It's 1972. I'm seventeen smoking a joint on an old tractor at a farmhouse we're renting for $45 a month in Solsberry, Indiana outside Bloomington. Ice cream cones are five cents in the store down the road. I'm high and confused, a continuing theme to this day.
I meet fifteen-year-old Gaybe who wants me to hitchhike with her to Berkeley. I hadn't thought about heading West though I had been a subscriber to the Berkeley Tribe for a year or so.
We leave that night and when we get to Missouri our latest driver is picking up everyone, the car is so full one boy is lying across the seats above us.
A cop chases us off the interstate outside Lawrence, Kansas but when we see one last set of headlights in the distance we dash back up the entrance ramp, thrust out our thumbs, and he stops.
He is a friendly guy who takes us home, turns us on to a white ceramic pipe full of weed, and then drops us back by the interstate.
The next day we get to Grand Junction, Colorado where we split a hit of windowpane acid and ride through an incredible lightening storm in Utah as I yak nonsensically to the driver.
Gaybe is very deep, I am pretty shallow, and she can never get over that. Forty-eight hours later we arrive in California and during my first shower in two days I discover a tick has ridden on my left nipple all the way from Indiana.
This crazy guy picks us up and rants about how advertising and license plates are controlling everyone all the way to Los Angeles.
We have some stupid argument, finally a falling out, and then I'm hitching up 101 while I can see her hitching on Highway 1 across the way. She does come back over and we made it to the East Bay together.
We split up when we get to Berkeley and I'm one of those kids with backpacks lounging around and playing frisbee on Sprowel Plaza. A woman asks if she can toss it with me and I say, “If you're human you can.”
That intrigues her and the next day she picks me up and takes me to her friend's house who is a doctoral candidate at Cal. Jean is a twenty-seven year old junior high teacher in Hayward married to a German guy.
We smoke a joint, get naked, I get on top of her, and I'm very inexperienced. “Well, bounce up and down or something,” she says.
That night some cute Moonie girls invite me to dinner at a very nice house up in the hills, there are a lot of people and they feed us rice and vegetables with yogurt and saffron.
I head across the bay but when I get to the Haight I am too late: I find a crash pad where a young woman is shooting up water.
I try to score some weed and the guy said give him the money and he'll be right back but I don't believe him. “Here, hold this blotter acid till I get back then,” he says. I give him the fifteen bucks, he dumps the worthless paper in my hand, and I never see him again.
Over at Delores Park I watch the mime troupe perform. All over the city are posters on light poles advertising the fourteen-year-old Guru Maharaji—I go to the event and watch him speak and then finally score a real lid of weed on Guerrero Street.
I find another crash pad listed in an underground newspaper and it's these predatory homos. As soon as I sit down one comes over, unzips my fly, and they probably had a good laugh when I ran out of there.
Talking to various nice hippie ladies in the Haight and surrounding neighborhoods of San Francisco I ask where a commune up north is which I could presumably join.
I write down names of towns in my little notebook, one very friendly flower child says try Garberville, Oregon, I think she says.
After I get out of the city I meet Shawn also hitchhiking on the Highway 101 onramp in San Rafael. He has just gotten out of San Quentin and is heading north with two full duffle bags. He is short, stocky, and tattooed with long red hair and beard. He wears an amulet and has a stash too.
“Let's twist one up,” he says. “The trees talk to me. I'm going to Nooning Creek, people are living naked on the creek.” I am very intrigued and tag along.
We stop in Garberville, I buy a bag of granola and a wedge of cheese at Evergreen Natural Foods, and we head out to the hills.
There are clumps of campers, refugees from the city, all naked along Nooning Creek. I'm truly amazed to drink spring water right off the mossy face of the mountain.
The astrologer Andy Gabor is in our camp group as well as a friendly blond woman in her twenties from the city. When takes off for a while I glance in the book she left lying there and her bookmark is a piece of paper saying, “Pain during intercourse.”
Later I realize that in the free sex seventies when people are flashing on each other and jumping in the bushes together, naturally and often, you kind of maybe need to make it known if you are not available?
Having been reared as a feminist where being attracted to woman meant you were treating them as a sex object it is surprising to see these California hippies just fucking if they want to. My feminism disorder, or misinterpretation, is quickly cleared up.
Some of the hippies go out at night to hunt deer by blinding them with the headlights of Henry's little red V-dub. Being a vegetarian I try to disrupt the hunt, and so begins my career of annoying people.
In downtown Whitethorn I'm surprised to see hippies drinking beer and smoking joints by the big stump. The day I arrive they are angry hippies: Dirk Dickenson has just been shot and killed by the cops in Alderpoint, Rock 'n Roll Steve is upset, and fourteen year old Lela is very emotional.
I hitchhike back to town and it seems like everyone has an old '50's Chevy or Dodge and they all stop. I get a ride back toward evening with Chad and his “old lady” who live up the Ettersburg road a few miles. (I got to know that turnoff a few years later as the “Shit Fuck Piss Ranch” road.”)
Happily I learn the hippie custom that as darkness falls whoever you're traveling with takes you home, shares dinner and a joint, and puts you up for the night on a couch or on the floor.
We go out to the sea, descend the steep winding trail to Needle Rock and I dance in the surf. There are groups of city hippies camping all along the beach around collections of driftwood. It is a magical time for this Hoosier wannabe.
We all go out to the Fourth of July party at Whiskey Hill. I've got golden seal mixed with cayenne on my face for poison oak. (I was traveling with Jethro Kloss's herb remedy book Back to Eden.) We walk down the trail into a clearing on the side of the hill.
I look around at these cool California hippies and just toss my frisbee into the air where it disappears in the woods. Doug Green is sitting naked on the hillside with a big smile on his face. “C'mon you phony hippies!” he says. “Take off your clothes!” I see Milton grinning and high-stepping toward Erica cabin behind a tall blond woman.
I get back from the party before Shawn and manage to talk my way into the sleeping bag of the woman he had invited to our camping site on Nooning Creek.
I'm surprised when he arrives back very soon. “I climbed up one mountain and rolled down another,” he says a couple of times. I climb out of her sleeping bag.
After a couple weeks I wander back to Indiana hitchhiking across Canada via the caves of Medicine Hat, Alberta. There are groups of travelers in the caves waiting for a freight train to catch on the nearby tracks. We're all are on acid and we share the one joint someone contributes.
(A few years later Shawn, in a jealous rage, guns down a guy who's holding a baby in his arms inside Tomaso's pizza place in Old Town Eureka. Thirty years later I meet a woman who knows the now full-grown baby. I suggest an interview with him but she says I probably shouldn't. Last year I met a woman, another one of Shawn's kids, who is trying to meet that baby/man for the first time, her half-brother.)
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