This tale was a long time in the making. Shortly after I graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, I began to reflect on stories and incidents from the sixties that eventually became this book. Many of those remembrances concerned the motivations of the youth movement. As I looked around, I saw that those fragile and hard-fought ideas of the counterculture were beginning to bear fruit—environmental organizations, the peace movement, women’s rights in the workplace, the ongoing public awareness of racism, emerging gay pride, populist political groups, and the proliferation of health food stores, organic food, and yoga classes.
I also knew that the catalyst for those ideas had been a mass leap in consciousness brought about by the use of psychoactive substances, by the ripping apart of “the filmiest of screens” as William James, the great American philosopher, declared after his initial experiments with nitrous oxide in 1882. At the apex of the sixties, over half a million people gathered at Woodstock in 1969, a single moment in time when those present became one person in mind, in large part because of shared psychedelic experience. From Woodstock, the tribes moved across the nation and the world, bringing with them a shift in personal values, from competition for money and transitory objects to a worldview that regarded humans as a single community and the planet as a living organism shared by all life.
What I was also seeing in the eighties was a declared war on drugs, a lumping of all drugs into one notorious category and a deliberate stigmatization of those who altered their consciousness. Tens of thousands of families were being affected by the incarceration of a loved one for nonviolent offenses against laws that were becoming more draconian and that often denied the spiritual conscience of an individual.
In between raising three boys, volunteering in schools, and working in the community, I researched and wrote at a time before computers, searching through the stacks of UC Berkeley’s libraries, the Berkeley Public Library, and reading through numerous volumes on the sixties found in bookstores. Not having a computer myself, I wrote by hand. About 1988, almost eight years after my first line, I purchased my first computer and typed the work, saving it on large floppy disks. By the end of that year, I had a printed work of enormous size.
In 1989, I decided to return to school for a teaching credential. Having spent so much time volunteering in schools, I thought it might be a good idea to get paid for my work. Little did I realize that a teacher’s life was a twelve-hour-a-day job, weekends included. The floppy disks and the ungainly manuscript sat on a shelf, forgotten, for almost twenty years.
Then, in 2007, on a whim, I took down the box with the old manuscript, dusted it off, and decided to read the first chapter, then the next, and found that I could not put the story down, having forgotten what I had written years ago. The pages were yellowed, the text was definitely a first draft—many revisions were necessary—but what I had was the kernel of a good novel, a remembrance for the children of the sixties who were now older. For many months, I searched for ways to convert the old floppy disks to a contemporary Word document, praying I would not have to retype the entire manuscript. Some of the disks were converted, some of the work was retyped, and much of what had been recovered was feisty on the page, refusing to be altered by margins and having a mind of its own. Through a great deal of finessing, I eventually came up with a document with which I could work and began the editing process.
No one person shapes the characters of these pages. They are an amalgam of the stories told to me in hours of interviews, scholarly and scientific texts, spiritual works, autobiographical and biographical readings, writings on the history of music, and days in libraries searching through old newspaper records for day-to-day events.
This story is for all of you who have dared to dream and imagine and who have worked for a better world.