During the 1960s and 1970s, I remember seeing Hari Krishnas in the streets of San Francisco, New York and at airports with incense in the air, chanting, dancing, praising God in their orange sarongs and pantaloons with close-shaved hair. This seemed almost typical for a time when the Hippie generation was in full swing. But these Hari Krishna young people were not hippies and were on a very different path, albeit that they, too, were all about peace and love.
Knowing little or nothing of Hindu spirituality or culture, I often wondered what these young people of my generation were into and up to, and what their lives were like. Having just read Rishi Waterman’s new memoir Children of a Harsh Bliss (My Life As a Hari Krishna), now I know. Having lived in Asheville and Black Mountain, North Carolina, since 2004, in his 292 page memoir, Waterman takes us into and inside his life as a Hari Krishna in their community in West Virginia, which he helped to create in 1971 and where he lived as a devout follower of the Hindu god Krishna for a little over 30 years.
We start out with David Waterman, at the end of his teenage years and having just read the Bhagavad gita, hitch-hiking across the American continent from San Francisco, to Colorado, to Florida, where he hears of an intentional community being started in the mountains of West Virginia. Curious to the core, he travels up the Southern Appalachian mountains and arriving in a rural community in Marshall County, near Wheeling, West Virginia, he begins, with a few others, the work on building a self-sufficient community from scratch.
As he says in the early stages of the book: “Soon I would be with the Krishnas and in the country. Living off the land in a spiritual community was everything I had wanted for some time.” He goes on to write: “In those early days, most of us were in our teens, many psychedelically floating out of the political and cultural explosion of the sixties, seeking shelter in a spiritual and agrarian lifestyle. We were also Prabhupada’s children, dedicated to carrying forward the mission of our teacher, who saw the immediate need to create an off-the-grid spiritual community.”
As a local remembered: “The hippies came in here in the late ’60s and early ’70s, with long hair and colorful costumes, the ladies floating around, trying to live off the land, and in many ways, just wanting to be country folks. They melted in. But the Krishnas had shaved heads and crazy-looking robes. They worshiped idols and gods and ate cow silage and did not kill their cows or eat meat.”
Having lived in a similar fashion in my own life, what Waterman set out to undertake was daunting, to say the least. During his tenure in the New Vrindaban community, Waterman, now known as Rishi, undertook such jobs during his tenure there as a builder, plumber, cook, night watchman, launderer, herdsman, news editor, palace builder, medical doctor, justice of the peace, and priest. All without training or background. With chapter titles for those early years like “Did the Cows Eat My Acid?” “When We All Smelled Like Strawberry Fields,” “Mast Mash and Kerosene Cures,” “Bathing in Ice Water,”and “Itchy Robes and Painful Organ Music,” Waterman takes us through those early years of trial and tribulation, yet all the while living a life of “plain living and high thinking, embracing the beauty and protection of nature.” More descriptively, many pages later, he shares these early memories: “One thing I loved about our pioneer community was its aliveness, a type of ecstatic spirit that seemed to frolic around us as we stayed connected to the natural world. For a while, we lived in a deep furrow; our hearts were woven into the earth. Outdoors was magic, homemade by God. Those of us who worked with the cows smelled like cows. Those who cut wood smelled like wood. Those who cooked smelled like smoke.”
If the physical manual labor wasn’t enough, the young members of the Krishna community had to deal with almost constant aggravation and literal life-threatening attacks from gun-toting, conservative members of the local community and a police force, who referred to the Vrindaban community members as “the funny farm.” This antagonism continued to eventually include lawsuits and surveillance by the FBI and other federal agencies. But despite it all, Waterman and the growing community continued to survive and thrive. “It became more than West Virginia. Our leader wanted us to embrace a cosmic reclamation of the earth at a very deep level and to connect deeply with nature, to be in her embrace. Most of us were spiritual homebodies, enjoying our cloistered life,” he writes as the years pass by—from memory to the page. By the 1980s the number of members of New Vrindaban was in the hundreds and they owned well over a thousand acres of land. In my mind, Waterman’s Children of a Harsh Bliss is a spiritual and generational classic. I don’t know of a better historical account of the Hari Krishna movement in the United States. It’s a memoir that reads like good fiction and kept this reader’s interest always moving forward from page to page until I was finished and was wanting more.
About the author: Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published and recognized author, editor and translator of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods (2005). He lives in the rural enclave of Tuckasegee in Jackson County.