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Memoir recounts communal life at Loleta’s Lighthouse Ranch
For those of us who may have forgotten about the commune that was located in Loleta in the ’70s, this book will bring it all back, in minute detail. D’Arcy Fallon’s new book, “So Late, So Soon,” is a lively, informative and entertaining memoir relating her experiences at the commune and her quest to find herself.
Poignant and pithy, “So Late, So Soon” is a straightforward, pull-no-punches read. Her experiences while at Humboldt’s own Lighthouse Ranch, overlooking Table Bluff during the early ’70s are sometimes irreverent, sometimes mournful, but always candid.
The post-’60s confusion championed by counterculture youth lead many people in search of spirituality — Fallon being no exception. She starts the volume off describing her experience while listening to the preacher, Jim Durkin, rant about getting closer to heaven. Her mind wanders, and she is filled with a sense of guilt for not “getting it.” While hitchhiking around Crescent City with her friend Josh, she was picked up by an old farmer in a rusty truck. “I’m going as far as Loleta, will that do?” They hesitate, jump in the truck, and discover the commune. Josh hightails it out of there, but Fallon sticks around for three years.
The book is woven with tales of Fallon’s Catholic upbringing in a military family, moving from California to Maryland, Arizona, the Philippines, back to California, then to Germany, Florida, Alabama, Virginia and completing “the loop” back to California. Her peripatetic youth taught her to “keep her eyes on the horizon, not the hearth.”
Fallon’s first weeks at the Lighthouse Ranch are spent studying her surroundings while groping for religious peace. “Fortune has its cookies to give out,” she glibly states. Her belief in God again seemed almost instantaneous, but the truth and honesty of her views shine forth. Such is the power of Fallon’s words. They are laconic, yet poetic; laced with an old-fashioned command of the English language that unquestionably springs from her early love of books.
Her memoirs are colored with characters that lived at the Lighthouse Ranch. Fallon has changed the names of all but three, so those of you who may have settled in Humboldt during the Ranch’s heyday need not worry. She describes the everyday details of communal living in hilarious style.
The book is also rife with passages concerning Eureka and the surrounding communities, and for those of us who were here in those days, it fuels a sense of nostalgia for the familiar-sounding businesses and places that no longer exist — a walk back in time. Fallon’s descriptions of the smells, sights and sounds of Humboldt become the reader’s own. The infamous Lighthouse Ranch near Loleta held a mystery to many locals, and though gossip and ridicule abounded concerning those 100 plus “Jesus Freaks,” “cultists,” or “weirdoes,” it was refreshing to learn that these people were not all crazy — perhaps just fearful of life on the outside, so chose a different path. They seemed, through Fallon’s eyes, to be trying to survive in the times of Watergate, the Vietnam War and a counterculture of self-realization, while actualizing their own form of religious tribal living; all for one and one for all.
Fallon writes about Lighthouse Ranch as a “gated community, without a gate,” and a “world unto itself.” She describes the peculiarities of her peers in ways that give one pause to muse about those days and the characters’ real identities.
Fallon recalls the drudgery of work required to keep the institution going — one pictures mounds of dishes to wash, laundry, bread to knead. Yet the author makes it easy to understand the reasons one would join such a religious commune, and leaves the reader grateful that she had the courage to write it all down.
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