In the late 1960s, new age communes began springing up in the American Southwest with names like Drop City, New Buffalo, Lama Foundation, Morning Star, Reality Construction Company, and the Hog Farm. In the summer of 1969, Roberta Price, a recent college graduate, secured a grant to visit these communities and photograph them. When she and her lover David arrived at Libre in the Huerfano Valley of southern Colorado, they were so taken with what they found that they wanted to participate instead of observe. The following spring they married, dropped out of graduate school in upstate New York, packed their belongings into a 1947 Chrysler Windsor Coupe, and moved to Libre, leaving family and academia behind.

Huerfano is Price's captivating memoir of the seven years she spent in the Huerfano ("Orphan") Valley when it was a petrie dish of countercultural experiments. She and David joined with fellow baby boomers in learning to mix cement, strip logs, weave rugs, tan leather, grow marijuana, build houses, fix cars, give birth, and make cheese, beer, and furniture as well as poetry, art, music, and love. They built a house around a boulder high on a ridge overlooking the valley and made ends meet by growing their own food, selling homemade goods, and hiring themselves out as day laborers. Over time their collective ranks swelled to more than 300, only to diminish again as, for many participants, the dream of a life of unbridled possibility gradually yielded to the hard realities of a life of voluntary poverty.

Price tells her story with a clear, distinctive voice, documenting her experiences with photos as well as words. Placing her story in the larger context of the times, she describes her participation in the antiwar movement, the advent of the women's movement, and her encounters with such icons as Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Abbie Hoffman, Stewart Brand, Allen Ginsburg, and Baba Ram Dass.

At once comic, poignant, and above all honest, Huerfano recaptures the sense of affirmation and experimentation that fueled the counterculture without lapsing into nostalgic sentimentality on the one hand or cynicism on the other.

©2013 University of Massachusetts Press (P)2019 Roberta Marie Price

love this it warmed my heart

I moved close to libre in the the area the old fences and buildings tell a story this book tells a beutiful story of a beutiful place where I feel even since being here causes the soul to grow and heal, there is something majestic and beutiful about this area these pinon trees remind me of life they can even split into 3 trees and keep growing even other parts of that tree die it keep growing this story shows how much we grow, how there so many things in life that pull on our heart strings. one thing is evident procrastination kills dreams some times in life you have to put down the Doobie and get to work and finish what you started sometimes we have to escape the imagination and shape our reality

Didn’t want this book to end

Huerfano is a beautiful and honest account of life in the counterculture in the 1970’s. It was funny, sad, and educational. I absolutely loved it.