The mystery at Sunrise lasted four and a half days. A group of old hippies reunited on a Friday and it was all over by Tuesday night.

Robert said he was the catalyst but actually he brought her. He drove up in his dirty white truck and he had her with him. Her given name was Sharon and her taken name was Guen.

Sunrise is an old commune. In its heyday, around 1972, as many as 58 people lived there, ranging in age from newborn to 40. It’s situated in a shallow valley in the hills above Bakersfield, California, and it’s named for the way the light sweeps west to east across it as the sun rises each morning above the eastern mountains.

It is 12 acres all told, but most of it is useless for cultivation or building. The terrain is rocky, the soil is full of clay, and there’s not enough water. In fact, the property isn’t very desirable, which is the reason it’s still private, these days, in California.

Sunrise was originally part of the Del Rios estate; by 1963 it was the property of the sole descendant of that once-numerous family, the lesbian Maria Elena del Rios Smythe. Maena, as she was called, had no children, but at the age of 60 she met and fell in thrall to the teachings of the guru Maximillion Gold (born Maxwell Goldberg). Max and Maena were close friends until her death in 1970, and she bequeathed the property to him.

There was a small scandal at the time. A male heir for Maena surprised a number of people; her attendant, her secretary, and her former companion all contested the will. And although neighbors were few and those few were accustomed to Maena’s strange house parties, there were protests when the longhairs began to arrive. But Max had been leading groups in the Los Angeles area for several years then, he had a vision of Sunrise as a sort of counter-university, and there was no stopping the commune once he had title to the property.

Robert was one of the original members. By then he had followed Max for a year. He read Max’s flyer on the wall of the Free Clinic while waiting for VD treatment with his first wife. He was 28 and had married 19 year-old Tracy because he loved having sex, but she loved having sex even more, and had it with others than him, and that’s why they were both in the Clinic that night, in front of the flyer that Max made. Robert took Tracy with him to the first Max session, and even had her by his side during the all-night talk that followed and for the first five meetings in Max’s LA apartment, but by the time Max and Robert went to Sunrise, Tracy was long gone.

They established the commune in late 1970, it peaked in 1972, and it was derelict by 1978. When they first drove out with their duffle bags Max was 38 and Robert near 30. There was one acolyte older than Max, and she took on a lot of the cooking chores; the rest of the group was younger.

They wore and tore the buildings but they tended to respect the high desert land. In an attempt to wake them up and help them remember themselves, Max distracted them from sleep and assigned them strange duties. Turning the house into a starship for a week was a good idea, except that their exuberance to cover all windows had an adverse effect on the custom draperies. The building of an addition onto the main house was a necessity, especially after the babies started coming, but it would have been wiser to hire a professional than to design that (unroofable) wing themselves. Max sent introverts to drama lessons and extroverts to the library. Anything to get people off autopilot.

It didn’t work for everybody, but it did for Max and Robert. Most of the other members eventually reverted to habit and instinct. Sexual jealousies conquered theories of non-possessiveness. Hunger for goods overpowered the sweet rewards of cooperation. Imperfect nuclear families formed and reformed and, as the children grew too old to run naked on the hard-packed golden dirt, dry-skinned grownups packed them into cars and drove off to small stucco houses and smaller dead jobs, in Fresno and Bakersfield and Stockton.