In the spring of 1971, Annie and her newborn baby moved to the Washington, DC, area to live with her mother, and Roberto left for unknown parts. I, too, had tired of the big, gray city, and decided to take off for the Pacific Coast. I had heard that Vancouver, British Columbia, was a "happening" place for young people. The Haight-Ashbury scene was over, and I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that the scene a thousand miles north in Vancouver would still be vital and interesting.
Driving in a secondhand Volkswagen Squareback my dad had bought me, I crossed the border into Canada the first evening of my trip. On my way west along the Trans-Canada Highway, I stayed in government-run youth hostels, at the grand cost of fifty cents a night. They were quaint, almost normal, establishments, with separate dorms for boys and girls. You could feel the influence of permissive yet anxious parents over the whole affair. The people who ran the hostels were earnest, wide-eyed, well-scrubbed, young social-worker types. Kind of square, like an older sibling, but not really, really square, like your parents.
The Canadian winters are long and tough, and the coming of the short summer season is most welcome. There was a tradition of hitchhiking around the country after school let out. Canada is the second largest country in the world and one of the most beautiful. What struck me was that Canadians had a much less adversarial relationship with their government (and with everything else) than we Americans did with ours. Most Canadians assumed that government programs were there for everyone's benefit and didn't seem to mind paying for them. In contrast, Americans were at each other's throats over just about everything.
Shortly after arriving in Vancouver, I rented a room in the hippie district on East Seventh Avenue between Québec and Ontario Streets. It was a shared house, or, loosely speaking, an urban commune. The monthly rent was $250, and I took one of the five bedrooms for fifty dollars a month.
Michael Martin-Pipe (his pen name, or, rather, his pipe name) was the master of ceremonies. He and his girlfriend Janice held the lease and slept in the master bedroom. He was a drug dealer with long fingernails and straight brown hair down to the middle of his back. She was a tough chick from back east who liked to dress up and carry dope through the airports without getting caught. They also ran a boutique on Main Street called the Legal Front (no kidding), a hippie capitalist adventure.
Janice's younger sister Kim and their friend Andrea also lived in the house. By the following winter Peter and his old lady had joined us. He kept body and soul together by doing house painting and odd jobs for a straight landlord friend of theirs.
Among the visitors at our house was Johnny Gyprock, a former construction worker with missing front teeth. (According to an obituary in the Powell River [BC] Peak, a man named John 'Gyprock' Ross died there in 2013.) Another was Adrian, better known as Nose, a famously intrepid hitchhiker. Peter was fond of telling stories about traveling in the American South with his friend Nose. It seemed that, on one occasion, Peter and his wife had tired of the road and decided to fly to Denver, their next destination. They took a hotel room for the night, while Nose continued to hitchhike. To Peter's astonishment, Nose was in Denver waiting for them the next day when they arrived. It seemed that he had gotten a ride the night before, and had prevailed on the driver to allow him to drive all night.
I quickly discovered that the style of policing on the West Coast was different. With my long hair, I was an easy target, once getting picked up on what I call a triple-W (Walking While White).
I decided to try my hand at solo street music in downtown Vancouver. I ended up making more noise than money on the guitar. Maybe some solo players can make a go of it, but I usually did better in groups.
Guitar players were a dime a dozen; almost every guy I knew owned one. A word about traveling with a guitar. If your old lady was with you, and there was only one extra seat in the car, the misogynistic musicians' code of the time called for the guitar to get the seat, while she rode in the back. Women come and go, but a musician gets attached to his instrument.
I met a player called Al. He was from Québec and was on the run from the law. I never worked up the courage to ask him what for.
Al's friend Denny was the consummate window man, but Al was good, too. On one occasion, Al and I pulled up next to two high school girls who were walking in Stanley Park. They climbed into the back seat at Al's invitation. I don't remember what happened to Al's girl, but Al and I and my girl eventually ended up at my house. After a while he said good-bye to us, leaving us sitting alone on the living room couch. After a long silence, I rose and motioned for her to come upstairs with me. In my room, I climbed onto the mattress in the loft. She did the same. We sat cross-legged, yogi-style facing each other. I lit a big, fat torpedo and took a toke. I gave it to her and she took a drag.
A couple of days later I got home and her father was stomping around the house looking for me. Eventually he left. Michael almost tossed him out.
A few months later, I met a young woman who worked in a doughnut shop in downtown Vancouver. I drove to her house in the suburbs to pick her up for a date. Not wanting her parents to see me, she came running out of her house when I pulled up. At that point I probably looked like a drowned rat. I guess women of a certain age like to go with "bad" guys.
On another occasion, I was playing outside the public library in downtown Vancouver when a young woman walked by. She stopped to talk and we went to her apartment in an upscale high-rise on the waterfront. She sat me down in a chair and started to try to brush out the tangles of my matted hair. When she got close enough, I tried to grab her butt. She jumped back, saying, "Not yet." I teased her about the "yet" part.
She was open about being a prostitute. We ended up at my house. I gathered that the apartment wasn't hers; she was just crashing there.
We had sex. Later that night, she got me talking about myself, who I was and where I was coming from. My travels from New Jersey to New York to Vancouver. My first ever extended conversation with a woman. Before I knew it, the day had begun to break. Boy, was I ever filled up with myself. I had gone on all night about myself.
We decided to take a walk to nearby Queen E Park and greet the morning light there. The park offers a panoramic view of the city. On the way home, she offered to fuck me again when we got back to the house. I felt as if she were treating me like a trick. Maybe she treats all men like tricks, I thought. Nevertheless, I took her up on the offer.
Afterwards, we went downstairs and I introduced her to Al, who was sitting at the kitchen table with his guitar. A few minutes later, she left, and I never saw her again.
Janice criticized my liaison with the woman, not because she was a prostitute, but because of her tender age. Janice had a big mouth and I never asked for her opinion. I countered that the woman is already a mother. Janice countered that the baby wasn't with her, so she wasn't a mother in the full sense of the term. I guess she had a point.
On another occasion, I was playing guitar by myself in my room when a young woman walked in, sat on the floor next to me, and silently pressed her knee against mine. I climbed to the loft and threw off my clothes. She joined me there and threw off her clothes, too. The next morning she disappeared without a word.
A few days later, I noticed a discharge. The staff at the free clinic gave me a hard time, wanting to know whom I had gotten the disease from. I told them, "Kathy." They kept asking, "Kathy who?" but I didn't know her last name. The pills they gave me cleared up the infection.
Several months later, I was standing at a downtown bus stop when Kathy got off the bus. She recognized me, came over, and said she was sorry about what had happened. I said, don't worry about it. I wanted to jump right back in bed with a woman who had once given me the clap.
Despite the problems, Canadian women made me feel warm and accepted in a way that American women hadn't. Canadian women seemed to like American men. I guess our presence in their country meant more opportunities for them.
Canadian men, on the other hand, assumed that if you were an American, you were a DD (draft dodger), an interloper. I had heard that there were a zillion guys from New York hanging out in Toronto for the duration of the war.
I bought a twelve-foot canvas teepee at a local teepee store. After waterproofing, it shrank to eleven feet. I also bought some 2x2's at a lumber warehouse to use for poles. The teepee was just roomy enough for one or two sleeping bags.
People have strong reactions to a teepee. Some love it; others hate it. If you care what other people think, if you need their approval, don't live in a teepee.
There seemed to be more people in Vancouver in the summer than in the winter. It has a vacation-y, touristy feeling. Southwestern BC is the only place in Canada I know of that doesn't have a brutal, deep-frozen winter. It rains in Vancouver in the late fall and early winter, but it doesn't snow much in the lower elevations.
Experts on such matters say that Winnipeg, Manitoba, is perhaps the coldest city of its size in North America, with Edmonton, Alberta, a close second.
The cold may partly explain why most of the Canadians I met were heavy drinkers and smokers, often rolling their own cigarettes. One gets the picture of people living in cabins in the woods with little else to do for all those long winter nights.
Vancouver, however, had an active social scene in Gastown, the historic downtown bar-and-restaurant district. This was also the place to go to score drugs. You could try the marijuana inside the bar, but the deal itself happened outside. Such was the arrangement among the dealers, the buying public, and the police.
That was the good news. The bad news was that the grass was often cut with tobacco. I guess the dealers assumed that most customers were already tobacco smokers, and wouldn't notice or mind the difference. As I wasn't a tobacco smoker, the tobacco-laced grass would take my head off. I gave up on Canadian "grass."
Trust me, tobacco is more powerful than marijuana.
While in Vancouver, I met a fellow space-traveler named Larry. He was into yoga, sometimes standing on his hands for hours at a time or swallowing medical gauze to cleanse his stomach. He had once been a cop in Chicago. This fact amused us greatly, as most of us rarely did anything that was, strictly speaking, legal.
He was also thirty years old, another possible cause for suspicion. In the early 1960s, Jack Weinberg of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, said, "We have a saying in the movement that we don't trust anybody over thirty." (He himself had turned thirty by the time I arrived in Canada.) In the interim, every self-appointed, media-crazed "spokesman for a generation" had repeated the slogan, not minding that our movement was largely leaderless and that we were all quite capable of speaking for ourselves.
While relations with our parents were often difficult, it wasn't true that we didn't trust anyone over thirty. Among those we held in high regard were the baby doctor Benjamin Spock, the US Senator and presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, the folk singer Pete Seeger, and the LSD and meditation guru Timothy Leary. All of them were older than my parents. To our way of thinking, the soul was eternal. (It may also be that generous grandparent figures are more approachable and less threatening than disciplinary parental figures.)
Larry and I got sick of the city and decided to visit some friends of his on Gabriola Island. It's in the Gulf Islands between the BC mainland and rustic, sparsely populated Vancouver Island. You have to take two ferries to get there from Vancouver, changing in Nanaimo. I wanted to pitch my teepee somewhere other than the tiny backyard of our house in the city.
In those days it was important to always keep moving. The buzzword was "truckin'", after the Grateful Dead song. We believed that if you stayed too long in one place, you would end up getting comfortable, safe, and married, with a job, a career, and a house, like the straight people. With something to lose, you would become resistant to change, and you would end up voting Republican (or Conservative, if you were a Canadian voter). If you weren't in constant motion, always open to new ideas, people, and places, you couldn't continue to grow and become the fully completed person you were meant to be.
Change was good. If someone appeared to be struggling, people would sometimes say, "Oh, they're going through changes." That is, they were adapting to and learning from whatever challenges they were confronting. It was understood that despite their immediate difficulties, they would be okay in the end, and perhaps even stronger. Life is a continual process of change and adaptation.
Change was our friend and stasis was our enemy.
The politics on the island were as follows: Larry's friend Clayton and his old lady Ann were living together in a house they had built the previous summer with a married couple called Hal and Ann. The former couple was from Ontario and the latter was from Connecticut. Peter (not the same Peter whom I met in Vancouver) was a friend of Clayton and Ann's and was into woodworking, favoring maple burls. Their friend Michael, who was also from back East, was heavily involved in meditation. They were the regulars.
We were joined at various times by Tom Jones, Stephane, Marguerite, and the younger sister of Clayton's Ann, whose name I forget.
Tom Jones was an alias for an American who had allegedly been involved in the Haight-Ashbury acid tests, and who was on the run from the law. It was said that Stephane had grown up in an ashram back East.
Marguerite and her son Lyle, who were from Montréal, lived with us awhile, as did various peripatetic couples such as John and Kim from Southern California, and George and Debbie from Ontario.
Clayton, Hal, and the Ann's lived in the house; the rest of us lived in tents, cabins, or makeshift lean-tos on the surrounding properties. The technologies of the day included space blankets and one-millimeter thick, heavy-duty plastic, the savior of the camper and the low-budget, freelance homesteader or squatter.
Larry and I usually crashed in the teepee. The fire inside kept us warm and dry. The smoke was, however, a problem, as was the scarcity of dry wood in rain-soaked coastal British Columbia. Had I to do it again, I'd get a fourteen-foot teepee for solo, temporary camping or perhaps a sixteen-footer for living with another person.
The payoff for living in a teepee came when you were awakened at night by the full moon peering down between the smoke flaps, flooding the canvas interior with a magical, silvery light.
Once you've gotten used to living outdoors, it's hard to go back to airless boxes.
Jan, pronounced Yon, was a thirty-year-old straight guy who lived nearby with his wife Sylvia. A handyman, he drove a truck with the words Keep On Truckin' painted on the side, after the popular Mr Natural cartoon series by R Crumb. He often spoke about going to New Zealand, the land of promised opportunities for young, ambitious pioneers. As far as we were concerned, tourists and fast-food restaurants had already threatened to overrun most of North America.
Gabriella, who was named after the island, was Clayton's dog. She was on her own as far as canine love and companionship were concerned.
Some of the communards had taken faux American Indian names like Sundance or Flying Squirrel. I chose Young Buck, a name that came to me on a trip. I had been reading a book called Be Here Now by Richard Alpert, also known as Baba Ram Dass. (He was another highly regarded member of the over-thirty set.) In one passage, the newly psychedelicized author returns home to his uncomprehending parents, and refers to himself as a "young tribal buck."
Larry was more of a futurist and science fiction fan than an ersatz American Indian. He had stars in his eyes and was the founder and leader of the Cosmic Space Patrol, a continent-wide collection of hopelessly brain-damaged misfits. I became an honorary member of the Patrol, mainly because it was I who paid for the membership patches.
Larry was another aspiring guitarist, sometimes performing for nursing home patients. His style was even more rudimentary than mine, however, and we never came together musically. His theme song was "Ghost Riders in the Sky," an old Vaughn Monroe and Burl Ives tune, later covered by Johnny Cash. Mine was Roberto's "You're In My Dreams," a song about Beatle dreams. Larry and I both have small, reedy singing voices.
On one occasion, we did a few songs together onstage in a club in Nanaimo. There was no one in the audience except for a few waiters on break. We did, however, look the part. Our hair was down to our shoulders and my guitar had a colorful macramé strap.
Whereas the hipsters in the city were beginning to dabble in powdered cocaine, which would become the preferred drug of the rest of the 1970s, most of the islanders had already graduated to natural highs. I, however, was still in my LSD evangelism phase, a Summer of Love time warp. LSD teaches you about commitment. Once you drop, there's no going back. You have to take the trip, be it good or bad. And no bitching or crying or moaning, either, or you'll end up at the health clinic as an intergalactic hobo voyager. I've had some strange trips — everyone does — but I never freaked.
Our little twelve-foot camping teepee inspired Hal and Ann to build a full-sized eighteen-footer, which is big enough for semi-permanent camping. After scoring the materials, Ann worked the treadle sewing machine while Hal steadied the canvas and supervised. I had nothing to do with the construction of their teepee, but after finishing it, they asked me to help with its erection. You start with the three poles that form the pyramidal foundation. Once these structural poles are lashed securely into place, you lean the other poles against them. Finally, you wrap the canvas around the outside of the cone formed by the poles.
I liked my jeans comfortable, and used to break in a pair by wearing it every day. Sometimes I'd go for as long as six months between trips to the Laundromat at the Silva Bay marina, a few miles down-island. I never wore underwear. It was more sensual not to, and it was easier to slip out of your clothes if the occasion called for it. I slept in my jeans, too. On a cool BC evening, I needed all the layers I could get.
On one occasion, I was driving home from the ferry with Larry when he spotted a hitchhiker. He insisted that I stop. Whatever you say, Larry. It was a young woman. Figures, knowing him. Heather and her dog Jack climbed into the back seat. He turned out to be a great conversational opener. Larry and Heather hit it off and married about a year later.
I hated to see him marry. I knew it would be the end not only of his days of freedom, but of his creativity as well.
They invited me to their wedding at the commune. Due to a misunderstanding about the timing of the event, I was at the beach the afternoon they took their vows.
Crunch time on the island came in the fall, when the weather started to get cool and wet and most people suddenly had to go back East, or back to school, or some such thing. To me, the coming of fall separated the men and women from the boys and girls. Real men and women didn't cave in to the "responsibility" bullshit.
Living outdoors in the winter could be a challenge, but if you had lived outside throughout the fall, your body would gradually get used to the cold. The hardest challenge was the rain, which got into everything. It was impossible to keep paper, books, or musical instruments dry. When winter came, I lent my guitar to Marguerite, who was living in a cabin. Being just a couple of feet off the wet ground made a huge difference.
Upon our arrival on the island, Michael was living in a cave high on a cliff above the Georgia Strait. His routine consisted of meditation and exactly one trip per day down to the beach below, where he filled his water jug from a stream. I sometimes slept there when he was off-island.
On one occasion, I was hanging out in the cave when a straight tourist family walked past in descending order of height — father, mother, little brother, little sister. They didn't look at me, but they must have thought I was from another planet. It was then I knew it was time to move on.
There are many beautiful, quiet places to live in North America, even today. To live in such a place, however, you must be willing to be nomadic. Wherever you settle, you'll have first dozens and then hundreds of neighbors, all of whom are looking for the same things you are. Soon there will be a stoplight, a general store, a tee-shirt stand, traffic congestion, and crime. Then you have to pick up and move on. That's the history of this continent from the European invasion to present.
I look back on my days on the island as among the most idyllic of my life. Sleeping on the ground and rising with the sun. As one of our visitors once observed, mother nature is a good companion.
The land of no appointments, no alarm clocks — no clocks, for that matter — no electricity, and no TV. As a result, I have no recollection of what most people think of as the 1970s — pet rocks, leisure suits, platform shoes, disco, or whatever commercial and mass media crap was around then. We didn't feel the slightest bit deprived. We were interested in living out our own story lines while others were more interested in connecting to a story line that was invented in the electronic media fantasy land. They seemed to take that particular form of artifice as somehow more real than their own selves and their own lives.
We called ourselves freaks because that's what we were. Today this might be called taking control of the language, or owning the language, or some such phrase. We knew we were freaks and that we couldn't change it if we tried. Indeed, many of us have spent the better part of our lives in a mighty, but ill-fated, struggle to fit in.
Ah, the 1960s, when life was simple and everything that was wrong with the world was due to the Establishment and the old people. Unlike today, when everything that's wrong with the world is still due to old people, except that now we are the old people.
New York | Musical Interludes | Vancouver | Bibliography