Ch. 2 - My “Summer of Love”: the Counterculture
Below is chapter 2 from Ken’s forthcoming book, How Did I Get Here? A Memoir of the Baby Boom Generation.
It was 1971. I was head over heels in love with a beautiful hippie girl.
We walked hand-in-hand across the Berkeley campus. Katie – her name then was Katie – with an angelic face and strawberry blond hair that cascaded down her shoulders, was a counterculture vision in her flowing white dress. With my unruly frizzy hair and scruffy black beard, a tie-dyed t-shirt and torn jeans, I could have been a hippie too.
A middle-aged woman approached us: “Can I take your picture?”
She was a tourist, with a camera slung around her neck. Friends were calling her back to the bus.
“I’m a history graduate student,” I thought. “I study at one of the world’s great universities. I should tell her I’m not like I appear.”
Katie and I looked at each other. We smiled. We posed. Two California hippies.
* * *
We met naked. I was teaching at the Black university in Greensboro North Carolina, and I threw parties at my apartment. Katie was with a group of white friends who turned up at a party. Greensboro hippies.
She and her friends stayed after, drinking wine and smoking marijuana. Someone suggested massages. One by one we each stripped down and received a full body massage from the group. I didn’t learn her name until a year later in California.
I returned to Berkeley in the summer of 1970 to complete my Ph.D. degree. I was a sixties radical studying working class life and rebellious social movements, tools for social change. I was ambitious too; I planned to be a university professor.
I was bouncing off a disastrous romance in Greensboro. I had taken up with a faculty friend’s wife. In the end, I was back in Berkeley, alone.
Lisa, the married woman I had pursued in Greensboro, also moved to Berkeley. I hoped to win her back. I should have been wary when she, another rules breaker, introduced me to Katie.
I didn’t know anyone like Katie. She had no career plan. She already had her own family. She and her husband had separated. With their two kids, both moved to the Bay Area when I returned. Katie had a nursing license, but nursing didn’t interest her, nor a college degree. They came, I realized, because anything was possible in the Bay Area in the early 1970s. Here was the new world of the California counterculture.
Much later, when we were separating, Katie explained. She did have a goal, not for a career, but for her life: “I wanted you to fall in love with me.”
* * *
I asked Katie to move in with me the next summer. Astonishingly, she said yes. Here was my Berkeley dream come true. I would live, unmarried, with this lovely adventurous woman.
This was not how you did it in Skokie, the Chicago suburb where I grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s. In Skokie you went out together, had sex in excruciatingly slow stages as you dated, fell in love, married, and then, finally, moved in together. Kids came later, with the career. That was the path for my high school friends who stayed. I had come to California in 1966 for the counterculture with its promise of sex in open relationships, no longer bound to dating rituals and marriage and having children. And I came for the radical politics, in Berkeley, for the Free Speech Movement and all that followed. And for a career: graduate school training as a historian and professor.
Katie was slim, and curvy too. She was graceful, with a bashful smile and that long yellow hair. She had a soft North Carolina accent that was a melody when she spoke. Katie had gentle country ways, kind of old fashioned, and even as a new age hippie in the white dress she liked to hold my arm when we walked together, as if I was her beau and we were courting, a proud feeling for me. She was not intellectual, not interested in my academic work, but smart and perceptive and curious about people, particularly me.
Katie was looking for something in California. And she saw something in me she desired. I never knew just what. But she wanted me, and she got me, fast, first as we came to know each other in Berkeley coffee houses, and then in my bed. I thought she was beautiful, soulful, and full of surprises.
But I was clear about us moving in together: “For the summer,” I told her. Just fun, neat and limited, I thought, not messy and endless, the opposite of my previous triangle. Graduate school classes would resume in the fall. I was on my academic career path to become a history professor. I would have it all.
I sublet an apartment from friends who would be away for a few months. It was on the hilly, wooded north side of campus with fine houses, winding streets, and charming steps up to the affluent neighborhoods. The place was spacious for me, with an actual separate bedroom. Like a treehouse, leafy branches filled our windows.
It was a warm lazy summer and we kept the windows open. Music floated in from the neighborhood, along with Katie’s records, all women’s voices: Joni Mitchel and Janis Joplin, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. I heard Carole King’s “Tapestry” album dozens of times that summer. I was wrapped around in Katie’s music.
I loved watching Katie with her kids. Daniel, at two, was an exuberant affectionate little guy with yellow curls and his mother’s deep blue eyes. Amy was graceful and stubborn, at four a glimpse of Katie as a child. I marveled: Katie, in her twenties like me, was responsible for these two little ones.
Katie was good with the kids…loving and attentive. But she startled me when, in a moment of irritation, she threated to give Daniel a “pop in the butt.” Pop in the butt? “Crude,” I thought. I never heard that where I came from, Skokie.
Katie and I explored Berkeley that summer. Daniel usually tired of walking, so we carried him. Hauling Daniel in our arms was cumbersome and it slowed us down. Katie didn’t have much money, so I offered to buy a child backpack. It bothered me, as if we couldn’t afford that essential convenience. But Katie was self-reliant – she wanted to pay her own way – and, I realized, she actually was in no hurry to get anywhere with or without Daniel. We continued toting him, dawdling along.
One bright Sunday morning Katie, Amy, Daniel and I wandered the grounds of the theological seminary overlooking the town. Bach streamed out of a building. A seminary student, true to the times, called over, “You make beautiful babies.” We laughed. At his mistake? No, at his truth. I felt like I had made these gorgeous children with Katie on this inspiring morning. We belonged together.
My younger brother, a teenager, came for a visit. I liked showing off my blond girlfriend who lived and slept with me. We went to Point Reyes National Seashore one day and hiked to the ocean. It was overcast and drizzling, and on the trail we sang songs about sunshine. As we reached the deserted coast, the sun burst through. Katie stripped off her clothes, danced across the sand, and slipped into the icy Pacific. We followed, bare too, into the waves. I watched us, naked, drying in the sun. “Anything is possible on a California beach,” I thought. “Here is a day in my California life.”
Katie gave me a birthday gift, a kitten, my first pet. I named her Gertrude, after Gertrude Stein, a big intellectual name for a kitty. My joke. I played with Gertrude, dangling string and chasing her around the apartment. On one of those chases, Gertrude dashed onto a windowsill and slipped right out, two stories to the ground. Amazingly, she was fine. More of my charmed summer.
Katie loved wildflowers. They were all over Berkeley, I discovered. We’d explore empty prairies down by the Bay, a spacious wilderness I never had noticed. She’d ramble about, stoop to examine plants and critters, gently, and pick out blossoms to bring home. Our apartment always had a bouquet of wild flowers. That was Katie.
With Katie I discovered deep intense sex. We’d get stoned on marijuana and make love. Sex, free love, do what feels good, sexual revolution: it was in the counterculture, the mainstream culture, everywhere. And now I was in it! Me too! Looking at Katie during sex, at her transported self, I could see the planes of her face. In those geometric shapes, I saw layers of character and feeling. I thought I understood Cubism, what Picasso had seen when he painted the faces of his lovers.
Katie was spiritual, something new to me, a stiff secular Jew. One Sunday she brought me to a service at Glide Memorial Church. Glide was San Francisco’s famed radical church, dedicated to serving poor and marginalized people, a place I never had considered visiting. It was an interracial congregation with hundreds of people. The service was a celebratory experience with gospel preaching, music and song, movement and joy. Katie was at home, in rhythm, somehow touching both her southern country girl past and her libertarian hippie present. I was uncomfortable with the religiosity, the fervor, and the strange underclass, a long reach from my Skokie childhood synagogue. But I recognized Katie’s hunger for Glide. That summer I went to church with Katie.
One Saturday afternoon, we strolled to a café, Katie’s arm resting around mine. A student approached in a chic blouse and tailored skirt, with makeup and styled hair. I looked her over. This familiar stranger could have been from my past world of fraternity socials at the University of Wisconsin. “A Barbie going to her sorority house,” I whispered to Katie, appraising as I eyed the co-ed. I felt wild and natural with Katie, that hippie feeling again. The co-ed understood my appraisal, and blushed. Katie, who was generous to others, gave the co-ed a warm smile, and shushed me after we passed.
We had an argument. It was over the white dress. Actually, it was over the shoes to accompany the white dress. We had landed tickets for a performance of the symphony orchestra. An evening out in San Francisco. Katie would wear her white dress. I adored her in that radiant gown, my dazzling flower child girlfriend. But at elegant Davies Hall? I fixed on her shoes, her hiking boots. “That’s not right,” I said, as if I knew what you wear to the symphony. But it’s what she had, or battered tennis shoes, also not right. We argued. I insisted: it was wrong. Katie was embarrassed. She finally borrowed shoes for the evening.
A more troubling problem followed. Katie told me she would be away for a night with Lisa, who had introduced us. Lisa, my on and mostly off North Carolina lover, had cut loose again from her husband, and was on her own journey of exploration. This bothered me: Katie with Lisa, in bed together, caressing each other. But how could I complain? I had no monogamous claim on Katie. I didn’t want the obligation. Sexual experimentation and open relationships were in the cultural air we breathed. Sexual revolution: anything goes, explore that possibility. There were no guidelines, not even for infidelity. The rules were gone with the 1950s and the suburb I left. This was no deception either; Katie just let me know, as a courtesy, it seemed. There was no jealousy, no good reason for jealousy. I had no legitimate objection.
I asked Katie about it when she returned the next day. She said she had wanted to check it out, sex with a woman, see if it wasn’t so “rowdy” as with a man. Apparently, it was. I couldn’t decide if this was a compliment or an insult to me. But I was relieved that she was disappointed.
My options were wide open too. Next, Lisa and I took another turn, yet another chapter in our unhappy cross country history. This time, in that same bed Katie had visited, it was a tepid encounter. The next day Katie told me she’d get out of the way if I wanted to resume with Lisa. I said no, Lisa and I were through. I was relieved to be back with Katie, just her and me.
We took a vacation from our Berkeley summer to a tepee. It was on land owned by Katie’s friends, an outpost in the early counterculture exodus from the cities to a simpler purer back-to-nature life. We drove north to Ukiah, and then off the freeway to the west along a country highway that wound up into the hills. We found the turnoff to a dirt road, unlocked the gate, and drove into the backcountry.
The tepee was a white canvas cone, standing tall under a blazing sun, against a brilliant blue sky. Katie knew what to do. We immediately took off our clothes, went for a walk, and never wore a stitch till we left. We explored, swam, cooked over a fire and slept inside the tepee. We were alone, joyful settlers in our own world.
I had brought my briefcase packed with graduate student work. I used it just once, when Katie photographed me posing in front of our tepee, naked. My body was lithe and tanned. My hair was wilder than ever, happily shooting out in all directions. I held the briefcase in front of my private parts, our joke about me and my academic preoccupations.
After we returned to the Bay Area, we took another kind of trip with the friends who owned that tepee. It began with dinner at their apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury neighborhood, the center of the hippie world.
Walking in the neighborhood that afternoon, with Katie at my side I almost felt at home among hippie encampments on the sidewalks, with marijuana wafting in the air. I wanted these to be my people, fellow young global counter cultural dissidents, cousins to my student rebels and civil rights activists. We all were against middle class materialism and repression, suffocating rationality, the Vietnam War machine, racism, the government, corporations, and capitalism. We were for peace, justice, community, liberation, and good vibes.
But this scene in the Haight was seedier than I recalled, with homeless drugged-out young people in scroungy clothes, grubby head shops, psychedelic clothing stores, fast food joints, sleazy guys selling drugs, menacing bikers, and an undercurrent of vagrancy and violence. The fresh hippie world of five years ago was ending.
Katie walked comfortably through this troubled neighborhood. I searched for signs that I also belonged.
I had visited the Haight during the Summer of Love, 1967 – “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” I took my visiting parents to tour the neighborhood, suddenly famous for the long-haired, costumed, smiling hippie tribal scene, vibrating with blasting psychedelic rock music and the promise of liberated sex. We were there with busloads of tourists, also curious about the emerging new youth world. The Haight had been new and shiny that sunny Sunday afternoon, with its turned on, do-your-own-thing cultural rebellion. A merry mutiny of middle class kids. A new promise of personal and social transformation.
“Get a job,” I told one young panhandler dunning the tourists, me and my parents. Back in 1967 I had been a sightseer, straight and square and amused. But even then I had been attracted to this world of liberation. I had wondered, “How do you get in? How do you become a hippie?”
Now, five years later, I was in it, through Katie. Really in it that evening. Dinner with her friends, two school teachers who seemed normal, began familiar enough with pasta and sangria and talk about education. But as hours slipped by, everything seemed to be warping…the apartment, the furniture, and the people. Me too.
Katie knew. I didn’t. She told me after we launched on the acid trip. It was a surprise, in the sangria, her gift to me.
I had told Katie I wanted to try LSD. I’d almost done it in the summer of 1966 when I arrived in Berkeley. A month before graduate school began, I discovered a group that was dedicated to the new mind-opening drug. They were followers of former Harvard Professor Stewart Alpert, aka Ram Dass, on a New Age spiritual quest for Eastern wisdom. I had gone to their meetings, heard about the liberating hallucinogenic drug as a first step, and asked for it. They were wary of me, even though LSD was not yet illegal. I was young and academic, no spiritual traveler. Eventually they gave me a tablet, an act of responsibility for my enlightenment, I guessed. But after much consideration, I decided against swallowing it: too scary for me.
Now, five years later, I felt safe on an acid trip with Katie, who knew her way around LSD and knew me. Most wonderfully, we sat in the dark living room, Katie and me, staring at sparkling decorations on the Christmas tree. The aluminum tinsel glowed blue, which I perceived as an amazing hidden property of the metal. Everything was radiant, throbbing with energy and color.
I wandered about the apartment, which seemed vast and outside time, its own mysterious universe. I might have made a pass at Katie’s friend. I found her attractive, which I had kept to myself, but my words and feelings spilled out that evening.
Her husband, our caretaker who was not tripping, gently nudged me on to the next experience. At one point, I remember Daniel crying hysterically, and me trying to comfort him, unsuccessfully, and I worried he couldn’t recognize me. Finally, I ended up in the right place, curled around Katie and Daniel in bed, and slept out the trip.
I felt mortified the next morning: had I come on to Katie’s friend? Nice me? And Daniel’s puzzlement over me, that was painful. What else had happened? Everyone seemed normal. I tried to act normal too, but when Katie asked if I was okay, I realized I wasn’t. She was fine. And she accepted whatever I had done. More of Katie’s generous spirit. But I wanted to escape that trippy evening with that out-of-control trippy me.
I recalled Simone de Beauvoir’s description of a psychedelic drug trip with Jean Paul Sartre. For months after, Sartre saw a giant tortoise following him. I worried about a visit from a reptile. But soon enough I was back to my own normal self. I never spoke with Katie about what actually happened. And I never again dropped acid.
I thought Katie had ideas about me that were flattering, but wrong. She imagined I came from an academic family with a lovely brown shingle home, like the professors in the Berkeley hills. A home with warm furnishings and tasteful artifacts from world travels. And lots of books filling built-in bookcases. And colorful paintings on the walls. Professional, learned, and affluent.
That’s where I was heading, but I didn’t know it yet. I was not traveling there in any straight line. Skokie, my home, was a middle-class suburb of Chicago. My parents were a few years removed from West Side Chicago, from Jewish immigrant communities struggling in the Depression, from survival through little neighborhood stores, sweatshop labor, and pushcarts. My father obtained a college degree through years of night school classes during the Depression, and he became a chemist during the war. After, my parents moved to a small practical suburban brick house, with plastic coverings on the living room furniture. My parents strove upward, with affluence and comforts for our family, and building a ladder for me to go on to law school, also in my future. But in 1971 law school and wealth were unlikely prospects for a politically radical, academically ambitious graduate student intent on working class studies and a Ph.D. degree.
I never set Katie straight on who I was. I’m not sure that I knew, or could have explained. But now, looking back, I wonder if Katie knew exactly where I was heading.
For a student of the working classes, I learned surprisingly little about the working-class background of the woman I lived with. I inhabited the exciting present with Katie that summer, without taking in her history. But I had ideas about her family: southern, country, large, poor, and Christian. Katie was on her own with her kids and separated husband. Her nursing license was an accomplishment in her family, and a practical means for her support. But she didn’t aspire to more, to become a doctor, start a clinic, or even find a job. She was about people, exploration of the northern California new world, and trying new relationships.
That summer of love Katie was intent on me, on me discovering myself with her in the counterculture.
* * *
I had planned for my romance with Katie to end with the summer. But our life together those three months was different than I expected. There was more fun and passion, more discovery about myself. Our play family seemed close and real. And I had only begun to explore the counterculture, a life outside academic competition and achievement, a life lived in the present without worry about accumulating money and prestige, the world Katie inhabited.
I had my plan for the years ahead: write the dissertation on nineteenth century working class life, secure a job as a professor, turn my dissertation into a book, and then that big second book to establish my academic reputation. I was on track to join a university community, to move up the nearby steps to a fine home in the Berkeley hills or some similar place. But now I survived on the margins of the academic world with grants and teaching stipends. How could I support Katie and Amy and Daniel, when I could barely pay my own way? And my time, it all went into my studies. At 27, I couldn’t have a family. None of my friends had families; only prolonged educations.
Katie was so different. Hippie? Working class? Country girl? She wasn’t intellectual. She wasn’t professional. She had no college degree, no career plan, no hunger to achieve. Her life seemed so formless, living in the here and now, starting each day without a plan, slowly making her way around Berkeley with Daniel in her arms. I didn’t understand her life.
How, I puzzled, would she fit into the life I expected? Mixing with my academic friends, who I had not introduced? Wife of a professor? That home in the Berkeley hills? Those faculty cocktail parties I already had experienced? Katie at a cocktail party in her hippie white dress?
I reminded Katie about our summer plan, my plan: three months living together, and that was all. I spoke about my academic career path, the classes resuming in weeks, the years of scholarship ahead.
That’s when she explained her plan: that I would fall in love with her and we would continue living together.
That stopped me, for a few moments. She wanted the summer of love to become a lifetime of love. With me.
“You succeeded,” I responded, glib. “I do love you. But I have to live my life.” I had it figured out: my own path, without Katie and the kids.
She was surprised. Actually, she was astonished. It made no sense to her. We were happy. We could just continue our happy lives together. Continue the summer in the fall, and then the winter, and on.
As I stuck to my plan without her, Katie despaired. I didn’t discuss it with her, but I could see she was unhappy. She was miserable. And she had no plan for what was next. But she didn’t argue. She didn’t try to persuade me. She didn’t warn me that I would regret it. My decision made no sense to her, but she accepted it as the way things were. I wondered if it was a class thing, as if she concluded she had overreached for me. I didn’t understand her acceptance of my decision.
A week later Katie came up with another plan. She and the kids would live on a commune in Arkansas. She had a friend there.
A commune? Live with others? Strangers? On the land in Arkansas? I thought, “She really is a hippie!”
Two weeks later, they went to Arkansas. It was that simple.
When I dropped off Katie and the kids at the airport, I felt relief. Back to my graduate student existence: on course, solo, and carefree. As planned.
But a few weeks later, I made my way to the Arkansas commune, on a cross country driving trip, en route to a visit with my parents in Skokie. With Gertrude, my lone companion, the remnant of the summer. I wanted to see Katie’s new life. I was curious about the commune. And, actually, I missed her and the kids.
I stayed a week. The Ozarks were oppressive: beautiful lush low mountains, with suffocating heat and humidity. The days blurred on the commune with hard physical labor growing food, tending animals, and maintaining the buildings. The food was simple and tasteless. The houses were primitive. The communards were rough ‘n tough rural hippies, eking out their existence, not friendly, not spiritual, not much peace and love, but many rules. I found this return to the land a difficult dull existence. I wanted no part it.
Katie was unhappy. The commune was a cold mean place, nowhere she wanted to live.
I considered packing up her and the kids and taking them away. But where? To my parents in Skokie? No, I could not walk up the front steps to that orderly brick house with my own instant disorderly family in tow. Surprise! Nor back to my new apartment in Berkeley, a spare studio with a foldout wall bed, where I would resume my Spartan graduate student life.
Katie did not argue. No plea to take them with me. Just dismal resignation. I was leaving them again.
I asked one of Katie’s friends to help. A law student. A guy. Like me, he had trailed Katie out to Arkansas. He was romantically interested. I said to him, “Take care of her.”
I drove off with Gertrude, wondering if I finally had given Katie away.
* * *
When I arrived back in Berkeley weeks later, Katie was there. Her name no longer was Katie.
She was Jo.
How could she just take a new first name? Her self-invention disturbed me.
“Why?” I asked. I suspected it was a rejection of her recent life with me as “Katie.”
“I always liked Jo. That’s me now.”
I wanted to start seeing her again. I had missed her. I had worried about her and the kids in that commune. I had second thoughts about separating.
She was furious: “How could you leave us in that hippie hellhole?”
I put a more positive spin on her anger. “Okay,” I thought, kind of encouraged. “Maybe she isn’t a hippie.”
For months, I couldn’t think of anything but winning Katie back, making love with her, being together with her and the kids. I begged her to resume our romantic life, but she refused. She was seeing another man, the law student, and she wasn’t sure who she wanted to be with. I was miserable. I wanted Katie, even if I had to atone for my desertions and call her Jo.
I had an academic pal, Oliver, an older graduate student, another generation, who I had introduced to Jo when she was Katie. Oliver had become friendly with her, and he knew our history. One day, after coffee with us, he told me, “You’re in a bad way with Jo. You have to get over her and move on.
Talking with Oliver one day about Jo, I realized he was attracted to her. “You like her,” I said, or accused.
He denied romantic interest. But I knew he wanted to have sex with her. And maybe they already were doing it. I could imagine it happening, casually, just because it didn’t matter, simply curiosity like when Katie did that night with Lisa. I was tormented with the thought of it, Oliver with Katie in our freewheeling world of sexual liberation and free love.
I found another apartment, a nice one with a separate bedroom and space for the kids to sleep.
I bought a Christmas tree in December, my first (and last). I invited Jo and the kids over to decorate the tree. I made a special dinner and we had a cozy evening listening to carols and decorating the tree. Jo came over and sat on my lap, our first physical contact in months.
She must have felt a burst of warmth. Or did she want assurance? Or was it curiosity? Or vengeance? I was aroused. She just sat there, comfortable. When I wrapped my arms around her, she skittered away. No, she would not stay the night. Merry Christmas 1971.
Jo finally agreed to go away with me, to try again. I made a reservation at a B&B in Mendocino, a romantic coastal town a few hours north of San Francisco. It was not far from those northern California hills where we had lived in our tepee.
That weekend was a succession of awkward moments: silent walks along the ocean, boring excursions into art galleries, chit chat through restaurant meals. When it wasn’t just uncomfortable, we argued, facing each other squatting on the big bed in our cozy inn, debating my insistence we could be a couple again.
Riding home, largely in silence, Jo told me the simple truth: “I fell out of love with you.”
I’d never understood how she’d had fallen in love with me.
Nor did I get how she could fall out of love with me, just like that, over a few months and a few words. But I believed her. I had deserted her a second time. I told myself, “We’re done. Accept it, like Katie did.”
Truthfully, I again felt relief. As I had pursued Jo those many months, I sometimes wondered if we re-united, would I leave her again? I still puzzled how she would fit in my life, or me in hers. But I had told myself, “This time is different. I’ll make it work.”
We both left the Bay Area the next summer. I went to a cottage in Jenner, a tiny community 75 miles north of San Francisco along the ocean. I sat at a desk on the porch, looking over the Russian River, writing my Ph.D. dissertation. And once again daydreaming about Jo, about how to win her back.
There was a hippie settlement along the Russian River that I expected to explore. It was an exodus from San Francisco to rural northern California. There were all kinds of hippie communes and homesteads back in the hills. I’d see the hippie scene in nearby Guerneville: the old buses with psychedelic paint jobs, the long hair and raggedy clothes, the head shops and organic food, the crafts and wares and holistic healing and shamanic drumming offered on bulletin boards.
I thought I was part of this hippie migration, leaving Berkeley for Jenner. But I had no contact with local hippies during my two years along the Russian River. I had zero interest. Without Jo, I realized, I was no hippie. I was a graduate student completing a Ph.D. dissertation about nineteenth century workers.
Jo moved north to Arcata and enrolled in Humboldt State University, another counter culture enclave. During an Arcata visit, she told me she had decided to get her college degree, and she planned for a more advanced nursing license. She had to be self-sufficient, she explained. Not dependent on men, she added, ruefully.
“Men like me?” I thought.
We were in touch. Occasionally I would take the kids to Jenner for a few days.
During one of those kids visits, Jo and I ended up in bed. In our lovemaking Jo did something that surprised me, that I found erotic.
After, before I said a thing, she said: “You have new moves.”
We argued. We both denied new tricks in bed, but I knew it was true. We both had been with others. We just couldn’t get ourselves back to the way it was that summer.
Months later, I was in Arcata, visiting Jo and the kids. Then the kids left with their father and it was the two of us. We went out drinking and dancing, at a bar where everything hippie had gone country. But now country was inscrutable to me: men and their pickup trucks, gals and their heartaches. Jo as a country girl was a mystery to me.
We came back to her house. Sometimes sheer persistence pays off. She agreed to sex. But nothing happened when we touched, no electricity, just frustration, mine. Jo saw it as confirmation of the way it was between us: over.
I was exasperated with Jo’s perpetual acceptance of our current static relationship. I told her we should relax, try harder, and more often. I believed we could get back to it. To what? To me, carefree, in love with Katie. To Katie loving me. To that Berkeley summer when we found each other.
I would not give up. I tried again, a year later, this time a surprise visit. Jo and some friends planned to drop off the kids in Jenner for a weekend with me and then continue to San Francisco. On an impulse, I decided to take the bus to Arcata first, a surprise visit to give Jo and me time together before the drive to my place in Jenner.
Jo was not happy to see me. She put me up in a sleeping bag in the living room, and went out that evening – dancing and drinking at that country bar, I thought – with a guy I heard dropping her off at the front door, while I camped out in the living room. It was excruciating.
The vehicle for the trip to Jenner and Berkeley was a friend’s battered Volkswagen bus, hand-decorated with psychedelic swirls. Nothing about it or the owner was reliable, and I waited day after day for the repairs that would allow us to leave. I was frozen in a time warp, just hanging out alone at Jo’s house, no purpose, watching her come and go, a kind of hell for me.
At last we boarded. I felt like I had joined a hippie tribe wandering the country on wheels, heading for action somewhere. The others were in high spirits, anything possible ahead. Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, new age travelers on a psychedelic bus adventure? No, not for me. I detested it: the swirly old VW, the rickety ride, our gang of hippies, our vagabond look at rest stops. I felt like I was on a road to anywhere, to nowhere, to no destination that interested me. This was a remnant of the Age of Aquarius that never had arrived for me, I thought, and I did not belong.
Then came another road trip with an end, Jo’s and my end. This time Jo arrived at my Jenner house, unplanned, when friends en route to San Francisco left the kids with me for the weekend. Jo just showed up with the friends and kids, unexpected. She walked in smiling, that shy smile as if everything was normal, just an old friend visiting. I was infuriated by her cavalier belief that she could just stop by my remote cabin on the Russian River, unannounced, a surprise, like I had done with her. I didn’t want to see her passing through as just a casual friend.
Outside, I yelled at her: “Never drop in where I live. Never!”
I vowed I was done with Jo, Katie, hippies, flower girls, the new age, the whole thing.
I left the Russian River and its hippie scene, the scene that I never had explored, and moved back to Berkeley. I completed my Ph.D. dissertation. Then I abruptly discarded my long-held career plan to become a professor. I jettisoned my studies of the working classes, who I decided I knew nothing about, including the Ph.D. dissertation that should have become my first book. I launched a new career as a freelance historian, studying a community of left-wing Jewish chicken ranchers, who felt like my own people that I could understand and write about.
I was excited about this swerve to what felt right, my true path. No more hippie fantasies about Jo and me. No more academic strivings to write about the mysterious working classes.
One Sunday morning at a flea market, I gave away Gertrude the cat. At last, five years later, goodbye to the last vestige of my summer of love.
* * *
I didn’t see Katie for 34 years.
Oliver was the one who brought us back together. It was 2010. I had stopped seeing Oliver, too, back in 1976, when I could not tolerate more worry that he was in bed with Jo.
He and I met at a 2010 memorial gathering for a partner in my Sonoma ranch collective. Before I had returned to Berkeley from Jenner in 1976, I had joined a community with land 15 miles to the north on Sea View Road. That collective, Chamokome ranch, was where I met my wife Stephanie three years later.
Chamokome was my true “counterculture,” not the hippie world I had explored with Katie in summer 1971. After the collapse of the sixties political upheaval, we Chamokome members remained comrades, sharing our wonderful coastal ranch. We were part of the counterculture retreat to rural life, but only for weekend and vacation visits to our ranch. We all led busy urban lives. When I joined in 1976, our members were Old Left and New Left political activists, professors and graduate students, not a hippie among us. New people expanded our membership over the coming years. We added attorneys, my own next career, and psychotherapists, including my wife Stephanie, and later came tech members.
I found my people at Chamokome: political, intellectual, professional, and critical of the mainstream culture. We became more conventional over the years. We were largely families, professionally ambitious, and financially comfortable. No drug visionaries, human potential explorers, or spiritual seekers. But even today we remain counter to the mainstream culture, a collective with shared values for our ranch: stewardship for the land, no profit from ownership, the group’s welfare placed over the individual, and democratic decision making.
As I spoke at that 2010 memorial, I spotted Oliver’s bushy head of hair – Jewish Einstein style – bobbing in the audience. It had to be Oliver.
We found each other at the reception. After trading information about our lives, Oliver blurted out: “I still see Jo.”
I felt a visceral shudder.
How did he know I still cared? I had not realized it myself. I had not thought about Jo for years. But Oliver remembered Jo and me. He sensed something.
They had kept contact. Now Jo lived in Fresno. She was married.
Oliver and I planned to get together. He said he wanted to pass on my contact information to Jo. I told him, “Oh yes!”
I wanted to see Jo. I wanted…I wanted…what did I want? Something.
I invited Oliver and his partner, a lovely older woman, for dinner. Across my dinner table, Oliver, in his 80s, flirted blatantly with Stephanie that evening, a ridiculous come-on. He truly was a visitor from the seventies: anything goes. Still.
I wanted to reach Jo. But I couldn’t find her online. Oliver was the way.
I learned more about Jo over lunches with Oliver. She was a nurse. She had put on some weight, but her face was beautiful. Oliver, I thought, was still smitten with her.
Did he sense my decades-long question? Yes.
“You know,” he blurted out at one of our meetings, “I never slept with Jo. It didn’t happen.” Like he was denying an accusation I never spoke.
“Not for lack of trying,” I thought.
I believed him this time. But it was strange, this reminder of the early 1970s, when every sexual possibility could be tried, no rules, all with exciting promise, and always my surprise in the end about my own confusion. Followed by another puzzling adventure.
Oliver assured me he had given my email address to Jo, but I didn’t hear from her. Months passed. Was it more of her maddening acceptance of the way things were, an acceptance beyond the reach of my arguments? Or perhaps she didn’t care about me anymore? Or she was angry at my final banishment of her from my life. Or, difficult for me to grasp, was she simply busy with her life, and not interested in me and our past?
Finally, I overcame my suspicion that Oliver was withholding Jo’s email address. I simply asked for it. He gave it to me without a care.
With Jo, I wanted to visit that extraordinary era of the Sixties and Seventies, and see my younger self in the counterculture liberation. I wanted to rediscover Jo when she was Katie in her hippie beauty, exploring a field of wildflowers. To feel again the intensity of that summer, of Katie and me together, of me discovering my hippie self. And understand my relentless academic career ambition, a career I later tossed away, but only after that ambition first brought me to a miserable end with Jo.
Hopeful about finding my younger self in that era of counterculture possibilities, I finally sent Jo an email with my own life summary. It was all true, but I was bragging too: my wonderful wife and daughter, the Ph.D. degree, the published books, the years of law practice, my current big court administration job, distance cycling, recent travels in New York City and the southwest, frequent visits to my Sonoma Country ranch collective, Chamokome, where Stephanie and I had met and married. I mentioned my hope to visit her.
Jo wrote back a newsy e-mail about herself, her husband Mike, the children and grandchildren, car camping, travels in South America. Her name still was Jo. No Katie in sight.
One Saturday afternoon in October 2010 I went to see Jo in Fresno. She lived in an older suburban neighborhood of tired homes with men working on battered pickup trucks in the driveways. These were working people.
There was Jo, out in front. Same angelic face, like Oliver said, but faded, without the sparkle. A pudgy angelic face and a pudgy body. What had happened to my wispy glowing girlfriend in her flowing white dress?
And me? How did I look to Jo? How did I look back then? I wanted to learn that too.
Inside I met Mike. We sat down in the living room, functional and plain, Jo across the room from me, right next to Mike on the couch, and we never left our spots. We filled each other in on our lives. Mike worked in construction programs with a state agency. He seemed fond of Jo, and protective. She stuck close to him.
Jo’s daughter Amy, who I knew as a child and who also lived in Fresno, came by with her husband. I was stunned. She was an image of Jo in her late 20s: that beautiful sweet face, flowing blond hair, blue eyes, slim body. It was as if Katie, the Katie I met in 1970, had walked in. I stared.
Jo brought out pictures of me and her and the kids from the 1970s. I was surprised that she held on to those snapshots all these years. I had my own photos of us, one with Jo in the white dress holding Gertrude, that I did not bring, embarrassed that I had saved the pictures. I showed photos of Stephanie and Julia.
Imagining this visit with Jo, I had pictured us strolling in a park, sitting on a bench, deep in talk about our shared history. I wanted to find out just what had happened at the end. How could she fall out of love with me? And the beginning too. Why did she fall in love with me? What was I like then? And what were we like together, when that tourist took our picture on campus, when the divinity student said we made beautiful babies, when we lived in a tepee?
And who was she back then? A hippie? And me? Hippie too? Just a bit?
I had imagined Jo’s romantic portrait of me in those days…handsome, serious, passionate, and searching. A mix of 1950s suburban ambition and 1960s political radicalism and 1970s hippie adventurer. And an academic too.
But that was all my imagination. She stayed by Mike’s side. I never had a moment alone with Jo. She gave no help with my longing for a visit back to my late 20s or my fantastical reconstruction of who I was in those years. I wanted time travel, together, and Jo did not provide it, none.
I learned what I could. Jo and Mike had a devoted relationship over many years living in California and North Carolina and back to California. Jo was at the center of a clan with children and grandchildren, the matriarch, carrying all the burdens, and caring for a disabled grandchild without complaint. She had earned that college degree and the advanced nursing license, had a long nursing career, and also worked at their family side business refurbishing and flipping old homes. They travelled as a family. And, surprise to me, Jo wrote poetry she was trying to publish.
Listening carefully, appraising her every word, I decided I had been right to break up at the end of that summer, as planned. Jo, with all her life accomplishments, had more dislocations, more job changes, more moving about the country, more restlessness and uncertainty and financial hardship, more problems with kids and grandkids, than I could have withstood. Together with Jo, I thought, I never could have become a historian and written my books, or taken years to retool as a litigation attorney, nor climbed to my current demanding job as a court system director. I might have been miserable with Jo, whose beauty I still could see, whose big heart I could still feel, whose gravitational pull still tugged at me.
Had Jo been a hippie? At the time, I thought she was the real thing, living it, not some suburban kid dressing up for weekends on Haight Street. Now I again considered that she had been working class and country poor, also dressed up as a hippie in that era, but no teeny bopper or groovy hippie chick. Rebellious and adventurous in the 1970s, on her own with her kids, the Bay Area counterculture was where she went to explore possibilities and find herself.
Like me, I saw now, Jo had been trying it on, trying on the counterculture. It had fit with Jo when I’d known her in the 1970s. It never had fit with me. I was too straight, too ambitious, unwilling to let go of my middle-class comforts and opportunities.
Yet now she didn’t seem to think about it. For Jo, that past was gone, as if it didn’t happen.
I still was gripped by that seductive era and by Jo, my idea of Jo, my memories of her and myself. That’s what brought me to Fresno to see her. I had been on a parallel track. My rebelliousness was from the suburban middle class. Also drawn to California, I found adventure in universities and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. And I found Katie…Jo…my own hippie girlfriend who guided me to the counterculture.
We met in Berkeley for a few unlikely months in 1971, my summer of love. We were suspended together in the fading possibilities of the already dying counterculture, between separate pasts and futures, divided by class and culture. That summer was all I could tolerate together, and years of futile strivings to bring back those months with Jo. I still wanted it in 2010, a taste of 1971, a glimmer, at my Fresno visit.
By the 1980s, I had clarified my direction. I wanted my own family, professional accomplishment, and upward mobility. It was a path that my immigrant history and ambitious family and suburban world had set me on in the 1950s. After my explorations of the 1960s and 1970s, I found some of that success the hard way, by resolutely completing my history books and starting over with law school. I had some extraordinary good luck too. I met Stephanie when she was young, 22, re-lived my 20s courting her, and I married her six years later, when I was 41, ready at last. We went slow and steady, and it was exciting with a young wife who fit in a comfortable middle-class world with me. We had Julia, and we built a life together, two ambitious and affluent professionals with a happy nuclear family.
I was more conventional and more ambitious than I had understood in the 1970s. I had feared that Jo was not, that she really was hippie and counter culture, working class and country poor. I feared that was where she would remain. And me with her. During that 2010 Fresno visit, I realized it: Jo had scared me. A future life in her counterculture had scared me. And a life ahead in her working class had scared me too.
I wondered if Jo had seen it back in 1971, when our summer ended. That her life scared me. That her life ahead scared me. That I would have deserted her again.
The Fresno afternoon wore on in the living room. Tedium set in over dinner, as the conversation turned entirely to the local construction economy. How much could I talk about construction? Not much, and I was largely silent. Then I left, happy to return home.
We traded e-mails after the visit. I invited Jo and Mike to dinner with Stephanie and me at our San Francisco home. I told Jo she’d like Stephanie. I wrote Jo that I still found her soulful, like I knew her in the seventies. I meant it about her soulfulness. I admired her accomplishments and her devotion to the people in her life. And that poetry she was writing. I was intrigued. What had I missed?
But in truth, I suspected Stephanie and Jo would not take to each other…would not appreciate each other. They inhabited different cultures. I did not fit in Jo’s world that afternoon in Fresno, except to keep the conversation going and listen carefully, and I did not see why Stephanie would be any more interested. But I wanted to show off Stephanie, her beauty and braininess and professional accomplishment and humor…the spectacular younger woman I had won as my life partner. And show our life together, our lovely home with warm wood and tasteful furniture and interesting paintings by friends hanging on the walls, the books and magazines scattered about, the home offices, the work in progress on the desks, the pictures of our splendid daughter Julia.
Jo wrote back that she couldn’t think of such nice things to say about me, as I wrote about her after the visit. A dig?
But, yes, she said, she’d get in touch about that dinner.
She didn’t.
And this time, finally, I let go.