The home stretch, New Years remixed into the Days of Awesomeness. Today I try to think about my failures, regrets, and how to mitigate their damage. “Ok, Boomer,” they spit out, suggesting a lack of insight, even a condemnation for all the woe in the world. Sirius XM shut down their holiday stations and so I shifted to Classic Vinyl, and just heard Jesse Colin Young’s sweet-voiced plea to “come on people, smile on your brother, everybody get together, try to love one another right now,” and this boomer memory shot to the surface:
In 1967 I entered the University of Washington as a freshman. In my second quarter, while experiencing severe geographic shock in the eternally-drizzling-four-hours-of-daylight-winter of Seattle, I had Professor John Chambless for Philosophy of Religion. On the first day of class, he rather outrageously stated that his goal for the course was that we should all take LSD and have a God-Trip. We did a close reading of the Book of Job and Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Over that winter, I started a long snail mail correspondence with my mom about, not only the mind-blowing ideas I was exploring, but whether or not I should take LSD. Unbeknownst to me, my dad (who had died years before Tim Leary ever said Turn on, tune in, drop out), had taken it once, but did not enjoy it, though she shared with me that another of our close family friends believed it had cured her of her severe mental illness. I decided to get “experienced” myself, and while in the thrall of the God Trip I had been assigned, I scribbled out a final exam essay on the Problem of Evil, which I later paid a cute coed in the library to type out for me. Chambliss gave me and A++, obviously realizing that I may have been the only one in the class of several hundred who had actually done the assignment the way he had intended.
Disillusioned by the scientific lifestyle of my favorite Ocean prof, who was doing interminable statistics in a cramped cabin in the bowels of a barge, I changed my major from Ocean to Art and figured I might as well move back to California to attend a Cal State for a fraction of what I was paying for the world class Ocean program at the UW. In the summer of 1969, during this transition, I attended the Sky River Rock Festival and Lighter than Air Fair, or Sky River II, a reprise of Sky River I which I had missed, but which by all accounts had been a joyous and beautiful gathering of the tribes, a carefree weekend of camping, loud music, psychedelics, and mud. SkyRiver II had been organized by none other than Prof Chambless. It too was a carefree weekend of camping, loud music, and psychedelics but rather than mud, with inflatable lighter than air sculptures. Happening a couple weeks after Woodstock, whose coverage raised outrage among the locals, it took a decision by the Washington State Supreme Court on the day before the festival for it to commence.
By the spring of 1970, the Nixonians who had lead the challenge to SR II, terrified of our continually ascendant counterculture, launched a campaign to work around the Supreme Court decision which led to every county in the state passing anti-rock-festival ordinances. The first return volley in this blooming culture war was to form a political party, the Buffalo Party (which was my party of preference on my voter registration for many years afterward) who held a ‘Convention’ in the woods with camping, loud music, and psychedelics, but no inflatable and lighter than air sculptures. I was back in LA at Cal State LA, and missed it, but the Convention was shut down and its ‘slate of candidates’ arrested for violating the ordinance.
The Hydra Collective, an underground political cell within the Seattle Liberation Front, led the next skirmish. They secretly sold ‘limited partnership deeds’ at $10 a head to raise the money for a downpayment on 160 acres farm in Washougal Washington, where a ‘private party’ with camping, loud music, psychedelics, and the creation of a new utopian community would be limited only to the new co-owners of the farm. Extensive and secret negotiations and legal wrangling over the validity of the escrow and title transfer lead to incomplete preparations for Sky River III which would begin the friday of the week before Labor Day and continue for 10 days. By that first Friday, Aug 28th, 10,000 ‘freaks’ descended on the site, which had only just been legally secured and whose location only publicly disclosed that week. A few of us had been around prepping the site, building a water system to store the spring water in plastic swimming pools, building the stage, concession stands etc. Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and many big names had been slated to perform, but there were no funds left for their expenses and the legal vagaries lead them all to cancel.
That first weekend was a grand and chaotic party with the promoters and organizers nowhere to be found; estimates vary, but there were close to 20,000 attendees. It was all local bands in an informal round-robin, sharing gear and rocking out, with the very experienced crowd all peace love and understanding, mostly. Sunday night, most of them went home, leaving a couple thousand of us onsite. A series of workshops had been planned, which now mostly amounted to folks taking the stage to share into the mic what they thought had happened and what they thought should happen. Monday and Tuesday we used the stage and PA to organize into a set of committees to prepare for the even bigger crowd expected for the next weekend. I was working at the time as a teacher, and horrified by a few stories about small children who had been lost and abandoned by too-high parents, I joined the Baby Liberation Front (BLF) with the goal of building a 24 hr child care center behind the stage. Among other committees established were The Flying Rape Squad, who had been alarmed by the numerous stories of sexual assault on the chaotic first weekend, and a community drug store to test and sell, at cost, Open-Clinic-tested-and-approved drugs to curb the rash of bad trips and overdoses. A vendor who had planned to sell cheap California wine (still illegal except at state outlets that resembled the DMV) decided they would use all their proceeds to support the Digger’s Free Kitchen.
There was music every night all week, and between sets, committee reps got on the mic to broadcast ads. BLF solicited and then received supplies of baby bottles, formula, diapers, tents, tables and other supplies. Someone even showed up with a little merry go round on the back of their pick up. Another brought a jungle gym. We put up a fence, we designed a flag, and we trained and scheduled volunteers. By the second Friday had a build an amazingly well-organized day care center in the woods. Labor Weekend brought thousands more folks than the previous weekend, despite the fact that the bands they came to see never showed; all except for the Youngbloods, for whom the crowd took up a collection to pay for their airfare. As the crowd screamed “Get Together!” which had become a sort of anthem for our little experiment in collectivism, Jesse Colin Young, chuckled into the mic, “We’re trying, man, we’re trying!”
The concrete sense that we might actually be building an alternative to the establishment in our amazing natural amphitheater with its civic organization, including the guy who was actually trying to build a funicular railroad down the steep slope on the southern boundary of the property to allow easier access for the skinny-dipping hippies to the beautiful Washougal river, made those couple of weeks one of the most profound experiences of my life. I discovered the power of collective action to successfully solve real problems and the great joy of hard work toward a shared and noble goal.
Many of my fellow Baby Liberation workers griped over that weekend about how they had hardly gotten to go up to the stage and experience the festival, of how hard we all had to work. They were resentful of the crowds who would cheer when we went on stage to promote ourselves or ask for supplies, but who didn’t come down to actually put in the hours of work that we were putting in. In my most surprising and enduring epiphany of the experience, I realized that 80% of the work is always done by 20% of the people; it is an enduring curse on the caring and competent. But even more, that the cheers of that 80% was actually a good-enough effort for them, in that very little civic work can happen without the support of our communities, and that the burden of leadership is actually a gift of assent from the less caring and competent who nevertheless have our backs. It was a visceral understanding of how democracy actually works that has served me well to this day.
Still listening to Classic Vinyl as I write this, a live version of the Eagle’s Hotel California is playing, and has me wondering, where did we go wrong, if we did at all? We Boomers were powerful just by virtue of our demographic; if we all cheered something on, it was bound to ascend. The baby boom was a real phenomena as our parents of the Greatest Generation tried to put what was just a couple decades packed with a global pandemic, economic collapse, and two world wars behind them by turning inward to their families and especially, to us, their children. As we came of age, raised by our traumatized parents who wished more than anything to spare us their traumatic coming of age, we put our cheering behind a civil rights movement, then an anti-war movement, women, gay, and animal rights, among other causes, all of which resulted in huge and significant changes in the culture, now mostly forgotten by the Ok-Boomer-spitting millennials.
Maybe it’s because there was a schism. At least from my perspective, it began in the Bay Area, the spiritual home of both Hippie Flower Power in the Haight and the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, these two currents of our activism forked. Both may have been empowered by a mostly selfish but very real fear among us kids of being sent off to die in an distant and unjust war, but the tactics we developed in those two flows of power diverged. I sat at many tables arguing which tactic we should champion. On one side were folks, mostly inspired by Marxism, who had had enough, who saw violent revolution as the only way history had ever been renewed. On the other, those who thought we needed to follow the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, whose messages had been more fundamentally spiritual than political, but both of whom had achieved enormous political change. Maybe this came down to the types of God Trips we had all had. One tributary for those who had experienced the agape of common livingness, the other perhaps for those had not been able to shake their bad trips seething with paranoia and doom, I don’t know. But we were kids, who didn’t trust anyone over 30 and who recklessly discarded most their hard-won wisdom in favor of our own ids. My take is that the SF Wing spawned the libertarian utopians of Silicon Valley, and the Berkeley wing the woke wave in academia, and that both of these currents have over-topped their banks.
Maybe that’s what these Ok Boomer kids are disparaging, but are they discarding our wisdom as well? Did the disruption we birthed make the world better or worse or both? What will their disruption bring? I don’t know much about that either. I get that they feel that we boomers had muscle cars and free love in a orgy of consumption that they know the planet and its peoples can no longer abide. I get that availability bias in new media has flooded their consciousness with catastrophes from every direction, many of which they probably can blame on us, just like we were able to blame our greatest-generation parents for the repressive establishment that they had trusted, having seen it overcome their existential cataclysms of the early 20th century. But I know that we are all imperfect apes, who undoubtedly made grave mistakes, causing painful suffering, just as we also created beauty and goodness that brought great joy to the world. Just as it always has been and always will be. Now as Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower plays, I forgive my parents the mistakes they made, apologize to my kids for the ones I have made, and ask for their forgiveness. It feels like another set of cataclysms are bearing down on us, and I trust that these kids will manage, just as we always have, however fitfully, to redeem their world.
Happy Atonement, Forgiveness, and Redemption!
HOLLY DAYS 