Plunging In
It’s 1970.
Google Earth doesn’t yet exist, but imagine that it does. You are in outer space. The earth is a round blue marble. Then you zoom in, in real time, on the map of the United States, the West Coast, Southern California. You see the dark blue waters of the Pacific Ocean . . . and as you get closer, you see the long ribbon of the Pacific Coast Highway, the beach towns south of Los Angeles, the furrows of the waves. You see the slender strip of land called the Balboa Peninsula, and you draw close to Corona del Mar. There is the beach, dotted with fire pits. There is an outcropping of cliffs that form a natural amphitheater near the mouth of the harbor. The rocks look wrinkled at this height. The sun is setting.
As you get closer, you see that there is a huge crowd massing the area. At first the people look like ants. They’re perched on the rocks, sitting on the sand, standing in the shallows of the rolling water. They have their arms around each other. They seem to be singing.
Beyond the scene on the beach, the world is a chaotic, confused place in 1970. The Vietnam War is raging. Richard Nixon is president of the United States. The nation is convulsing with divisions between young and old, black and white, and hippies and “straights,” meaning conservatives. Young women are burning their bras in the streets; young men are burning their draft cards. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison rule the airwaves, though drugs will take their lives within a year. The hippie movement, born of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, has been turned inside out by disillusionment, bad trips, cynicism, and pain. For many of the flower children, their kaleidoscope colors have faded to shades of gray.
Now you are close enough to the beach to hear the music. There are simple choruses and haunting, melodic harmonies. Something about “one in the Spirit, one in the Lord.” The setting looks like a baptismal scene from the New Testament except for the cutoff shorts of the slender teenaged girls. Most have long hair parted in the middle; some are shivering, sharing a striped towel, and weeping tears of joy, with huge, fresh smiles.
There is a long-haired teenaged boy. He looks like he’s about seventeen. He’s more quiet and reserved than the girls, as if he still carries the burdens of the past dead ends of drinking, drug use, and skeptical despair. A bearded pastor in a flowing tunic, sopping wet, dunks the young man down in the cold water for a long moment. It’s as if he’s been buried.
Then the hippie pastor raises the kid up, and the teenager bursts out of the sea, water streaming from his face and hair and shoulders. His heart is on his face, and he is weeping. Joy. Release. Freedom. The first thing he gasps, though, is strange:
“I’m alive!”