Vermont to Capture 70s Counterculture

In another story, I see that the Vermont State Historical Society is collecting memorabilia and other things for a projected museum piece on Vermont's hippies and the 70s Counterculture.

Aside from peace signs and food cooperatives, the 1970s influx of longhaired youth to Vermont brought experimental communes to the hillsides and social activism, as well as drug use and fears of a hippie invasion.
Now the Vermont Historical Society is collecting stories and artifacts in a two-year study to document the lasting influence the decade has had on the state. It's holding forums around the state for people to tell their stories, good and bad, about that era in Vermont.
"The hippie generation is not just drugs, sex and rock and roll, as we all can attest to," Ann Taylor, 63, said at a forum last week in Burlington. "What I truly love is that we were involved politically, back to earth. We care about nature, we understand the wellness concept and what that is."

Sounds like fun. I can't wait to see the final product Of course actually getting to Vermont might be a problem for an elderly shut-in on a fixed income...

The Revenge of the Hippies...

Speaking of Hippies, no less an authority than Mr. Duck Dynasty himself, Phil Robertson says that over 100 million Americans are infected with an STD, and it's all the fault of those god damn Hippies:

There is a penalty to be paid for what the beatniks, who morphed into the hippies [did]. You say what do you call the hundred and ten million people who have sexually transmitted illnesses? It's the revenge of the hippies! Sex drugs and rock and roll have come back to haunt us.

Yeah, Phil. You look like the perfect spokesman for the anti-Hippie movement. Go find a 14 15-year-old to screw before she gets used up -- "ruined" -- and isn't fit for anything except using a hand washboard to clean that skanky beard of yours.

The Death of Hitchhiking

Used to be, way back when, that one of the most efficiently economical, if not speedy, ways to get from point A to point B was to hitchhike. Despite such stories as that of Billy Cook (who did kill a couple who were kind enough to give him a ride on US 66) and a ton of urban legends that told of drivers being murdered by psychopathic or ghost hitchhikers (the "no good deed goes unpunished" school of thought), hitchhiking was a viable transportation alternative in the US starting in the Great Depression and continuing through the mid-1970s.

It was helped along by the likes of Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was not only the so-called (by the sensationalistic-even-then media but no one else) "Bible of the Beat Generation" but a seminal influence on the thinking and behavior of the "flower children" of the late 1960s. All that despite the fact that even a casual reading of On the Road will reveal that Jack Kerouac did surprisingly very little hitchhiking in that book.

This alternative form of travel reached its zenith with the rise of the Hippie Movement, when any "long-haired freak" (i.e., a Hippie) who wanted to go somewhere was virtually guaranteed of a ride, at least part of the way, by some other long-haired freak in a car. It was rare for someone to have to wait longer than an hour -- and often much less -- at a good freeway on-ramp before getting a ride.

There was an active "jungle drums" communication system between and among the hitchhikers as to what on-ramps were the best and which were to be avoided. Back then, a lot of states still had some very draconian laws against hitchhiking, but those laws were enforced differently in each state. Colorado had the most strict laws, and they were the most strictly enforced. A good friend of mine was trying to hitchhike out of Trinidad and got swept up by the cops, had to spend a night in jail and two hours the next morning at a "rescue mission" (where he had to sit through a lengthy and completely boring sermon) only to get for his sustenance a bean sandwich(!) and an onion, followed by a five-mile hike out of town before the cops finally turned back and he was able to snag a ride over the border to New Mexico.

I did my share of hitchhiking back in the day, and it was almost always an adventure. One time my buddy and I were at the very back end of a line of Hippies wanting rides from Sacramento to "the north" (Portland or Seattle) and a guy drove down the line asking people something and then driving on to the next person or group. I didn't know what he was up to, and I was ready to turn him down since everyone else had, but when he got to us he said he was going north, but he was going over to the coast road (Hwy 101) and then north, but only as far as Eureka. "Only?"

We took the ride, eventually landing in Arcata in time to socialize (i.e., "party down") with some Humboldt State students (even back then it was known as "Dope U") for a few days, and arrived in Portland a few days behind in a schedule that we didn't really have.

No, I didn't ever get picked up by that legendary car full of horny schoolteachers resulting in a Dear Penthouse Forum letter. Nor the solitary woman out to "get even" with her husband -- that's what bars were for, anyway...

But one thing I used to do all the time circa 1974, killing time at an on-ramp, was to write this graffiti on the backs of freeway on-ramp signs: "A man without a country is like a fish without a bicycle." That wasn't original with me by any means -- I cribbed it off the wall of a Hippie bar in the Bellingham WA suburb of Fairhaven -- but I do note with a modicum of anonymous pride that it was eventually picked up by Gloria Steinem and changed to "a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle".

It was an extremely interesting and entertaining way to travel, as long as you didn't have an inflexible itinerary or a schedule, as long as you were willing to entertain the drivers that picked you up, and as long as you didn't have an over-inflated idea of how dangerous it was to hitchhike. The California Highway Patrol did a study, released in 1974, that indicated that hitchhikers were not disproportionately more likely to become crime victims than the general population. Other studies confirmed that as well.

So why did it stop? Nowadays you can drive from coast to coast, from border to border, and see maybe a single hitchhiker or two. I think it's because all the hippies grew older and got more fearful from watching Faux News, and everyone else -- the same people who wouldn't give you a ride back then -- still has the same "fuck you" attitude that they always had...

That and I think we are all more fearful in general than we were back in the day, when it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and love was all around, you know, all that stuff. I personally have not picked up a hitchhiker in years and likely will never do so again. It's probably still as non-dangerous as it ever was, but still... I'm older now and I've probably soaked up by osmosis some of that famous "good sense" that we all seemed to lack back then. (My father was famous for saying, about me, while shaking his head slowly back and forth, "that boy just ain't right in the head".)

In 2013, MSNBC did a story called What Killed Hitchhiking? that goes into it in some depth. As a guy named Phil Reed from Edmunds.com says, "it was the demise of the '60s mentality of love and trust and the belief in community ... Hitchhiking hippies were replaced by hitchhiking ex-cons. Even I wouldn’t pick up a hitchhiker today."

And there you go.

The Back-to-the-Land Hippies and The Lost Generation

A long, long time ago, in 1974, I was a graduate-school dropout from The University of California at Santa Babara and an "official" member of the Hippie movement. Admittedly, I was in it mostly for the sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, but there were a lot of people I knew who were really into it, who really talked up the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the casting aside of the old ways of belief and thinking. (For those of you who want to explore the whole Hippie phenomenon further, there is, naturally, a website called Welcome to Hippyland devoted to that.

We were Hippies. We drove -- and lived in -- our vans VW , we wore our hair long, we wore our clothes weird, and we wore our smells patchouli (in the mistaken belief that the overpowering scent of patchouli would cover up the odor of the marijuana smoke in our cars when we got pulled over by The Man), and we grabbed up so many copies of the Whole Earth Catalog that, ironically, the printing of which laid waste to entire forests. The book was great, and even Steve Jobs eventually characterized The Whole Earth Catalog the Google of the 60s.

One dream that everybody had was to go "Back to the Land". Everyone was lulled into a patently false sense of "we can do this, we can really do this!" by publications like the Mother Earth News magazine ("Five Acres and Independence!"), the Foxfire magazine and book series ("Make Your Own Bacon!"), and a thick yellowish-pulp-paper national catalog of land for sale at ridiculously low prices, the name of which escapes me now (and for which an Internet search turns up so many false positives that it would be like finding a straw in a haystack to identify it -- maybe one of my literally dozens of readers can help here...).

So it was decided we would some buy some plot of ground out of this catalog, then all move onto the property, start a commune, raise our own food (vegetables, chickens, pigs) and, in the words of Lenny in the 1939 film of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, "Live off the fat a the lan'!" There was even some vague talk to house the whole commune in a built-by-hand "sweat equity" geodesic dome, based on the "plans" in Steve Baer's Dome Cookbook, or move into in a amateurly clobbered-together house constructed on the concepts in Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher's Art by Art Boericke and Barry Shapiro.

As most of you know, I grew up on a farm, so I knew how much work running that rural paradise was really going to be. It was at that point that I more or less delicately excused myself from the deliberations. I knew that these slacker layabouts would likely starve to death the first winter, since none of them wanted to get up before noon, they couldn't slaughter a pig if their life depended on it (which it would), and the only "crop" they were interested in harvesting off that five acres of independence was marijuana.

One of my favorite writers, T.C. Boyle captured this whole idea masterfully in his novel, Drop City, which was kinda-sorta based on the very real commune of Drop City in Colorado, and springboarded off of the idea that somebody back then had had that all free-thinking, free-spirited hippie-types ought to move to ... Alaska(!). Because Alaska had such a small citizenry population that it was theoretically possible to get enough of the "right kind of people" to move there and register to vote so that a true "Hippie Haven" could come into existence. Legal pot! Yay!

Ha.

A lot of that catalog land, it turned out, was for sale so cheap because it was in such remote locations that it would require a week of backpacking just to get to it. But there were a few places that were not so remote -- the more civilized parts of Montana and Idaho featured prominently in these dreams, despite the fact that, like Alaska, pretty much none of these "new homesteaders" had actually ever been there.

Finally they settled on Ferry County, Washington. It had it all -- remoteness, cheap land, a leave-'em-alone attitude from the local authorities, and a county seat, Republic*, that had fewer than 1,000 residents.

There were some reasons for that. In winter Ferry County gets socked in deep by ice and snow, and in summer the heat is enough to melt the bumper off a Buick.

About that time I had had enough of the Californian neo-bohemian Hippie lifestyle, and hightailed it back to Washington State, where I eventually got a job working for The Man (i.e, the state), and settled into a nice lower-middle-class existence. But there was always a part of me that kind of wondered what I had missed by bailing out.

So. Fast forward a couple of dozen years, and I found myself in Republic, Washington, for my job (for a while I was in the state administration of Americorps), where I thought I recognized someone from those days. I was reluctant at first to approach her -- wary of the whole "So you're working for The Man now, huh?" thing, I guess.

But approach her I did and asked her if she had lived in Isla Vista, California, in 1974. Turns out it was her, but she didn't really seem to remember me clearly -- she seemed as spaced out then as she was back in the day.

She was the only one of that group who had made good on the plan to move to Ferry County and get back to the land (by getting in with some other people, who actually knew what they were doing), but here she was 25 years later, still living in poverty, still acting distracted and spacey, still smelling of patchouli and pot, even still wearing the same clothes! And living on a commune nestled between two anti-government bunker-building gun-toting food-hoarding deer-poaching survivalists.

I asked if all the neighbors got along with each other. "Better than you'd think," she said. "We don't trust the state, they hate the state, and we all just leave each other alone."

Good advice, that last part. But that whole situation vis-à-vis the hippies and their survivalist neighbors didn't really surprise me. Both groups shared many common goals and ideas and ways of looking at the world. But one is fully armed and the other isn't... If a fight starts, who do you think is going to win it?

So that's pretty much how the whole Hippie experience played out. Most people finally grew up, decided that society wasn't so fucked up after all, ended up getting jobs and mortgages and living in the real world, i.e. "selling out". But some didn't, and while I'd like to believe that everyone made the choice that was right, for them, I know that for every Ferry County Suzy Starburst happily settled into a bucolic Hippie paradise there are ten homeless street drifters living in cardboard boxes, chugging 40s and spare-changing at shopping-mall-entrance curb-cuts The ones who aren't dead from Agent Orange, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, exposure or just plain poverty.

Sadly, in many ways, they really did turn out to be, like their forebears, the young people in the 1920s, a "lost generation".

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 Republic WA, by the way, is famous for something else: The Stonerose Interpretive Center, which is a sure-'nuff fossil bed that is, amazingly, open to the public. That means that you can drive there and pick away at an Eocene Epic fossil site. And it doesn't take long at all to actually find a real fifty-million-year-old fossil! That you can keep and take home with you! And this, as far as I know, is the only site of this kind anywhere in the world. I think the only reason it hasn't been picked away completely by now is that it is so remote -- it takes a whole day to drive there just from Seattle. Plus it is so easy to find a fossil that most people chip away only a foot or so of the strata before they find their fossil and get tired.

But it is a real thrill to chip away carefully at a flat piece of sandstone until you get it split and reveal the perferctly formed ghost leaf from fifty-million-years ago. There's nothing else like it.