"My parents raised me on a commune in Angels Camp, in the Sierras," says 21-year-old Neriah Davis, who is turning heads on the shaded terrace of a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. As we chat, November leaves drift onto our table, and mother nature provides an eerie counterpoint -- we're being dusted by ash from wildfires raging in Topanga Canyon.
Neriah's early life in the central Sierra Nevada gold-mining town of Angels Camp was bucolic but raw. "We didn't have electricity. We didn't have a TV. When we wanted to take a bath, we had to heat the water and pour it into the bathtub. My parents grew all their own food. It was like "Little House on the Prairie." I love that that's the way I grew up."
The commune was a former kayaking school called the Confluence. When Neriah, her parents and her three siblings moved there in the mid-Seventies, they fought efforts to dam the Stanislaus River. "My dad was one of the main protesters. When I was seven or eight, just a little kid, ...
