I walk where most men fear to go
I’ve learned things only witches know
In the late ’60s many young Westerners headed out on what became known as the Hippie Trail, in search of adventure, enlightenment, and access to inexpensive, high-quality hashish. The trail began in Istanbul, Turkey. From there travelers headed east through Iran to Afghanistan, then Pakistan, and on to India—where the Beatles had famously made their spiritual pilgrimage in February 1968. From India, travelers could either head north to Kashmir, south to Bombay, Ceylon or the beaches of Goa, or northeast to the furthest outpost of the trail in Kathmandu, Nepal. All these destinations could be reached via train for next to nothing.
In October of 1968, 23-year-old Craig Smith, guitar slung over his back, joined the trail in Turkey. Information buried in the Apache/Inca notes suggests he arrived via Greece and Innsbruck, Austria, where he met a girl called Polly: “Under stars we drank our deep red wine” was a song lyric he attributed to that meeting. By November he was in Istanbul, where he befriended Patrick Mulcahy, an Irishman, who until recently had been working as a bookbinder in San Francisco. Smith and Mulcahy were having dinner one day at the Pudding Shop, a popular hangout for European and American travelers, when they were joined at their table by two young women from North Dakota: Mary Hurly and Ann Dignan. Mary’s first impression of Craig was that he seemed “incredibly cool,” dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, his neck adorned with love beads, a “stereotypical hippie” with “a striking pair of eyes.” “He was quiet and contemplative,” she remembers. “He had dirty-blondish hair, carried a guitar and wore a sheepskin coat. During the course of our conversation Craig explained the presence of his guitar, telling us he was a singer who had been in a group called the Good Time Singers, and had appeared frequently on The Andy Williams Show. No mention, to the best of my recollection, was made of his songwriting career.”
“He dressed differently,” remembers Ann. “He had a long Afghan coat with sheep or goat fur on the inside, it was dirty white, and he wore a purse slung sideways across one shoulder to the hip. I think that’s where he carried all his ID and money and stuff. And he had a guitar case, and long, wild, wispy hair that probably never saw a comb.”
After talking for a while, Craig and Patrick revealed that they had plans to travel overland to Delhi in a van owned by a Greek fellow named Constantine. “Connie had purchased an old VW van while visiting his family in Greece,” remembers Mary. “He was taking it back to Australia, where he was currently living, and needed riders to share expenses. As luck would have it, there was just enough room for two more. We signed up on the spot.”
Mary and Ann, both 23, paired off with Craig and Patrick respectively, and a couple of days later, set off on the trail for India in Connie’s van. “Looking back on it, I don’t know how all five of us crammed into that old VW van because Constantine had tons of stuff,” says Ann. “We always figured he was smuggling something, but we weren’t interested in knowing. That was his business. He had, to my knowledge, a very limited understanding of English. In fact the four words I mainly remember from him were: ‘Fucking idiot!’ and ‘Bloody bastard!’”
“We were excited beyond description,” continues Mary. “Unfortunately, our elevated spirits were quickly crushed when just a few short hours later, as we rolled into Ankara, the van broke down. And the bad news kept coming. It seems the part needed to put the rubber back on the road would take days to arrive. Connie felt terrible and suggested we go on without him. We weren’t really sure what to do since we were counting on being driven to India as planned and it was hard to adopt a different mindset. As we stood around looking lost, one of the mechanics approached a couple of Turkish truckers who were headed in the same direction we were planning on going, and asked whether we could ride along in the back of their truck. When they agreed, all hesitation dissolved and a few minutes later, off we went. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Connie, but something told me I would see him again. And indeed, months later I actually noticed him on a crowded street in New Delhi—sort of like that guy in Mad magazine whose face pops up all the time no matter where, no matter when, no matter what; the ‘What? Me worry?’ guy.”
This stage of their journey, in the back of a truck carrying olive oil or similar, turned out to be extremely uncomfortable. The weather had turned brutally cold, especially at night. “It was freezing-ass cold,” confirms Mary, “as the only space available to us, after all, was in the open air. But, hey, beggars can’t be choosers. Since there were tarps back there covering their wares, we quickly chose to seek shelter under them as well. This helped a lot. Between the tarps, body heat and regular stops for hot chai and hot meals, we survived a couple of long days and an equal amount of extremely long, black as hell nights.”
“Probably my clearest memory of Craig,” remembers Ann, “is him sitting in the back of that truck with his guitar and his nice warm coat. He was on top, outside the tarp facing backwards, and we were huddled down below facing him, and it was like ‘Wow! What are we doing?’ I don’t know if any of us knew where we were going except we were ‘going to India’ and it was ‘the Hippie Trail’ and the Beatles had been there and the Maharishi…”
When the truck reached its destination, the four of them hopped on a bus to continue their journey east. “Within a few days we were crossing into Iran, which was still safe at that point,” recounts Mary. “In fact, Iran was actually still in a ‘Golden Age’ as far as Americans were concerned. The Shah was in power, oil was flowing and much of Tehran was Westernized. Women were free to wear what they wanted, although in the more congested areas—obviously where people of limited means lived—they were hidden by custom behind the veil. The modernized downtown area of Tehran was obviously where the money was. There one found extravagant restaurants and lavish nightclubs. We explored the city for some time and, after a few days, once more headed east, but this time by train, stopping in small towns along the way.”
Mary Hurly, Craig Smith’s travel companion on his journey through Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan in 1968. (Photo courtesy Mary Hurly)
By now Mary had gotten to know Craig a lot better. “Craig and I were very different,” she reflects. “I came from a college background and was making the trip as a cultural journey. Craig was on more of a spiritual journey. He was very quiet and focused on meditation and music. And he definitely had a head start on every one of us when it came to taking drugs. In fact, he had brought a huge supply of LSD with him, a substance which I had only read about, and he took it on a regular basis.”
Mary remembers that Craig was very much obsessed with music, especially the Beatles. He would play their songs, and his own, for an hour or more each night before they all went to sleep. “He had a very melodious voice,” she remembers. “It was filled with conviction and power. He played guitar and sang every night, followed by a period of meditation in the traditional lotus posture. He was obsessed with getting to India. I’m guessing that, as he was such a devotee of the Beatles, who had embraced some sort of Indian holy man, that he had taken up that same cause in devotion to them. Not to mention that as a diehard musician he would have had to be fascinated with those centuries-old sitars and other instruments, and learning to play them must have been a lure. I do remember that Craig wanted to live in one of their complexes when he reached India—which was the last thing I would have wanted to do!”
One night in a small hotel or hostel in one of the towns along the route, Craig began to play “I Am the Walrus.” “It was as if he was the only one in the room,” Mary recalls. “When he reached the chorus of ‘coo coo ca CHOO’ he became very intense. By the third chorus, he was singing as if he was in Shea Stadium. Suddenly there was a pounding on the door. Patrick opened it and there stood an exasperated and exhausted Afghan pointing to his watch. It was eight o’clock and apparently way past his bedtime. So we apologized, which I assume the man understood from our attempts to bow and look sorry, and the guitar was put away.”
Their journey along the Hippie Trail continued over the next couple of weeks. “After a total of about two or two-and-a-half weeks we arrived into Afghanistan,” relates Mary. “The first town we came to was Herat. It was like stepping backwards several centuries. Not that the entire Middle East isn’t seriously steeped in old traditions, but in Afghanistan it seemed to be times ten. There the women on the street were all totally hidden from view beneath burkas. Black burkas. Hot black burkas—as in almost no air to breathe. The men had the run of the streets and the tea shops. Since the men were plainly visible I couldn’t help but notice that in relation to all other men we had seen, either in Turkey or in Iran, the Afghans in the cities we visited were quite tall, had much lighter skin, and wore turbans and baggy pants. Seeing someone with blue eyes or red hair wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities either. All the shopkeepers, innkeepers, restaurant workers, as well as people in the various bazaars, were extremely accommodating to us despite Ann and myself being dressed in jeans. I suppose since so many Westerners were exploring the region, they were actually used to them, and since we were transient we didn’t need to be whipped into shape.”
“I loved Afghanistan,” adds Ann. “It was a wonderful place. Iran and Turkey were really repressed, ugly, horrible places. The women were invisible, the men wore either brown or black, or brown and black, and nobody ever smiled. You couldn’t walk down the street. I understood after the trip was over that we totally violated all of their morals or ethics with our appearance. We were European females traveling, unaccompanied by family, with other males, and we wore pants and didn’t cover our faces. So it was really unpleasant. Every bathroom had holes cut out where the peepers could observe whatever was going on in the bathrooms, showers or toilets. Always being groped as you walked down the street... But in Afghanistan they were smiling and they wore colors and were pleasant. Or at least they didn’t grope you or peer at you as you went to the bathroom. But their women were completely covered with chadris, and peered through this little cloth latticework. We knew nothing about the cultures, and they probably knew nothing about us except for there was a stream of white Europeans crossing overland from basically Turkey to Delhi. You were always meeting people and it was always word-of-mouth for places to stay and so on.”
“Besides the obvious physical differences between the people of Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, there were many other things that stood out,” remembers Mary. “In Herat, taxicabs had been in part replaced by horse-drawn carriages, the horses colorfully adorned with elaborate headdresses dripping in bells. Everything chimed as they pranced down the street. Buses were wooden and made in the shape of a box with an open second story for your sheep or goat or whatever else you were bringing along. They were also used for the inevitable overflow of passengers. Also we noticed that no one ducked down to avoid the wind. Instead they seemed to love facing it head-on, turbans and baggy pants notwithstanding. Besides, the men were so skilled at wrapping their headgear that I doubt whether even a strong wind could blow their turbans off. Another distinguishing feature of these unusual but charming relics was the paintings of harem dancers which adorned their sides—which I found rather hilarious, considering the place in society that women there were relegated to. But, hey, a man could dream, right? All buses were manned by two employees, one who did the driving and another who sat in the passenger seat completely open to the outside. That way his job, which was to quickly exit the bus and hand-crank it up so that it could run, was made much easier. Once the old bus was up and running, down the streets it would rumble, sounds of the old ‘ooga, ooga’ squeeze horns warning other pedestrians and sometimes their donkeys of its approach. It was totally amazing.”
The four Americans soon adapted to this new, exotic environment. “On our first day of browsing the shops in Herat, Craig and Patrick discovered that one of the products for sale was hashish. So naturally the guys were now more interested in purchasing some of that over more sheepskin. I suppose they had quickly decided that it was part of the larger rich cultural experience. So chopping chunks off of the block and stuffing them into a pipe became a new part of Craig’s nightly routine. But he didn’t smoke alone: Patrick and Ann were eager to try it out as well. I was not eager to get into the dope scene, but I did eventually experiment later, in Kabul, since by that time I had had plenty of time to study the reaction it had on people that smoked it and it didn’t appear to be too dangerous.”
As well as smoking copious amounts of hashish out of a pipe he’d bought in the marketplace, Craig continued to dip into the stash of LSD he carried in his shoulder purse. “One night he begged me to take a tab,” Mary recalls. “I was really afraid, and was also not in the habit of bowing to peer pressure, but I finally relented. Nothing happened and I couldn’t have been happier.”
Smith also continued his nightly ritual of meditating for one hour in the lotus position before going to bed. “He tried again and again, also unsuccessfully, to get me to meditate,” remembers Mary. “However, one morning he told me that he had awakened in the middle of the night only to see me sitting in a lotus position, meditating. It obviously was a delusion but he was very pleased. Truth be told, what made the whole experience on the Hippie Trail for me had nothing to do with drugs, sex, rock and roll or meditation—it was what I was learning about these ancient cultures; their religious practices, food, customs and jewelry was what really excited me. So in many ways I suppose I wasn’t really a ’60s kind of woman. Yes, I was in that I wanted freedom and choices never available to young people before—and, hey, birth control pills had only recently hit the market so those options were now available for the first time without worry. But I was neither a California girl at the time or one that needed to find myself while simultaneously drifting through an altered state. Instead, I was merely a seeker of concrete experiences. Craig was a seeker of the abstract.”
From Herat, they eventually made their way southeast to Kandahar. From there, they planned to travel to Kabul. But at the last minute Craig elected to stay a few more days in Kandahar and catch up with the others later. It turned out to be the most fateful decision of his life.
“The night before Patrick, Ann and I left for Kabul, we had all gone to a musical event together,” recounts Mary. “I don’t even know how we heard about it, but I am guessing someone indicated it to Craig, since he always carried his guitar everywhere. The concert was in a small room and everyone was squatting on their chairs, something that I was just getting used to since normally we sit on them.” “It was a smoke shop,” remembers Ann. “Everyone was using hookahs.”
“It was an incredible evening,” continues Mary. “The male musicians were all in a semicircle on the floor in the front of the room playing instruments I had never seen or heard before. Everything about the music was 180 degrees different than ours, but it was amazing. Craig was especially enamored with it. The next morning he told me he wasn’t coming with us, but would join us in Kabul a few days later. I assumed he wanted to see more of this marvelous music.”
So Mary, along with Ann and Patrick, left for Kabul without Craig. There they waited for him in a hotel, the agreed meeting place. He never showed so they continued on their journey, eventually making it all the way to India and Nepal. Whenever they’d run into other travelers along the trail they’d ask if they’d heard anything about the whereabouts of an American guy named Craig. It wasn’t until several months later, when Mary and Ann returned to Kabul, that they finally got word of what might have happened to him.
“I ran into some people and asked about him and they said they’d heard about this American named Craig who went crazy,” remembers Ann. “The rumor I heard was that he was hallucinating on LSD and went running through the market with a knife, threatening people or being threatened, and then just disappeared into insanity.”
“The details that they gave were sketchy,” elaborates Mary, “but they mentioned seeing Craig in a marketplace in Kandahar looking over the fruit. Then suddenly he had grabbed a knife and gone after a vendor in one of the stalls. Apparently this action provoked an immediate reaction from the man’s friends. The tables turned, and the last thing they saw was fruit, turbans and men flying, and Craig running for his life up over a couple of distant hills, then disappearing over a ridge with the men still in hot pursuit.”
There is no definitive account of what happened next, but apparently Craig was badly beaten and left for dead. He later described being severely beaten by a group of men who then urinated on him. In another account, he said he was then kidnapped, drugged and raped repeatedly over a period of several days. Miraculously, he survived, but spent some time afterwards in a hospital there. “Nobody seemed to know what had happened to him after that,” says Ann. “Was he institutionalized? Did he end up at the embassy? How did he get out? There was no consulate in Kandahar, only Kabul.”
What is known for certain is that after this nightmarish experience, Craig Smith was never the same. Quite possibly, in addition to the mental trauma, he suffered a severe concussion and permanent brain injury, triggering his subsequent mental illness.
Craig had never displayed any psychotic or violent tendencies prior to this incident. The knife incident was, by the reckoning of everyone who knew him, completely out of character. It’s quite possible he grabbed the knife in self-defense if he feared he was about to be robbed or assaulted. That fear could have been real or imagined. It’s almost certain he was under the influence of LSD and hashish at the time, which would have amplified his paranoia considerably. Either way, the consequences of the attack were devastating and permanent.
Mary, who now works in the psychiatric field, suspects that Craig may have had a preexisting psychiatric disorder that could have been triggered by the trauma of the attack combined with the drugs he was using. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised, now that I have more years of experience behind me in psych, that he may have been a budding schizophrenic,” she reflects. “Schizophrenia typically presents in a man’s late teens, early twenties. They begin to get more isolative, draw into themselves and find it difficult to maintain relationships. They often think that people are following them or intend to kill them, which is perhaps why he grabbed the knife, intending to strike first—if it actually happened that way. But it all fits. I don’t think that the LSD helped at all. It would have made things worse as it obviously also distorts reality.”
Mary and Ann returned to the States in April 1969. In the years since, Mary had often wondered about Craig’s fate, and carried a certain amount of guilt too, wondering if she was to blame because she had left him behind in Kandahar.
“I am relieved to have a clearer picture of what actually happened between myself and Craig Smith,” she wrote me in 2003, “and a small idea of just what might have happened to him. It is good for me to know that I wasn’t that brain-dead as to have walked away from someone who just didn’t manage to come back to a hotel room. I have always wondered what had become of him, but had felt that LSD had played a large part in whatever caused him to snap on that occasion in Afghanistan since I know for a fact that he was dosing himself with it regularly. Whatever the circumstances, it seems that after he ran up over that hill in Kandahar he became someone else.”
What happened immediately after the attack on Craig in Kandahar is not clear. Given his injuries and his mental state, it seems unlikely that his journey down the Hippie Trail continued beyond Afghanistan—but it may have. India had been his stated destination when he left the States, and he later claimed to have been there.
Hal Kant, Craig’s lawyer since the Good Time Singers days, appears to have had a role in getting Craig out of his dire situation in Kandahar and back home to Los Angeles. It was through Kant that word filtered back to the States about Craig’s fate.
In December 1968, Michael and Sally Storm were in Kant’s office taking care of some business. They hadn’t seen or heard from Craig in a couple of years, but his name came up in a most unexpected way. “Hal Kant told us that Craig had been beaten and robbed in Afghanistan,” remembers Sally. “We hadn’t known that he was even out of the country, but Hal Kant told us that he had been found in an insane asylum in Afghanistan.”
An insane asylum in Afghanistan. The Storms confirm that these were the exact words Kant used. “I know Hal Kant said ‘insane asylum,’ because the idea of an Afghani insane asylum was such a horrifying concept I never forgot it,” says Sally. “Had he said ‘hospital’ I would have had a very different reaction. He said that Craig had no idea who he was, or what had happened to him. I don’t think Hal ever told me how Craig came to be released, if he regained his memory there or if someone identified him.”