Sarah and I had done some hitching in the spring, to Baltimore for a Led Zeppelin concert. I had been a little afraid of it, but she and her friends had been all over the place by thumb, including the solar eclipse ceremony where we met, on Virginia Beach.

A sobering episode in the Age of Aquarius, on my first trip out west

I came to understand there was a network held together with music, dope, and long hair, a network that would virtually guarantee us a ride within half an hour on any well-travelled road.

The vehicle would be an older model. An approaching VW bus was a sure thing. The driver and any other riders would look like us. Often, they would offer us a joint. On the radio or tape player would be Crosby, Stills & Nash or Van Morrison or Dylan or some other music we all knew.

At the concert in Baltimore, Sarah kept asking “freaks” (“hippie” was a just a word from Time magazine) if they knew a place we could crash that night. It didn’t take her long. 

The woman (we said “woman,” trying to be what is now called politically correct, though others still said “girl,” or even “chick”) who said we could stay at her apartment was with her boyfriend (that term stayed around much longer) and his brother. They all had jobs at some local factory. Back at their place, after a little more pot and beer, extra mattresses appeared, and Sarah and I had a good sleep.

In the morning we were off to Williamsburg to be students again. The trip had taught me there really was a counter-culture, and it was strong, and you didn’t have to be in college to belong. I was impressed.

I let my hair grow longer. I let my beard grow too. I decided shaving was not only a tedious chore that turned a man into a robot under the control of the established order; it was against nature. Hair grew for a reason, a part of some divine plan. To cut it was to prevent the natural unfolding of that plan. Besides, it identified me as a member of the clan. As David Crosby put it, it was my “freak flag”.

Now, a year later, I was behind the wheel of my white (with red interior) 1964 Chevelle that my father had sold me for $300. I had knocked out the firewall to the trunk and figured out how to take off the seat backs and arrange them so Sarah and I could sleep in the car when we couldn’t find a place to pitch our small tent, which was more comfortable, thanks to our air mattresses.

Now it was our turn to pick up hitchhikers. Some of them were on epic quests. Others were out for a lark, or late for work, or whatever. In any case, the counter-cultural bond was already formed when they climbed in, so after trading names and travel plans we could cut right to the meaning of life or some equally weighty subject. There was a lot of talk that year about one of the states — either Vermont, Oregon, or Colorado — seceding from the union to become a “hippie state”. In June Sarah and I decided to head for Boulder, Colorado, which was said to be a center for new thinking and progressive lifestyles.

It was the first trip west for both of us, and we marveled at the open space. Weather was not as much of a surprise anymore; you could see it coming.

Sarah had recently read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and she was imagining native Americans over every ridge and rise. As a boy I had read a kid’s biography of Zebulon Pike, and I insisted that our introduction to the Rockies had to be Pike’s Peak. At last we saw it, rising out of the plains, as the cliché goes, shimmering in those highway heatwaves and getting larger by the mile until we were finally there. Of course I had to drive all the way up to the summit at 14,700 feet (I had memorized that). We had a snowball fight at the top.

The West! We had made it to the West. We began to realize just how big an impact all those TV westerns had made on us. We were high, in more ways than one. 

Close up, the land was browner, dustier than we had anticipated, but our hitchhikers had explained we were on the drier side of the Rockies. Besides, the majesty of the mountains dominated everything. And the expansive deep-blue sky, a sea substitute, gave us a limitless sense of freedom. Coasting back down the steep grade, we were exhilarated.

The next day, after an impromptu side trip up an old mining road, from which we saw beavers tending their dams, we arrived in Denver. We visited a bookstore, where we bought an underground newspaper and a Zap comic book illustrated by R. Crumb. Failing to find a free place to stay, we headed to Boulder. 

After a stroll though the university campus, we ended up on “The Hill,” Boulder’s collection of coffeeshops, headshops, and bookstores. I remember Bonnie Raitt was on a nightclub marquee for that night, but we couldn’t afford a ticket. In fact, the whole trip would not have been possible without my Exxon credit card. By the way, gas was only 30-some cents a gallon then.

That afternoon we continued to ask students and other young folks if they could put us up for the night or suggest another free place to go. Some cities had official sleeping halls or church basements for traveling young people, or the local YMCA or YWCA welcomed people like us for a very small fee. As a very last resort we could have stayed in a motel. Today, my adult kids still can’t believe that rooms at Motel 6 and Super 8 really did cost $6 and $8 per night.

In Boulder, a frequent answer to our inquiries was “the mountains”. Finally, a guy with a red bandana around his head and a missing front tooth gave us directions to a seasonal encampment of freaks on national-forest land. It was on the way to Rocky Mountain National Park, almost to Nederland, he explained, and nicknamed Pleasant Valley. Pointing to his head, he said to keep looking on the right for a tall stick with a red bandana tied to it, at the entrance to a dirt road.

The drive was longer than we had expected, and it was nearly dusk when we finally saw the bandana and made the turn, into a dense forest of lodgepole pines, onto the worst road I had ever seen. Rocks of all shapes and sizes did their best to inflict damage to the undercarriage of my tired and dirty car. In fact, there were stretches that were nothing but rocks, some sticking up like icebergs, waiting patiently for an oil pan to puncture. Maneuvering around these was made more difficult by the fact that the road was dropping rapidly.

Finally we saw a meadow to the right, and the road leveled out, ending in what served as a parking area for around a dozen cars. To the left was a pine-covered hillside with no underbrush. Most of the campsites were in these trees. Straight ahead was a transitional zone of young aspens, with a few old pines left by loggers the last time around. The valley floor was still somewhere out there, but the slope was gradual. There was a nice view across the aspens to another ridge of pines. Sarah and I saw it as pure wilderness.

“Welcome!” called a nearby voice. Our eyes were drawn to a rotund, bearded man with wire-rim glasses.

“Want a beer?”

Of course we did.

The greeter called himself Doc and, I think, fancied himself as a sort of mayor of the whole encampment. He showed us where to park and where we could pitch our tent on flat ground nearby. Across the road in the pines, there were some makeshift tents of plastic, but many campers just had sleeping bags. Doc squeezed into his Karmann Ghia every night.

Six or seven of us sat around Doc’s campfire late into the night, passing joints and getting to know each other. Many more campfires of various sizes flickered between the trees on the hill across the road. I guess Doc must have been pushing 40, while the rest of us were 20ish. As for other members of the meadow group, I vaguely remember a “heavy dude” who’d been to India and did a lot of meditating. Stephen and Mike, friends from Michigan, were still in high school. They were hitching to visit Mike’s aunt (or was it grandmother?) in California. Everyone else had been there at least a few days. Doc was there for the summer. He went hiking with his camera most days, he explained. Every 10 days or so, he would drive down to Boulder, turn his film in to be developed on post cards, pick up his previous batch of cards, and peddle them around to various drugstores, gift shops, and such.

Doc also revealed some demographics of the camp, not that I had heard the word “demographics” back then. Apparently, the freaks on the hill, who had just now begun to break out into what was to be an all-night series of whoops and howls, were, to one degree or another, into LSD and other hallucinogens. A subgroup of that “tribe,” camping farther up the road, was very much into the powerful drug STP. Doc’s voice took on a more serious tone with this news. Sarah and I had never done STP, but we knew it contained speed (amphetamine), which could produce fear and aggression.

The next morning was the summer solstice. Sunshine came into our camp early. Not only sunshine the light, but Sunshine the “chick”. She gave us a quick tour of the valley, pointing out the bathing stream, a clear spring for drinking water, and a cabin where someone calling himself Crazy Horse lived, or had lived (I forget). Back at Doc’s campfire, we all had lots of bacon and granola for breakfast. It was a nice change from the usual oatmeal or Wheatena.

We then went for a long hike up the mountain with Mike and Stephen. Along the way we saw a teepee and a makeshift shower. We saw porcupine trundling out of an abandoned mineshaft and climbing a tree, with spectacular snowcapped peaks to the west. 

Attempting to take a shortcut back to our campsite, we nearly got lost. Instead, we ran across an old bus with many freaks camping in and around it. They planned to stay a long time. We talked with them for about an hour.

Back at the camp Sarah and I had lunch, with our last two bottles of beer. We then hiked out again, to a very, very cold lake. We took off our clothes and jumped in. Back at our campsite I collected firewood, and Sarah cooked dinner. It was just another summer day, but one of the best ones yet. We had met interesting people — types we had heard about but never thought we’d see.

After dinner (Sarah worked wonders on our gasoline-fueled Coleman camp stove), when night fell, we again began to talk around Doc’s large campfire ring with our new friends. Suddenly, from the hillside, a rowdy argument, then screaming, captured our attention. A while later two guys from up the hill came to our fire. One just sat on a log, staring at the fire. The other started talking about how “everyone up there is going crazy”. He told us some strangers from the STP camp had come to their site demanding free dope. The guy who was selling it wouldn’t give them anything. The STPers got mad, our visitor said, and stabbed the dealer in the stomach with a sharpened stick. Someone took the victim to the hospital down in Boulder.

Doc, who was upset in part because no one had told him about the incident earlier, left to talk to other witnesses. Soon after, another freak came running, shouting that Doc was needed to drive to town to get the sheriff. A rumor was swirling: The STPers were on their way back, with guns. There was panic, especially at the campsites on the hillside, where most folks were tripping.

We who were merely stoned tried to keep cool. By now it was after midnight. Several people piled into cars and drove out, up the long, rocky road to civilization. A guy in a VW bus pulled up next to our fire and said he had turned back because about 10 STPers had attacked his bus with rocks and axes. He had a pistol, and we were about to line our few cars up as some sort of defense line when the cops arrived — four cruisers, with red, white, and blue lights flashing but no sirens. They stepped out holding shotguns. They ordered all of us on both sides of the road to gather in front of a spotlight mounted on one of the cruisers. They asked a lot of questions, but none of us had seen the stabbing. One cop (we had all been calling them pigs for the last few years) said they couldn’t help us unless we helped them, so they were leaving but would keep a cruiser up on the main road for a while. 

A bunch of scared freaks, a majority of those who had been in the spotlight, left with the cops — they had offered to take anyone, so the campers crowded into the backseats of the cruisers. Where they were dropped off, I have no idea.

Another bunch came off the hill to join us at Doc’s campfire. Doc “patrolled” the area, pacing around in the darkness. There was much talk and speculation; everyone had their say. Around 2 a.m. we dispersed to our sleeping bags.

I was up early, gathering wood, when a guy came up and asked me if Sarah would be willing to cook “this” for him. From inside the tent, Sarah imagined a dead rabbit, but it turned out to be a dried Mexican macaroni dinner.

We packed up, and somehow managed to fit five guys into my car — seven of us altogether, with bucket seats up front! We split for Estes Park. Shortly after turning onto the paved road up the mountain, I switched on the radio, but there was no news of the stabbing. Headed for the Continental Divide, we hoped the dealer had not died.

We had never seen such views, such canyons with big birds gliding on updrafts. We saw mountain goats. A couple of days later, on the other side of the mountains, three of our hitchhikers asked to be dropped off. One was heading south, two up to Canada, where the government, we heard, had set up huge tents every so often along the Trans-Canadian Highway for transients. The tents were white with big black letters: “YOUTH/JEUNES”. Sarah and I saw these later that summer on our way back home from this wide-ranging tour.

There were more adventures, of course. Stephen and Mike rode with us all the way to LA, camping in some breathtaking (“far out,” at the time) Utah redrock country along the way. We got to know them well. I hope they’ve had lives as fortunate as mine.

I remember lengthy discussions, in the car and around many a campfire, about communes. We all thought a revolution, peaceful or otherwise, was coming soon — that the rest of our lives would not be anything like those of our parents. No, we would all be in tribes, bubbling over with love, living off the land. Some freaks were already doing it, right?

I was on board, but I also remember voicing the worry that we would have to make up new rules for our new societies, rules dealing with leadership, abuse, anger, bullying, cheating, on and on — the same issues “straight” society had been dealing with for centuries. In other words, we would have to start all over again.

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Note: Many thanks to Sarah Haman for the photos and for the source material, her journal of that summer, without which my memory would have recovered only a fraction of those heady days.