I’ve never really liked the “baby boomer” description. Besides, I think there’s a major barrier between the early experiences of those born before ’47 or ’48, and those after. Around ’48, my wave, was when TV sets were present from the very beginning of our exposure to the world. We can’t remember ever not having one at least somewhere in the neighborhood. (Suddenly, I remember being three or four and having the Sullivan brothers show up to watch “Howdy Doody” with me. They didn’t yet have a tube of their own.)
Every year as our class advanced, our new round of teachers was baffled. All they knew was we were “different” from the previous ones. So to some extent, the TV influence feeds into the hippie outbreak. We were, in effect, wired differently from our seniors. Still are, for that matter.
But the other big shortcoming in the boomer classification is the way it ignores the huge fissure within our generation between those who supported the Vietnam Conflict and those of us who opposed it. That’s something that’s never fully healed, and it’s certainly crippled our ability to come together to advance the ideals some of us, at least, so passionately embraced. I suspect there are many politicians and corporate executives – the dreaded Establishment, that is – who actively worked to keep the wound festering.
So here I am, calling for a renewed vision of our legacy. That’s been one of the promptings of the novels in my series Hippie Trails. You’re welcome to come along on the trip.
When you go to the beach, you need to secure your snacks from the marauding gulls. Here one makes off with a bag of popcorn, which the bird promptly ripped open before a host of rivals flocked in.
Sometimes as I listen during an open mic, especially (and oh how I hate that spelling!), I find myself focusing on a particular reader’s moralizing and editorializing or cliche or heavy reliance on simile rather than metaphor, and that soon sends me into a disturbing zone.
What happens is that I begin editing heavily with an imaginary thick black marker, striking through all of the offending words and phrases, and pretty soon I’m tuning into only to the blackened blocks in the air and tuning out everything else.
Admittedly, I edit myself heavily, and this is a central step in the creation of many of my own works. Admittedly, too, I’m projecting myself onto the poor writer onstage. Admittedly, in particular, I’m forgetting to be humble and open here, star that I might imagine myself to be.
In drawing on the hippie era, I realize how many different strands there were to the movement. Mine happened to lead into a yoga ashram, and though we were drug-free and celibate, we were also at the crossroads of a lot of the hippie action.
As I ponder the era, I also realize DL’s journey in those pages could just as easily turned toward underground violence, had he joined one of the cells of bombers targeting military research operations in frustration, and that version of the story probably would have had commercial publishing cachet. But to me, it would have been dishonest.
More meaningful to my vision is the comment by Mari (River Mama 5) to an earlier posting here:
Amazing how many different views there are. … Hippies to me were quite different. To me, it gave birth to great changes in our society. … I am quite thankful for … the back to the land movement and the Calvary Chapels churches that came to exist during this time. I came to know Jesus Christ in one of them.
They also pioneered living a simpler life … showing compassion to others. Taking care of this gift that is our planet. The “hippies” in America, were great artisans. As a weaver, quilter, and knitter, I look back at this time and find myself inspired by the way creativity roamed free among this way of living.
This is the side I wish to nourish and celebrate. And thank you, Mari and all the others, for sharing.
On my Monday free of the office, I drove up the palisades to nose around a picturesque river city in dull, mid-October weather. Looked at the signs. City Fish Market – Fresh or Smoked, down along the water. “Bill’s,” one door said; the other was “Private.” Down the main street from Doug’s Steak House, which was supposed to be THE place for Mississippi catfish, the town school stood in front of Lock and Dam No. 10.
I pulled into the Corps of Engineers parking lot as the Jack Wofford pushed its barges into the lock, noticed an observation tower, and climbed up to a deck occupied by mostly married retirees. But in the corner, more my age, was a woman in a London Fog trench coat and big boots, her long, black hair blowing in the cold wind. For a while I wondered if she was part of the pairs and quartets of older folks with their cameras who had come to view the autumn foliage and poke around the gift shops and galleries. She turned her head, noticed me briefly, turned back several times. Between twenty-five and thirty-two, I guessed. Proper makeup, classy.
Then, on the riverboat, a cook appeared at a door and fired back with his camera. She laughed.
Once the retirees beside her left, I asked her how the crews got their three lengths of barges – 3×3, for nine in all – out of the locks. “I don’t know,” almost a question. “I’ve never been here before.”
This time I noticed her crooked teeth. Began to wonder about games.
The cook emerged again, this time from the pilot house, and threw something, calculating for the wind. The object curved sharply at the last moment, into her fine catch. She unwrapped it a bit, saw it was a brownie with a phone number and address inside. She giggled to another old couple: “I think he’s had a lot of experience.”
Once the riverboat churned out of the lock, she descended to a powder blue Ford Torino, donned kid gloves with little holes for driving, and drove off.
The wrapper around her plates left me wondering if she was from the Henry County in Iowa or the one up in Minnesota.
I was left wondering, of course. Why so dressed up? And free on a Monday? That wasn’t a typical single person’s car. A professional, between stops? An art major, who gave it up for money? A government worker, with Columbus Day free? Off to a sweet rendezvous? Delightful divorced? Bored, with kids?
Me, at the time, with my own wife a thousand miles to the west, presumably finishing college.
A central problem for newspapers in the past half century is that they became increasingly homogenized and thus lost their distinctive, individual identities. Admittedly, that was always a problem when people saw it as “the paper” rather than the Times or Post or Chronicle or Herald and so on. But in the days when a city would have two or more daily newspapers, each one needed to have some unique identity to set it apart in the marketplace. Sometimes it was along party lines – Republican or Democrat – or social identities, such as blue-collar or proper society, but often it also meant the kind of news that was emphasized: national and international, for instance, versus local. And hometown columnists were always a voice that readers could count on. Think Herb Caen in San Francisco, Mike Royko in Chicago, or Jimmy Breslin in New York – or any of the great sportswriters.
In those days, newspapers were thinner than they became in the last decades of the 20th century – often just two sections – rather than the four to eight that followed in the great mergers and closures that led most cities to have only one daily journal. Much of that problem, we should note, could be blamed on the “unduplicated readership” that ad-space buyers relied on in allocating their budgets. No matter how marvelous the Washington Star was in its final days, or the suburban Journal papers were in the counties around the city, they couldn’t overcome that hurdle – when it came to outright readership, the Washington Post had the monopoly. Since everybody had to read it, there was no point in advertising elsewhere.
With few exceptions – New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia – we’re left with single-paper markets where the product looks and reads like those everywhere else, except that the stories take place there than elsewhere.
As the local newspaper more and more became a one-size-fits-all model, what I no longer heard was the feeling that it “speaks for me” or my section of the wider community. And now, even those special voices within its pages are no longer there – one by one, the columnists were never replaced.
The newspaper I longed to create had little resemblance to that bland crime-and-crashes emphasis that too often prevails these days, in place of more difficult and costly investigative reporting or a bigger view that critically examines education, the fine arts, social justice, the environment, and so on.
It’s hard to get excited by what’s there. And we wonder why circulation kept declining even before the Internet?
This is, I should note, a contrarian viewpoint, since the publishers kept proclaiming the “improved service” each time they merged two papers into one. So here we are, online and blogging.
~*~
Hometown News
To find out more about Hometown News or to obtain your own copy, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
Unlike the rest of my family, I have an aversion to onions. Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not pretty. I’ll spare you my rant. Likewise, I could cite a long history, with heavy childhood quagmire, but we’ll just leave it there.
Leeks, on the other hand, create no problems. They’re marvelous and so beautiful in and out of the garden. So it’s a glorious compromise, all the way around. (Shall we say that potato-leek soup is one of my favorites?)
And I’ve developed quite the love for garlic. In and out of the garden.
It’s tune in, turn on, and take action in this tale of campus intrigue. Little does a small band in a remote college town realize its opposition to small-ante bureaucracy goes straight to the state capital. And then Washington and the Mekong Delta are another matter as the hippie movement hits tranquil Daffodil. Nothing will remain quite the same.
As the headline said:
BOTCHED DRUG BUST BACKFIRES.
When narcotics agents made an early morning knock-down-the-doors raid on the twelfth-floor of one of the high-rise dormitory towers, they turned up nothing – and were surrounded by irate residents before they could frame anyone, either.
“If you think the slaying of innocent students at Jackson State University was merely a racial atrocity,” Lakasha proclaimed, “you’re not seeing the big picture. It’s about an attack on civil rights – freedoms that belong to all of us. You don’t have to live in a big city to live in ghetto housing. Every student in Daffodil lives in a ghetto. Where I come from, we have a word for high-rise housing like these big dorms – the Projects. And the pigs who come charging into the Projects act just like those who busted in on the twelfth floor the other night. Never mind whether they find anything or not. Look, the university’s demanding that the students pay for the busted doors and busted furniture and busted walls. That’s why they call it a bust in the first place. Wake up, America! Demand the names of the ‘unnamed informants,’ the ones who were so wrong about the presence of illicit substances in those rooms. Wake up, I say! Mississippi’s closer to Daffodil than you think!”
~*~
To learn more about my novel, go to my page at Smashwords.com.
I read – and write – not to escape the world but rather to more fully engage it. So literature for me hardly falls into the Entertainment category, even when it’s entertaining.
Likewise, my goal in the written word is to perceive some basic or essential connection with new clarity, understanding, and compassion.
This makes a world of difference, page by page. Maybe I’m just looking for holy scripture, even of a secular sort. Or at least the Holy One along with the mundane.
Often, my approach to writing and other fine arts resembles the essence of a dream – one foot in the present, the other in the past. Or, in another way, one foot in concrete reality, the other in fantasy of some sort, such as surrealism, as a way to engage more than I’d otherwise apprehend.
Rockport, Massachusetts, sits at the end of Cape Ann.
Mention “the Cape” anywhere in New England and people assume you’re talking about Cape Cod, that marvelous arm extending from southeastern Massachusetts. (Well, it does have its own dictionary entry.)
Mention “the Other Cape,” and a few knowing heads will nod or smile in recognition of Cape Ann, jutting from Boston’s North Shore.
It’s not that those are New England’s only two points of land extending into the ocean – the definition of a cape. For perspective, two of Maine’s most photographed lighthouses are on Cape Elizabeth and, close to us, Cape Neddick.
What Cape Ann and Cape Cod share is a certain ambience, a feeling that – well, you’re in a unique place and not just anywhere in New England.
If you’re not familiar with Cape Cod, let me say there are many fine guidebooks that describe the experience. Today’s gallivant, though, takes us ever so briefly to Cape Ann, which by its most generous definitions (probably mine) can be no more than a third the length of its famed rival. While Cape Cod is neatly demarked by the Bourne and Sagamore bridges, Cape Ann is a bit more diffusive. Since we come down from the north, we find that “Cape” familiarity in the air as we come into Ipswich, which claims more “first period houses” (1625 to 1725) than anywhere else in America – 58 in all. It’s a charming community and, like most of Cape Ann itself, has a more varied mix of social classes than you typically find on the bigger peninsula.
My introduction to the town came last fall when K. Peddlar Bridges invited me down to do a poetry reading on his Roadpoet cable-access television show – and we had a blast. Before the taping, I went for a walk through some lovely year-round neighborhoods that could stand as textbook tours of American architectural styles. I crossed a stone arched bridge as geese took V-formation and honked low above me. Turns out the 1764 Choate Bridge is the oldest double stone arch bridge in continuous use in the country. (I don’t make this up, nor do I challenge the accuracy of the claims.) Leading to an impressive Colonial-era garrison house, the span connects to Turkey Shore and Labor in Vain roads. You get the picture. And, yes, you don’t get a better sense of that Puritan outlook than “Labor in Vain,” do you?
The reproduction 1657 Alexander Knight house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, suggests the difficult life facing the early settlers, especially through a New England winter.The elegant 1677 Whipple House in Ipswich is considerably smaller than the House of the Seven Gables in Salem but similar in style.
So the next week, my wife and I took off for a fuller exploration. We headed on down the road through gentleman farms and veered off for Crane Beach, passing long vistas of salt marshes where prized hay was once harvested. (It was high in mineral nutrition but gave the milk a salty taste, according to the tales.)
The beach itself was once part of the Crane family’s Castle Hill summer estate, which is another destination. The estate, the 1,234-acre Castle Neck dunes and beach, and adjacent 700-acre wildlife preserve are part of the Trustees of Reservations holdings. (Be advised, there’s an admission fee to the park – $8 a car when we went; up to $25 a car on summer weekends.)
But what a beach! My wife was overjoyed to see white sand, like those of her native North Carolina, rather than the usual gray or brown of New England. And that sand seems to run on forever, with fascinating patches of rippled washboard, tufts of sea oats, and an array of shells we don’t find in our usual rounds of the coast. It may have been October, but our nostrils were greeted with that distinctive Coppertone aroma, and our eyes viewed an array of sun worshippers extending their tans as well as a few daring souls in the water. We walked and walked and, well, might still be walking if we hadn’t felt hunger kick in.
We’ll be back.
Washboarding and footprints decorate the sand at Crane Beach.Here’s a view looking into a dune behind the beach.
Venturing on, we came into the small waterside village of Essex, where we poked into Woodman’s “in the rough” for a seafood lunch. “Rough,” which is also in the name of an outdoor haunt we love in York, Maine, seems to indicate ordering and picking up from a counter rather than wait staff service, as well as a picnic-flavor rustic decor. As we looked at the blackboard and its prices, we nearly left for cheaper fare, but Rachel caught a posted review by food gurus Michael and Jane Stern – and I knew we weren’t leaving. I’m glad we stayed.
It was fun and filling – they don’t skimp on their portions. We can see why it’s a classic destination for the traditional regional seafood, especially of the “messy” sort. And, as she said, they “know how to do batter.” That’s a high compliment on her part. (Onion rings, anyone?)
The heart of Cape Ann is the city of Gloucester and its varied neighborhoods around the waters. It claims to be from the same year as Dover, although unlike my city, it was abandoned for a period, and is about the same size, roughly 29,000 residents. It lays claim to being America’s oldest seaport and has always been a busy, often brutish, fishing harbor. Gorton’s Seafood uses the city’s sea captain sculpture as its emblem. The Perfect Storm movie captures some of this legacy. These days it’s also the home to a number of whale-watch operations, due to its proximity to the famed Stellwagen Bank fishing grounds. In the 1950s and ’60s poet Charles Olson sought to capture the local spirit in his Maximus series, drawing on Ezra Pound’s literary foundation.
For us, though, the glory of the place is its three large wind-generator turbines rotating gracefully from the highest points along Route 128. They are immense works of art, comforting, landmarks. How anyone can oppose their construction baffles us. And, yes, they do sing … softly.
The trees might give you an idea of the scale and majesty of these Cape Ann landmarks.
Cape Ann culminates in the town of Rockport, which has long attracted summer artists to its shores. More recently, the three-decade old Rockport chamber music summer festival has developed a loyal following, which led to the 2010 opening of the 330-seat Shalin Liu Performance Center and its year-round offerings that include classical, folk, blues, and jazz. When they say “intimate,” it’s true. What makes this hall truly amazing is that the back of the stage has wooden panels, for acoustical purposes, that roll away to reveal a panorama of the harbor. Maybe the Santa Fe Opera surpasses the view, but I bet you can find folks who can quibble.
The village itself has much of the Cape Cod shopping flavor of boutiques, restaurants, artist galleries, jewelers, and so on – especially in its Bearskin Neck district.
The big window in the largest building overlooking Rockport Harbor is the back of the stage at the Shalin Liu Performance Center. By the way, the tide’s out. We were among a crowd enjoying an art installation that doubled as sunny seating on one of the stone wharves.Downtown Rockport has a traditional blend of resort retailers … and shoppers to match.
By the way, Massachusetts Bay Transit trains run from Boston’s North Station to Rockport, with Cape Ann stops along the way.
While I mentioned whale watches, I should note we prefer to venture out from Newburyport to the north, in part because the vessel there has the option of heading to either Stellwagen Bank in Massachusetts Bay or Jeffrey’s Ledge in the Gulf of Maine. When it goes to Stellwagen, though, it cruises around Cape Ann and offers fine views of the Straightsmouth Island and Thacher Island twin lighthouses – the 1861 replacements for the 1771 originals – closer to Gloucester Harbor.
