Joyous Lake 1975

The Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace; Music on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York has impacted American music culture for over fifty years. Richie Havens opened the festival and Jimi Hendrix closed the concert with a fiery psychedelic finesse. A half million freaks, heads, and hippies attended the outdoor show. Millions more had been there in spirit.

I was one of them, because that August weekend I was washing dishes and walloping pots in the kitchen of the Tara Hotel in Braintree, Mass. Seventeen years old and trapped in a meaningless job listening to the newscasts of Woodstock over a radio, thinking that I must have done something horribly bad in a previous lifetime to have been punished so severely in the present. Few of us knew that that Summer after the Summer of Love was history. More teens grew their hair longer. We smoked more pot. I dropped LSD. The anti-war movement expanded into the middle-class, while Black Power was crushed by the FBI. Woodstock was our two-syllable nirvana. Everyone wanted a piece.

In August 1975 AK stupied keyboards at Berkeley School of Music and I was driving taxi, but I had been hired to be a substitute by the Boston School Committee. As a substitute at South Boston High School. The epicenter of the Anti-Bussing Movement. Two weeks before Labor Day AK received a phone call from Rockford, whom we had met the previous summer north of San Diego. The three of us had shared several acid trips on Moonlight Beach. The Pacific roared with motorcycle waves and a seal had spoken to us in a trance. There has been a girl with blonde hair. She had big breasts. It was a nude beach. None of us wore a thing. After we came down, Alan announced that the blonde and he were heading north to San Francisco. I would have joined him, if AK hadn't talked me into returning to Boston.

"We have no money." It was a good argument for a recent college graduate, although no bank had hired me upon graduation.

Rockford had hit the road with $10, the blonde, and a guitar. He stayed a year. I worked driving taxi in Boston.

During his recent phone conversation with AK, Rockford had explained that the Haight had been overrun by junkies, speed freaks, and scammers.

"A very uncool place, but Nona said that Woodstock was cool. She's from New Jersey." Nona had replaced the blonde.

AK said we should go there and the next weekend AK and I drove west from Boston in his Firebird.

Four hours to Woodstock across the Mass Pike and then down the Hudson and into the Catskills to Woodstock under Overlook Mountain. Summer. Still a hippie summer in Woodstock.

Rockford's house was a renovated chicken coop by Tannery Brook. Nona was Euro-Asian exotic with long black hair and a Balinese legong dancer's body. Her  beauty refused to be trumped by her nasal New Jersey accent. He made his money as a stret musician. Nona played tambourine. A good tambourine. That night Joe Cocker was playing at the Joyous Lake, a small bar on the main road. We smoked hash and then walked down the wooded side street to the small club, crowded with hippie die-hards and free spirited women.

Cocker had just emerged from a long de-tox clinic. His friends refused him the right to drink, while they guzzled beer. The Sheffield singer's voice had retained its gritty tone and the audience hit the floor to THE LETTER. AK, Rockford, and Nona menage-a-troised. When he sang A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS, I was transported to Max Yasgur's farm six years ago. I danced with a full-breasted brunette from the town. I looked down the valley of her cleavage Her breasts were huge. She ground her hips into my groin. I got hard and and at song's end she asked, "You want to come to my place and smoke some weed?".

"Love to." Hippie girl, pot, sex. It might have been six years after Woodstock, but this was my Aquarius moment, because the Season of Lust was in full swing winter, spring, summer, and fall. We had sex three times that night. I was at the height of my power. Only 25. She told me that she had come her from Ohio after Woodstock. She had yet to leave the town. The following morning she shook me awake.

"You gotta go."

Her body was a little bigger than I remembered. And she was a little older. I didn't care. I wanted more.

"Why?" I was ready to move into her small apartment overlooking Main Street.

"Because my old man is coming back this afternoon." She threw my jeans and tee-shirt on the bed. "He's a biker adn runs with the Outlaws."

"I'm going." I had never heard of the Outlaws, but bikers were trouble and angry bikers even more trouble. I dressed as fast as Clark Kent changing into Superman.

Ten minutes later I was back at Rockford's place. AK and he were playing African thumb piano. Nona swayed to the rhythmic plinking. Her long black hair sashaying across her spine. They laughed at my story. I didn't think that it was that funny and later that day we spotted Dora on the back of a Harley. Her old man was a tattooed bear biker. 240 and 6-3. I kept my distance after that.

That summer I visited Woodstock a couple more times.

Dora was always with her old man. I returned her gaze with a secret smile.

AK and I dropped acid in July. We rocked out in the chicken shack. I played kazoo, Rockford strummed his guitar, and AK plunked out notes on his kalimba. Nona our muse was the dancing tambourine girl. He and I wanted her, as did every man in Woodstock. Nona was Rockford's for the moment. AK and I hated him for that possession. Neither of us were proud of that envy.

That autumn Rockford and Nona moved back to the coast. Neither AK nor I returned to Woodstock in the following years.

I ran into Nona in Bali in 1993. She still had a New Jersey accent, but as beautiful as ever. Rockford lived in Iowa. I saw him in 2009. AK taught school in Jupiter Beach, Fla. We meet each other at least once a year. The three of us remained good friends.

This past Labor Weekend I drove through Woodstock on the way to the deep Catskills. The Joyous Lake was now the Not Fade Away. The hippies were in their 60s. I walked over to Dora's old apartment and knocked on the door. No one answered and I went downstairs to the Garden Cafe.

"Does a Dora live upstairs?"

"No." The long-hair chubby teenager answered, while smearing organic butter on a bagel. It was morning. "But a lot of guys ask the same question. She must have been something."

"She was."

And so were the rest of us from that Woodstock generation and the Age of Aquarius keeps on shining with the Earth pointing at that constellation for the next 2000 years.

Rock on, Dora.

The name means golden and my memory of that night glows like stolen treasure.

Foto of Dora's apartment in the main square of Woodstock.

Nameless Hippie Girl

This photo symbolized the free-wheeling hippie era. I had long mistakenly supposed the young topless woman so enthralled with the music was at Woodstock, but today I discovered thanks to 2011 Daily Mail report that the flower child had a name.

Jennifer Wilson.

Her photo had been taken at a music festival in 1978 shortly after her move from Essex to London. She was not on drugs. The twenty-five year-old had recently divorced her husband. Concerts were something to do.

"I seemed to be photographed at pop concerts every time I went. I used to wear unusual clothing with lots of colours - I still do but I'm trying to tone it down now I'm older. I think it was at Reading Festival, while dancing to a band like Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Deep Purple, Genesis - it could have been any band like that. I used to love music when I was at school. The teacher used to tell us to close our eyes when listening to a piece of music so you can hear it properly and not get distracted by what's going on around you. I still close my eyes now when listening to a new record. Sometimes the photo is used with the wrong story, like drugs or promiscuity, that insinuates all sorts of things I don't like. I didn't take drugs, I was too naive. And I wasn't even promiscuous. I couldn't believe I was the one who was photographed. It was the happiest time of a my life. I met lovely people. It was all love and peace."

This photo captured the era.

It has helped keep the spirit alive.

"I'm shocked that the photo has been used this long."

ThE Age of Aquarius has just begun.

Going Up Country - Thai Style

Back in the 60s during their Woodstock concert Canned Heat had a small hit GOING UP COUNTRY.

"Going up country, baby, do you want to come along?"

After Altamont longhairs abandoned the rip-offs, bummers, and downers of the big cities to establish Aquarian communes in the hinterland offering free love, organic food, and reefer to establish a democracy on the foundations of the new age agrarian revolution, unfortunately few of these utopias lasted past the past the winter of the Moral Majority after the Summer of Love.

Why was well-portrayed in T. C. Boyle's novel DROP CITY about the collapse of a Northern Californian commune and the surviving members' exodus to Alaska, but that didn't keep hippies from coming together for another try.

Like Alan Lage in Encinitas. 1974.

The Iowan had survived cancer as a teen and was living with an LSD professor on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I dropped acid with him and his blonde girlfriend on Black's Beach. Leslie looked like Pattie Hearst, the kidnapped heiress turned bank robber. The cops raided us as SLA revolutionaries. The acid was on paper. They touched it. Within twenty minutes the officers were getting a rush. We left town that night not wanting to witness the cops' wrath in the morning. I said good-bye to Alan and his girl on the PCH.

"We're going to Marin live off the country."

I almost joined them, but the cops up north would be after Pattie Hearst too.

A year later he showed up in Woodstock New York. Leslie had been replaced by Nona, half-New Jersey/half-Filipino. Skinny as Olive Oyl and smelling of cinnamon. They had a commune of two in a chicken farm. Grass, organic food, and John Lennon. Nona danced to Alan's guitar. Her sinuous body weaved a trance invading my dreams. She was Alan's chick and while I might covet my friend's chick I wasn't going to steal her, because I only break one commandment at a time and this night I went home with a fat girl I met at the Joyous Lake Bar. Babs had big breasts. We had sex in her bathtub next to a babbling creek. Later in her bed we committed sodomy. I should have stayed, but had the ambition to become a writer in New York.

And I thought writers needed to live in the city.

Not the country.

Almost 35 years in Boston, New York, LA, Paris, Hamburg, Bangkok, Pattaya.

My first Thai wife doesn't like Pattaya.

She preferred living in Ban Nam Phu west of Chai-nat.

2 hours by bus from Pattaya to Morchit. Another 3 hours to Chai-nat, then a 50 kilometer car ride.

Over our years together she has bought 20 rai of land and ten cows. The land was being prepared for a teakwood forest, so we can sell carbon rights to polluting factories and harvest the timber in 15 years. I went up once a month to visit my wife and daughter.

Crossing the river at Wat Sing we entered a land without farangs.

Rice paddies, egrets, buffalos, butterflies, pigs, trees, mountains, dirt roads, and early evenings drinking beer with rice farmers under a billion stars in the sky.

"Going up-country, baby, do you want to come along?"

Sometimes I think it'd be nice.

Smoke a little weed, drink a lot of beer, but what would I do for work?

Grow rice?

Only to brew lao-khao whiskey.

Teach English.

The headmaster of my daughter's school would like that.

10,000 baht/month.

Nature. Quiet. Wife. Daughter. Farm. Beer. Reefer.

But then I ask myself what would happen if civilization collapsed under the weight of global warming. No electricity. No cars. No airplanes. No way to get back to the West.

The sea would flood Pattaya and Bangkok. People would flee inland. I would head up to my wife's farm. It was on higher ground. 110 feet above sea level. My daughter would be happy to see me. My wife would view me as another mouth to feed.

"What can he do?"

Back in 1995 I was in Tibet with my friend Tim Challen. The road to Nepal had been smothered by a mudslide. We were sort of stranded in Lhasa. He asked, "If the world fell apart, what would be do to live here?"

The choices were simple in Tibet.

"Become a monk or a clown. A clown like Sean Connery and Michael Caine in A MAN WHO WOULD BE KING."

Tim liked the idea and several years ago I had everyone laughing at a family dinner telling them about getting a penis transplant from a horse and charging everyone 10 baht to see the farang with the ham ma yoow or long horse cock.

20 baht to touch it.

A hippie freak show clown.

That would be my calling after the Armageddon.

"Going up-country, baby, you want to come along?"

Roads To Nowhere Catskills

The Catskills are less than two hours from Dutchess County, so when my host in Millbrook suggested a road trip to visit friends across the Hudson on a splendid September morning, I was all green lights. Andrew's wife opted out of the journey. Her kids were a handful on long rides. We set off after a heart breakfast and headed west to the mountains.

We crossed the Hudson and soon passed through Hunter. The ski slope was bare and the resort's parking lot was empty. Our friends lived slightly farther west on the desolate dissected plateau with long valley vistas and the summer air poured into Andrew's Tundra.

The Lexington NY turn-off swung south for New York 23A onto Route 42. Philippe, once the 'prettiest woman in northern Maine, was vacationing with his family of four in his modernized hunting cabin opposite WestKill Mountain. We arrived a little after noon. There was no offer of lunch.

Only lovely tea from freshly picked mint.

The reminiscing conversation was entertaining, but the rumble from Andrew's stomach grew louder. My gastric echoes were a little more demure, since I had stolen cookies from the kitchen. The schnorred Oreos tasted great, but Phillipe's kids eyed me with Gestapo suspicion. Children was very possessive about food.

After an hour we said our goodbyes and sat in Andrew's truck. He wanted to return along New York State 23.

"I've never been on any of these roads." The route over from Woodstock had been a avenue of arcadian scenery and I studied the map on my lap. "42 goes south to 28. We go west for a few miles and then head south on 47 to New Paltz."

"New Paltz is about a 100 miles away. Is there anywhere to eat on the way?" Andrew was dying for food.

"Has to be someplace on the way." Few towns dotted the backside of the Catskills; Shandakan, Big Indian, Neversink. This was the weekend. Stores made a fortune selling hot dogs to hungry day-trippers like us, but I replied honestly, "I'm not so sure.

"I got lost on the road from Tannersville to Woodstock. One hour in the dark." Andrew was British. He had seen DELIVERANCE. For him the land of the rednecks began once over the Hudson.

"That was night." I argued for 47. "We'll never come this way again. I'd like to see what there is. Even if it's nothing."

"There better be something to eat."

He wheeled south and followed my directions to 47. The two hotels in Big Indian were closed for the season and their signs wore years of weather.

"That's not a good omen."

The two-lane road slunk through bland valleys.

No stores.

No food.

We drove deeper into the terra incognita. Andrew voiced his discontent. We were hungry, except Philippe no longer bore the blame for our lack of food. The secluded settlements of Olivera and Wistock Mountain were devoid of commerce. Frost Valley's services were reserved for YMCA campers.

"What do people eat here?" Andrew was frantic. It was well past lunch.

"Bark probably, but the only business I've seen for the past hour has been 'yard sales'." We slowed by each house hoping for food, but they offered nothing to eat and crap for sale.

"They look too fat to live only on bark. They must be snacking on moss in their spare time."

Our fragile state caused us to make a wrong turning.

Left to Clarityville in hope of sustenance.

Once more a meal of disappointment.

Andrew turned on his GPS and typed in 'diner'. The GPS did not respond. Andrew was for straight on. I was too. The land of nowhere had to end somewhere.

40 miles later we rolled into New Platz. I bought Andrew whatever he wanted. The foodless journey had been my idea.

"One day we'll laugh about this."

"But not today."

And I don't ever have to see the back of those mountains again.

Once was more than enough.

Especially on an empty stomach.

One Bag Theory

Back in 1974 my good friend AK and I traveled cross-country to Encinitas, a small beach town slightly north of San Diego. We crashed at his friend's bungalow and spent our days sunning and bodysurfing at Moonlight Beach and our nights smoking pot and drinking wine. We made friends with a hippie guitar guru wandering the coast with a long-haired blonde. Rockford and Carol were free as the wind.

"We only want a place to sleep, eat, and place our music," Rockford explained atop the bluff, as the sun set in the Pacific. They were staying with a clinical psychiatrist from UCSD studying the effects of LSD on humans. They were two of his guinea pigs and the acid left them daily dazed. One afternoon Rockford defended his participation by saying, "I don't believe in money. I have everything I need in one bag."

"What about your guitar?"

"That's my extra, but other than that one bag is all anyone needs in this life. Some clothes, sandals, a good book, plus a little weed."

Rockford offered me a place in his band. Carol played tambourine. I was to solo on kazoo. He looked at my canvas travel bag.

"Way too much shit."

"It's almost nothing." I had more clothing than the two of them.

"Nothing is nothing other than nothing." Carol dismissed my excessive possessiveness with a wry smile. I wasn’t getting the message and the next morning they left without me for San Francisco.

AK and I hitchhiked back across America. We re-united with Rockford in Woodstock. The three of us remained friends and I never asked the old hippie about abandoning me to a life of meaningless acquisition.

This morning I read an article in Huffington Post echoing Rockford's one bag theory.

A 69 year-old German woman abandoned money twenty-two years ago. The divorcee has perfected a barter economy called “Gib und Nimm” or Give and Take. Her attempts to convert Dortmund to a moneyless society was met with derision by the workless and retirees addicted to cash or credit, but her year-long experiment has made her a happier and healthier person.

According to the HP all of her belongings fit into a single-back suitcase and a rucksack, she has emergency savings of €200 and any other money she comes across, she gives away. Heidemarie doesn’t even have health insurance as she didn’t want to be accused of stealing from the state, and says she relies on the power of self-healing whenever she gets a little sick.

Rockford understood that money is the root of all evil, but somehow I don't think this theory works in a go-go bar.

At least not at my age.

SPEAKING WITH SEALS by Peter Nolan Smith

August turned hot in San Diego. Floe and I slept outdoors under the stars. Two sleeping bags served as our mattress and a single sheet covered our bodies throughout the night.

I told her everything.

After recounting the fight with the junkie thieves in Haight-Ashbury, she said,

“You scare me.”

“Why?” I was telling her the truth.

“I left home, because my father beat me. I thought I was possessed by Satan.” She didn’t explain why.

“Was he religious?”

“An Army chaplain.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

"But you have a violent streak.”

“I’m trying to leave it behind.” I held both her hands loosely. “You’re helping me.”

“I can’t be around violence.” This was a warning.

“I’ll never show you any.”

A soft kiss sealed our pact.

We woke to the morning mist melting off the flower fields around the bungalow. Floe and I made love with the dawn.

This heaven was meant to last forever.

Within two weeks forever ended with the last day of summer.

Our hostess’ aunt and uncle were coming home.

Helen said they were cool, but even cool people had a problem with strangers sleeping on their lawn, especially when one of them was only seventeen.

“Rockford wants to heads up to San Francisco.” Floe lay close.

“And do what?” Her friend was a wanderer.

“Play music on the street.”

“And live where?” I had passed through the Haight in June. The hippie era had been replaced by a blight of speed freaks.

“We know some people there. I’d like you to come.”

“I’d like to come too.” I offered another option. “Or you could come with me to Boston.”

“That’s so far away and cold. I don’t like the cold anymore.” She was a child of the sun. Her light brown skin had been toasted golden by the months on the beach. The sun had deposited blonde in her dark curly hair. She was a goddess in my eyes.

“It’s a nice city.” It was a half-truth.

I was white and she was black. Boston wasn’t nice to mixed couple, but I could protect her from any harm. I was half-Irish. My family came from Jamaica Plain. We took care of our own.

“Where would we live?” Her ‘we’ included Rockford. They were only friends, but she owed him for saving her from a bad scene.

“There are cheap houses in Mission Hill. Several hippie communes are in that neighborhood. I’ll drive cab at first and then teach school in October.”

“Sorry, but I don’t think I’m ready to settle down. Not on the East Coast.” California was stronger than her Texas blood.

“We don’t have to decide today.” I was a big believer in putting off the inevitable.

“No, we don’t,” she smiled and caressed my thigh. “Today’s the day. We’ll all trip today.”

“Mark is back?”

Rockford and she had been staying with a professor from San Diego State. His field of study was the effect of LSD on the human mind. The two of them were his guinea pigs. They got $20 a trip.

“With a new patch of LSD-25 from Sandoz.” The Swiss-made acid was the purest in the world.

“Then today is the day.” I pulled her on top of me. She liked it that way.

Afterward we joined the rest of the summer commune in the bungalow. Helen was making omelets.

“LSD is better on an empty stomach,” Rockford said, sipping at green tea.

“Not better.” Floe shook her head. “If your stomach is empty, then it takes half the time for the acid to hit.”

“Fastest with the mostest.” Rockford raised his cup of tea.

“Anyone else following Doctor Rockford’s path.” Helen held two plates in her hands. Vincent and Cuchillo loved her cooking.

“We’re in.”

“Me too.” AK was a hearty eater.

“I’m not tripping, so I’ll have a good breakfast.” Pam wasn’t jeopardizing her nursing career with an acid trip.

“Just toast for me.” I popped two slices in the toaster and turned to Floe, who said, “I’ll have the same as you.”

Rockford went over to the stereo and put on Tim Buckley’s HAPPY SAD.

“Timothy Leary said mind set was as important as setting. We have Moonlight Beach. A setting doesn’t get better than that and I love STRANGE FEELING.”

The opening song of the LP mirrored the atmosphere of an early morning in Southern California. We ate recapping old trips like a sports team preparing for a big game.

A little after ten Rockford rose to his feet.

“Enough talk. Let’s do it.”

We looked at each other. No one was bailing out and we exited from the bungalow. The sky was clearing up and the bouquet of mist off the flowers was a dream to our senses.

After piling into Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible, Helen drove us down Encinitas Boulevard across the PCH to the bluff overlooking the beach.

Mark was standing in his front yard.

The lanky professor was wearing a seersucker suit. He introduced himself and wrote down our names in a journal.

“I want you to have a good time and don’t freak out if you see me writing down anything. It’s strictly for my research.”

“The CIA tested LSD on soldiers in the 50s.” AK was anti-Pentagon like the rest of us. The Vietnam War was almost over, but the government had been saying that it had been almost over since Nixon took office.

“I’m not with military. I’m more after opening the mind to other worlds.”

“Same as Aldous Huxley.” Looking at his suit I recalled Huxley grooving on the texture of his gray flannel suit. “Will you be tripping?”

“Not today.” He shut the journal. “But I like it. Now this young lady is studying nursing?”

“Yes.” Pam was going to enter her last year of nursing school in the fall.

“And you’re not tripping either?” Mark asked Helen.

“I like my world the way it is.”

“So it will be the five of you. Normally I would prefer you to stay in the house.”

“We want to be on the beach.” Rockford understood the end of the summer meant the break-up of our temporary commune. “I can handle the beach.”

“Swimming can be dangerous on LSD.”

“We’re all good swimmers other than Vincent,” I explained to Mark.

“I have no intentions of going in that ocean. I’ll be grooving on the beach.” The dancer loved the feel of the sand under his feet.

“I won’t stand in your way, but no one is climbing that cliff high. Understood.”

“Yes.” The five of us replied in unison.

The path to the beach was steep. No one wanted to end up in the hospital.

“Then here it is.” Mark handed us each a small slip of paper. “The dose will be 100 micrograms. Basically the same as a grain of sand. The trip should last about 8-10 hours. I’ll be there to help you through any rough moments, but this stuff is very pure. Happy trails.”

We looked at the small white blotters. Vince was first to go, then Cuchillo, Floe, Rockford, me, and lastly AK. Pam was looking at him with disapproval.

“No one has ever died from LSD,” he said after swallowing the tab.

“No, they’ve only gone crazy.” Pam was very straight about drugs.

The newspapers loved reporting stories of trippers staring in the sun for hours, losing their minds, hurting themselves, and crying for hours.

“RD Laing felt that most bad trips are a result of shaking off the trauma of birth, but there’s no proof of that or that anyone ever destroyed their cornea looking into the sun for hours.”

“Newsweek printed that story.” I had read it in 1968.

“And they reported that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked a US navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.” AK distrusted any news other than baseball box scores.

“Bad trips do happen,” Mark admitted, but never on this LSD.

“I dropped it ten times this summer.” Rockford opened his hands and said, “And nothing bad ever happened to me.”

“This acid is pure.” Floe was another devotee.

“It’s your picnic.” Pam shrugged to AK. “I don’t want anyone to call me a ‘buzzkill’.”

“No one can say that about you.” AK kissed the blonde. She never nagged him about smoking pot.

“Now that’s out of the way.” Floe held out her tab to me.

I opened my mouth and she put the LSD on my tongue.

“Welcome to the New Church.”

I reciprocated in kind. Cuchillo and Victor put their tabs on their tongues and swapped them with a soul kiss. AK simply flicked his into his mouth.

Victor held out his hand.

Mark gave him another tab.

Victor offered it to Helen.

“Be with us.”

She couldn't refuse the man of her dreams and we applauded her joining the clan.

“I suggest we go to the beach by car.” Mark was playing it safe.

The LSD would take about an hour to hit, two hours to peak to a psychedelic plateau lasting till sunset and then the gradual return to reality.

“Fine with me.” I embraced Floe. She was a good feeling in my life.

Our group divided between Mark’s Saab and Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible. We listened to Joni Mitchell on the short ride to the Moonlight Beach parking lot.

Weeks ago I had seen the two lesbians with whom I had spent a sordid weekend in Big Sur. They had been with Bill. The drifter and I had fought in San Francisco. He was bad news, but not seeing the girl’s pickup was a good thing and I opened my mind to the world.

Our troupe tramped down the beach to our driftwood shack.

Surfers greeted Mark with hugs and longhaired girls kisses him on the cheek. He was well-liked by everyone and this greeting warmed my heart with a fuzzy glow. We were all part of the great experiment.

“I love it here.” Floe unfolded our blanket. “But there are other places along the coast. I’d like to show you them.”

“I’ve seen Big Sur.”

“Not with me.” She stripped off her top, baring her breasts to the sun. Her body had no tan lines. “And I’m much nicer than those lesbian ax-murderers.”

“Please, no more mention of them.” I grimaced thinking about the three nights lost to their sexual mania. Nymphomania was a dream better left to fantasy.

“Sorry, I won’t bum you out.”

“You never could.” I pulled my shirt over my head and lay on the blanket.

AK and Rockford were respectively playing the African thumb piano and guitar. Floe picked up a tambourine and handed me a kazoo.

“Join us when you feel the mood.”

Moonlight Beach wasn’t a nude beach, but the high cliffs prevented any voyeurs a view of our camp and the police never came down this far from the parking lot. We were free.

Helen, Cuchillo, and Victor peeled down to the state of Adam and Eve. Pam joined them and for the first time I saw what everyone else saw in their mind’s eyes.

Pam possessed the ideal body to satisfy the desire of an American male and probably many females. Her breasts were soft handfuls of flesh tipped by rose nipples and her firm belly curved to an angel tuft of blonde pubic hair separating taut thighs and shapely calves. Even here feet were pretty.’

Her skin crawled with arcane etchings and the sun shadowed runes of lust.

“Stop staring.” Floe whispered without a hint of jealousy.

“I think I just got off.” I turned to Floe.

Her eyes shone a fluorescent green and I grinned with an ignorant understanding of the universe.

“Me too.” Her pupils had consumed her green irises with the hunger of a black hole. “Let’s go let the sea touch us.”

Floe and I rose from the blanket.

The wind off the ocean bore the scent of Arctic brine and the crashing surf revved with the thunder of a herd of Harley-Davidson.

All my other trips had been practice for this day.

A hand unbuttoned my jean shorts. It wasn’t mine.

“We don’t need clothes.” Floe was naked.

We had been sleeping together for almost a month.

“I never saw you before.”

“That’s because before you only looked.” She tugged off my jeans.

They fell to my knees and I kicked free of them.

I was naked.

Floe was naked.

All we wore was the wind.

“Now.”

We dove into the ocean.

It spoke every language of the sea.

I broke to surface and turned to watch my friends charging into the surf.

Millions of years ago we came from the sea.

Today we returned home.

The surfers shouted out a welcome.

Seals popped up their heads from the foam.

Pelicans skimmed the rims of waves.

“Are you feeling anything?” AK treaded water by my side.

“I’m feeling everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.” I was in contact with Alpha Centurai. The extraterrestrial Morse Code borrowed the bassline from Booker T and The MGS. The galaxy embraced the day and I told AK, “It will hit soon. Be prepared.”

“The Boy Scout motto.”

The sun’s dappled reflection prismed on AK’s face. I lost him in the kaleidoscope and swam to Floe.

She bobbed every surge. I joined her. The beach was getting distant.

“We’re caught in a riptide.”

She woke from the trance of eternity.

“Let’s get back to shore. It’s safer there.”

She shouted to Rockford who had been tugged farther out on the unseen stream. His eyes widened in acknowledgement of his situation and he skirted the undertow to a cresting wave. It took him closer to shore. Two seals accompanied him through the surf. Floe and I reached the beach and shook the sea from our flesh.

Beads of water hung in her hair like pearls waiting to melt in the sun.

I popped them between my thumb and index finger.

“My hands was made for this.”

The water rained on her face like tears.

Floe pulled my hands to her breasts. Her nipples were cherry pits after the swim in the cold sea. Goosebumps armored her flesh. My hands were bleached white from the Humboldt Current. Floe’s skin was the color of treasured dust.

We were one.

“Your hands were made for this.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic.

AK, Pam, Rockford, and Cuchillo straggled out of the surf like shipwreck survivors. The swell monstered to triple overhead were and the surfers fought the cruel sea with fearless determination.

Victor came to the water’s edge with eyes blinded to everything, but the young surfers.

“They are Gods.”

“They challenge the Gods.” I had read more Bullfinch’s Mythology than the Bible.

“You really are high.” Pam was right.

“But a nice high.” I kissed Floe.

Her smile fired my heart.

All the cracks melted from it.

“Floe, someone is happy to see you.” Victor pointed at my groin.

“It’s not a sexual erection, but a psychedelic erection.”

They all laughed and we danced up the sloping sand to our driftwood refuge. Helen and Victor were happy to see us.

“Welcome back to land.”

“We have returned from the sea.” Rockford picked up his guitar. He winked at me. “No Beatles.”

“Play what you want.” The LSD had washed away the rejection of a teenage girl in love with Paul McCartney.

AK and Rockford played songs from Monterrey Pop, Woodstock, and Altamont. They reincarnated the 60s.

We sang, we danced, we cried, and we touched the sky.

We stopped our revels, when a seal pup waddled onto the beach. He stared at us with big black eyes. I tried speaking in English and French.

He barked out a command.

I jumped back from his snarling teeth.

“What is he saying?”

“He’s saying the same thing every animal says.” Floe threw the pup an apple. He caught it with circus expertise. “He’s saying that he’s hungry. Sorry, seal, we don’t have any fish.”

The baby seal spit out the fruit and scampered into the surf.

Mark wrote down everything.

I went over to him and stared at his journal.

The words belonged to forgotten race.

“What do you feel?”

“Before everything and now the goodness of the day.” I hugged him. “Thanks.”

“Thank me later.” His smile was a child of the Summer of Love. “Your friends are already saying it.”

I turned my head.

Underneath the bluff Cuchillo, Helen, and Victor were locked in a menage-a-trois. Their three bodies shape-shifted between species and Floe bushwhacked me with a whisper.

“Leave them alone. Be with me.”

“Forever.” Seconds were paralyzed minutes and minutes expanded to hours.

I was peaking.

“Forget forever. I want you now.”

Our embrace carried us to the end of galaxy.

We held our course through the stars.

Our bodies formed a comet.

Its flight brought us back to now.

AK, Rockford and the rest were laughing hysterically.

Sand covered us from head to toe.

“Beach donuts.” Victor was burnt red from the sun.

My flesh felt torched.

Floe was hot to my touch.

At least none of us had stared into the sun.

It was dropping into the Pacific.

The tide was rising up the beach.

I was coming down.

“Home.”

I was exhausted and Floe said, “Not home, but not here.”

I knew where her was and also that I didn’t want this summer to end.

“You asked if I wanted to go north with you.”

“Yes.” Her eyes gleamed with expectation.

“I’m joining the circus.”

Floe threw her arms around me. I lifted her off her feet and we wheeled on the sand around and around until I set her down.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Questions are good answers on LSD.

We put on our clothes and headed for the parking lot.

Traces of the LSD flashed across the cliffs. The Mayans had carved images in the sand. I couldn’t read the hieroglyphics. No one else saw them, but as we approached our cars, Floe said, “Shit.”

I saw why.

Bill and the two lesbians were sitting in the back of the battered pickup truck. The drifter was wearing a leather vest and torn jeans. His beard was coming back. He looked like a deserter from Quantrill’s Legion ready to burn Kansas.

I had told Floe about the fight in the Haight.

She stepped closer to me.

Everyone had heard the story about Joey and Jill in Big Sur.

They stopped walking.

“Well, well.” Bill hopped from the flatbed.

The bruise from my punch had faded from his face.

“Fags, niggers, and Jews.” The southerner cracked his knuckles.

Joey and Jill recognized me.

“The redwoods.”

Their drug had been speed. It still was speed.

Bill licked his lips like a lizard.

Speed made him a brave man.

LSD made us vulnerable.

“When Joey and Jill told me about some guy they fucked in Big Sur, I thought maybe it was you. Then I thought I saw you at Black’s Beach, but Joey said you had a smaller penis, right, Joey?”

“Everyone is small compared to you.” Joey was in love.

Jill didn’t look happy.

She liked women, especially when the only man in their life was Bill.

“So fag boy, how’s fucking a nigger whore.”

I stepped forward with clenched fists.

“Don’t,” begged Floe.

My ears were blind.

Bill raised scarred knuckles.

This was one-on-one.

He bobbed and weaved with cunning.

It was Ali versus Sonny Liston.

I came from Maine.

We don’t believe in boxing.

I slipped a right under his guard and connected with his jaw.

For all this talk Bill was a pug.

He dropped on his ass.

“Do me a favor and keep your hole shut.” I turned to guide Floe past him.

She was running down the beach.

I chased her.

She ran faster.

Waves cut at her feet.

The tide was slapping against the cliff.

Voices shouted out warnings.

“Floe.”

A knee-deep surge knocked her down and sucked her into the ocean.

I grabbed her arm.

“Stay away from me.” She scrambled to her feet. “I told you I didn’t like violence. I told you more than once. I told you about my father. You’re no different than him.”

I had killed three days of Woodstock with a second of Altamont.

The surf swirled up to my thighs.

A path led up the bluff.

Surfers were shouting from above.

“Floe, we have to get out of here.”

I pointed to the cliff.

She snapped out of her trance.

We were in danger.

“Go.”

A wave thundered behind us. I pushed her up the trail. She reached back for me. The sea wanted an offering. I scratched my hands into the dirt and crabbed to safety.

A minute later we were on top of the bluff.

The surfers asked if we were okay.

Floe walked away down 3rd Street.

I wasn’t supposed to follow her.

“Floe.”

She became a shadow in the dusk.

I cried good-bye.

She never saw my tears.

This was a bummer.

“Floe.”

I raised my eyes to the night sky.

The moon rose in the east and meteorites scarred space.

“Floe.”

It was short for something and I knew that I would never know what that was.

I rubbed my knuckles and walked toward the PCH.

Alone.

Joyous Lake 1975

The Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace & Music on Max Yasgur's 600-acre dairy farm near the hamlet of White Lake in the town of Bethel, New York has impacted American music culture for over forty years. Richie Havens opened the festival and Jimi Hendrix closed the concert with a fiery set of psychedelic finesse. A half million freaks, heads, and hippies attended the outdoor show. Millions more have said that they were in spirit. I was one of them, for that August weekend I was stuck washing dishes and walloping pots in the kitchen of the Tara Hotel in Braintree, Mass. 17 years old and trapped in a meaningless job listening to the newscast over a radio. I thought that I must have done something horribly bad in a previous lifetime to have been punished so severely in the present.

Few of us knew that the summer of love was history. Teens grew their hair longer. We smoked more pot. I dropped LSD. The anti-war movement expanded into the middle-class. Woodstock was our two-syllable nirvana. Everyone wanted a piece.

In the Spring of 1975 AK was studying keyboards at Berkeley School of Music and I was teaching school at South Boston. He received a phone call from Rockford. We had met the previous summer north of San Diego. The three of us had shared an acid trip on Moonlight Beach. The Pacific roared with motorcycle waves and a seal had spoken to us in a trance. There was a girl with blonde hair. She had big breasts. It was a nude beach. None of us wore a thing. After we came down Alan announced that he was heading north to San Francisco. I would have joined him, if AK hadn't talked me into returning to Boston.

"We have no money."

Rockford had hit the road with $10, the blonde, and a guitar.

He stayed a year.

During the phone conversation Rockford explained that the Haight was overrun by junkies, speed freaks, and scammers.

"A very uncool place, but Nona said that Woodstock was cool."

He invited us for a visit.

The next weekend AK and I drove west from Boston in his Firebird. 4 hours to Woodstock. Rockford's house was a renovated chicken coop by Tannery Brook. Nona was exotic with long black hair and a Balinese legong dancer's body. She spoke with a New Jersey accent. A nasal grate forgiven by her beauty. We smoked hash and then walked down the wooded side street to the Joyous Lake. Joe Cocker was playing at the small bar crowded with hippie die-hards and free spirited women.

Cocker had just emerged from a de-tox clinic. His friends refused him the right to drink, while guzzling beer. The Sheffield singer's voice retained its gritty tone and the audience hit the dance floor. I met a full-breasted brunette from the town. Her dress revealed her tits down the the nipples.

"You want to come to my place?" She ground hips against my cock.

"Love to." Hippie girl, pot, sex. It might be six years after Woodstock, but this was my Aquarius moment. The Summer of Love might be over, but the Season of Lust was in full swing winter, spring, summer, and fall.

I had sex with Dora three times that night.

"You gotta go." She shook me awake.

Her body was a little bigger than I remembered. And she was a little older. I didn't care. I wanted more.

"Why?" I was ready to move into her small apartment overlooking Main Street.

"Because my old man is coming back tonight." She threw my jeans and tee-shirt on the bed. "He's a biker."

"I'm going." Bikers were trouble and angry bikers even more trouble. I dressed like as fast as Clark Kent turning into Superman. Ten minutes later I was back at Rockford's place. AK and he were playing African thumb piano. Nona was swaying to the rhythmic plinking. They laughed at my story. I didn't think that it was that funny and later I saw Dora on the back of a Harley.

Her old man was a tattooed bear.

I visited Woodstock a couple more times over that summer.

AK and I dropped acid in July. We rocked out in the chicken shack. I played kazoo, Rockford strummed his guitar, and AK plunked out notes on his kalimba. Nona our muse was the dancing tambourine girl.

We wanted her, as did every man in Woodstock. Nona was Rockford's for the moment. AK and I hated him for that possession. Neither of us were proud of that envy.

That autumn Rockford and Nona moved back to the coast. Neither AK nor I returned to Woodstock in the following years. I ran into Nona in Bali in 1993. Rockford lives in Iowa. I saw him in 2009. . AK teaches school in Jupiter Beach, Fla. We see each other at least once a year.

This past Labor Weekend I passed through Woodstock on the way to the deep Catskills. The Joyous Lake was now the Not Fade Away. The hippies were in their 60s. I walked over to Dora's old apartment and knocked on the door. No one answered and I went downstairs to the Garden Cafe.

"Does a Dora live upstairs."

"No." The long-hair teenager answered while smearing butter on a bagel. It was morning. "But a lot of guys ask the same question. She must have been something."

"She was."

And so were the rest of us from that Woodstock generation, for the Age of Aquarius keeps on shining with the Earth pointing at that constellation for the next 2000 years.

Rock on, Dora.

The name means golden and my memory of that night glows like treasure.