The bus came by and I got on; That’s when it all began; There was cowboy Neal at the wheel; Of a bus to never-ever land – from “That’s It for the Other One” – Grateful Dead
We drove south on Highway 1, nearing San Francisco on the 4th of July in 1971. I suppose the Vista Cruiser, with my father behind the wheel, was your typical postcard picture of the American family – mom and dad and in this case three boys, of which I was, at the wise old age of 14, the oldest.
It was not long after passing through Bodega Bay, made famous eight years earlier by Hitchcock’s original angry birds, that we began seeing people lining both sides of the road. Traffic had slowed to look at them, those whose grandchildren today might be found at any Occupy Anywhere, U.S.A.
In 1971 they were called hippies, that now extinct subculture that had morphed from Beatnik to hipster to that final revolutionary form I was staring at from the back-facing rear seat of our version of the Griswold family roadster.
I watched, and some of the bearded men and their bellbottomed women look back at me as we slowly passed. I didn’t know it at the time, but we were moving closer to their ground zero, the corner of Haight and Ashbury, in the city turned psychedelic during the Summer of Love four years earlier.
The crowd thickened as we continued, and tents began to appear. Dad slowed even more, muttering under his breath, as the hippies, most of who were younger then than my kids are now, crowded the road.
I saw a partially naked woman carrying a toddler walk into a tent. Anytime you’re fourteen, and a boy, and you catch a glimpse of female nudity as I did then, you feel your life is pretty much complete. I stared, and a guy with hair down below his shoulders saw me gawking; he laughed and gave me the peace sign.
“Whoa,” said my brother Dean, who had been lucky enough to spot the same thing. “Read your comic,” mom said in a scolding tone. But that wasn’t happening as we both stared intently out the window.
I pushed Dean back, knocking him into a planter mom had bought in Seattle and on top of the cardboard box that held my electronic football game, where plastic teams of Jets and Raiders convulsed into epileptic fits when you plugged in the field.
“Be careful retard,” I told him. “You are!” he retorted. “Don’t make me pull over!” dad barked. But there wasn’t much chance of that considering the surroundings.
We had come thousands of miles, and looking back, my parent’s patience was phenomenal. They didn’t murder one of us, which is a minor miracle. If I never thanked you for not ever killing me, mom and dad, let me do it now.
The entire trip took six weeks. We spent two weeks in Seattle, where dad had a company. Along the way, mom took hundreds of pictures, which she had put on slides and later projected over half the living room wall, where unlucky guests of 1507 Kent Road sat through hours of our memories.
Mom turned on the radio to drown out our bickering. Sammi Smith sang that she needed help making it through the night, and mom, never much of a C and W fan, turned the dial. Next came Mungo Jerry singing about having women on your mind in the summertime, which she cared for even less. She finally settled on a news station where the DJ was telling about someone in New York named Joe Colombo who had been shot in the head. Then a report that The Doors 27-year-old lead singer Jim Morrison had been found dead in his bathtub in Paris; heroin was also mentioned. With a worried look, mom shook her head and turned off the radio. “I don’t know where the world is headed,” I remember her saying as I kept checking the tent openings outside.
We got back home a few weeks later, near the end of that road trip summer I’ll always remember. I would begin my four years at Catholic High soon and mom told me before that happened I needed a haircut.
Days later, I sat in the barber’s chair, watching what little hair I had fall to the shop’s tile floor, thinking back to a guy by the side of the California road who once gave me the peace sign, and wondering, a little sadly, if I’d missed out on something.