For two years, readers of the Smoky Mountian News have followed monthly installments of Zoro’s Field, a book by Jackson County resident Thomas Crowe about his solo back-to-the-land mission, a calling he carried out in the late 1970s in a small cabin in the woods of Polk County.

The last chapter appears in this week’s issue. Zoro’s Field is being published by University of Georgia Press and is due out the first week in May.

Crowe unabashedly invites readers into the philosophical, introspective world he came to know when he left society to live with nature. Crowe’s life leading up to his self-sufficient experiment is rarely mentioned in his essays, however, so we asked him to chronicle his life leading up to Zoro’s Field.

The story is an intriguing one. Crowe was a social activist poet in San Francisco. He hung out with beat legends like Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder and published the poetry of political prisoners in his literary beat magazine.

SMN: Why did you decide to move to San Fransisco in the mid-1970s?

Crowe: “I just wanted to hang around some of my literary heroes. The beats were really it in terms of American writers. They were really the smaz for me. They opened all the doors and windows in terms of my understanding of what it is to be poet.”

SMN: How did you break into the beat scene?

Crowe: “The beat scene had more or less gone dormant since the ‘50s. But a bunch of other young writers had all showed up about the same time looking for their beat mentors, so to speak.

“I literally walked into City Lights publishing offices and found Lawrence Furhlenghetti and said ‘Hello, my name is Thomas Crowe, and I’ve been wanting to meet you all my life.’ Furhlenghetti had spent time writing in France also, so that was sort of my hook. I said ‘I have this manuscript and maybe you’d like to publish it.’ I’m glad he didn’t publish it because it was trash. Really. It was terrible.”

SMN: Can you elaborate on France?

Crowe: “Before San Fransisco, I lived in France. I wanted to be a French poet. I had spent my life studying the French poets and playwrights and philosophers and the expatriate literary scene in Paris. I thought to be a great poet you had to go where the great poets come from and it would rub off on you. I went straight to where the action had been at the turn of the century. That was another naïve thing. You’ll always be an American in Paris.”

SMN: Back to San Francisco, was it hard as a Graham County native to be accepted into that lifestyle?

Crowe: “By being around other poets and like minded people, my own writing advanced exponentially and very quickly. I was emulating a lot of these people in some ways, which is one of the phases you go through as a young writer.

“We used to call it the University of the Streets. We were getting this incredible education. We were going over to the apartments and flats of all the older guys in the evenings and then hanging out in the bars and cafes talking poetry and the arts and politics all the time. It was invigorating.

“We were very active socially and very vocal. We had FBI guys hanging around all the time watching us because we were making lots of noise and we had big crowds for these readings and events where we were highlighting political injustices of the time.”

SMN: Why do you think the FBI was watching you?

Crowe: “San Francisco was an epicenter for several radical social justice movements at the time: the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, Weather Underground (a Marxist revolutionary group) and several Latin American revolutionary groups.

“All these heavy-duty political prisoners were in Folsom prison, and we went up there and had writer’s workshops with them. These guys wanted help from the outside in terms of getting their political writing out. So we published them in our magazine, Beatitude, the ‘50s literary beat magazine which we had resurrected.

“One of them was Pancho Aguila, a Nicaraguan revolutionary who was in America trying to raise money and consciousness to overthrow the Nicaraguan dictator, who was a CIA puppet. He was caught in connection with an armored truck robbery and thrown in jail with no chance of parole.

“I dedicated a book to him called Poems for Che Guevara’s Dream.”

SMN: What made you leave the San Fransisco scene?

Crowe: “I was attracted to Gary Snyder’s vision, the whole back to the land thing. (Snyder is a well-known poet connected with the beat scene but living in the Sierra Mountains outside the city.)

“The whole bio-regional movement was getting going out there. It advocated that states should be identified according to geographical boundaries, like watersheds, animal migration patterns, habitats, instead of political boundaries. We should all be living more consciously and organically.

“I was going up to the Sierras and hanging out and staying with these guys when I was invited to join this communal farm. There were about six to eight people living on an 80-acre farm trying to do a back-to-the-land, self-sufficient lifestyle thing. We did a lot of bartering and trading for the things we couldn’t produce ourselves.”

SMN: How did you end up leaving the community for Zoro’s Field?

Crowe: “It was a hard decision. But it didn’t happen in the form of a decision. It was one of those strange surreal things that happen. I had no desire to come back to the east at all and had no reason to come back to North Carolina.

“One day Gary Snyder turned to me and told me ‘you need to go back home.’ I thought maybe I was being kicked out of the community at first.

“What he was saying was you can stay here and be part of this scene, but this scene is already happening. But we need people to go back and plant the seed of the bioregional movement in the places where they are actually from. There was this opportunity to live in a cabin back in Western North Carolina, and I just went back to North Carolina to check it out. In the process of checking it out, I just stayed.”

SMN: Was it a culture shock? Did you miss all the people you’d been surrounded with the past four years?

Crowe: “I felt like I kind of needed to get away from all these big literary influences and I needed to get some distance and develop my own voice. I had gotten so used to being around other people. But instead of being a small fish in big pond — in Northern California it’s a very big ponds of writers — I was the only poet I knew living out here. It kind of gave me an identity automatically.

“My poetry had been very urban angst, social justice oriented. As soon as I moved out here, nature began creeping into my writing more and more.”