At the time I met Dr. Burden, I had not seen my father for over two years, and it would be another two or more before we saw each other again. He was always in my heart, and I know now that some of my perceptions of him were the result of my own romantic nature mixed with truth, memory and wishful thinking.

Many of my happiest childhood memories were in his studio watching him paint, being shown how pigments were mixed, listening to him talk about great artists and the great movements in art. I loved the smell of turpentine and linseed oil. I loved watching him make things and improvise on what he didn't know. There were few places I was as happy as I was in his studio. Our casual conversations covered all manner of topics from artists to musicians to how things were made. We never talked about sports or cars.

In the early 1950's in Berkeley my father always managed to have a studio in some nearby storefront or, in one case, an unused bakery shed. I watched him draw and paint models he hired, watched him make stretcher bars, watched him stretch canvases and prime them. I modeled for him frequently (it kept me quiet and he didn't have to pay me). I learned how to sit still and hold a pose for long periods of time.

I can't remember when I first modeled for him. I only knew that my sister, who is four years older, had modeled also, and our modeling was taken for granted. My father would talk a little sometimes, and he would tell me if I could move and when I could take a break. Often we listened to music. Sometimes I was clothed and sometimes I was nude. We heated water on a pot-bellied stove and made green Japanese tea. It was idyllic in all the ways that the my parents' relationship with each other was not.

When my father left us and drove off to New York with all the paintings he could carry tied to the top of a borrowed Studebaker, I was unconscious of the enormity of my pain. But with the passing years came my increasing anger towards my mother, whom I blamed, rightly or wrongly, for his departure.

Several months after my dad left, my mother took my sister and me to live in Egypt, where she fulfilled a lifelong dream under the guise of a managing a public relations project for the Egyptian government. The cultures of ancient Egypt engendered a rich mythology in which the ideas of reincarnation figured prominently. This was a fascination of my mother's, and one that I accepted as easily as modeling for my father in the nude.

Living in Egypt was an adventure into a world both familiar in its humanity and its fabled history as well as exotic in its completely non-Christian, non-European orientation. It was the perfect antidote to the pain of my father's departure.

In Cairo I found out about the Islamic world, about poverty and about a history so great and rich I have never absorbed it completely. In upper Egypt I saw magnificent temples and monuments; I had my first peak experience while visiting the temple of Karnak. I seldom thought about America and never missed much except my father, my grandmother, and our cat.

When we returned to our life back in Berkeley six months later, I began to look around and I liked less and less of what I saw in my peers. As the years passed and I did not see my dad again, I gradually began to invent myself in an image that I thought would reflect my father's values.

By 1962 the gossip regarding my nude modeling for my father had followed me for years and gotten nastier as time went by. I became less tolerant of the bullying by the testosterone-saturated little roosters who prided themselves on their athletic prowess and placed low value on any of the things I held as precious.

They seemed to live in a world where sex, cars and sports were the only relevant topics; my not sharing their values made me unpopular. That I was not embarrassed to have modeled nude must surely have disturbed them. What they could not know was that the implication that there was something dirty about this activity was an affront to my feelings about both my father and to the remnants of my innocence. At fourteen I was able to ignore the harassment only with increasingly gritted teeth, and one day I reached my limit.

I decided that whoever next insulted me and my father with these innuendos would receive my full fury.

In the lunchroom waiting in line for a tray one day, I heard a voice make a comment linking me, my father, and all that is filthy in one snide quip dripping with slime. I turned around and slugged the first boy I saw as hard as I could. I had never seen him before, I did not care who he was, I was angry and not going to hide it any more.

From that time on the comments seemed to cease.

I also began to refuse to participate in the gladiator-inspired team sports that passed for physical education. I didn't care who didn't want me on their team; I was determined to make them regret I was in the class. I was a bad sport and indifferent to the opinions of others. This was my only available revenge on the one area of their pride.

Although my father and I wrote and phoned each other regularly, this was but slight consolation against the intensity of my unconscious grief over his absence.

Maybe I was born angry, as my mother sometimes liked to say, or maybe I was angry about the dynamics in my family or the dynamics in the world. Whatever the cause, it is a fact that by the time I was fourteen I was a burning fuse waiting for an opportunity to express myself on my own terms.

In the summer of 1962 I began to effect a change in my public identity by refusing to wash my jeans and by purchasing a blue chambray work shirt. I wore turtle-necked sweaters and I avoided the barbershop. I saw as little of my mother as I could arrange. My career goals centered around being an actor, and I was in fact actively involved with a semi-professional little theater group. I fashioned my bohemian persona on what I imagined would dovetail with my father's world, and also on an article in Life Magazine which described a generic beatnik lifestyle.

A local public radio station offered a Friday night folk music program; I became a fan and began my education in the avant garde popular music of the period. This was an "open mike" show, and the station was usually filled with hangers-on and well-wishers of various sorts. It was the place to be cool, be seen and be invited to the inevitable party which took place afterwards, starting at one in the morning. I met others of like temperament--not many my own age, yet I was not alone. No one objected to my drinking wine and smoking cigarettes.

Early in the fall semester my mother heard of a man who was in town looking for students to take to his experimental school in southern Baja California. Another family had sent their son there for summer school and he had loved it. This was the era of Summerhill and many other alternative schools.

Eager to do something to change our relationship, my mother suggested I try this school. I'd have been willing to go anywhere with anyone, just to get away, especially to a foreign country. An appointment was made for me to have an interview. I met Doctor Burden and agreed to go to Shimber Beris, which was the name of this school.

Dr. David Burden was a tall Englishman with glasses and little hair on top of his head. I have to admit that the romantic in me was attracted to his being English and the adventurer was attracted to going to Mexico. I was promised formal education by correspondence course from the University of London. I was so impressed that I was going to completely outclass the jerks on the junior high playground that my imagination quickly took over; I was confident that this was the place for me.

It was arranged that I would meet the group in Fresno and that I must bring some specific equipment and clothing for living in the desert.

My only regret in departing public school was leaving the drama class, where I was carving a niche for myself due to my theatrical personality and art background.

I was met at the Greyhound terminal in Fresno by Dr. Burden, Dick from Berkeley and Rod from Long Beach. I wore motorcycle boots, blue jeans and a chambray work shirt.

The first thing we did as a group was to go to an enormous military surplus warehouse and purchase supplies for our life in Mexico. We bought large field stoves, pots and pans, tents, tarpaulins and two twenty five gallon tanks for drinking water.

Dr. Burden had also just purchased a vehicle which had seen military service in North Africa in WW2. It had bulletproof gas tanks, dual tires on the back, four-wheel drive and about a dozen various gears in two gear boxes. A game hunter had remodeled it with four bunks, a sink, a propane-powered refrigerator and stove. It was well suited for our purposes; we called it the "Elephant." That night we drove to Ojai, to a place called Meher Mount.

Agnes Barron had been a foreign correspondent before the war but was now a devotee of Meher Baba, an Indian yogi. She had named her retreat on a mountain top overlooking the Ojai valley after her guru. There was a house, two dormitory-style buildings, a garage, a neglected swimming pool full of frigid algae-clouded water, and the overwhelming rotten-egg odor of sulphur everywhere. The area was known as Sulphur Mountain. Sulphur water flowed from all the taps and stained the sinks and plumbing.

The boys slept in one dorm and the girls in another. Regardless of whatever rules were laid down about what we could or could not talk about, all such rules were instantly ignored when Dr. Burden was out of earshot. I got a crash course in the life of a teenage surfer from Long Beach. Rod told me tales of surfing and sex and beach parties, woody station wagons and rock 'n' roll in the Southern California sun. I felt confirmed in my belief that he was from a foreign country.

The rest of our group included Dr. Burden's wife and their nine-year-old daughter, Daphne; two sisters whose parents were diplomats in Malaya; Tru, a tall woman with stringy grey hair who looked like a Dorothea Lange portrait from the dust bowl; Tru's husband Clear, who sometimes appeared in an old Kaiser car with a trunk full of produce rescued from some supermarket dumpster; Beth and Linda, another pair of sisters; and Brad, another boy from Berkeley, who was later joined by his mother Connie and little brother Steve.

I attached myself to Dick from Berkeley; we had at least some common points of reference. He was four years older than me. Never having had a brother, I appreciated his tolerance and patience with me.

Dick was fascinated with working on the Mrs. Burden's 1948 Studebaker and the 1933 Dodge coupe he found in Miss Baron's garage. I was more involved with letting everyone else know how unspeakably hip I was in all matters relating to the arts, controversial issues (of which at fourteen I had only an inkling), music and theater. Mrs. Burden tried briefly to teach us some theater techniques but, like much of the structure at Shimber Beris, this was lost in the shuffle.

Occasionally the group would go to the community center in Ojai to folk dance on a Friday night. And there were many different mundane activities such as getting non-sulphur drinking water in five gallon jars, picking oranges in you-pick-it orchards, cooking, doing laundry or washing dishes. I managed to carve some sandal soles from an old tire, using only a pocket knife and a lot of determination. On one trip to town I shoplifted a lovely Esterbrook fountain pen which made me feel very guilty every time I looked at it.

Most of the time it was the girls who handled the cooking chores and other traditionally domestic work. The boys were assigned to do labor-oriented work, such as fixing the septic tank or repairing the vehicles, none of which I knew anything about.

Every morning the group gathered in the living room for a meditation period. This could be silent, but more often it involved Doctor reading from some spiritual material of his choice: The Third Eye, by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa; Winged Pharaoh, by Joan Grant; The White Company, by Conan Doyle; or The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins. And often Dr. Burden sermonized on whatever he was in the mood to critique; his themes generally revolved around his opinion that we were all the damaged products of a depraved society. The hidden agenda to be revealed was that only through Shimber Beris was salvation available to us, poor wretched souls that we were.

I learned that Shimber Beris meant "valley of the birds" in Swahili and that Dr. Burden was the son of missionary parents; he had spent a lot of time in Africa as a child. He was a doctor of chiropractic although he began to put on airs of being skilled in the areas of homeopathy and naturopathy and even dentistry.

After a few weeks at Meher Mount there was a falling out with Miss Baron, which resulted in our abrupt departure. For the next several months we drifted from one public campground to the next in Ventura and San Diego Counties. During this time I amused myself by getting away with smoking cigarettes on the sly, reading from the complete works of O. Henry and a copy of Playboy I had managed to smuggle along with me. The Playboy fed my adolescent libido and the short stories about turn of the century bohemia in Greenwich Village fueled my romantic notions of being a beatnik.

Often I accompanied Dr. Burden and Dick or Rod on seemingly interminable treks to find some piece of equipment our leader wanted to take to Baja: second-hand dental equipment, an ozone generator, a small grain mill, an arc welder, a washing machine, an electrical generator, tarpaulins, a fifty-gallon drum to hold gasoline, and a military surplus trailer. We searched health food stores for organic produce, raw milk, raw nuts, whole grains and honey-sweetened ice cream.

At a romantically seedy trailer park near San Diego I was caught smoking a cigarette in the shower by Dr. Burden, who told me that his wife had a psychic vision of me doing that. I forget the punishment; no doubt it involved some form of spiritual penance of his design.

The spiritual/metaphysical atmosphere unfolded around me day after day, although I was often amused that I had heard the references already from my mother in one form or another. The suburban children he picked up as students for his makeshift tough-love school of spiritual reintegration were often more confused, bewildered and submissive than I to the whims he proclaimed in the name of lofty spirituality.

Towards the end of my experience with the school I heard Dr. Burden casually claim to be capable of levitation and telekinesis, although he refused to demonstrate these skills in front of us.

My time unfolded in uneven pieces, now smooth and serene, now angry and rebellious. At times I felt sullen and resentful; at others I was happy to be Dr. Burden's pet clown; but always in the background were profound doubts about the purpose of my involvement. I reminded myself that the alternative was to return to the purgatory of the public school system, where I felt completely misplaced. I didn't know where I wanted to be unless it was at the High School of Music and Art I had heard of in New York City, and living with my dad. That was a dream never to be realized.

It seemed that new rules and new unpleasant surprises were always being unveiled. The rule that all mail home was to be read first by Doctor was a violation of privacy I was unprepared for. The idea was that he wanted to be sure we were telling the truth about what was happening to us. My level of communication with my mother at the time was poor enough that the content of my letters to her were bland and unremarkable in any case. The letters to my father, on the other hand, were much more direct and specific about my experience; those I simply smuggled past the censor.

After five months of wandering around southern California in the Elephant, we were finally ready to go to Mexico. Our first stop was to be San Felipe, where a boat the school owned was supposedly docked.

In Tijuana we stopped only long enough to find drivers to guide our two-vehicle caravan down the peninsula. Just past San Felipe we made camp by the side of the road in the desert less than a mile from the beach. This turned into a several day stopover. It was discovered that we lacked some crucial automotive parts for the Studebaker. Dick and Rod, being the oldest, were sent to get replacement parts.

That night we were told that the school's boat had sunk. The story was that a storm had torn it from its anchor and demolished it totally. We walked the beach wondering which pieces of driftwood had once been part of the boat. Later a rumor spread that the Mexican government had taken the boat due to some disagreement with Dr. Burden.

While we were camped waiting for Dick and Rod to return, I practiced baking bread in the gasoline-fired field oven and generally enjoyed the warm spring weather. The totally exotic wilderness and the absurd circumstances of my existence suited my sense of irony.

One American tourist stopped with his camper to chat briefly, unaware of the nature of our group. "Hyuck-hyuck, we hadda catastrophe last night," he chortled. "We run outta liquor." Another American tourist drove past towing a boat called The Wet Dream....This was the America Dr. Burden loved to hate and he seldom wasted an opportunity to remind us that we were all products of the depraved society north of the border. What I loved was watching his reaction to these tourists, which struck me as equally absurd as the vulgarity which offended him.

At last we continued our trek south. The changing desert delighted me. The landscape with its austere and unexpected beauty was overwhelming, and I was fascinated with the occasional villages along the road.

In March the full force of Spring was on the desert--balmy weather, blue sky, jackrabbits, birds and exotic vegetation. We stopped in each village to stretch our legs and to buy penuche, the crude sugar sold in every general store and which in every village tasted remarkably different. Some tasted like light molasses, some more like unsweetened chocolate, some almost like maple sugar. The general stores were like sets from a western movie, with all the goods one would need sold from behind one long counter that ran the length of the store.

We managed to average a hundred miles a day and never failed to have at least one flat tire. At night we camped at the side of the road, built a fire and cooked our vegetarian meals on the gas burner in the Elephant.

Frequently the meals consisted of atole, a corn meal mush eaten by the people in the region. Postum, a roasted grain product which supposedly resembled coffee, was the hot beverage of choice, sweetened with brown sugar.

The native navigator/drivers always made their camp at a discreet distance from our group. I watched as they built a simple snare and later roasted a small animal over a fire of their own. I admired them, and part of me wished I could learn from them what their lives were like, and not live within the fantasy culture created by Dr. Burden.

As we crept day by day down the peninsula there were always new images to contemplate, such as the Viscaino desert and the waters of Scammons Lagoon, where whales came to give birth. On the broad sands of the lagoon were scattered beautiful turtle shells; I didn't know it then, but the flesh of these turtles was the plunder of hunters who would later themselves be the target of environmentalists.

Somewhere along the road we stopped for a day so that the older boys could change the transmission in the Studebaker. At another juncture we bided our time while they replaced an axle on the Elephant, which, with all its power and strength, had met its match in this terrain. One afternoon we came upon some Americans whose jeep had cracked its frame crossing a ditch. They were more than surprised when we pulled over and offered to weld the break for them on the spot. It was fun to be a part of the group at these times.

At other times I could stare at the beauty of the landscape and tune out the surreal contradictions I felt bombarded and threatened with from Dr. Burden and occasionally from the other students. Dick had quietly counseled me early on to "take what I needed and leave the rest." His words helped, but he had demons of his own and was prone to be distant at times. In time I would find it harder to "take what I needed" as my anger at new insanities blinded me to what goodness there was.

One afternoon after more than ten days of deeply rutted and rock-strewn roads, we came at last to "good" road which had been scraped flat by a grader. Dr. Burden told us that we would soon be in La Paz and near the end of our journey. For me the best and worst was yet to come.

Some hours later we pulled over to the side of the road near a deserted stretch of the beach on the bay of La Paz. Dr. Burden found a telephone or telegraph facility and contacted his hired helper in San Bartolo, Juan Alvarez.

While we waited for him to call another boy and I wandered on the beach and met a man lazing in the sand who offered us a shot of brandy from his bottle. We happily accepted. Another man seemed to be firing a rifle in our direction so we returned to the Elephant.

Juan drove up in another vehicle owned by the school, a Dodge Power Wagon once used as a military ambulance in WW2. Juan was to become my most trusted friend for the rest of my stay with Shimber Beris.

Our caravan drove south on the main road from La Paz toward Cabo San Lucas. The road was sandy and rutted in places, passing through shallow arroyos and rocky outcroppings covered with enormous wild fig trees. Cactus in vast varieties along with a plethora of other desert vegetation seemed to grow everywhere. We passed through quiet villages, a ghost town and the first vestiges of what would later become "resorts." Eventually we arrived in San Bartolo, about halfway between La Paz and the cape.

The excitement of actually living in a foreign culture overcame the doubts I had about being with the group; for the moment I was more than satisfied to have come this far.

San Bartolo is an inland village situated on a large spring which issues forth from a low cliff in the middle of the village. The village was occupied by people of modest education and economics, mostly involved in agriculture. In every way they appeared to me to possess a sweetness and dignity that is missing in American city dwellers. The women wore long print dresses, and most had long black hair; their feet were either bare or sandaled. The men wore denim pants, blue or white shirts, straw hats, and sandals made from rubber tires and inner tubes.

Dr. Burden had leased a piece of land from a Senor Castro, whom he had dealt with before. The land was about an acre in size and had one building on it. An irrigation ditch ran along the lower edge of the property and separated it from a lush orchard on the other side. At one edge of the property was a large rocky outcropping with the ubiquitous fig trees growing on it. The outhouse stood to the far north. There were small palm trees scattered in the field, which lay well below the main road. The driveway into the property was steep and badly rutted.

The building, next to which we parked the Elephant, was built of stone; it had one window and a sturdy door. From the south wall a very large roof slanted broadly down to a point some distance from the building; the three remaining sides were open. The area under the roof was packed dirt.

Beside one of the stone walls a traditional cooking fireplace had been built. This was an elevated hearth on top of which were constructed three trough-like spaces divided by mud bricks. A kettle placed over the cooking fire would rest on the edges of the two parallel rows of bricks. Most of our cooking was done here; the remainder was done on the field stoves.

The area under the roof was the main social area for the group. A large dining table was installed--and soon there were some unusual rules in place as well.

We were forbidden to speak under the roof at any time. And we were forbidden to speak about the past anywhere under any circumstances.

The punishment for breaking either rule was to be forbidden from speaking for an entire day. The punishment for violating one's punishment added a day to the sentence. It looked for a while as though some of us might never be allowed to speak again.

Our tents were set up in the field with generous distance between them. I was not eager to sleep with my face at ground level, the ground being very dusty and hard, nor was I eager to be at eye level with scorpions, snakes or iguanas. I constructed a bed by first cutting four limbs with a "vee" shape at one end and sinking them into the ground for corner posts; I braced them with rocks, sticks and mud. I cut two limbs for the width and two more for the length; I laid these pieces in the crotches of the "vees" and lashed the frame together. I wove the springs for the bed out of ule, which is made by cutting a continuous strip from an inner tube, usually for the purpose of tying down a load on a truck. I had the best bed in camp.

Various field trips became routine. The group would pile into the Dodge Power Wagon to go get the trophy fish the rich Texans often discarded after having their pictures taken, before they flew home in their private planes; we ate a lot of free fish this way. Other trips were to small farms to procure vegetables or fruit.

Slowly there seemed to grow upon our group a vague nightmarish feeling of oppression and a cold manipulative hostility from Dr. Burden. Mrs. Burden had been installed in a villa in La Paz and we missed her gentler influence. Occasionally I would see her in La Paz when we drove up to buy things not available in San Bartolo. Often the students talked about the feeling that we were living in a concentration camp. Frequently many of us were depressed.

On one visit to La Paz, Dick and I sat on a bench waiting for Dr. Burden when we saw the actor John Wayne come ashore from his converted mine sweeper, anchored out in the harbor. I remember being amused and mildly repelled by these Hollywood Americans, who seemed more alien than ever to the world I now occupied.

Another wonderful memory of La Paz was the opportunity Dr. Burden found for me to spend a day in a bakery watching the traditional methods of baking with a huge brick oven being applied by a generous and friendly crew of young men.

These became the moments of grace between the extended passages of emotional turbulence fueled by the sometimes sadistic emotional treatment from our guardian with all his spiritual rationalizations, all his threats of "bad karma" or the horrors that life after death would bring if we didn't straighten out now.

At times like these I retreated within myself, into a shell of protective memories where I nurtured all the details I loved about my home in Berkeley. I remembered the trees, our cat, the house, the rooms in the house, special Sunday mornings when we listened to music and my mother and sister played Scrabble. More than anything else I returned to the memories of music which I longed to hear again. As a child I had played violin and developed a strong ear for musical memory. This gift kept me as close to sanity as I was likely to come. I remembered favorite passages of Mozart and Hayden, of Broadway musicals, and of the new Joan Baez records I had listened to avidly not long before leaving Berkeley. I read short stories in the O. Henry collection, looked at pictures and read from Playboy.

Somehow or other my father sent me a copy of The Realist from New York, an outrageously hip underground satire magazine which, had it ever been found, would have guaranteed me a place of honor in the special hell reserved for those who displeased Dr. Burden.

I also amused myself by carving wooden spoons from wood I found in the desert on a quest for better materials for my bed.

I was deprived of the pleasure of my bed on my birthday, however, due to an incident which began to shift the balance of my feelings against remaining at Shimber Beris.

Repeated disagreements with Dr. Burden, we were warned, would lead to punishment more severe than a mere "silence" for a day or two. The offender would be put into "isolation"--cut off from all communication and interaction with the group--and be deprived of all familiar or protective environments.

I have long since forgotten what transgression brought the wrath of Doctor Burden upon me but the ultimate in his arsenal was laid to my psyche on April 16, 1963, the day before my fifteenth birthday.

I was restricted to one square yard of ground next to a palm tree, off in the sticks, well away from the camp but in plain sight. I was required to stand, not lean against the tree, with my back to the group. A tray of food was brought to my feet three times a day. At night I was allowed to sleep on the ground where I had stood all day.

Finally after three days it was decided I needed no more of this therapy and I was elevated to a bottom-of-the-pile kitchen helper. I cleaned all the dishes for the school after each meal. I was still being given the "silent" treatment, but I was allowed the privilege of sleeping in my tent again. This lasted another two weeks.

I no longer recall the process by which I reemerged into the better graces of the headmaster, but I learned that I might as well lie with a smile on my face if that relieved the abuse. The seeds had been planted for my own insurrection.

Mine was not the only rebellion. Two boys ran off to La Paz but were picked up by the police and returned. I slowly formulated a different kind of rebellion. In the meantime, I was determined to glean as much pleasure from the beauty and charm of the land and the culture as I could.

Our most interesting excursion by far lasted several days in the costal desert, where we helped build the first road from the main highway to a village called Cardonal.

Don David, as the natives called Dr. Burden, rode a horse, as did his daughter Daphne, making some of us feel like peons with our great white master while we labored with picks and shovels in the hot bright sun alongside a crew of local people who would benefit from our efforts.

We drove the first automobile into the village. They told us that many of the women and children had never seen a real motor vehicle before, except in magazine pictures. I felt ambivalent about our distinction.

Cardonal is a hamlet of thatched houses on the Sea of Cortez. Fishing is the principal source of income. The men sell their catch in La Paz, transporting it in their canoes.

In this village I watched two men spin horse hair into a beautiful bridle for a horse, fascinated by the process of the craft.

In the desert we gorged on fresh cactus fruit as red and sweet as watermelon, getting our hands bloody from the thorns. We camped on the beach for several nights and one of the most spiritual experiences was watching the sun rise over the Sea of Cortez.

Yet there was real danger in this environment. We swam often in the clear water, and many of our group were stung by the ubiquitous man-o-war jellyfish with their poisonous tails.

Another kind of poisoning came from the free fish we were given one day at Los Barriles, a resort; the school devoured this fish greedily for dinner. I awoke in the middle of the night with the most intense itching of the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. The next day I found that others had more violent reactions to the food poisoning.

More than once we ate rancid butter after it spoiled. Dr. Burden bought weevil-infested wheat which we cleaned tediously by hand before grinding it in our little electric mill which was powered by the enormous marine generator we had bought in San Pedro.

Our general sanitation was probably no better than anyone else's in the village, despite our electrical generator, which allowed us to run the washing machine, a light bulb, and whatever Dr. Burden had in the office he'd set up in the Elephant.

I bathed usually in the irrigation ditch at the edge of the property, often stealing mangoes or papayas from the orchard next door where I loved to wander.

As the summer progressed I began to notice I had sores on my feet that did not heal. Feeling myself to be a hardy sort, I ignored this condition until I began to realize that the sores were spreading; in fact, if I merely scratched uninfected skin with my fingernail, I would have within 24 hours a running sore at that place, festering and spreading like the others.

My legs hurt from the inside and were only comfortable when lifted horizontally. I was told I had subclinical pellagra, related in some way to leprosy.

I saw people in the village hobbling around with legs covered with the sores and began to wonder what this all added up to for me.

When I could, I spent more and more time talking to Juan, confiding in him my anger and frustration towards Dr. Burden. He was entirely sympathetic and told me that Dr. Burden had changed, he was not like he used to be, and it disturbed Juan too.

On one occasion I visited Juan's house, a woven basket-like house with a thatched roof, off the main road close to our property. His wife was cooking and I commented on the delicious smells. Soon after that Juan began to regularly bring me food his wife had cooked, a delicious memory I still savor as much for the sensual pleasure as for the incredible generosity of spirit.

Before the problems began with my legs one of my main pleasures had been to walk through the village and buy eggs from people who had extras to sell. This gave me further opportunities to witness their lives up close in ways which I appreciated more than I could adequately express.

A visit to the butcher was a revelation in the matter-of-fact realities of the operation in such a primitive situation. Under a half roof lay the carcass of the cow where it had fallen in death. The butcher cut off the pieces fresh from the carcass for customers on request. When business was slow, he cut strips and hung them on racks to dry in the sun.

The reduction of mobility from my diseased legs meant that the only peace I had was when the group went off on a trip and I declined to join. I could be alone or visit with Juan, who came to help me speak Spanish. But I was getting to the end of my patience with this experience, and I was beginning to formulate the plan for my final rebellion.

I regretted that I'd be leaving Juan and everything else that I loved there. I loved the sounds and smells of the village, the donkeys braying in the night and the roosters crowing before dawn. I loved Matilda, who spoke no English and had come to cook for us and help with laundry. She ironed the clothes with old fashioned irons heated over the coals; to dampen them she took a mouthful of water and liberally sprayed the garment as she held it at arms length. She made flawless tortillas with her hands as fast as a machine. She was graceful and patient and kind. She and Juan were no doubt among the better-paid members of the village. I would miss them both.

But the emotional claustrophobia of the situation, my deteriorating physical health, and the fact that I wanted to see my sister (who was leaving Berkeley soon to go to school in Italy for a year), all prompted my decision to leave.

Because of my awkward relationship with my mother, she had no idea how frightening and desperate my situation was. Only in the letters to my father that I routinely snuck by the censor had I described my experiences truthfully. The communication between my parents was limited and poor. The result of all this was that my mother disbelieved my complaints about the school when I finally described them.

I decided that my best strategy was to force Dr. Bruden's hand by randomly and routinely breaking all the rules. This meant talking openly with girls about sex, always a popular topic at fifteen. It also meant talking openly about the past, and talking under the big roof, and continuing to do so with a smile on my face even after I was punished with the assigned "silences."

I forget how long this went on, but I know I managed to aggravate Dr. Burden to the extent that he saw me as a threat to his control. He wrote my mother and told her I would have to leave. Once again I was put in "isolation," this time in my tent because of my diseased legs. By this point I was glad to be alone.

My mother wrote an angry letter to me and told me I would not be allowed to return home but would go straight to a military boarding school in the suburbs. I figured I was ready for a change anyway, regardless of what direction.

I had a hunch that Dr. Burden would not easily let go of the two thousand dollars a year he was getting for me. A few minutes before I was to leave with Juan to go to La Paz, he called me into his office and told me he was sure that if I wanted to stay that we could work things out satisfactorily. I told him I was quite sure that I was far too disturbed for him to be able to help me.

I felt very melancholy about going back to the States. There was so much that I was ambivalent about. I was sad to leave Juan and the village and the wonderful landscape of southern Baja California. I hugged Juan in tears and waved good-bye and boarded the plane.

Years later I met someone who knew someone else who had gone to Shimber Beris after me, and they said Juan had died of diabetes a few years later. Tears pricked my eyes.

On the plane flying north to uncertainty I picked up a news magazine to pass the time and saw a picture of a holy man in a saffron robe in flames in a country called Viet Nam. I didn't know where that was and was completely shocked by the image of a burning monk.

Epilogue

Shimber Beris touched my life only a few more times after that, but always unexpectedly.

When I returned home I was not sent to military school but, much to my complete bewilderment, was brought back home as if nothing disgraceful had occurred. It was discovered that my skin disease could be cured quickly with a balanced diet and good sanitation, plus a little antibacterial ointment. The scars lasted for years.

My mother was slow to acknowledge the truth of my experience and it wasn't until I was visited by other ex-students and we discussed the events in front of her that she realized I had not made it up. My father was glad it was passed, but he had been furious at the time.

Dr. Burden came up to Berkeley some months later and bought an ocean-going tug boat which he berthed in the Berkeley marina for a time. He had dinner at our house at least once and I visited them at least once. He wanted me to call him "Dad" but I was not able to bring myself to quite that level of affection for him. He gave us a beautiful Siamese cat, named "Popocateptl," which I adored until he ran away.

Shimber Beris faded into the repertoire of stories from my life until the fall of 1986 when I was a cab driver in San Francisco.

I was in the midst of a collapsed marriage and in great emotional turmoil. I picked up a Sunday newspaper and saw Dr. Burden's picture on the front page. The headlines said something about a vision of utopia that had died in the jungle in Guatemala. I read, with tears running down my face about the death of the school, the abandonment of Dr Burden by his wife and daughter. I read of students who had remained there, married to other students, now with children of their own; they had been there when I was there almost 25 years earlier. The same sort of chills ran up my spine as when the People's Temple suicide took place. I was glad I had known when to leave.