The Secrets of a Cult Like School...
At the beginning of the fall semester of junior high school in Berkeley California in 1962 I was entering the second half of the ninth grade. I was a “midterm” student, having begun kindergarten in January due to the overcrowding in public schools of baby boomer children after World War Two.
I was not a happy fourteen-year-old, but that is not uncommon for adolescents.
The primary causes of my unhappiness were the absence of my father a fine artist, who my mom had essentially pushed out of the house some five years earlier. He had been my ally and champion and I considered him my best friend. His move to New York City made our relationship awkward, but I never doubted his unconditional love the way I did with my mom with whom I had a tense and often alienating relationship.
Add to this that I was being bullied mercilessly. I was now offered an opportunity to attend a private school located at the south end of the Baja California peninsula in Mexico.
At the time I was unaware that a family who had homesteaded an old miner’s claim in Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border, had a daughter I would come to know. Her parents had begun an “alternative” school, which my mother had learned about from a casual friend. In addition, the wife of the headmaster and mother of the little girl had written a book that was popular in esoteric circles.
My mother was a highly intelligent woman with a degree in journalism; she also had an obsession with metaphysics, reincarnation and the occult in general. I don’t know what she knew about this school, but I agreed to attend. After joining the group, I soon found myself in familiar territory.
I was pleased with the remote location of the school, though my cynical attitude towards my mother and the school yard bullies was that it was not far enough away. I had something more like Tierra del Fuego in mind, but I accepted this opportunity despite any reservation.
The school was run by an American teacher, whose idea it had largely been, and who remained in the background while her husband, an Englishman born in colonial Uganda, was the front man.
After agreeing to attend I left public school and took a bus to meet the group in Fresno, California. Although I joined the school in early October of that year, it was not until February of the next year that we actually entered Mexico. I was unaware of various machinations taking place behind the scenes that had delayed our journey, but I would eventually learn much more.
Before going to Mexico, the school met at a retreat on a mountain outside Ojai, California. That ended after a couple of months due to a disagreement between them and the owner of the retreat, an eccentric devotee of an Indian guru.
The diet was vegetarian and the philosophical outlook was defiantly alternative, with a heavy diet of metaphysics. It would not be long before rules were put in place that would attempt to shape our psyche’s into new knots.
Before I arrived, the headmaster had acquired an exotic overland vehicle that resembled a short school bus. It had been built for military service in North Africa. It possessed a bullet proof exterior and gas tanks. It had two transmissions, one with extra low gears to navigate overland and one regular one. It had dual tires on the back, black out lights, double windows and had last been outfitted by big game hunters with bunks and a propane powered refrigerator and cooking stove. On the doors were painted pink elephants, thus we referred to it as “The Elephant”.
It was in this vehicle, after living in various camp grounds, that we crossed the Mexican border. Despite a flat tire every day, we progressed down the Baja peninsula at ten miles an hour. The road was badly rutted and rock strewn. The headmaster’s wife rode in the back seat of an old Studebaker with a driver hired off the street in Tijuana.
Ten days later we arrived in the outskirts of La Paz, the capital of southern Baja California. The headmaster took his wife to a villa he had rented for her and after that, she was only an occasional presence at the school, seeming to hover in the shadows.
During this brief break with the “authorities” absent, the group relaxed. We discussed our feelings about the school. Someone mentioned they hoped to learn to speak Spanish and then their daughter spoke up.
Until this moment, she had been a mostly silent observer and it felt to me like she kept everyone, including her parents at arm’s length. Now she chose to speak, probably due to the absence of her parents. She announced that her father would not allow anyone to learn Spanish because it would make it too easy for them to run away.
After the drive sixty miles south from La Paz, we were informed that there would be new rules for our group. There was to be no talk about our previous lives, or life in the United States. We were forbidden from having money, or receiving gifts from home. Furthermore, we were prohibited from speaking under any roof, unless the headmaster was present. There was to be no singing. All mail was to be read first, incoming and outgoing alike.
The school had leased a few acres north of the Tropic of Capricorn, the land had a single small stone building with a large thatched ramada built along one side that afforded a generous outdoor space shielded from the sun.
In this space was a hearth with fire boxes over which cooking was done and a table built with legs permanently anchored in the ground.
I took all the rules in stride and despite my inner turmoil, I kept my focus.
My main chore was to wander through the village to buy eggs from anyone with extra eggs to sell. All around us, day and night were the crowing of roosters and the braying of donkeys. I would ask people if they had eggs to spare and for a moment I could observe. Houses had dirt floors and thatched roofs. There was no running water, electricity, sewer, telephones, televisions or any of the conveniences of daily life in America. A single telegraph wire ran through the village, allowing sending telegrams. Everyone hauled water from a communal well and wore sandals made from rubber tires.
While collecting eggs, I would also stop at the general store to pick up or drop off mail. The store was the local post office as well. Inside the store was illuminated by powerful kerosene lamps, and a counter ran from wall to wall, with all the goods and the clerk behind. It looked like the classic general store seen in a cowboy western movie.
After many months I offended the headmaster and he put me in “isolation”. This involved my standing next to a palm tree with my back to the school in a small square for three days. I faced the outhouse. It was my fifteenth birthday.
A few months later I picked up an infection on my legs that caused open ulcers if I so much as casually scratched the skin with my finger nail. I decided I’d had enough and began to wonder how to leave.
I knew that my mother would not accept my return at that point and certain that the headmaster would not. He had been continually encouraging the group to think in terms of never returning and he would take care of us. I didn’t buy it.
I decided on a passive rebellion. I began to speak under any roof and to talk about any subject I knew was forbidden. After a few days I was noticed and again placed in isolation, but this time in a vacant tent, due to my leg problem.
My mother wrote an angry letter and the headmaster told me I had to leave. I was not particularly distressed.
After I got home I was confronted with my mercurial mother, who did not seem to believe much of what I told her about my experience. She did, however, send me to a better school to make up for the year of lost education.
No one seemed to believe descriptions of my experience, or if they did, they found it too strange and became distant. I learned to keep it to myself. I became obsessed with understanding what the experience had really been.
I did not know what a cult was, and the era of cults had not yet arrived. I found myself trying sort out the experience but didn’t know where to start.
Having nothing to compare it with I tried to understand what I’d experienced but, I couldn’t, so I just kept wondering. My curiosity became an obsession. Later I learned the term “Follie aux deux”, from a therapist I chose for his familiarity with such groups. I began wondering about the idea of when two people share a psychosis of some kind.
In 1978 the newspapers announced the mass murders at the cult run by Jim Jones in Guiana. I sat up and took notice reading for the first time a description of a cult leader. I began to suspect that my experience had something in common and began to wonder about the other students.
In 1986 the headmaster’s picture was on the front page of a San Francisco Sunday edition newspaper. Inside were two full pages of pictures and articles. They described how he had relocated the school to a compound on a mountain top in the jungle in eastern Guatemala. He had been taking in students with severe mental illness who belonged in a psychiatric hospital. If he didn’t like the way they acted he fed them food laced with tranquilizers and locked them in small huts in the jungle. Inquiring parents were routinely told their child was “not ready to come home yet”. The brother of one such student had managed to come home and tell his parents and eventually the newspaper got wind of the story which exposed the school, but only a little, it turned out.
The newspaper article made me cry when I read the account because it confirmed my suspicions. The articles described staff who had been students when I was there. They had never left, married each other and had children. I felt like I had dodged a bullet and was shocked to realize I’d had the good sense to feel something was wrong even when I couldn’t say what it really was.
~ Peter A.