I was in the high school class of 1968, indelibly stamped. When that year was still the future, it represented that border between childhood dependency and my real life, whatever that might mean.  I had known nothing but childhood, but I felt ready for things to turn.

I was in the high school class of 1968, indelibly stamped. When that year was still the future, it represented that border between childhood dependency and my real life, whatever that might mean.  I had known nothing but childhood, but I felt ready for things to turn. 

Actually, I thought I should have been allowed to leave home and the tedium of high school two years earlier, when my older sister and my boyfriend graduated, and our family moved from small-town Michigan to suburban Maryland.  We had traveled a lot over my previous 16 years and I felt no desire to stay in East Lansing, but when I entered the halls of the new high school in Bethesda, the prospect of two more years there seemed truly unbearable.  Why couldn’t I just follow my sister to college instead?   The countdown to 1968 dragged on.

So much was happening—I couldn’t know if it was just because I was an adolescent, or if the times were as remarkable as they seemed.   1967 was the Summer of Love—a call to youth to break free and be different.  New music, new drugs, new mores, new society.  The Mothers of Invention:  “No way to delay, there’s trouble comin’ every day.” Boys were being drafted to the Vietnam war, under growing protests. Martin Luther King was assassinated in April of 1968.  In May, The Poor People’s March on Washington came to town and we hammered together shower stalls for it in the church parking lot.  Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June.  Still to come, the world watching in horror at the police riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August.

Meanwhile, I put on my graduation gown in June and couldn’t close the door on high school fast enough.  I had flown under the radar and done well despite it all, but the relevant anthem was still the Animals’ “We gotta get outta this place!”  Congratulations seemed empty.  It was over.

That summer, I babysat for a friend’s sister at Lake Winnipesaukee, a job far from home, where I was treated not as a child. I saved money and went with a youth group to a conference in Santa Fe, meeting new faces and brushing against people involved in the Reyes Tijerina legal case for land rights. The clear, dry high desert was a wonder. I ate a thick slice of meaty, whole grain bread sold by a woman on the market square and promised myself I would come back some day. In September, I celebrated my eighteenth birthday by meeting a handful of friends on the banks of the Potomac River for an early-morning  “stoned soul picnic” with red-yellow honey, sassafras and moonshine.

I entered college that fall, a big, bewildering place where I had never been so free—to find friends, lovers, outdoor adventures, meetings, demonstrations, work, classes.  When my parents dropped me off, they didn’t know that I had already vowed to myself, despite their earnest support, that I would never, ever return to live at home.  I was also determined to leave the protected walls of college after a couple of years, when I figured I would be ready to take on learning from the “real world”.  And 1968 was the turning point.