"Get off the hose!"

Sweat dripped from Steve's brown Carhart jumper as he pointed at Samir, who was standing on the garden hose with a stupid look on his face. Samir was a short Indian fellow, mid-20s with Coke bottle-thick glasses, a receding hairline and full shoulders.

"GET OFF THE HOSE!"

We had been burning the weeds out of the acequia, the irrigation ditch running behind the main house. The ditch would provide valuable water to the garlic bulbs, broccoli, and assorted herbs we had planned to grow in the coming months. At some point the hose had snagged on an uprooted twig and the flames found a dry spot of grass to climb out of the ditch before Steve could wet the ground around them.

"Goddamn it!" roared Steve as he yanked the hose from under Samir's feet.

Diego, Samir's tall, long-haired Portuguese friend from back East, stood with his legs rooted in the red soil until Steve reached over the ditch and pushed a rake into his hands and urged him to comb dirt over the lingering flames in the ditch.

The larger flames to Steve's left were now licking the edges of the garlic patch and heading towards the bare twig-trees ringing the commune property.

I dropped my hoe and dashed along the dome of the greenhouse toward the north kitchen. The mother peahen was standing besides the spigot; I shushed her aside, cranked the handle, and plunged a blue mop bucket under the rushing water.

A patch of sun sat on the compost heap to my right, and the albino peacock was honking underneath the pear tree by the pool. Two magpies darted overhead, oblivious to the black smoke billowing from the south end of the main house.

It was a much larger fire that had brought me to northern New Mexico two months before that incident in the ditch. I'd been living in downtown Buffalo, NY, as a refugee from the dull suburbs of my youth, and was enraptured by the vibrant culture within walking distance of my apartment. Art openings, new restaurants, punk shows, bookstores, record stores, anti-globalization protests, bars open 'til 4am -- it was the rare moment I spent at home.

When I awoke one Tuesday morning to catch the tail end of the 9/11 attacks on CNN, my thoughts turned not to vengeance or war, but to the water supply. Buffalo's infrastructure was aging and fragile, and a far smaller attack could have crippled the rotting 300,000-person metropolis for years. While my friends sat in the park with candles and told passing motorists to stop watching TV over the din of djembes, I was up with night sweats picturing hordes of starving black youth seizing the groceries of Elmwood Avenue and running off with my girlfriend. Tanks on Main Street, black helicopters casting spotlights through tiny urban yards, Ani DiFranco set aflame on the steps of city hall --anything was possible in a city run by incompetent clods, and I wasn't prepared to deal with any of it.

That fall I chained myself to the Internet in a desperate search for a way out. Winter survival training camps in California, sessions with "tracker" Tom Brown in Florida, esoteric New Paradigm spirituality, the Hopi Indians, Christian evangelism: anything was worth a shot. The Hopi in particular seemed suited to survive: they were simple, tough, and had a chart carved in stone to prove the white man was doomed. And while I couldn't join the dying tribe, I could do the next best thing: join a commune 341.83 miles away from the Hopi reservation.

The commune sat on small parcel of land purchased from one of the Rio Grande valley's many aboriginal tribes just north of Santa Fe. Steve and Danielle had put a down payment on the six-figure property the previous winter with a jumble of student loans, grants, and gumption, and were busy transforming the shambling adobe buildings of this former landscaper's estate into a vegan micro-utopia only a half hour drive from the Los Alamos Nuclear Labs.

Founded on the principles of egalitarianism, all village members would share in both income and daily chores, make decisions via consensus, and work hard to create an oasis of social and environmental sustainability in a world sailing briskly down the River Styx. While the community plan called for 10-20 people living on the 1.5 acre plot, at this point only a shifting population of guests, visitors, renters, and vagabonds was on hand to help Steve and Danielle fulfill their dreams, wade through peacock shit, and eat the extra tofu.

Along with renovations to the main house (only the southern third was habitable at this point), the community was busting ass to remodel three rental cabins, an ongoing project which kept me busy sanding and staining lintels, tiling floors, cleaning bricks, hauling trash, and helping Steve in the workshop. During my frequent trips from the main house to the cabins, I would wander around the compound's exotic hodgepodge of garden spaces, fruit trees, and stone paths, breathing in the clean air of the Sangre de Christos and working on my tan by the defunct in-ground pool.

While the community had more than enough work to do (and a hefty mortgage to pay off), work requirements were easy: our 40-hour weekly quota included tasks like tending the wood-burning stove, feeding peacocks, doing laundry, cleaning the common areas, hauling trash, and running to town on errands. With our copious free time we ate, played Scrabble, watched movies, went hiking, and explored the shops and cafes of the nearby capital.

Yet despite the laid-back atmosphere, Steve and Danielle had an ambitious vision. A refugee from the DC area, Steve was an expert in sustainable building techniques, and on my very first day there he took me through the entire settlement and laid out his broad vision for brownwater irrigation, passive solar heating, and off-the-grid energy. Danielle, in turn, was envisioning an oasis of alternative healthcare, with rooms for acupuncture, yoga, massage, and aromatherapy.

Yet for all their plans, Steve and Danielle's view of other people, especially those with different value systems from their own, was far dimmer, and it explained why none of our visitors stayed for more than a week. When a 50-something divorcee began renting one of the smaller cabins and suggested the community consider a marketing campaign to boost membership, Danielle wrinkled her nose and disclosed her aversions to "that kind of energy." A thoughtful, sincere letter from an applicant who worked as a journalist sent Steve off on a 45-minute lunchtime rant because the writer dared to use the word "objective." Scientists were laughed at, conservatives scorned, meat eaters, smokers, drug users, gun owners, and people who liked onions (Steve hated onions) all banned... in short, this model of a sustainable society was the type of place 99% of humanity wouldn't be caught dead in.

Yet there was hope, and it came in the form of a 6-month-old baby, his 20-something multi-ethnic parents (Diego and his wife Nicole), their friend Samir, and an old Jung-quoting hippie named Disco. They were all coming to the commune together, and they were quite serious about joining. With 4.5 new permanent members, Steve and Danielle would finally be able to renovate the property, harvest a full bounty of food at the end of the summer, and make some additional income via outside jobs.

Preparations for the newbies were undertaken with renewed vigor. We scoured the grounds to dull all sharp edges, weed out thorns, fill holes, wall-off ditches, and tame the maniacal peacocks. Upon their arrival, a great vegan feast of cornbread, fava beans, quinoa, steamed kale, and multigrain bread was prepared and served in the main community room. After board games and an intense conversation about Bahaism over herbal tea, the parents were given the main bedroom, Samir and Disco cozy inflatables on the pink tile floor of the future Great Hall, and everyone slept safe and secure.

Things went sour the next day.

Nicole, exhausted from monitoring the baby's romps through the perilous property, grumbled about our safety conditions. Diego was non-plussed with the idea that he might have to seek cash-earning work at one of the mini-malls a mile away along the highway (as the commune's sole means of outside income -- distributing sex-ed products -- was barely paying for itself). Samir was thinking of returning to the Theravedan monastery he had fled a year before, and Disco -- a long-time resident of a thirty-year-old commune in rural Missouri -- decided he was too old to be building a new commune from scratch.

I too was ready to move on, having resumed eating meat after a cancer scare. (Two weeks before Easter I had found a lump in my chest, and after some research realized the scary deficiencies of my vegan diet. I began sneaking away to the local grocery store for beef jerky and cans of salmon, and to protect my transgressions I formed a secret society with a renter and the gardening intern devoted to drinking, smoking, meat, girls, and guns. It lasted a week.)

If there were any lingering doubts, they were burned away by the acequia fire a few days later.

As I rounded the south corner of the house with the bucket sloshing between my calloused fingers, Steve was swatting out the last remnants of flame with his work gloves as Samir, Diego, and Disco looked on. He was dripping with sweat; dirt and ash gathered at his laugh lines. Beyond the property, two horses regarded us with indifference, oblivious to the conflagration they could have been fleeing.

"Shit," said Steve, stooping through the blackened brush, "I dropped my glasses. Help me find my glasses!"

Samir crept along by his side, while the rest of us just watched.