A simple plan?

Jon Butts had 54 acres and a vision: to live simply, to take care of the land and have it take care of him, to join forces with like-minded people. But can an idealistic guy find happiness on a 21st century commune?

[Times photos: Stefanie Boyar] At Butts' "intentional community" in Plant City, the group works on an assembly line, cleaning and packing melons for sale: from left, Heather Hazen, Bak Kourkian, Janu Turzo, Jon Butts, Debbie Butts and Casey Butts.

By LANE DeGREGORY

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 20, 2001

Slow down. There are fruits and berries, fishes and game, trees and bushes and pine groves and people with faraway looks in their eyes in the place we are going.
-- Raymond Mungo, Total Loss Farm, 1970.

PLANT CITY -- After half a mile, the gravel road turns into dirt. Two muddy ruts snake under a cattle gate, hug a green pond, thread through palms and pines and palmettos. The air smells like old dogs and fresh compost.

"You can be happy without a lot of money, breathe real air, sweat real hard, listen to the bugs, smell the dirt, eat real food, go to bed without being stressed," says Jon Butts, among the sunflowers growing in his organic garden.

Jon Butts parks his rusty golf cart in the shade of crape myrtles and steps out slowly. It's early August, and the fields are pregnant with produce. Melons are tugging on the vines. Tree branches have sprouted long lime fingernails. Everything needs picking or pruning.

"Too much work for one man," Butts says, shaking his blond ponytail.

This was supposed to be his paradise, his escape. The Answer.

But after 16 years of pulling pineapples and planting palms, teaching Casey to drive a tractor and trying to convince Debbie things will work out, Butts isn't so sure anymore.

He moved out here with a packet of palm seeds. Bought 54 acres a half-hour east of Tampa, 3 miles from civilization. A feed store passes for culture in these parts.

He brought a 1985 Ford pickup, four dogs and five chickens, countless cats, a loud rooster. Two guitars. Plenty of old stumps for drumming.

But he didn't have help.

He hired migrant workers, but two trashed his mobile home. He paid laborers from town, but they quit when the work dried up. All the guys who moved in were lazy or sick, borrowed money or booze.

Baj Kourkian uses freshly picked basil from the garden as a garnish for the dinner plates. Community members take turns cooking organic meals; the menu this night is stir-fried vegetables served over Japonica rice.

Then, three years ago, Butts came up with a plan to save the farm. He would start an "intentional community." A sort of 21st century commune. A place where 40 or 50 earth-friendly people create their own utopia, far from Wal-Marts and McDonald's and Mobil stations. A place to find things that have been lost.

He envisions composting toilets outside the crumbling henhouses. Dented mobile homes overflowing with laughter and life and dirty, fresh veggies picked by dozens of calloused hands.

Insulation from America, right here in Central Florida.

But it's hard to build a commune by yourself. Especially when you've never lived in one, never visited one, never read about others through Thoreau or Skinner or Mungo.

Besides, he says, "I think my wife is ready to ditch the whole thing.

"I've got a lot of good ideas. I've got this land -- and it's got me. I've just got to find a few folks who see what I see out here."

Somebody has to crate those melons. Melons mean money. And they're ripening fast.

Butts is lean and strong, with the real muscles men get when they work outdoors instead of working out. His sky blue eyes are fringed with laugh lines, pale creases in his leathery tan. He's 52, with the energy and ideals of someone half his age. He never wears a watch.

Heather Hazen makes curtains - recycled bed sheets purchased at a thrift store - for the mobile home she shares with Janu Turzo and Baj Kourkian.

Growing up in Tampa, living in tract housing, Butts was the typical middle-class kid -- TV dinners and all. He studied accounting at community college, met Debbie while she was a bank teller, got married 24 years ago, had a son, Casey, a few years later. Butts ran Plant Nursery on leased land in Tampa. Did well with landscaping and tree sales for a while. Then Honda Land bought the property.

So he started searching for someplace where suburbia would be less likely to sprawl.

He heard about an old chicken ranch outside Plant City: 53 acres plus an acre deeded as a homestead. He built a house, fixed the barn, started working on neighboring farmers' machinery to make the mortgage.

Each afternoon, when he was done in the shop, he would walk out back and stuff palm seeds into small peat pots, remembering what people paid for tall trees at the nursery.

Trees grew. Plants prospered.

Butts was working 18 hours a day, trying to keep up.

His blond beard went gray.

Three years ago, while leafing through a magazine, Butts came across a classified for an intentional community. He had never heard of one. He read the fine print.

"I knew about hippie communes from the '60s, of course. But this sounded different," Butts says. "People coming together not for religion or philosophy, not to be nudists or wife-swap. Just to work the land and eat naturally, and live slower, simpler lives."

Just what he wanted. He put an ad in a local shopper: Looking for people interested in farming and a cheap place to live.

The first Fellowship of Intentional Communities was established in 1948 in Yellow Springs, Ohio. By the mid '80s, more than 100 independent communities across the country had formed a network. The group's Web site now lists intentional communities in 40 states and includes more than 540 communities around the world.

At least 160 communities have survived a decade, and 300 new ones have started since 1990. "Most members range in age from 30 to 60," the Web site says. "The most common form of governance is democratic, with decisions made by some form of consensus or voting."

Butts wants all the income from the trees and produce to go back to the commune. His $300,000 farm is paid off. In four years, the $90,000 house will be, too.

"People don't have to have money or pay rent when they come here," he says. "I'm not asking anyone to surrender their assets. We'll just share the fruits of our labors."

Some folks were more into fruits than labors.

Two weeks after the ad was published, a 30-something guy showed up, stashed his wife and two kids in the dilapidated mobile home behind Butts' house, asked to borrow a few bucks. He slept late, left a few days later.

Butts bought another ad. This time he specified: intentional community.

George came by, asking everyone to call him Prim "for prima donna." The name proved prophetic. George didn't do jack. He meditated all morning, took afternoon naps, sat at Butts' computer until 2 a.m. sending e-mails to pals in New Jersey.

Butts asked George to leave. Then he discovered the Reach Book: a listing of intentional communities. A more targeted audience, surely.

Larry, who was getting divorced, moved in -- then tried to kill himself. Robert, from Baltimore, couldn't swing a hammer, couldn't stop eating. A woman from Naples wanted to live rent-free so she could pay off her $90,000 credit card debt.

Spirit, a Deadhead, worked out for a while. But after a few weeks, he started preaching about veganism. He couldn't stay, he said, unless Butts and his family renounced all meat and dairy products. Then leave, Butts said.

After that, Butts started a Web site. "We are interested in renewable energy projects, native plants, permaculture and fun," says his EcoFarm home page. "We are trying to home-school our 17-year-old son and could use help, or at least he could use some company near his age."

Karin found the farm on the Internet last fall, sailed in from South Africa. She's a divorced mom, 47, with three young sons. She picked spinach, sewed quilts, turned the compost pile, trimmed trees, cooked stir-fry suppers. Butts built boats for the boys in his workshop, taught them to ride bikes and hunt fossils.

"It was the first time this place had really started to feel like a community," Butts says."For me, it was a beautiful time."

Karin and her kids stayed five months, through Christmas and the winter fogs. In February, her ex-husband tracked her down. He wanted his boys back and took Karin with them.

"I was so sad to see them go," Butts says.

Debbie wasn't. While her husband runs the farm, she works full time in Tampa, a plant specialist for the Hillsborough County extension service. She has never been too keen on the community idea. But she's trying to be supportive.

"I'm not into the totally shared everything," she says. "These people are moving into our house. I feel like they're invading my privacy."

Imagine coming home after working all day to find another woman cooking in your kitchen, your husband building toys for someone else's sons, three children who aren't yours playing in your living room. No one is paying rent. This woman is home all day with your husband.

And she's the 15th person to live in your house in as many months.

"I'm getting burned out," Debbie says. "I'm not sure this is going to work."

Casey doesn't care. He's broad-shouldered and sullen, spikes his hair and wears baggy Tommy Hilfiger jeans. He has grown up on this farm. Can't wait to get off, move to the city. One more year.

What about his dad's dream? "It's okay," he says, shrugging. "Not for me."

The melons ripened in August. By then, only Butts and Casey were around to pick them. Butts was worried.

Then the e-mail came.

"Hello all in sunny florida ... I have been involved in several communities over the past 14 years, some good and of course some bad. I am interested in the starting of a new community as opposed to joining an established one.

"I am a non-smoker, occasional drinker (when the neighbors bring moonshine over) I am not a hippy, no tattoos or piercings or green hair. Actually clean cut for farm life, except I haven't shaved for a few weeks and probably need a hair cut. I am divorced with no children, I do have the ability to bring people into a community to help it grow, I enjoy music and anything electronic.

"Well, that's a quick run down on me."

The message came from North Carolina, from a 41-year-old man who was living on a communal farm, cooking for 50 people. He said he does carpentry and works computers. He signed his name "Baj (old turkish name for freedom)."

He didn't mention his friends.

Butts called his wife at work. "This one feels different," he told her. She didn't answer.

"He'll be here Saturday."

Baj bumps down the gravel road, follows the ruts through the cattle gates, winds around the pond and palms and palmettos. Two muddy dogs chase his truck by the swamp. He slows at the orchard, smiles at the lime shoots.

Heather is beside him on the front seat. She's 19. Used to manage a tobacco shop in Greenville, S.C. Janu is riding shotgun. He's 18. Just got his GED in Philadelphia. They met in the kitchen at Zendik Farm, the Carolina arts commune where they were last living. But elders there were trying to tell them whom to date, what kind of music to listen to, what to eat. When Baj told them about Butts' farm, the two teenagers asked to come too.

"It's quiet out here," Baj says, surveying the machine shop. Iridescent dragonflies are buzzing through the tall grass. Somewhere, a crow is cawing.

He parks in the shade of an elm, unloads three duffel bags, a brown toolbox and a silver drum. All they brought. All they need.

The farmhouse is long and low. On the front porch, a flag with a faded cardinal flops over an old sink. A calico cat is snoring in a plastic lawn chair. Five melons are sunbathing on a discarded stove.

All the doors and windows are open. Butts' bedroom, the kitchen and living room are on one end, then a rectangular dining room with a huge picnic table. A covered breezeway separates the second bedroom and bath.

Butts didn't expect the teenagers. He had assumed Baj would stay in Casey's room, with Casey. His new guests have other plans.

"I've done this for a while," says Baj, whose real name is Mark. "I lived on a communal farm in Maine for seven years. We grew organic mushrooms for Albertsons supermarkets. Then they got into militia, so I left. Met these guys and we got talking about starting something up.

"So we're here to help. We've got lots of ideas."

Three weeks later, Baj and Janu have gutted the old mobile home, yanked out rotten ceiling tiles, built bunk beds from scrap lumber, painted and sanded and sweated and laughed and reclaimed broken furniture from the barn.

Heather sewed curtains from bright sheets she bought at Goodwill, nailed tapestries to the ceiling.

And -- with Butts' help -- they picked all 10,000 pounds of melons. Just in time. Loaded them into wooden wagons, carted them to market.

Now, their community has $700 cash.

"It's not like we need much," Janu says. "The only thing I need new is music. And I can listen to the radio, download it off the Internet. If I'm working hard here, contributing to the community, I wouldn't feel bad about asking for a little cash either, to buy a CD or something. It's not like you're not allowed to have anything for yourself."

In the evenings, Heather and Janu saute peppers and onions, make their own chili sauce, cook couscous, brown rice or tabouli. When Debbie comes home from work, dinner is waiting. Everyone -- even Casey -- eats around the big picnic table.

They talk about how America has become polluted and bulldozed, plastic and overconsumed, how it's not what they had hoped for at all. They talk about how natural labor is so much better than living unnaturally. And how happy they are here at home.

Most nights, after Baj or Butts does the dishes, there's a jam session: Baj and Butts on guitar, Heather, Debbie and Janu on homemade drums. Sometimes, they sit on the porch, serenading the stars.

They plan to have monthly meetings to discuss what's bothering who and which kinds of crops to try next.

"These guys haven't asked me for anything," Butts says. "They came in here saying their truck was paid off, the insurance is paid up for a year. They're not dependent.

"The only serious problem so far is that they had the vacuum out there, cleaning the trailer, and I needed it this morning. Pretty serious, huh?

"This is just a different way to enjoy life. You can be part of the sitcom instead of sitting in your easy chair, with a beer in your hand, watching others pretend to live.

"You can be happy without a lot of money, breathe real air, sweat real hard, listen to the bugs, smell the dirt, eat real food, go to bed without being stressed.

"I knew there were other people out there who saw things the same way. We've got room, still, for many more."

Butts says he hasn't read Mungo, who lived on a Vermont commune in the late '60s and early '70s. But this Plant City farmer sounds a lot like the peacenik philosopher. Thirty years later, the words still resonate:

Suddenly realized what comes after the end of the movie. The Life. Get out of your vinyl armchair and walk out into the street, leaving the flick behind, meet a stranger or two, fall in love, chase butterflies up to the orchard, father and mother your children, keep up your compost heap, feel the wind in your eyes. The Life is whatever you think it is. How it goes on and on!

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