Which Road Did You Come From?, Part One

Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the emotional limbo of post-college life in 1970s Pasadena, where returning home sparks a spiral of depression, existential doubt, and a search for meaning. Amid the decay of suburban sprawl and family disconnection, a psychedelic night with friends offers a vision of communal living rooted in shared purpose and simplicity. Philipson explores internal disillusionment with the external collapse of American ideals, crafting a powerful meditation on adulthood, authenticity, and the yearning to build a life beyond inherited expectations.

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

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Transcript

In the fall of 1972 it happened. I graduated from college. This wasn’t unexpected and yet I was unprepared. I was not aware that the train of events which I thought of as “my life” had been running along prebuilt tracks: elementary school, middle school, high school, college. I did not realize that once I left the last station, there were no more tracks. 

I knew I would go to graduate school someday but not right away. I was going to be a writer, even though my UC Santa Cruz writing teacher, James Houston, had already pronounced my creative epitaph: “You’re too much an of intellectual for creative writing and too much of a writer to only read what others have to say.” As a bon mot, that might have cut me off at the knees—it was pithy—but I was too callow to understand the seriousness of his charge. I continued to consider myself a writer, or at least a writer in training, and I drafted one unpublishable story after another. 

I stayed in Santa Cruz for another six months because I had friends there, had fun there, and knew my way around. My parents stopped supporting me, but that was part of the deal, and I had savings from my summer job. I found another one working the counter and kitchen of a fast-food burger joint called Crockers. I was, of course, too good for the job. I gleefully reported to my housemates that the one question I failed on the entry-level exam asked, “What are the first names of the Crocker brothers?” Bob and Jim (I learned their names soon enough) also must have considered me too good for the job. They fired me before the month’s probation was up. 

Since I had enough money to last until summer, I enjoyed the student life without the student responsibilities—without any responsibilities—until it was time to go home. Where else could I continue to live well without money? It might have been a variation on that Robert Frost line I’d read in “The Death of the Hired Man

Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in

But that was so bleak! I loved home! My parents were cool—good New Deal liberals who had weathered the ideological blasts of the sixties. I wouldn’t be the first of the children to return home after leaving for school. I had stayed there three summers out of four during my college years, and this summer would be like the others. No question but that I would be welcome.

And perhaps it could be a time of new beginnings and new commitments, a generous intention to add something to the lives of my parents. The nest was empty for the first time ever. I could rediscover the neighborhood I had grown up in, work and be productive, write and be creative. I would go home fully and consciously with an open heart and critical eye for the life I had, until then, taken for granted. I possessed the tools now: I had my B.A. in literature!

* * *

It was not immediately apparent that I had failed. Only little by little did the consistent falling-shorts soften me up for the disorientation I had no idea was waiting for me: rising later than I meant to, exercising less than I wanted, eating more, reading less, writing not at all. Smoking too much dope. I didn’t realize I was soaking up depression until the sponge that was my mind could absorb no more. I lost my tenuous hold on my still inchoate adult identity. My mother cooked the meals, did the laundry, cleaned the house. I was not expected to pull my weight, as I had done in the communal houses of Santa Cruz. After a few feeble efforts at an adult participation, I sank confusedly back into the role of child. I visualized it as foundering in a bin of hot bread dough.

I had told my parents that I wanted to take a break before looking for work, but as the days slipped by, I woke up to a vague dread. I didn’t want to look for work and didn’t want to examine the reasons for not doing so. Well-meaning suggestions from the adults around me, and especially my parents, triggered a silent resistance that I knew I had to hide. I grew more bewildered and depressed. This was so different from the bright brash English major I had been on campus! I had student-taught a class on my own topic, “The Daemonic in American Literature,” while only a junior. As a senior I had founded an organization, the Lit Body, to pursue the study of literature in its social and political context. I had appointed myself one of the three student speakers to represent the class of ’72—even though I was one quarter behind and wasn’t actually graduating. And when I did graduate, I did so with honors.

Where was my strength? My sense of purpose? I wasn’t even trying to make it work.

My parents, sensing my growing confusion, remained tactfully supportive. Numerous crises with other children had taught them that parents were the first and easiest targets. But their very proximity made me feel more guilty and confused. I wanted them to don their role, to chide me and tell me to get off my duff. I wanted to lash out at them instead of fighting with myself in a descending spiral of recrimination, false resolution, listlessness, and despair. I took long walks through the neighborhood, but it provided no diversion. Sometimes I would tramp for miles without seeing anything. And it was hot and smoggy during the summer, the worst time to be in L.A. 

Once, when I was sitting by the pool and twilight had infused a bit of coolness into the air, I watched my mother through the kitchen window. As she prepared dinner, I found her movements stabbingly familiar: the back-and-forth between the sink and stove, the opening of cupboards and drawers, the hang of her hair and the peaceful abstractedness of her face, her lovely face. Rising from the neighborhood, the San Gabriel Mountains began to lose their dusty blue color. Suddenly I swelled with emotion. I wanted to walk in the house and say, “Mom, I love you, and I’ve never been so confused in my life.” But I remained sitting in the gathering dusk, washed by a wave of self-pity. Was I not constipated and pathetic? (Yes.) I talked to my friends about joining a counseling group. I smoked more dope.

Well before my arrival, my folks had planned a trip to the High Sierra Camps of Yosemite. I had gone with them numerous times, and they invited me to join them once again, but I refused. I wanted to spend the week by myself, to think things out, I told them. What I really wanted was to be home without the shade of parental presence. Once I waved them off on their drive to the mountains I retreated to the house and barely stirred for the next three days. I woke up late, lay by the pool all afternoon, watched reruns of old movies far into the night. I had promised my parents I would look in on Grandma Jeanette while they were gone, so I did have to make one outside foray for that. She had recently been placed in a “convalescent home” (a euphemism we all agreed to) twenty minutes away. For some time, she had been in physical decline, but now she had entered the first of her breaks from reality. I hadn’t seen her like that before, and the visit was so traumatic that I didn’t let it penetrate my consciousness. I couldn’t do anything about Grandma, so I just continued to spin about my own sorry circles. Periods of tumultuous thought were broken up by long stretches of time when my mind didn’t function at all. I didn’t know which I preferred.

The night of my visit to Grandma I had a dream that, unlike the confused procession of others that came and went during my uneasy sleep, I remembered with clarity the following morning. I was peering into the ice-box, reaching for food that, I realized with guilt, I was eating out of pure obsession. Somehow, I slipped and fell into the white metal container my mother used to store eggs. As I fell, I shrank to the size of the eggs themselves, and I was unable to find my footing on their smooth surface. I looked up for help and saw David, my older brother—normal size but frighteningly enlarged from my shrunken perspective—shaking with derisive laughter. “I got you now, Bobby!” he said, stretching his hand toward me. I jolted awake.

I had to get away. It was almost noon and already too hot to spend time in the sun. The beach! I needed to be near the water. I had always had the ocean nearby at school, and when the angst of being young and emotional overwhelmed me, I could take comfort in its ever changing sweep upon the shore. Its vastness was calming, and it was something that man could not build on or control. After five years of the beaches and redwoods of Santa Cruz, the endless unrelieved cityscapes of L.A.—so hot and huge and dirty—grated on my nerves with a light but constant friction. 

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife.

I climbed in the car and sped over the freeways to Santa Monica. Arriving toward two o’clock, I ate lunch at the sleaziest hamburger stand I could find and spent the rest of the afternoon walking along the sand. The growl of the waves cresting out from the shore should have been soothing but only led my senses back to my deepening gyre. I saw less at the beach than during my neighborhood walks. And even here I was not free of the atmospheric muck that blanketed the L.A. basin. As it began its crepuscular descent, the bloated sun turned a threatening venereal red. I had escaped nothing. My new companions, emptiness and dread, held me in a suctioning embrace.

The freeways were clogged during the journey home, and I arrived in Pasadena irritable and nervous. Too hyped up to return to an empty house, I drove to the home of my “adult” friends, Fern and Kay Masse. Although Fern and Kay were only ten years older, they already had a family of four girls. In their ramshackle four-bedroom house, they had established a haimish atmosphere that comforted me and reminded me of the better times I had grown up with. They were more than ready for the countercultural values of the sixties and had worked them into their family structure. Treated as adults, the girls were developing strong personalities. Fern and Kay were sensitive, humorous, and inhabited a working-class leftist perspective that went beyond the comfortable liberalism of my own upbringing. 

Fern had grown up on a farm in Maine where the winters and the work routine were equally harsh. As soon as he was old enough, he came to the Golden State, kicking around for a few years before he determined to learn a trade. He mastered carpentry, cabinetmaking, grew skilled with the saw and lathe. I had met him the previous summer filling in as a replacement for vacationing custodians at Cal Tech, where he worked as a machinist. Fern had an understanding and mastery of murky and forbidding technologies: power tools, plumbing, electrical wiring. The second floor of their house had been recently gutted in a fire and, battling their insurance company all the way, Fern and Kay rebuilt everything themselves. Fern was as self-sufficient a man as I had met.

And Kay was fine woman, kind and intelligent and unafraid to express her opinions. She had borne two children and survived a nasty divorce by the time she was twenty-three but retained a basic faith in herself. The love she and Fern had for each other was obvious, and it seemed a marriage of equals. Kay exhibited a flair for design and, I believed, real artistic potential, but her time was spoken for by the house, the family, and a thriving garden on what used to be the backyard lawn. The house décor was clearly her expression, a comfortable blend of sturdy, sometimes idiosyncratic furniture, indoor plants, intriguing interior colors on walls decorated with pictures, and collages of her own creation.

They were both constantly busy. Fern worked weekends in his garage as a cabinetmaker and Kay, like my mother when she was raising four children, never caught a break. In the evenings, however, they relaxed in the front room with beer and dope and an endless supply of popcorn. (The girls usually liked to hang out with their parents as well but the house rule was that grass, like alcohol, was reserved for adults, and the oldest was only sixteen.) It was this scene that I hoped to find when I parked in front of their house. Fern met me at the door, a small-framed man whose shoulders had been stooped by too much physical labor at too early an age. He wore wire-rimmed glasses on his narrow face, his resemblance to a satyr heightened by a moustache, goatee, and long brown hair. Inside the front room, Kay and the three younger daughters were sprawled about in various positions. A bowl of popcorn sat in the middle of the floor. One of the extraordinary details about the house is what it didn’t have: a television set.

I said hello to everybody and followed Fern into the kitchen to get some beer. The walls were being painted a bright orange.

“I’m glad you came by tonight,” Fern said as he opened the refrigerator. The bottom shelf was filled with tool cans for Coors. “How are you feeling?”

“All right, I guess. Nothing spectacular.”

“Uh-huh.” Fern handed me a beer. “You feel like dropping some acid with me?”

That took me aback. “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?”

Fern shrugged. “I always have to work. I just bought a blotter, and I’d like to try it out.”

It didn’t take me long to consider the proposition. “Sure. If you’re gonna drop, I’d like to do it with you.”

Fern disappeared into his bedroom and returned bearing a matchbox. Inside lay little plastic rectangles on a cotton pad. We each swallowed one.

“I don’t know how evenly spread it is,” Fern said, “but I’m sure we’ll both get off.”

We went back to the front room with our beers and sat on the floor. Fern switched the receiver of his stereo system over to the tape deck and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band flowed from the four speakers sitting in each corner of the room.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in

And stops my mind from wandering 

Where it will go-o-o.

I talked to Kay and the girls, ate popcorn, drank beer, and began to unwind from the freeway drive. After a while, I became conscious of the familiar prickly feeling on my forehead; it was increasingly difficult to concentrate on what was being said around me. Fern, with closed eyes, was listening to the music with a smile. Finally, I got up and wandered outside to the back steps. Sitting down I began to trip. Palm trees, illuminated by the streetlamps, moved against the nighttime sky casting spectral kaleidoscopic shadows. When I transferred my gaze to Kay’s garden, glittering triangles of mica moved in vertical patterns all along the vines. The night pulsated gently. It was good acid, not much speed.

Fern came out and sat next to me. I felt a rush of friendship break through my body. I wanted to tell Fern how much I admired him, loved him even. I didn’t. We talked of the acid, shared little discoveries with each other. I revealed the effects of the palm trees, and Fern pointed out how the sliver of the moon danced like a piece of foil hanging in the breeze. This triggered the escape of one of the tongue twisters that had encrusted itself into my neurons during childhood.

No need to light a night-light

On a light night like tonight

For a night-light’s light’s a slight light

And tonight’s a night that’s light.

“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck?” Fern riposted.

“That’s not the question, Fern. The question is: hominy grits?”

“Twenty? Thirty?

“Lordy! Forty!”

“Fifty is niftier.”

We were cracking up now.

“Sixty is . . . ” Fern hazarded.

“Not sexy.” I chimed.

Both of us laughed uproariously at this pointless riff.

“We would’ve had to give up at seventy.” Fern said.

“Evidently,” I replied.

Fern’s eyes widened. “You’re good!”

I puffed up with pride. “One of the many benefits of a degree in literature.”

“I never got beyond high school,” Fern said ruefully.

“Fern, you’re smarter than most pointy heads with a mortarboard on top!”

“I suppose so. I’ve certainly seen my share of idiots at Cal Tech.”

“There’s this riddle I ran across that’s a pretty good measure of intelligence.”

“Oh my god! You’re gonna test me on acid?”

“The Doors of Perception, baby! You’ll just get there faster.”

“Shoot!”

“I don’t have a gun.”

“Robert!” Fern protested! 

“Sorry,” I replied. “I was trained in this verbal ping-pong at the family groaning board.”

“Hence the groaners.”

“Fern!” I exclaimed, “Not bad for an elementary school dropout!”

Fern laughed. “The riddle.”

“A pilgrim had been searching for the City of Truth for many years. Finally he found himself one day at a fork in the road. One path branched off toward the City of Lies; the other led to the City of Truth. The pilgrim did not know which route led to which city. There was a man standing at the fork who was from one of them, the pilgrim didn’t know which. If he was from the City of Lies, he could only tell lies, but if his home was the City of Truth, then only truth would issue from his lips. The pilgrim wanted to find out which road to take, but he could ask the man only one question. What was the question?”

Fern was a stubborn man. For what seemed like an interminable time he tried to figure out that answer—or perhaps his mind had gone through that hole the Beatles were singing about. A police siren screamed down the street. We never had those on the mesa.

“God! What a horrible noise!” I exclaimed.

“You hear it all the time around here,” Fern said. “The area’s crime rate is shooting up. I can’t stay here if my kids aren’t safe. Last Halloween, Monica was pushed down and had all her candy stolen. Joyce has been threatened twice by Black teenagers.”

“What? In ‘Little Old Lady from Pasadena’-land?

Fern laughed sardonically. “The Beach Boys never lived in Pasadena. There’s a ghetto here like everywhere else, and we’re on the expanding edge of it.”

“Yeah, I mean I know the west side of town. . . . But I’ve only driven through it. There were hardly any Blacks at Pasadena High.” 

“Robert, this is the west side of town.”

I slapped my forehead. “I just never made the association. You’re the only people . . .” I stopped.

“It’s all right,” Fern said gently.

Tears sprang to my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for.

“That’s why I was able to buy a house in Pasadena. This was the neighborhood I could afford. You know how much I’ve put into the place. It was falling apart when I bought it. And it was a Black family who’d lived here. I can’t afford to move, especially since the fire.”

“But you were telling me about the fights you had with the insurance company.”

“Having an insurance policy only gives you the right to fight the insurance company. It was a constant depressing battle. We won some and we lost some. But the lawyers on both sides always won. And those corporate bastards always have the last laugh. Yeah, we got enough out of them to rebuild the second floor—barely—but they jacked the premiums up so much that I can’t make ends meet anymore. Even with the cabinetmaking. I was barely surviving.”

“Fern, I had no idea!”

“Yeah, life as an adult—not what it was cracked up to be: inflation, rising crime, deteriorating schools. . . .”

“Pasadena High was only five years old when I started going to school there.”

“That’s the east side, Robert. And even that changed when Pasadena schools were ordered to desegregate two years ago.”

“What?” I was again flabbergasted. “Busing in Pasadena?” I’d only associated forced busing with the Deep South—or maybe Chicago.

Fern laughed. “Out of sight, out of mind, eh? But you went away to college. Why should you have given it any thought?”

It was my turn to laugh. “But I was a student radical. I helped blockade the administration building in solidarity with the People’s Park protests. I was arrested for blocking traffic on Highway 1 during the Cambodia strike. I helped organize the grape boycott for the United Farm Workers. I almost burned my draft card when Joan Baez and David Harris came to speak on campus.”

“Almost?” Fern smiled.

“I guess I was a sunshine superman.”

“A what?”

“A sunshine . . . Christ, I meant to say sunshine soldier.” Then I began singing:

“Sunshine came softly through my window today

Coulda tripped out easy, but I’ve changed my ways.”

“Actually, you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Change your ways. Sunshine’s another term for LSD, and here you are tripping!”

Once again we both laughed, far harder than the joke merited. 

“Guilty, your honor!” I continued. “Was every hit song from the last ten years about drugs?”

“You know the Little Old Lady from Pasadena was on speed, right?” Then Fern croaked, “Go, granny; go, granny; go, granny, go!”

More wild glee.

Kay approached from the kitchen. “What are you guys laughing about? We can hear you over the music!”

“Stoner humor, honey! You had to be there.”

“I was there,” she replied. “Then I had all these girls.” An uncomfortable silence followed.

“They’re mine too,” Fern finally said. “And I’m going to work tomorrow.”

“Well, we’re all going to bed,” Kay replied. “Turn out the lights downstairs when you’re done.”

“I should leave,” I said, getting up.

“No, no. Fern enjoys your company, and he always goes to bed later than I do anyway.”

“I’ll be up soon, honey.”

“It was good seeing you, Robert. Good night.” She bent down and kissed Fern on the forehead. 

“Does she know?” I asked Fern after Kay left.

“She doesn’t like it, so we don’t talk about it. I provide; I’m a good husband. But the money stuff worries her too. That’s why she plants such a big garden. We can take care of the girls as long as they’re home, but there will never be money to send them to college.”

“God, Fern! It’s such a shame that man of your talents should find it so hard to get by! You’ve really got something to offer. I’d give anything to have some of your skills!”

“My skills are tied up with the city. The job at Cal Tech is the best-paying one I could hope for. I don’t have a college degree, and I’ll never get one. I know what country life is like without money, and if I’m going to struggle I’d rather do it here.”

“But you just said—”

“I know what I just said,” Fern cut in. “But what choice do I have?”

And then . . . the vision was born. 

If a group of friends could get together, buy some land in the country, a group of friends who wanted to establish a viable, self-sufficient community . . . 

We started talking about the thing in abstract terms. It was easy for me, part of the college zeitgeist I had absorbed at Santa Cruz. In fact, I had friends who had bought fifty acres of undeveloped land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

“Fern, why not?” I said. “It’s close enough to Placerville to provide jobs and schooling for the kids. It’s not like we’d be homesteading. And until the community got established and no longer needed serious money, there’s better-paying white-collar work in Sacramento, less than an hour away.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” Fern concurred. “I’ve always wanted to design and build my own house.”

“Hell, it’d be like barn-raising among the Amish. We could work on one another’s houses, eat communally, grow pot—that’s an easy cash crop.”

Was it the acid that fed our fire of conviction? What started out as a daydream gained the weight of possibility? Why not? Why not?

Our discussion grew increasingly heated, more involved. 

“I liked growing up in the country,” Fern said. “But the winters and not having enough people to work the farm . . . it was not fun.”

“Yeah, but California isn’t Maine, and there’d be plenty of people on the commune. In fact, I spent five months on an Israeli kibbutz, so I’ve seen that kind of communal living up close.”

“I’d like my girls to know another kind of life besides city life. Lisa’s only sixteen, but she’s already getting that look from creepy older guys. And Kay wouldn’t be the only one responsible for bringing them up.”

I laughed. “In the kibbutz they take their socialism so seriously that the children are brought up communally. They have afternoon tea with their parents every day; otherwise they’re raised as a group.”

Fern whistled. “I can’t even imagine that!”

“The whole mind-set is different. It’s about a collective good, not individual happiness. And I have to say, the kibbutzniks that I got to know seemed to be some of the happiest people I’d met. The children too. Even the adolescents enjoyed being with their parents.”

Talking about the kibbutz, I grew intoxicated by the example of a lifestyle I had been introduced to but had never thought of applying to my world. But the prospect! Meaningful work, a challenge to create an alternative lifestyle with a community of friends and equals. And why couldn’t I farm? What could be more satisfying than working with the land for my community? My degree in Literature was worthless; I already knew that. But on the commune, I would acquire not only a knowledge of the earth but a knowledge of human nature as well—the cycle of the seasons, the trajectory of life as we pass from infancy to wisdom. Within the flight of time’s arrow, Life had found a way to create its own cycles through new generations, through generation itself! It was an acid epiphany, and I explained it to my friend with soaring incoherence.

“Don’t you see, Fern? Life is supposed to be lived through its natural cycles! This smog that blights our cities! The earth itself is telling us we’re pollution.”

“Amen to that!” Fern concurred. “All fueled by the endless race for the dollar.”

“But we could unplug from that,” I urged. “Be as self-sufficient as possible. That’s what the kibbutzniks did when they came to Palestine. There was no modern economy, no cities to attach to, and certainly the slivers of Orthodox Jews who had hung in there over the centuries could be of no help.”

I’m re-creating this discussion in a far more coherent manner than what we experienced. Fern started talking about how God always seemed to manifest most strongly in the Holy Land. There were no Jews in rural Maine, and that accident of my identity impressed him inordinately. But I was on to the cycles of nature, and if our commune’s coming into existence furthered God’s purposes, all the better. Nature, destiny, choosing and being chosen, the accident of our meeting and becoming friends—all this was no accident. How else could I have befriended this blue-collar man? Up and up we soared until finally I grabbed his hands and burst forth.

“Let’s do it, Fern! Let’s do it! What harm can it do to try? Let’s think about it and start looking for others!”

Fern smiled broadly. “Oh, I don’t have to look very far. My best friend from Maine lives in Portland, works at a dead-end job, wife abandoned him with two kids. He hates his life there. He’d like to go back to farming, but there’s nothing to go back to.”

“Yes!” I cried. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Give us all a second chance. Choose our fate rather than having it thrust upon us. I know some people too. Let me talk to them about it. What harm can it do?”

“None, I guess. Talking can’t hurt.”

“Then let’s shake on it,” I said, holding out my hand. My fingers seemed to undulate like lazily waving kelp.

Fern grasped my hand fervently. At his touch, my head split in an acid climax. 

“Oh!” I cried. “If only I had something to contribute! I don’t know how to do anything worthwhile. I can’t even get a decent job!”

“You’re still a young man,” Fern replied. He took my left hand and held it palm up. “This is a good hand. If you want me to I’ll teach you cabinetmaking.”

Tears of amazement filled my eyes. “You’d do that?” I exclaimed. “For me?”

Fern held his gaze steady. “You’re a man like anybody else. You deserve a chance.”

I was overwhelmed by gratitude and confusion. “I don’t know what to say!”

Fern dropped my hand. “You don’t have to say anything. You can tell me what you’ve decided later.”

“No, no! I want to do it. It’s just such a . . . a big thing!”

“I can’t pay you much,” Fern said. “And we’ll only be able to work on the weekends, but if you’re interested in learning, I can teach you.”

“For sure I’m interested!” I replied. “God yes, I’m interested!”

* * *

I did not sleep that night. Fern and I continued to talk in the afterglow of his offer, but finally he had to excuse himself and go to bed. I drove home and spent the rest of the night sitting by the pool. Still under the influence of acid, I fantasized freely. I saw myself coming in from the fields after a hard day’s work, sweaty but contented. Supper would be laid on the table: a big pot of baked beans, hot corn bread, ham. There would be a fire in the huge brick fireplace. First the other men and I would take a communal shower, talking about the day’s work, the weather, what needed looking after on the property.

“Hope it doesn’t get much cooler in the mornings. The strawberries won’t like it.”

“Yep, winter seems to be settin’ in kind of early this year.”

Around the dinner table the conversation would be more general: politics, culture, books. Maybe a pecan pie for dessert with a cup of black coffee.

And then, of course, the quiet times: the long meditative walks through the country with the Labrador retriever, the book lined study with its French doors and potbellied stove, the notebooks filling up with observations arising from a life well lived.

My mind continued to churn. Now I had a plan of action, a direction, a place to go. I would live at home, get a factory job, learn cabinetmaking on the weekends. After a couple of years, with the help of other friends, there would be enough money to buy some land. Sure, it would mean buckling down for a while, making a few sacrifices, but for such a goal! I was dazzled by the high-mindedness of it all. This was serious! This was real! This was Life! As the sky grew light in the east, I went into the house and brought out a portable record player. I watched the rising of the sun as Dvorák’s New World Symphony conjured a pristine American West. 

With the air heating quickly, I went back to the house, prepared a light breakfast, and stuffed some clothes into a knapsack. I had made another decision during my long, thought-filled vigil. My college friends Alan and Carol were living only a few hours away, in the Santa Ana Mountains above Lake Elsinore. We’d been housemates the year before in a three-bedroom place with an outstanding view of the San Lorenzo Valley from the living room. There were others there; we were a student co-op sharing expenses, meals, stories and lives. 

I had met Alan first in one of UCSC’s experimental classes, an encounter group led by the guru of Bob Edgar, the biology professor selected to set up and lead Kresge, the newest of the Santa Cruz colleges. Michael Khan, the psychologist who had liberated the future provost from the suffocating strictures of science and bourgeois morality, was supposed to guide a group of specially selected students into the brave new world of an egalitarian administrative structure that allowed us equal say in planning the architecture of the not yet built campus, determining budgets, and hiring faculty. First, however, we had to prove our fitness for the task by baring our souls, facing our demons, and allowing Michael’s T-group leadership to frame our commitment. My sharply honed style of barbs and irony did not sit well with Michael, whom I considered to be a control freak. At six foot two, our “facilitator” was considerably bigger than I, and during one of our confrontations, he challenged me to wrestle him in the midst of the surrounding circle of observers. He had cunningly fired me up beforehand, and I accepted his challenge, whereupon I was pinned and humiliated. “Do you give up?” he repeated until my tears streamed, and I was forced to say it out loud.

As soon as he released me I grabbed my backpack and retreated to a nearby redwood grove, where I could cry in earnest. 

“Bob!” Alan had followed me outside. I did not know him well, and I was ashamed. He moved forward. 

“Don’t!” I said, stepping away. “I don’t want anybody to see me like this.” 

“It’s all right. We all end up crying in there anyway. It’s a rite of passage.”

“What did he prove?” I sniffled. “That he could beat me up? That makes him king?”

“He’s an asshole,” Alan concurred. “You challenged him, and he couldn’t tolerate that.”

“And he’s supposed to be an exemplar of Consciousness III?” I asked bitterly, using the term for the counterculture worldview coined by Charles Reich in The Greening of America. “My brother made the same point without the New Age trappings.”

“Your brother beat you up?”

“Frequently.”

“I’m an only child,” Alan said. “I never had that.”

“You didn’t miss anything.”

“I guess not, but it was lonely sometimes.”

That stanched the flow of self-pity. Somebody else was unhappy? My primary association with unhappiness was a personal emotion that I had to run from as quickly as possible. 

“C’mon,” Alan said. “Let’s get you to a bathroom where you can clean up. Then I’ll walk you back to your dorm.”

I never returned to “Creating Kresge College” (5 units) but was allowed to withdraw without penalty. Alan dropped the course as well, and thus began our friendship.

I doubt it would have come about in a less dramatic fashion. Except for his good looks, Alan was a guy I would have quickly assigned to a bit part in my ongoing production. He was good and decent but not quick or literary or much tempted by the drugs, radical politics, and challenging of norms that fed so much of our college life. Alan had grown up in Yorba Linda, and it was only when we started hanging out together that he began to appreciate that life had more to offer than just getting by. I was perhaps not the catalyst but definitely a part of that. 

Surprisingly for the time, Alan came with a wife, a wholesome corn-fed woman from Fiddletown in the Sierra Nevada foothills. They had met as freshmen at the Claremont Colleges. Carol went to Scripps and Alan was enrolled in Harvey Mudd, where his father, an engineer with the military, had encouraged him to pursue a similar degree. Carol was the first woman Alan had seriously dated, the first woman he’d had sex with. Between Alice’s country upbringing and her life at the all-female undergraduate institution, she hadn’t had much experience with men pursuing higher education. In spring of their sophomore year, they married. Alan didn’t like the science-oriented curriculum offered by Harvey Mudd and chose Santa Cruz for his final two years as a liberal arts antidote, probably to his father’s displeasure. To further compound his sin, he intended to major in psychology. Carol wanted to come with him. She hated Orange County, didn’t like school, and thought she might as well marry. Alan was a nice guy, good-looking, and he was her ticket out. It wasn’t a cynical move on her part. She didn’t feel she had many options, and this one seemed acceptable. Alan, for his part, was in love.

I met Carol a few times at their married-student-housing apartment but got to know her only after I had invited the couple to round out the numbers in the co-op on Graham Hill Road during our senior year. It was easy to underestimate Carol. She wasn’t forward, but the wholesome looks and country background belied the edge underneath. While living with us, she slowly came to realize that she wanted more of a change than what Alan had provided. That manifested itself in a desultory affair with a married university instructor. Alan couldn’t hide his unhappiness or the fact that some nights she wasn’t at home, but the episode ended after a few weeks, and no breakup ensued. When Alan left Santa Cruz to reluctantly accept his father’s offer to help build his retirement home in the Santa Ana Mountains, Carol followed.

In spite of their problems, I felt warmly toward both parties. It seemed to me that their unhappiness stemmed more from the general restlessness of the time rather than a basic incompatibility. They were both good people. I knew they’d be interested in the idea of a country commune. Carol had come from a rural environment and it was her oft expressed intention to return to it. If she and Alan had this kind of future to work for, they might find new meaning in their marriage.

I drove fast but carefully along the freeways heading south. I was still running off the acid, and I didn’t want to be caught off guard if I suddenly began to crash. Arriving at Lake Elsinore without incident, I began the steep climb to the top of the first Santa Ana range. Like the San Gabriels, they were high, steep, and dry. As I gained altitude, I broke through the layer of smog drifting down from L.A. The lake itself looked flaccid and artificial, regular in outline and reflecting an unappetizing brown. The mountains were real enough, however, and once I had turned away from the valley, I basked in the feeling of being up high and away. Yucca plants grew all over the steep grade that lifted from the road. The air was bright and clear.

Turning left at the first dirt road beyond the pass, I rumbled along until I came to a sign announcing the entrance to California Rancho Estates, “Your Refuge from the City.” This was where Alan’s parents planned to spend their retirement years. So far only two homes had been completed, but I could easily imagine the neighborhood of ranch-style houses bringing the city to the Santa Anas and an economic shot in the arm to the town on Lake Elsinore’s shores. California Rancho Estates residents would enjoy the comforts of an L.A. suburb amid the beauty of the mountains. The streets had already been laid out with names like Primrose Terrance and Vallejo Drive. Street signs rose from a field of sage announcing future intersections, waiting for the arrival of rich refugees. I noted with gloomy satisfaction that even here, looking north, I could see the haze hanging over the valley. 

I drove around until I found the site where Carol and Alan were working. Alan’s parents must have had their choice of plots because their house was placed next to the only tree in the vicinity, a California live oak. As I pulled up to the cement foundation, my friends stood up from their work and greeted me enthusiastically. Even though it was only late morning, they were glad for the opportunity to stop, and we spent the hot part of the day talking under the shade of the tree, enjoying the peace of the mountain.

We ate lunch and, pleading exhaustion, I took a nap in the trailer while Alan and Carol returned to work. Some time later, the banging of a hammer woke me. I felt punchy and dragged out. Bringing myself to a sitting position I exited the trailer, collapsed in a camp chair under the oak, and let life seep slowly into me. It was hotter than ever. The air was quiet and dry. 

“Take a break,” I called out. “The work will still be there.”

Carol went into the trailer and brought out a pitcher of lemonade.

“Savioress!” I half groaned, taking the proffered glass. The lemonade was iced, and the cold felt good in my hands. The three of us sat sipping our drinks and looking out over the dusty yellow field that stretched away.

“It’s really nice up here,” I said. “You must enjoy this work.”

“We do,” Alan replied. “Especially in the morning when it’s cool.”

“It’s gonna be a shame when this place is developed.”

Alan nodded. “It won’t be the same when there are four hundred houses here.”

I whistled. “Four hundred! How big are the lots?”

“Half an acre. And if this turns out well, there’s another spot farther along the ridge they’re planning to build on as well.”

“My god! It’s going to be a regular bedroom community up here!”

“I guess so. Dad says they expect to have this area completely developed in ten years.”

I digested this information and looked out with new appreciation. Except for the two completed houses and the expectant street signs standing guard over the unplanted lawns and hedges, the scene afforded an unbroken view of parched and rolling hilltop. A breeze blew gently, making the leaves of the oak rustle secretively; a dry, crackling sound like toneless crickets pricked the silence. Each half-acre lot would, of course, have its own fence. In ten years this view would no longer exist—nor this silence.”

“You know what it feels like?” I said. “Like a ghost town in reverse. This place is doomed.”

The sun glistened on the white cement of the foundation. Pipes and wooden posts thrust up from the dusty flooring. A gentle, familiar melancholy drifted over the three of us.

“That’s why I don’t like it here,” Carol finally said. “Everything seems that way.”

“You should try growing up in L.A.,” I replied. “That really does strange things to your head. I can’t look at a beautiful scene without thinking of its eventual destruction. You know how gentlemen of the Renaissance would keep skulls in their studies to remind them of life’s passing? It’s like walking around with one of those imprinted on your brain. There is no river that will not be polluted, no field that won’t turn into a housing development, no meadow that isn’t destined to disappear under asphalt.”

Carol shivered. “I hate it when you talk like that. People are beginning to realize what’s happening.”

“Sure. They’re looking around them and seeing things are fucked up. But who’s to blame? Everybody, it turns out. Everybody who is willing to sell something public for any kind of private gain is responsible for what’s happening. That whole mess of a city they call Los Angeles is the result of a thousand little fortunes that have been made. Nobody planned it that way.”

“Yes,” Alan said, “but there are some obvious pigs in the system, like land developers, the oil companies, the Pentagon, and big conglomerates like ITT.”

“And our president,” I added.

“And the president. I mean, at least there are some visible targets to go for.”

“Sure, they’re visible,” I exclaimed. “They’re like huge cow patties in an open field. But there’s a lot of shit lying around in smaller clumps.”

“So, are you saying we shouldn’t try to fight the big offenders?” Carol asked.

“Not at all! But how are you fighting them? By building another house in another real estate development?”

“Ouch!” Alan protested. “That’s just to get a little money together.”

“And if you didn’t do it somebody else would,” I continued for him. “You’re absolutely right! I’d do the same thing! The only thing I’m saying is that there’s an interior pig in us all. If the fight against the big pigs is going to be successful, we’ve got to fight the interior pig as well. That’s probably just as tough a one to win.”

Alan thought about my remarks. “What you say puts things in a different light,” he rejoined meditatively. “I guess the moral thing to do would be to quit the job and join the Sierra Club.”

“And what would you live on?” I asked. “I mean, the system does have us by the balls. We can kick and scream, but we still need the gelt.”

“What’s gelt?” Carol asked.

“Gold, girl! Coin! Gimme the green! Deal me the dough!”

“Money?”

“You got it! Except you don’t have it. And that’s what keeps us living these artificial lives. We’re too bourgeois to go all counterculture, and who wants to be living in a tent at age forty?

“So,” I continued, realizing that had a perfect entrée into my subject, “what we’ve got to do is build a solid base for ourselves from which we can operate. Something as self-sufficient as possible that is consciously dedicated to the institution of a new set of nonexploitative values.” 

And with that I launched into the rural commune. I elaborated upon how it could be a viable alternative to the Establishment, talked up the possibilities for its realization. I told them about Fern and Kay, how wonderful they were, how they wanted to get out of the city, and about all the skills they had to offer. Animated by my recent conversion, I expostulated about how this could by my purpose in life, how my friends could become a part of this too. “We’re young still, just at the beginning of our adult lives. We have everything ahead of us. This is a chance to create a real community, to do real work, to live a real alternative!”