Chicago Tribune
August 6, 2006
Dean Kuipers’ “Burning Rainbow Farm” chronicles a forgotten chapter of a struggle peculiar to a nation founded by landed rebels: how to balance the social benefits of strict law and order with the ideals of individual freedom and property rights.
Kuipers tells the story of a marginal part of the country and two marginal men from the scraggly farms and barely-hanging-on small towns of southwest Michigan and northwest Indiana. There, in the mid-1990s, Tom Crosslin and Rollie Rohm, gay men dedicated to each other and to the legalization of marijuana, created Rainbow Farm. Anyone who chose to pitch a tent on their property about 40 miles south-southwest of Kalamazoo, Mich., would be free to do as they pleased, as long as they hurt no one else–one potent version of the American Dream.
Crosslin stands as the center of the narrative, a compelling man who occupies what seems to be an impossible combination of character types: working-class jack-of-all-trades; small-town real-estate wheeler-dealer; entrepreneur and employer; dedicated, live-and-let-live pot smoker; and battle-scarred barroom brawler and loving gay man. He fit nowhere into the stereotypes of the red/blue American divide.
Legalized marijuana, Crosslin and his fellow travelers believed, would save the world. He set out to make Rainbow Farm the center of a festival scene focused on rock music and marijuana reform. Amid the music, vendors’ booths, flowing beer and marijuana, he registered voters and worked for his causes.
This open assault on conservative positions came at a less-than-propitious time, when the war on drugs and government rhetoric about law and order were heating up, along with its perhaps-inevitable mirror image, the anti-government militia movement. After warrantless searches and other interference by the police, Crosslin became involved with members of the Michigan Militia and used them as security for events on the farm. He believed their reputation would keep the local law at arm’s length, off his private property.
This alliance led Crosslin’s antagonists to assume the farm was an armed camp, like Ruby Ridge in Idaho, or the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When Cass County Prosecutor Scott Teter moved to seize the farm under civil forfeiture drug laws, the tragedy entered its final act. Crosslin and Rohm ran almost everyone off the farm and set its buildings on fire, determined that if the government was to seize their property it would get nothing of value. An armed standoff ensued, and FBI snipers shot Crosslin dead. The next day Rohm was killed by local police under circumstances that remain unclear.
One would expect such a spectacular event to become as commonly known as similar fatal moments at Ruby Ridge or Waco, but timing is everything. Rohm’s funeral took place Sept. 11, 2001, as the attention of the nation instantly shifted from the militia movement and home-grown terrorists to Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. Rainbow Farm was forgotten, except by the men and women who mourned or celebrated its destruction.
In telling his story, Kuipers brings Rainbow Farm back to life, but the book is really about something larger: the fundamental conflict over definitions of American identity and the relationship between government power and individual freedom. Crosslin and Rohm’s vision of “a stoner utopia,” however misguided it may seem to the abstemious, was in line with other American utopian communities dating to the early 19th Century. They wanted what many Americans have alwayswanted: a place of their own to do as they pleased without interference from authorities.
The book does have serious flaws. The prose is sometimes as awkward as a greasy-fingered pothead struggling to open a bag of chips. But the narrative drive of the story, the vividly drawn characters and setting, and its comprehensive historical take on marijuana and America’s war on drugs, outweigh these flaws.
Kuipers’ depiction of a forgotten confrontation between the forces of law and order and two men who insisted on their right to do as they would on their own property should be read by anyone interested in the dynamic of personal liberty and government power in contemporary America.”