LAKE CHAMPLAIN, Oct. 12 – Sandra Good opens the door to her home just a field of clover away from the blue basin of Lake Champlain. She’s wearing all blue.

Charles Manson calls her Blue.

She has swimming pool blue eyes. Between them is the white scar of an X she carved into her forehead with a knife and a screwdriver after Manson cut an X between his eyes.

“I have X’d myself from your world,” Manson said at the time.

In the minds of Manson and his followers, that world was an unjust one, filled with exploiters and polluters. Unless we changed our ways, the end of that world was at hand. Manson and his group decided they would give America a portent of the madness and chaos that was to come.

Just after midnight on Aug. 9, 1969, four Manson followers cut the telephone wires to the Bel Air home of actress Sharon Tate and slipped inside. It was a night so quiet, one of the killers would later say, you could almost hear the sound of ice rattling in the cocktail shakers of the homes down in Benedict Canyon.

The Manson followers murdered Tate, four house guests and a friend of the caretaker. Tate’s husband, the director Roman Polanski, was away at the time.

The following night two of the killers and a third Manson follower walked through the back door of the home of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, owners of a chain of grocery stores, and murdered them. Their home was picked at random.

The victims were variously stabbed, bludgeoned and shot to death. Medical examiners counted 156 stab wounds in the seven bodies.

Good didn’t take part in the killings, although she respects the Manson followers who did. On the nights of the murders she was in jail, 8 1/2 months pregnant with Manson’s child. ( Tate also was 8 1/2 months pregnant.) Good and a woman named Mary Brunner had been picked up by police outside a Sears store after Brunner had used a stolen credit card to buy diapers for her baby and tools for the group’s dune buggies.

Good, Brunner and the rest of the Manson Family were living in the foothills of the Santa Susana Mountains, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles, at an old abandoned Western movie set called the Spahn Movie Ranch. (The term Manson Family was a creation of the media, says Good. The group never called itself that.) On the isolated ranch, there was a clear distinction between life “in here” and life “out there.” Life in here was good, life out there was evil.

Tate and the others were killed to shake us awake, says Good. Look what will happen if you don’t stop your lying, polluting, warring ways. “We told them to stop,” she says.

In the context of the imminent destruction of the world, “a few dead bodies to stop that — I feel nothing,” she says.

Good still holds to this doomsday vision. She still believes in a war against pollution, corporate greed and people’s mistreatment of one another. “Nice liberals” recycling their newspapers and plastic cider jugs won’t cut it. It has to be war. And war for life is not murder, says Good.

She was imprisoned for 10 years for conspiracy to send threatening letters to corporate executives and for giving interviews to the media in which she warned that something bad would befall these business executives unless their corporations changed their polluting ways.

When she was released from prison in 1985, federal officials told her she had to live in Camden, N.J., but she refused to go to that “toxic waste dump.” The U.S. probation officer for Vermont felt she was being mistreated and suggested she be moved to Vermont to serve her five years probation. She agreed.

After an initial brief media storm in Burlington, she went south to the little town of Bridport on the shores of Lake Champlain, rented a room in a house and settled into a life of anonymity as “Sandra Collins.” (Collins is her middle name.)

But her cloak was lifted last year when she got involved in a protest against an International Paper Co. mill in Ticonderoga, N.Y., for its daily discharge of millions of gallons of paper-making wastewater into the lake. Someone recognized her from a newspaper photograph.

To be discovered, to remove the cloak, meant freedom. Now she’s free, she says, to try to shed some light, to tell the truth about the Manson Family. And then, there’s this, too, says Good: As Sandra Collins, she could work to try to stop the pollution of the lake in her backyard. As Sandra Good she can work to try to save the world.

You want to be Sandra Good.

“I want to be Blue,” she says. “Blue.”

But more than that, more than anything, she wants to see Charlie. “I’ve waited 20 years,” she says.

So this winter, when her probation is up, she’s going back to California, back to where it all began.

There was a lot of love at the Spahn Movie Ranch, says Good.

“Charlie played music, and it went out that there was good music here,” says Good. Young people gathered.

“We knew the system was rotten from top to bottom and all around and in and out. And we had a vision that kind of grew from us being together and being young, and seeing more of our own beauty, and seeing beauty and spirit as reflected by Manson and music and dancing, and just a good day, lightness and caring for one another, caring for the animals, the horses and the cats and the dogs and the chickens, and caring for old George Spahn.

There were no radios or clocks or newspapers. The group lived on throwaways from supermarkets. “We had no money. I didn’t have shoes for I don’t know how long. But we were rich. Because we were rich within ourselves. Giving is what makes you rich.”

Good was about 24 and a student at San Francisco State University when a boyfriend introduced her to Manson and his followers in 1968. Later, when her friend flew back to San Francisco, Good stayed behind. “I felt like I was home.”

But it was a different kind of home from the one she grew up in. “We were middle-class young people,” she says, “full of our moms and dads and schools.” Manson, in contrast, had grown up in reform schools and jail cells, his mind untainted, says Good, by the programming and conditioning of parents and society.

“Boy, everything about the way we’re raised in this country moves against life, spirit, soul, expression, spontaneity — the stuff you had as a child.”

The notion of child is significant.

“He loved us unconditionally,” she says. “He saw the child in us … he was like a father.”

Good considers it a curse to be trapped inside her logical, analytical mind. She wishes she could be like a child and just be totally aware and open. “I remember one of the first things Charlie said was, ‘You’ve got to quit thinking so much.’ ”

She says Manson awakened in them a childlike interest in life and an enthusiasm for living one day at a time without fear and doubt.

So how do you go from a childlike interest in life to murdering seven people?

The end justifies the means, says Good. In the case of the Manson Family, the end supposedly was to save the world from nuclear war or environmental destruction. Just as some people might think a war to free Kuwait from Iraq and to secure Mideast oil fields would justify the lives lost, Good believes that a war against pollution and the destruction of the Earth is a just war.

“I’m not against war. But I am against a war that doesn’t serve to rectify a wrong, but serves fear and money and power and self-destruction. There’s no good that can come out of this Iraqi situation … The earth cannot sustain any more of this oil taking … What it amounts to is warring to save a way of life, which is a way of life that destroys life.”

Good says that people need a scapegoat. They need to make Manson the devil. But, she says, we’re all guilty of complicity: Americans lead corrupt, destructive lives. “We’ve all got blood on our hands.”

Good says the acronym the Manson followers used was ATWA, which stands for Air, Trees, Water and Animals, and also “All The Way Alive.” Good’s war would be a war for ATWA, a fight for life, the only cause she can see for war.

In one of the books written about Manson, The Family, the author says ATWA was an invention, that the Manson followers made it up after the fact to try to justify senseless killings. Good says that’s a lie, and that during the Manson trial, the defendants talked about trying to save the environment and working against wars like Vietnam.

“I remember one question to one of the women was, ‘What went through your mind when you stabbed so-and-so?’ ” says Good, making a stabbing motion against her arm. “She said, ‘That’s just one less car.’ Cold!

“To Pat Krenwinkel: ‘What went through your mind when you put that fork in Leno LaBianca, when you carved WAR on his chest?’ She said, ‘That’s one man who won’t send his son to war.'”

There was a secondary reason why the Manson followers killed those seven people, says Good. This one isn’t so hard to try to understand. Three weeks before the Tate-LaBianca murders, Manson group member Bobby Beausoleil had killed a man named Gary Hinman over a drug deal gone sour, and was being held in jail on suspicion of murder. “Political Piggy” had been written on the wall in Hinman’s blood.

A lot of the women at the Spahn ranch wanted to get Beausoleil out of jail, says Good. And so in the Tate-LaBianca murders words such as “Pig” were written in the victims’ blood. The Manson followers hoped the authorities would decide they had the wrong man in jail.

Good respects the murderers, as much as she respects “nine-year-olds in the hills of Guatemala carrying weapons.” Why? “Because they love their people. They have richness in them, they have heart and soul. And they’re going to fight for it. We’ve so lost that, that we can’t even defend our own life.”

She admires the children who take up the cause.

Good herself is childlike. She has a playful smile, she moves in a playful manner. She’s small and trim, with tiny feet. She’s in her mid-forties but seems younger. She won’t say how old she is; she says she doesn’t believe in her age. Some days she feels as if she were 6, some days she feels 3,000 years old.

Young people are drawn to Manson, says Good.

In the past year Manson has handed over to Good the task of reading and sometimes answering much of his mail, since it’s difficult for him to do this in prison. He receives hundreds of letters from across the world, many of them from young people. ( There are even Manson clubs in Japan.) Some write because they’re working on a term paper about Manson; others write simply because they’re attracted to him.

“The very young people are the ones who seem to be the most interested,” says Good.

“I understand why because they see the love there. They see it in the eyes.”

People are obviously blind to the beauty of the Earth, says Good. To her, every part of the Earth, down to the last bug, is beautiful. “You look at a bug, it’s magical!” she says, making a bug with her fingers. “A bird, weed, grass, tree … when you see how beautiful it is, how can you hurt it?”

Good doesn’t tire of talking about the environment, or about Manson. On a recent warm day, she spoke to a reporter for nearly seven hours — at the dining room table in the morning, during lunch, through two walks, while picking eggplant and cucumbers from her garden, and back at the dining room table again.

She speaks in a clear, fine voice, and it’s immediately apparent how bright she is, how articulate. The words flow relentlessly. You nod and nod, yes, yes, hustling to follow the twists and turns of her mind.

She free associates, segueing from one subject to the next, from what she sees as an instinct in young people for sacrifice, to Shakespeare, to dumping poisons in lakes, to painful relationships between men and women, and back to sacrifice.

She hands the reporter a taped interview with Manson by a Berkeley, Calif., radio station. “You think I’m free associative — wait until you hear Charlie!”

They’re remarkably similar.

She returns to talking about Shakespeare. Good was an English literature major in college, and loved to read of times when people were honorable and noble, and when there were fairies and elves and imagination. She longs for that. Shakespeare had the fantasy element in his writing, she says, because that’s part of life. “Knowing that there are spirits and magic. There’s magic. Look at the flowers, the way they dance.”

She points through the glass door. Outside, the cosmos dance in the wind on their long stems.

She lives in a lovely, light-filled house, all blond wood and solar heated and surrounded by her gardens. Beyond are the silos of a neighboring farm and the lake. The home is filled with dried flowers and wreaths that Good makes from the flowers she grows. In an upstairs bedroom, her bed is next to a huge window with a postcard view of Lake Champlain. But when you walk into her bedroom, it’s not the lake you see immediately. It’s the photo of Manson on her bedstand.

There also are photos in her home of her close friend, Red, named by Manson for all the red of the Earth — for redwoods, foxes and fire — and for her red hair. America knows her as Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, now serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of former President Gerald Ford.

(Manson named Good for the blues of the earth, the blue sky and blue water. She grew up in California, on the ocean, and she loved to surf and swim.)

Her home on Lake Champlain is owned by her housemate Earl Parsons, a disc jockey at a country music station in nearby Middlebury. When she was first moved from prison in West Virginia to Burlington, she lived in a boardinghouse owned by Parsons’ mother, but left after a few days to escape the media. She was befriended by Earl Parsons; they’re not involved in a relationship.

(Good has never been married, although several of the books about the Manson family, such as Helter Shelter, report that she was. A week after the murders, the Manson group was rounded up and arrested for possession of stolen dune buggies, the police having no idea that some of their members had done the killings. Good was pregnant with Manson’s son and was afraid the authorities would take her baby since she didn’t have a husband. So she lied, saying she was married to a man named Joel Pugh, a boyfriend she had parted company with when she met Manson. He later committed suicide in London, says Good.)

(Her son by Manson, now 20, was raised by someone else, and she never discloses his name or where he lives. They keep in touch. “He’s a good kid,” she says simply.)

Last year Good — as Sandra Collins — and Parsons made news when they refused to accept Parsons’ $12,000 share of an out-of-court settlement from the International Paper Co. in a decade-long pollution suit brought by lakeshore landowners. Under the deal, the paper giant admitted no wrongdoing but paid $5 million to its opponents and their attorneys and to a fund created to pay for research about Lake Champlain.

News reports at the time noted that the paper mill had violated its permit limits for the discharge of wastewater and air pollution over the years, but for the most part the plant has been operating within the law.

Good and Parsons shared the belief that the payoff to the landowners was “blood money,” and Good captured the eye of the press when she wrote eloquent letters to the editor on the subject, and was subsequently interviewed and profiled as Sandra Collins by such papers as The Burlington Free Press. Among other acts — such as protesting in front of the federal courthouse in Burlington — she also spoke in person with senators Patrick Leahy and Jim Jeffords and Congressman Peter Smith about pollution in Lake Champlain.

She racked up some large phone bills, which Parsons helped pay. She contributes to household expenses by selling her organic vegetables and the wreaths she makes. It’s a casual arrangement she has with Parsons: When she has money she gives it to him. But other than phone bills she has few expenses. She and Parsons are vegetarians and basically live off her gardens; the home is heated largely by the sun; and she doesn’t drive and so rarely goes out. She stays to herself.

On this day she seems lonely. She doesn’t seem to want her visitor to go, even though it’s just one more reporter who has briefly come into her life and will almost as quickly leave.

Although Good is an infrequent visitor in town, she does leave the house often for long walks, or to hike across the frozen field of clover to skate on Lake Champlain.

It was the lake that let her be Sandra Good again. She became free to try to convince us to rise up against pollution and save the world. And free to try to convince us that keeping Manson locked in prison is a tragic mistake.

By ANDREA NEIL