Summer of Love R.I.P.
‘Well, I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, Tell me, where are you going?’
‘Woodstock’
It’s been 50 years since the hippie uprising bloomed in San Francisco and wilted shortly after. I went out to Haight-Ashbury in 1975, only 8 years too late. By then Flower Power was dried and pressed, steel bars were on the storefronts and the streets were filled with zombies too drugged to leave in time. I left in a few hours, scratching my long haired head where to go next.
Hunter S. Thompson famously said in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that there was place in the foothills above Frisco where a person with the right kind of eyes could see where that bohemian utopian tidal wave crested and finally broke. I’m pretty sure I found the archaeological proof of that highwater mark. Just turned the truck around and headed ‘home’, a fictional place as it turned out, an old Polish farmhouse with a barn, summer ‘kitchen’, well and hand pump, plus an outhouse. Cut wood for the hard winter to come and settled in to work on a divorce. We wore icicles in our hair, not flowers. We picked at our marital wounds and by spring the Summer of Love was long since dead and buried.
But — and yeah, Virginia, there’s always a caveat — but some of those seeds from that era, passed bong to bong or secreted away in the short stints at communes, something remained fertile of those ill-formed dreams we had, some lyric or other took root and grew in my personal darkness until finally it emerged, a full blown song, tentative at first, I realize now, then more vigorous in the damp country air of the Pacific Northwest. We did go back to the land, we did set our souls free. We did realize, in the end, we are stardust, we are golden. And we finally got ourselves back to the Garden.
Camano Island on my 67th Birthday
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Tags: flower power, Hunter Thompson, san francisco with flowers in your hair, summer of love
A pal (the guy I hitch-hiked through Europe with) moved to HAabout the same time you did. He and his wife rented a very small apartment, and walked down to a corner market for a few essentials. On the walk back, they were mugged by a 12-year-old with a bike and a revolver. The Summer of Love was short.
I was never mugged with a bike, but … it would’ve shortened my stay even more. I did, however, run over a bike on the way back from San Francisco, in Boulder. I guess I mugged him with a truck. I was out of Boulder quick as I could.
Happy Birthday Skeeter!
Muchas Grasses, Amigo!
A very belated happy birthday to you! It makes me happy that you have your Garden.
Nothing like Old Age to make a boy look back on his life.