Imagine: Skinny-dipping at The Land with John Lennon

An exhibit about the Gate Hill Cooperative evokes memories for one former Rocklander.

Imagine you’re a teenage girl in the mid-1970s, a bit of an outsider among your 11th-grade classmates.

Your friend’s an apprentice to an avant-garde artist at the Gate Hill Cooperative, “the groovy artist colony secluded-away on a nearby mountain” in Rockland County known as The Land.

She’s invited to a garden party there one summer weekend, and asks you to come along. And, oh, by the way, it’s rumored John Lennon will be among the guests.

So Carol Cohen puts on a gauzy blouse found at a head shop, denim skirt, suede fringed belt, moccasins, “like some Hippie Fairy Godmother had waved her magic joint over me.”

Cohen (who now goes by Carolena de la Norte) has visited The Land before, where she’s entranced by the community’s “hippie-trippy lifestyle,” she recounts in her memoir. 

“What a cool place,” she writes. “A pagan and irreverent confab of visionary bohemians who disdain all things mainstream, shun the mundane, and laugh at normal rules.”

Read more about the Gate Hill Cooperative, and an exhibit and talk about The Land at the Rockland Center for the Arts here.

John Lennon and composer Rip Hayman at the Gate Hill Cooperative in Haverstraw, circa 1970s. Photograph by Paco Underhill

In her memory of that long-ago afternoon, Carol Cohen makes quite an entrance at the community near the Minisceongo Creek.

She feverishly drives her station wagon up the steep dirt road leading to the soiree, nearly plowing into a few startled guests — among them John, Yoko, newborn baby Sean and John’s older son Julian.

She’s nonplussed until John extends his hand and introduces the family, including Yoko, who’s “draped in a floor length granny gown halfway engulfed by her cascade of super-duper-long, wavy, dark flowing tresses.”

Rain threatens to dampen the festivities until Lennon dons a cape, jumps upon a boulder and begins chanting “No Rain! No Rain! No Rain!,” as the crowd joins in. Rain stops. Sky turns blue.

Carol walks, almost dreamlike, to a nearby swimming hole with her newly befriended Beatle, who confesses he’s never gone skinny dipping before. 

Lennon’s clothes and trademark granny glasses come off as he jumps in, “having as much of a ball as any skinny-dipper who has skinny-dipped a thousand times before.”

(In case you’re wondering, there’s no libidinous goings-on during this chaste encounter.)

Back at the party, Carol senses it’s time to split. “That last libretto of being naked with John Lennon, and then going back and trying to continue maintaining composure is, well, it is not going to happen.”

She and her friend say their goodbyes, flop into the car, and bolt away, laughing madly, reliving every detail.

Looking back on the experience, de la Norte, who lives in Los Angeles where she’s a jazz flutist/vocalist and composer, says that meeting Lennon “changed me. It set the bar for extraordinary.”

Carol Cohen, now Carolena de la Norte, circa 1970s.