Commune Unplugs From the World to Save It

Just beyond the sign that proclaims “Zendik Farm Survival Station,” near the 4,000-foot elevation hamlet of Tierra del Sol, in southeastern San Diego County, live 35 people who say they’re the heart and soul of a revolution.

It doesn’t look like such an important place--but then, their revolution hasn’t exactly grabbed the world by its tail, either.

There are chickens pecking the dirt around a score of old cars, half of them stripped for essentials to make the other half drivable.

There are milk-producing goats, domesticated Death Valley burros, some tired horses and a dozen or more dogs, and an organic garden with cabbage and onions, potatoes and turnips, and loads of tomatoes.

There are some huts and shacks that serve as bedrooms and art studios, and a more traditional home with an add-on upstairs.

Most everything is splashed abstractly with paint--lavender is the favored color--and almost everything is adorned with the letter “Z,” right down to the dangling earrings worn by the men and the tattoo on the right cheekbone of the head woman.

Welcome to the home the Zendiks built. This is their headquarters from which to save the world. If we don’t do it, they ask themselves, who will?

Art and music are their loves; saving the world from “ecollapse” is their mission. They preach that competition is society’s devil, and truth and cooperation are its savior. This band of 35 is out to convert the world’s residents with the conviction that they are the chief stewards of the Earth, and that all things bad--from poisoned streams to wars to cancer to political upheaval--are manifestations of competition, man to man, nation to nation.

“We’re not survivalists because we’re saying you can’t save yourself and your children unless you save everyone else as well, because we’re all breathing the same air,” says Arol Zendik, 48, a theater actress, exotic dancer, artist and traveler who serves as the matriarch of the Zendik family. “Remember that corny little saying as a kid, ‘One for all and all for one’? Well, there won’t be any survival for any of us unless we all survive together.”

At first blush, the occupants of this place don’t look like stockholders of a new world, but maybe a late-’60s hippie commune at best. They wear headbands, tie-dyed T-shirts and jeans with patches; they embrace esoteric art and music, and hold no regard for mainstream culture and society. Disdain, actually.

They salvage old cars and washing machines and tape decks, and cannibalize them for parts rather than buy new ones. They grow their own food and sew their own clothes. A well-stocked library is filled with second-hand books from practical first aid to esoteric philosophy, along with the requisite stack of National Geographics.

Technology No Stranger

They don’t turn their back on modern progress; they consider technology their opposing thumb, and use computers and word processors to help publish their literature.

Here, everything is collective. The money, the chores, the name Zendik, the child-rearing, the fun, the sex, the mentality. Especially the mentality.

That mentality goes something like this, according to a 10-year-old showing off her math prowess to a visitor:

“The square root of 81 is 9. The square root of 49 is 7. The square root of a square is the dumb culture he grew up in.”

At the Zendik Farm Arts Cooperative, the commune’s official name, the rest of the world is seen as pathologically square and self-destructive. And if its current residents are beyond saving, there are the children. Ah, the children. The world will be saved through its children.

“Our job is to save them. We need to teach them to be honest, to be simple,” says the 67-year-old, long-haired bohemian patriarch of the Zendik village who calls himself Wulf Zendik, wears a worn, tie-dyed robe and collects his wild beard at the tip with a leather string. Chief elder, philosopher, poet, musician, never-say-die beatnik and guru, this one-time jazz musician-turned-bookie discovered in 1969 that all the world, starting with him, was crazy and he’d better unplug himself from it before it was too late.

He took with him his favorite woman, who dropped the first letter from her name and now calls herself Arol, and together they stole away to his parents’ property near Perris, south of Riverside.

They established an asylum for artists, published an anti-war paperback through Doubleday, improved the property, sold it for a profit and hit the road. The members made up new and usually nonsensical first names like Zyde, Kan, Lore, Aunya and Keen, and adopted as their last name Zendik--Sanskrit for “outlaw” or “heretic” and the name of the protagonist in Wulf’s 900-page unpublished novel. They’ve moved around the country looking for an ecologically safe and sane place to call home.

They tried Florida, the Salton Sea, the Laguna Mountains, Topanga Canyon and even a house in Imperial Beach. Everywhere, they were driven out, either by pesticides or smog or sewage spilling out into the ocean. Finally, in February, 1986, Wulf and Arol put down $90,000 cash for this 75-acre spread within a cannon shot of the Mexican border, where there’s almost always a healthy and usually smog-free breeze, lots of sunshine and clean well water.

Numbers Have Grown Their numbers since 1969 grew from 5 to 9 to 15 to 35 now, thanks to street recruiting and advertising in alternative newspapers. Of the eight children between the ages of 3 1/2 months and 11 years, four were born at the commune, and four came here when their parents joined.

The Zendiks’ recruiting targets are men and women who tried to cooperate and be truthful “out there,” in the real world, but were rejected for their principles and who needed to retreat to a place where they could be, well, unconditionally cooperative and truthful, said Wulf Zendik.

Some of the members enjoyed affluent life styles and reached the top of their social ladders, only to discover there wasn’t much there to hang onto, he said. Several of the women described themselves as having upper-class upbringings rich with amenities but short on relationships.

‘Not a Hippie Hideaway’

Then there is 29-year-old Zan Zendik. As a legal secretary in San Diego, she found her work “tedious and meaningless” while growing frustrated because she was not spending much time with her 5-year-old son. Their future was sterile, she said. “I wanted him to grow up and believe in something, to have a family, and to have an organic life style.”

She saw a Zendik advertisement and decided to join the ranks. “This is not a hippie hideaway,” she said. “And we’re not trying to change laws and the Constitution to make things different. We need to change people and educate our young people about the Earth and its natural laws.”

The group does this through a variety of hand-out, newsprint-quality publications for which it seeks donations of $1. One is titled “Ecolibrium,” a collection of Wulf Zendik’s “serminars” on “ecol-warrior politics for dismantling the death culture and mobilizing for a sane society.” Another is “Zendika Warrior,” a collection of essays, cartoons and commentary on issues ranging from communal relationships to “nucleacide.”

Chen Zendik, 32, is a UC San Diego graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics and a former congressional intern who joined the organization five years ago after a bounce-around career “out there.” He said the Zendiks make about $1,000 a week in donations for their publications, which are hawked in alternative bookstores, on streets and outside rock concerts in San Diego and Los Angeles.

The publications are proof, he said, that the Zendiks are not turning their back on society, but trying to affect it. They simply live together in a commune because it’s the only place where they can find truth and cooperation and environmental safety.

Not for Everyone

Not everyone is cut out for communal living, Chen said; only a fraction of those who show interest in the place are accepted by the others.

One reason that relatively few people join the ranks, he acknowledged, is that the Zendiks do not acknowledge a deity. A forgiving God, he said, is society’s crutch, allowing man an excuse to perform less than his ultimate in trying to save the Earth because he knows that God will forgive him for being less than he should be. The Zendiks have no place for anyone who might need God’s forgiveness.

Moreover, there are relatively few takers to the Zendik life style because “we are a revolutionary movement, and how many revolutionaries are out there?” Chen said. “How many people are cultured enough to go for this? The majority of people are passive followers of the status quo.”

Too, the residents of this so-called survival station live under a set of rules and guidelines foreign to the mainstream.

If a resident is interested in having sex with another person, for instance, he must announce his interest through a two-member “erosocial” committee, which will pass along the request and return with the answer to the interested party. And if a relationship has soured, the problem is aired before the same committee.

The idea, said Arol and the others, is to save either party the pressure of agreeing to sex or the embarrassment of rejection because it is softened through the third-party intervention.

If the two parties agree to have sex, they find their names coupled on the day’s list of work chores and other activities.

Not all sexual relationships are handled through the committee; occasionally on Sunday nights, an “eroticollective” is held in the main house that features music, dance and whatever else it might lead to, Chen Zendik said.

One of the purposes of the eroticollective is to break down the feelings of possessiveness among persons; anyone who shows up essentially announces, by his presence, that he is available that evening for sex. But before the evening is over, the outcome is announced to the erosocial committee for monitoring purposes.

‘Constant Social Counseling’

“There is constant social counseling here,” said Arol.

Such rules and guidelines are necessary, said Wulf Zendik, to promote truthful relationships, the cornerstone of their little society. But the thrust of the commune is to save the world through its children--albeit just eight of them for now.

The children are schooled daily in subjects ranging from math, history and reading to art, culture, dance, theater and horseback riding. The children talk of how “we’re a big, happy family” and, indeed, every adult in the commune shares in the rearing of the children. To watch the children play, it is unclear who their real parents are.

“Here we can give the children decent air, clean water, organic food,” Wulf Zendik said. “We can give them safety from kidnapers and rapists. We can teach them about friendship and . . . how the life ‘out there’ is predicated on competition. Society teaches its children that you have to be competitive to score in the world.”

Can Zendik & Co. really change the world by raising society’s eco-conscience? That message, after all, isn’t new.

This commune is populated, he said, by people more true to their convictions than, say, members of the Sierra Club, because the Zendiks are willing to live and practice their philosophy daily, to the extreme.

“We’re here to save the kids. This is not pie-in-the-sky. Life is happening here. They are being educated here,” Wulf said.

“True, they’re being educated as revolutionaries, because that’s the only logical, intelligent response to the culture as it is. We would like to be a Utopia, but we can’t until the whole world is a Utopia.”