We returned our loaner
bikes to the fence beside the gate leading into the backyard of the B&B,
greeted a score of other hikers who were hanging out in their space underneath
fruit trees growing beside a split-rail fence, and plopped down onto our air
mattresses and sleeping bags. I immediately began nibbling on my
cookies and taking occasional swigs of chocolate milk.
Dusk was gradually
settling over the landscape, and the resident ants were trying their best to
gain access to the top of my air mattress, while large, black crows were
sitting in the trees, observing my every action, waiting for a chance to zip in
and score a hit on any food that I might have left unattended. As I lay
on my down quilt with my feet exposed to the air, I let my mind drift to
today’s events. I thought about Yashinka and his desire to visit the
Black Bear Ranch Commune on the other side of Etna Summit. I wondered if
he would actually meet the residents of the commune and, if so, would they be
willing to talk to him.
Communes are
nothing new; they’ve been around forever. They flourish whenever a group
of like-minded individuals decide to get away from it all, pool their
resources, live off the land, live off the grid, grow their own food, and
basically live whatever lifestyle they can conjure up that makes them happy.
But the Black Bear Commune that Yashinka wanted to visit was, perhaps, a
bit different in terms of its origin and its philosophy on lifestyle.
Black Bear, flat out,
was started as a hippy commune in 1967, a community of like-minded individuals
from the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury district, adjacent to the Golden Gate
Park in San Francisco, during the height of the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s
and 1970s. It was a wild and tumultuous time, a time of social upheaval,
a time of abandonment of what was considered the norm. Rock music, drugs,
and the war in Vietnam were the accelerants that fueled the hippy movement – a
time of defiance towards government authority, parents, and social norms in
general.
It was a time defined by the music of the Beatles, the Rolling
Stones, Barry McGuire, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin,
Jimi Hendrix, the Mamas & the Papas, and Bob Dylan; the insanity of the
times was amplified by LSD drug proponents Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and his
Merry Pranksters, and Owsley Stanley – the King of LSD.
I lived through these
times, and experienced them vicariously through the medium of television,
radio, and newsprint. I think it worthwhile to recall some of the more
poignant events of the 1960s as an insight into the culture that produced the
first residents of the Black Bear Ranch Commune because the residents of the
commune today are not quite like their predecessors.
As I reviewed the events
of the 1960s and 1970s, I was struck with astonishment at the escalation of
violence and social upheaval that occurred during those two decades of turmoil
– two decades that forever changed the cultural norms of America, for better or
for worse, depending on one’s moral compass.
1960
May 6 – Civil Rights Act
of 1960 signed by President Eisenhower.
March 15 – Lunch counter
sit-ins spread to fifteen cities in five southern states
Nov – JFK elected
president.
1961
March 1 – JFK announces
creation of the Peace Corps.
April 25 – Bay of Pigs,
Cuba - U.S. planned invasion is defeated by Castro.
August 13 – East German
border guards begin construction of Berlin Wall.
October 6 – President
Kennedy advises Americans to build fallout shelters.
1962
Sept – Timothy Leary
promotes LSD research
October 22 – Cuban
Missile Crisis – Soviet missile bases in Cuba, Kennedy orders naval blockade.
1963
June 12 – Civil rights
leader Medgar Evers assassinated.
August 28 – Martin
Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, Washington, D.C. Civil Rights
March, two hundred thousand attend.
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