The day Sam Shepherd died

My mind works in peculiar ways on a good day. We were having a yard sale at my cousins' house in Nicasio and I was lamenting that everyone who stopped were strangers. But then it all changed. First the Peter Coyote lookalike dropped by and left empty-handed, then one of the McIsaacs from Tocaloma (Bud) stopped by. I told him I used to go out with Allan McIsaac. Suddenly it was old home week. And then I sold my toy spool Nessie to Phil Waddell for a buck, he was in a red car and the toy matched. He's from 71 Alta in Lagunitas. He said it was the house next to the one where all the musicians came to play....probably Jean Paul Picken's place, which led to a rather convoluted discussion of the good old days, to Big Brother & the Holding Company, to Janis, Herself (we lived near Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo) because meanwhile someone was wailing away on some blues number at the Rancho Nicasio, which led to a story on Ken Kesey, and the Diggers...which made me think of Lynn Deutra and the Forest Knolls Freestore in the basement of Ron and Marsha Thelin's old red house on Resaca. Which made me inexplicably think of Sam Shepherd. Don't ask. Even I can't make out that connection, other than I used to see him in Mill Valley when I worked for Mimi Fariña. Then I just found out that he died. You see how it goes? The old homes of memory. Circular breathing.

Summer Camp

As a kid growing up in West Marin in the 1950s & 60s, I lived in a place where we never went to camp but kids from all over the US came to camp where we lived.

It was an uneasy mix as the Forest Farm summer campers were from the land of faraway (mostly the eastern seaboard—NY) and they had no notion they were guests in our land—they weren't nice to the natives. Nor was Old Man Gregg.

Camp counselors and campers hailed from the far reaches of the known world and descended upon Forest Farm Summer Camp each June, founded in 1944 by the Greggs. They may as well have been Martians.

The official story goes that the Greggs welcomed everyone—they built their own pool when a Chinese counselor was told she couldn't swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club. But we local kids were never invited to swim at the Woodacre Improvement Club or in the Gregg pool. Ever. No matter how much we drooled. Funny how that goes.

Somebody At Forest Farm Summer Camp must've had a sense of humor: SAN RAFAEL. Calif. (AP) —A sign posted recently on the office door at the Forest Farms Camp by owner Harold Gregg reads, please keep door closed so bird won't eat our cat." The bird is a turkey vulture. (Miami Herald/Lewiston Evening Journal/The Evening Independent, etc., July 26, 27, 1965). 

 I actually do vaguely remember the sign. Only I didn't get the joke at the time.

The FBI was interested in the Greggs for suspicious activities, but then anyone who moved to Marin and Sonoma from Hollywood or New York was under investigation during the paranoid era of McCarthyism—including my best friend Stephanie's mother, Johanna Stone, a former Russian translator for the UN.

Mrs. Gregg was OK—she was a former teacher who was originally from Petaluma, so she was nicer to the local kids than her husband, Harold. I believe cookies may have been involved.

Harold Gregg, a New Englander, dressed in plaid shirts, thin and dour as they come, taunted Jack Gilbert when his daughter Linda brought him home. The apocryphal story goes: Old Man Gregg said Jack wasn't a real man, but a sissy poet.

Jack got his macho out and shimmied up a Doug fir to fell it with a chainsaw. Something went horribly wrong—the tree split in the middle and Jack came plunging to earth like a sad soft Icarus.

Linda Gregg ran off to Greece to care for Jack Gilbert whose wings were forever clipped. He was sentenced to the wheelchair—and she became a famous poet. Most people know Forest Farm Camp as Serenity Acres—the rehab place where Jerry Garcia died. But that was long after Harold died.

Forest Farm Camp was a commune before that. One of my high school classmate ran away from home and lived there in the 1970s when Claire and Jim Felson owned it from 1966 to 1976. She later told us wild stories of musicians who lived there and even wilder parties. Chalk it up to the times we lived in.

Mrs. Barbano—who also ran Barbano's Lagunitas summer camp on Arroyo Road, just down the hill from the Greggs, opened up her pool for swimming lessons—that's where I learned to swim at the ripe old age of ten. Old Man Barbano's daughter was killed in a car accident in Mexico. He wasn't right in the head after that.

Old Man Barbano gave up the summer camp business and rented the dorms out to musicians including Big Brother and the Holding Company. Yes, Janis Joplin. When the grief got to be too much for him, he shot himself in the head. We were walking home from high school when they brought the gurney out. It was the first time I saw a dead man. But not the last.

There were other camps in the San Geronimo Valley but I don't know their names. Perhaps someone else will remember the stories of the summer camps. The transient folk. Certainly people came in droves from the Bay Area to Camp Taylor ever since the turn of the 19th century. Some families camped out all summer long along the banks of Papermill Creek and Devil's Gulch. Research fodder for another blogeen.

Sutton & Tristano

I stumbled upon a Facebook thread by a Lagunitas School classmate, Kevin McConnell, who posted a link to Pete Sutton's dad, Ralph Sutton. I'd totally forgotten that Ralph, who tickled a mean Maple Leaf Rag in his time, played some of his famous stride piano compositions at a school assembly concert when we were all very young. But after Kevin posted it, minute fragments drifted back from the imperfectly shelved memories of childhood.

What I did remember, was, being surprised to hear such a complex arrangement of chords and cartoon music churning out of the cranky old school piano. Magic music from a strange man dressed in a gray suit who looked more like a school principal (or maybe Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman) than a famous jazz musician. Kevin said that the jazz concert inspired him to become a musician. Me, not so much.

And the vague memory fragment of that concert goes a long way in explaining why my classmate Pete Sutton's best friend, Steve Tristano, was standing on the piano bench banging out a rollicking Boogie-Woogie on the piano at recess. We were all rockin' out. That music was so radically different than the somber proscribed chords of the  America, the Beautiful. The teacher, hearing the infernal ruckus, came bursting into the classroom, apoplectic. We were all so busted.

From this incident, I learned that certain types of music was forbidden, therefore delicious. I also feared our 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Burge, was going to have heart failure right in front of us. I'd never seen such a show of emotion from our right-proper 50s school-marm teacher.

There was always a lot of counterculture going on in the San Geronimo Valley in the late 1950s, and early 60s. But we were so young and we knew no other life—living out so far from the towns and the growing suburbs. Many famous musicians and artists and writers took refuge in The Valley as the Marin Beat scene havens, including Mill Valley and the former fishing village of Sausalito, were beginning to erode into the effluent of mainstream acceptability.

Steve was born with his musical talent. Our 2nd grade Boogie-Woogie champ was the son of another famous jazz musician, Lennie Tristano. But great jazz musicians were also absenteé fathers—always on the road—or more notably playing the clubs in New York, where the real action was.

So to see Ralph Sutton was unusual as it was to see the blind piano player, Lennie Tristano. People often lumped Sutton & Tristano's names together, and said that they were famous jazz musicians in New York. But in retrospect, I can't imagine such a synthesis as they were both such very different musicians.

A bit of San Geronimo Valley apocrypha: Scott Joplin (with whom I share a birthdate) was said to have visited the Valley in the 1890s, and allegedly wrote Maple Leaf Rag at Frank "Speck" McAuliffe's bar in Lagunitas.

Don't know if there's any truth to the story—other than countless would-be ragtime piano players have banged out that archetypal ragtime hottie on every available piano in the Valley. But chances are pretty good Scott Joplin hammered out a rendition of it at Speck's. What was the bar called before Speck McAuliffe bought the place since this was before his time—Lagunitas Tavern & Livery?

Before you go, Whoa there, Nellie! Teddy Roosevelt had a cabin in Lagunitas—Argentina House—and used to water at the Lagunitas trough when he got all hot and bothered. And Joplin was no stranger to The Valley. (Nor were José Revere (Paul's kin), or Alexander Graham Bell—who set up the first telephone in the Dollar barn on Dickson Ranch.)

Teddy Roosevelt liked The Valley for its wildness and isolation. He famously exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West."

Another Boogie-Woogied classmate, Adair (Lara) Daley once dubbed The Valley in her SF Chronicle column as The Valley that Time Forgot. Growing up in West Marin, we were all so far west of the west, we met ourselves coming and going. Often shunned by the townies, we were our own universe.

Famous People I once knew

On Facebook, someone asked me about the famous people I've met, and I replied in no particular order. Small fragments of stories began to appear, some are pasted here, in hopes I'll do something with them at a later date.

Some fragments I've already blogged on about, but I'll want to compare the language, to see if I have any fresh perspectives, or new leads...otherwise, it's merely archival, and maybe it should stay in draft form. Tho I don't think I ever wrote about the musicians or Scatman...

I've met Scatman Crothers, Kate Wolf, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. I've met so many of the legends. Where to even begin?

Well, it WAS the 60s...and 70s and 80s...Janis lived on Arroyo Road at Camp Lagunitas, or Barbano’s. She'd be getting up about the time we walked home from high school...

Grace Slick—we wandered into her house in the middle of a drug deal...there were red roses on the piano and a sunken hot tub in the living room with a blue and green shag rug. She stumbled out of the bedroom around 4 PM, in a black ecru-hemmed babydoll negligeé (I kid you not), raccoon makeup caked under her eyes, and she was quite cross with us for being in her living room. But the guys were in the kitchen having a smoke.

Scatman Crothers was at the River Theater in Guerneville, after his concert, we all piled into a booth at a Guerneville coffeeshop (River Inn?) and gossiped the night away. He was a great storyteller. What I remember is Scatman imitating Cab Calloway's famous song, with a Heidi heidi hei. I took notes, it appeared in The Paper with photos. All my tear sheets have melted back into the earth after the biblical rains we had in the 1990s. I have the negatives somewhere. 

I met Kate Wolf there at the Rio Theatre too. Nina Gerber was on guitar. Man, that girl can play. It was a fundraiser for something—was it for Kate's own leukemia? I don't remember. Kate kept quiet about it. I remember she sang so drearily, I was bored to tears. It was only later that I found out about the leukemia and I felt so bad for panning her performance. But it was dreary. I'd seen her around before, at the Forest Knolls Post Office, in her white Ford station wagon. She lived up on Resaca.

Never actually talked to Janis, she was pretty hung over... We were shy high school kids, so we merely said hi as we went up the road home. She never picked us up hitchhiking. But I loved her Porsche with its mural.

Stan Getz,  Etta James, Dr. Maya Angelou, Irving Layton and Donald Sutherland. OK, Stan was the lie. No one caught it, though.

Dave Brubeck wrote a letter to The Paper praising my Russian River Jazz Fest photography. It was a thrill watching him from backstage playing Take Five, one of my mom's favorite theater sayings. And Stan was very approachable between sets, chatted with me about my work teaching lids poetry and art. I gave him some anthologies. (Note to myself: I have to find my famous people letters and scan them).

Steven Gross who also was working for The Paper, took pix also, I secretly think he coveted my job, and he coincidentally stole my negatives of Etta James. He was quite nasty about it too. Not on my list of people to reconnect with.

Maya Angelou and her son Guy Johnson, I read with them in SF for National Poetry Association. This was long before she got famous. Guy and I exchangeds letters for a while. 

I met Irving Layton and Donald Sutherland at his sister Boschka's wake. Never talked to Donnie. so I guess I didn’t meet him.  Irving was quite the charmer. I could see what she saw in him. That Newfie crowd got rather famous: Irving—Canada's Poet Laureate, Donald took some Oscars home—Ordinary People or Six Degrees of Separation? And there was Leonard Cohen. So I'm one degree of separation from Leonard. The wake was at Boschka's new home at Goat Rock so the events are inexorably intertwined.

I met the Bridges all at once at the Sacramento Music Circus: I think it was Guys and Dolls. We were all staying at the same motel. I wanted to know why Lloyd named Beau "Boy" as Jeff clearly was younger (closer to my age). Mr Sea Hunt himself gathered me up on his lap and roared with laughter.

Lloyd bought me a crystal star necklace. A prized possession that I lost down the back seat of a neighbor's car. I cried, and Agnes was too drunk to help—at 9 AM. Lloyd's crystal star slid down my neck, down into the void. Later, I would meet Leeta, my first boyfriend's  mother—who went to high school with Lloyd in Petaluma, so our worlds were all fairly intertwined.

Big bad Beau wouldn't let Jeff play with me in the pool. My feelings were hurt.

My mom was costuming the play. It took me a half a lifetime to figure out why Lloyd was laughing uproariously at my unconscious Beau/Boy "joke." I was pretty sure adults weren't to be trusted. Beau didn't want to have anything to do with me. I was 6, I was a girl, I couldn't swim so Jeff & I eyed each other in the shallow end, with Beau being the bossy older brother....they were so blond, they took my breath away. Even then.

Tommy Smothers used to babysit me at Gate 5 while my mom was at the Gate Playhouse theater. Dick Smothers never babysat me, he left it to Tommy who liked kids. And he was more fun to be around.

Bobby Darin was in Big Sur and my mom met him after midnight at the Esalen baths. She met lots of people: even Frank Sinatra bought her a drink once at the Cal Neva—she showed me where they sat. They drove up to Forest Knolls. Bobby showed me the chords to "If I were a Carpenter." Can you dig it? I payed badly for him on my palomino pony guitar, until my fingers bled, I was but a child. What did I know about fame?

Tom Waits, Joan Baez, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Dick and Tommy Smothers and Sterling Hayden. I've met them too.

I met Tom Waits at Ruth Mankin's 50th birthday party in Sebastopol but he was afraid of being bugged by fans, so we ignored him until he began to feel like a ghost of his own choosing. I felt sorry for him so we mostly just stood at the stove and ate sweet potato fries with lime & chili powder, talking of food and inanity itself. He hennaed his hair so his sideburns were sort of an auberge-eggplant color. I taught his daughter art and calligraphy one summer at LBC...she was sufficiently spoiled to be too cool for her own good.

I was an extra a few times on Nash Bridges. Cheech Marin and Don Johnson arrived on the scene, so I guess technically, I've met them as well. I was shouting out to them and taking photos like a good brash reporter. I took fake photos with my camera. On hindsight, I wish I'd had film in my camera. They blew up the VA hospital. It was quite astounding. My blue truck was an extra too, & it got paid more than I did. Tiny little checks from Universal Studios...almost not worth cashing. But I did. In those days, every penny counted. Still does.

Extras blend into the woodwork or wind up on the proverbial cutting room floor. Neil had a longer scene with Jeff Bridges in Tucker, that was reduced to a 30-second blip. You have to slo-mo it to see him.

Oh, we met Dame Edna too... We ushered at Theater on the Square in SF and met Barry Humphreys after the show...but I've already done far too many of these Famous People quizzes.

Seamus Heaney, Kenny Rogers, Carlos Santana, Robin Williams and Eric Idle.

I went to school with Robin way before fame came along...I ran into Robin later with Eric Idle at the Greek Theater, I was working backstage, Bread & Roses Festival. He remembered me...which shocked me. Nothing like getting a slippery, steamy bear hug from a very sweaty performer after a show... Once I was madly in love with Robin when I was 17, I used to follow him all around College of Marin, as he did his silly walks in green gym shorts and a woman's bathing cap on his head with the chin strap dangling.

Eric Idle looked like a cross-eyed Siamese cat up close, but was very kind. I mean what DO you say to a Python. When Robin and Eric revved it up back stage with Big Mikie, Michael Pritchard, I about died  of laughter.

I was asked to take photos of Kenny Rogers with some friends in the Green Room at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts, in Santa Rosa, after a show. He was very nice. Lotta pancake makeup. I got to see the show too. I gained a new appreciation for Kenny Rogers, not formerly on my music radar screen.

Then there was Bo Diddly. It was at the Sonoma County Fair, I was taking photos, and Bo Diddly invited me into his trailer after the show for an interview (I was dancing up front, and taking photos during the show). I expected to do a story on him. What I wasn't expecting was to be chased around the trailer by him. He had his guitar, Lucille, strapped on, and nearly had me cornered, but I ducked under her neck. Made my escape. Needless to say, I was much more cautious around Chuck Berry, who was a perfect gentleman.

Redux list, 2021

People I’ve met or been within five theater.

Sheesh, I’ve met and chatted with so many famous people, it’s impossible to pick just 5. So it’s 5 categories. Actors, musicians, scientists /public figures, political figures, writers.

1. Robin Williams

Eric Idle

Lloyd Bridges, Beau and Jeff

Connie Stevens

George Lucas

Sterling Hayden

Tommy & Dick Smothers

Dame Edna

Cheech Marin

Don Johnson

Faye Dunaway

Ron Perlman

Brian Cox

Peter Coyote

2. Kenny Rogers

Pete Seeger

Joan Baez

Dave Brubeck

Bo Diddly

Eartha Kitt

Jesse Colin Young

Van Morrison 

Bob Dylan

Janis Joplin

Bobby Darin

Tom Waits

Carlos Santana

Grace Slick

Scatman Crothers

Kate Wolf

Mimi Fariña 

Tracy Chapman

3. Commander Chris Hadfield, astronaut

Dr. Al Baez, invented lasers

Bill Moyers

Noam Chomsky

Leonard Matlovich

Maria Shriver

David Brower

Famous Amos

Edwin Drummond, famous rock climber, ex boyfriend

4. Irish president Mary Robinson

Irish president Mary McAleece

Jerry Brown

Willie Brown 

Barbara Boxer 

Gary Giacomini

Robert Reich

5. Rita Dove

Seamus Heaney

Joy Harjo

Robert Bly

Maya Angelou

Lou Welch

Raymond Carver

Irving Layton

Isabel Allende

Joseph  Brodsky

Galway Kinnell

Alice Walker

Allan Ginsberg

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Robert Hass

Juan Felipe Herrera

James Patterson

Tim Severin, explorer, writer

Ken Kesey

I see I need to work on my politicians. George Lucas is the only lie. Chomsky and Clinton I was pretty far away from. Martin Sheen too.

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v.

I grew up on Turtle Island. I was an unwilling player during the revolutionary birth ot the 60's and the Summer ot Love. Some ot it had to do with age, or lack ot it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. Half of my friends ran away to the Haight Ashbury and the other half practiced making their necks as red as the necks of their blue-collar parents'.

My mother turned me on with green oatmeal cookies. Actually, it was an accident. We were at her gay friend's house in Larkspur having dinner. A friend, Sue Williams and I helped ourselves to the big cookie jar. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more health food chocolate chip cookies loaded with that weird green shit. Ugh!

Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's long hair, danced, and wove peace symbols on the shoebox we converted to a finger loom? My mother went along with my frenzied creative urges before I fell into a narcoticised dreamstate while Janis wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby
you know you got it
if it makes you feel good

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris.

Micaela and I crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat stuck in the Sausalito mud at an angle that almost rivaled that of the Spreckles House. Jean Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the curved ferryboat wall, defied horizon and plum-line logic. 

We sneaked into the captain's brig that served as a loft and watched the party below us carry on. While our parents were turning on and dropping out, we ran wild in the streets. Sneaking off to the Avalon. Fillmore. Winterland. Sometimes finding our parents there before us. My mother was very hip and my reverse rebellion kept me straighter than most of my friends.

The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out all Ken Kesey's acid tests. Took me to the Panhandle. Parties and concerts in Golden Gate Park. The Be-in. Magic Mountain of Marin. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with wal-to-wall bare mattresses, sinks filled with putrid dishes, mountains of rotting garbage, incense and patchouli oil made me wary of acid and hard drugs.

Various rock groups divided up the San Geronimo Valley like musical mafias. Jefferson Starship hung a model bi-plane from a bay tree in Woodacre. The Grateful Dead were mostly encamped in Forest Knolls, while Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. Mrs. Barbano rented the dorms to them, but after her daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep on the gurney as they wheeled him into the ambulance.

Most afternoons, when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home from school, dropped acid with the musicians at Barbano's instead, and I felt betrayed by this.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. Most of the musicians never got out of bed until afternoon—that was the time to score, and hang out for a jam session. Bill Bowan, the drummer for the Sons of Champlain, always had grass and there was even an abandoned van parked at Dead Man's Curve in Lagunitas for lovers in search of a bed. John McBride often took advantage of that pad on wheels.

It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the San Geronimo Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight. From LA, or New York, everybody began to migrate westward like lemmings to the sea. 

House of Richard took over the old dance hall in Forest Knolls. I sold my first chain crocheted caps there, and in exchange, bought hay for my horse. Richard told me how the border police, looking far dope, tore apart their VW van after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims. The disciples of the Summer of Love moved to the Valley enmasse. 

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

"If you remember the '60's you weren't really there."
— Robin Williams

I was an unwilling player during the birth of the 60's and the Summer of Love. Some of it had to do with age, or lack of it on my part. I was 14 and uptight. It was an accident but my mother turned us on with green cookies. We couldn't understand why they made such a fuss, and wouldn't let us have any more cookies loaded with weird green stuff. Why were they watching us so oddly as we corn-braided and beaded each other's hair and wove peace symbols on an improvised shoebox the finger loom? Janis Joplin wailed and crooned on the stereo:

Take it!
Take another little piece of my heart
now baby

A life size poster of Grace Slick wrapped in an American flag sung to me from the wall and the air filled with visual debris. We crashed parties on The Charles Van Dam ferry boat, sunk rakishly in the Sausalito mud. Varda's geometric blue and red paintings nailed to the wall defied horizon and plum-line logic. The drug experimentation blossomed in kalidascopic exponentials. Crazy people got crazier. My mother checked out Ken Kesey's acid tests. Clouds of incense roiling out of the Psychedelic Shop. People sleeping in doorways. Crash pads with bare mattresses and sinks filled with rotting garbage, reeking of incense and patchouli oil.

Big Brother and the Holding Company took over the barracks at Barbano's summer camp on Arroyo Road. After Barbano's daughter was killed by a car in Mexico— something to do with dope; Mr. Barbano shot himself in the head. Walking home from school, I remember him all white and red as if asleep in the ambulance.

Most afternoons when the shadows grew long and chill settled into the gulch, the hills reverbrated with the distorted screaming of electric guitars. My friend Micaela quit coming home, dropped acid at Barbano's, or hung out at one of the Grateful Dead pads instead, and I felt betrayed by her abandonment.

We ran from one end of the San Geronimo Valley to the other—searching for dope. And the rock stars were our best bet. It wasn't just the rock stars who moved into the Valley. Those fleeing from the Haight, or New York. We all dealed.

At The House of Richard, once the old dance hall in Forest Knolls, Richard himself, told me how the border police tore apart their VW van looking for dope after a textile buying trip in Mexico. Even the tires were removed from the rims.

Kerouac On the Road. Cassidy at the wheel. Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass floated into town. Alan Watts was staying with a former Jesuit brother at the Heart Sutra House. There was no time for recording history. In Mary Mackey's English class at Drake High School (emphasis on high), we studied the lyrics on the Revolver album. We tried another high. Someone issued a warning that morning glory seeds were coated with poison. Heavenly Blues turned deadly. A friend in the slammer for dealing. Rumor of another petty dealer turning up dead in an oil barrel in the San Rafael canal for double-crossing a dope dealer. Hendrix dead. Joplin dead. Bobby dead. The vets. All those dead coming home in boxes.

We traded Zap Comix for dope. The school narc married red-headed Kelly, a friend of mine. My art teacher Warren Fairbanks (who went to school with my mom), married my classmate Rachel and moved to Bolinas. No one else bothered to get married. We watched light shows at the Fairfax Pavillian. Everybody's made Time Magazine as the first health food store in the US.

Things got hopping on the Bolinas Mesa. Lots of writers climbing aboard Turtle Island. Gary Snyder talked about this place as if he owned it; I thought I could write like him. What's the big deal? So I began my apprenticeship.

Moulton's store in Forest Knolls burned down and there wasn't much to downtown except hang outside the Valley Tavern, or at the train platform. The same was true about Lagunitas. Some say, the boy who set his own house on fire, killing two younger brothers, torched this building too. Some say he burned down all the historic wooden buildings in The Valley.

Tensions rose. Old Man Bevans, out gardening on the old railroad bed between Castro and Sir Francis Drake Blvd at Arroyo Road, went vigilante and stuck his rake through one Hell's Angel's tire spokes. When the Angel got done with Old Man Bevans there wasn't much left to hospitalize. Everyone started selling out. Land was subdivided. Dairies went under. One could feel the change in the wind.

Gurus and TM moved to Marin. Then, the EST graduates. Most of us moved on and became ex-patriot. I moved from Forest Knolls to Forestville. Little did Lew Welch know when he wrote "The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings," that there was nowhere else left for us to go. It was no longer a question of need. Houses desecrated the sides of the goddess, Mt. Tarn. Ken Kesey, the Merry Prankster headed north to greener pastures.

Life magazine ran pictures of the war in full color, they're still etched in my mind like shadows of Hiroshima. My mother checked in and out of mental wards like they were revolving doors. She wanted me to read One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest so I could understand shock therapy. I waited in hospital wards with wax-yellowed and green tile floors with curved corners for my mother to make her grand entrance in a blue hospital gown and paper slippers.

One pill makes you whiter

And one pill makes you small 

The ones that mother gives you 

Don't do anything at all

On the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love, I'm working with the crazies at Napa State Hospital. The inmates have their poems memorized. I can't remember any of my poems all the way through. I meet a friend of my mother's, Sally Lacy, an inmate, who raised an eyebrow, and wants to know what I'm doing in a place like this. It's like a 60's time capsule here. Do I tell them that of all the artists, poets are the most often institutionalized? Depending upon how one looks at it— maybe it's those who are locked up who are closer to poetry. The nuthouses are breeding poets. The trickster Coyote has holes in his pockets.

The Summer of Love wore down like a bad trip. Vietnam. Reagan brought out the National Guard at People's Park; brothers and sisters fell. As we marched, we shielded our faces from the FBI who took photographic aim from the top of the Zim's Drive-in tower in San Rafael. Zim Boy grinning down at us and waving.

People moved to the country and joined communes like Limelighter Lou Gottleib's Morning Star Ranch in Sonoma, or moved to the Eel River. Some went back to the land and raised families. Most cut off their hair, bought suits and joined the rat race. Jerry Rubin. Yuppies. Baby boomers, baby carrots and raduccio.

Bitter vets returned home and were treated like aliens from another planet. John Lennon gunned down in New York by some crazy wanting fame, and 20 years later, we like to think a revolution is brewing. Punk rock. The children conceived during that Summer of Love have come of age in an era of violence and apathy. And Lew Welch, with a gun to his head, walking off into the wilderness for the last time because there was no way left to remind the planet of its smoky gentleness. Turtle Island is shaking again. In what form will the revolution take this time around?

6/1987
added 6/17

More S o L

• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS (Summer of Love) long v....
• COMING OF AGE IN AQUARIUS

Summer of Love, etc.
A revamp from an earlier post from 2013, 'Tween Worlds

A related blog post: Ken Kesey