"Thompson's Chicken Ranch"

by Michael Finley
(c) 2001 by Michael Finley

We had two other brushes with the Universal Life Church. We learned from people on the street that a sister congregation of some note existed out in the Mojave Desert 100 miles away, near Twenty Nine Palms. The first chance we got, we hitchhiked out there, to see if it made sense to align ourselves with the place.

Thompson's Chicken Ranch was a true desert commune, consisting of a gutted main house, a machine shed, a couple of lean-to's and a water tower that had water when it rained, which it never did.

We went out there perhaps three times during our months on L.A. The first time was ecclesiastical outreach; the other times were just for fun. The desert was an incredible place for Midwesterners on holiday. The crumbling ruined mountains, that looked older than Sinai, and twice as forbidding, sat right behind the ranch. Everywhere were Joshua trees and the braided branches of their dead. Yucca plants exploded at every armsbreadth. And under every rock, something living -- a gecko, a Gila monster, hornytoad, or a rattlesnake. It was Don Juan country, a fine, unforgiving place to surrender to the sun.

I have three main memories of Thompson's Chicken Ranch: one involving teenaged runaways, one involving mass murderer Charles Manson, and the third involving an earthquake that destroyed all of California, and us with it.

The core population of the ranch was a small handful of men in breechclouts, as lean as jerky and about half as verbal, who lounged in the shadows in the daytime, and ventured out only at night. It says something that in all our visits to the place -- where we were regarded about as seriously as the Partridge Family -- we never learned any of their names. Indeed, I can’t recall even having a conversation with anyone. We communicated mainly with grunts and far-out's.  People just arrived, found a corner to crash in, and did their thing. It was not just that they were nonverbal, but that they were incurious, as if the sun had baked all the inquisitiveness out of them.

These guys were hard-core in their habits, and I would guess wealthy in their background. They had no visible means of support, they never lifted a finger for any other human being, yet they were up to their ears in high quality LSD, California red wine and ganja, and for their delectation a kind of underground railroad arrived every day with three or four or five high school girls in it.

Every morning that we stayed by the ranch, the local police would show up and cart off the underaged girls that had been there the night before. It was not a big deal. The police would arrive promptly around 8:30 AM, would go to the back door and call out "Hello?" and would then roust the groggy 14-year-olds and 15-year-olds and lead them away to the patrol car. In town, they would have the girls call their parents and arrange for their return. It might even have been the same girls each morning.

Had this happened back in Ohio, it would have been a screaming scandal, with banner headlines in the local Republican rags. Here in California, with the Age of Aquarius already growing dog-eared in the desert sun, it was matter-of-fact. Daughters didn’t belong with their families in the new age. That they were sent home every morning was a weary formality of a changed world.

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