thought. It turns out that I am part of a tribe (of fringies, but a tribe nonetheless). Understanding and accepting fringie life helps me to better navigate the waters of the normie world, for although I am not as crunchy as some, I am certainly crispier than most. I am proud that I, like so many of the women in this book, will never have beige carpeting in my house, will never own or wear a skirt suit, will never revere misogynistic steak-house politics, and will never be a
Growing up between two worlds, I learned to judge people by their actions, not their outsides. People are either part of the problem or part of the solution. For or against the planet and everyone on it. Black, white, fat, skinny-who cares? The wise counterculture hippie in me doesn’t care about that. Lazy is not black or white or brown or yellow. It is lazy. Sexual carelessness is not hippie; it is sexual carelessness. Lastly, everyone has a story to tell, everyone is unique and everyone has to find her own way in this world regardless of her upbringing and her relation to the starting line.
If you grew up in bare feet, you may find this book a comforting balm of commonality. If you are a normie, you might appreciate the, at times, alien differences between us and our collective ‘life is short but very wide’ approach to things. Either way, these essays offer a vivid glimpse of the wild ride of a counterculture childhood. All in all, a compelling anthropological gathering.
Love,
Moon Zappa
August 1999
Introduction
This is what I remember: the rusted frame of an old car aban-loned in a ditch near the farm, Ray sitting on an overturned bucket watching his vegetable garden grow, the comings and goings of men in John Deere caps and plaid shirts to and from the barn across the road, the long drive into town in the red ‘62 Ford truck, the taste of dust rising from the lane, the blackberries, the smell of wet dogs, standing on my tip toes to pluck a seed from a sunflower, gathering brown eggs in the chicken coop, priming the pump, swimming in the pond, snapping turtles, strawberries, morning glories, snapdragons, the Allman Brothers’
I am the child of hippies. I spent my plump, naked girlhood frolicking through the vegetable garden and spinning on the porch to crazed, hippie banjo music. I called my parents by their first names until I was nine and knew who John Lennon was before I had heard of Jesus Christ. Grace Slick and Che Guevara were my role models-not Farrah Fawcett, not Betty Ford. I wanted to grow up to be a fire dog. I ate millet casserole and wheat bread, uncoerced. I was weaned on goat’s milk. Until I was six, I insisted on wearing a different color sock on each foot. I ran with the dogs. I buried my dolls. My mother told me I was an artist. My father taught me to sing. I didn’t take baths. I believed Richard Nixon was lying, and I believed I could grow up to do anything.
For my parents and their friends, the idea at the heart of the counterculture was simple: rejection. Rejection of the Establishment’s war, its social mores, its institutions, its hang-ups, its corruption and its pantsuits. The counterculture was a social phenomenon, not a political one. There was no hippie manifesto and, unless you count Woodstock, no one ever called a summit meeting. Yet, some common threads linked the hippies. Like my parents, many were from white, middle-class backgrounds. Many were antiwar. Many used drugs. But the hippies were not at the forefront of the anti-Vietnam movement, like the students or other members of the New Left. Their form of social protest was nonparticipation-total rejection of the war machine and all its accouterments. Cops were ‘pigs,’ the president was a crook, America was spelled with a ‘K,’ adults were not to be trusted-even white sugar was suspect.
Although the hippie trip started out as a social experiment, it became political despite itself. The hippies set about creating a lifestyle that not only abandoned, but defied the cultural norms. By rejecting the expectations and betrayals of their upbringings, they could start fresh with the next generation. They could change the world one child at a time.
Back in the ‘real’ world, the world my parents had forsaken, the questionable futures of these children soon became the source of much anxiety along the cul de sac. What was to become of kids like me who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns instead of names? What future lay in store for children who were raised with no boundaries, who knew about drugs and Janis Joplin and the female orgasm, who were never instructed in the art of personal hygiene, who were alienated from mainstream culture, who were taught to question authority, government, the social order? Certainly such children would be ill prepared to participate in ‘normal’ society, much less join the Junior League. At best they would be maladjusted; at worst, sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists.
Hippie kids grew up the products of a great experiment. As with any scene, there were good parents, and bad parents, and everyone’s experience was not the same. But these parents were all trying something different, something radical, something revolutionary. Their failures, in many cases, could be considered as unique and interesting as their successes.
What better way to learn about a lifestyle than by looking at the children it produced? How successful were the hippies at insulating themselves from mainstream culture, and what influences could they not escape? How have the children of the hippies taken up their parents’ legacy of rebellion? What aspects of the counterculture have these children embraced as adults, and what have they rejected?
As children of the counterculture, we faced constant negotiation between home life and outside influences. We learned to live between two worlds: the one our parents created and the straight one that surrounded us. Our parents couldn’t shield us from mainstream culture-though many of them tried. They could simply do their best to pass on their values and beliefs about a difficult, corrupt world. Many of us still struggle with this dichotomy, vainly attempting to be true to each world and betray neither. We may be hippies at home and yuppies in the office. We might want to make pottery and grow organic vegetables and still be drawn to cell phones and Jettas. We struggle to retain the truth of who we are, which many of us find rooted in our childhoods, even as we live in a world that may eschew our alternative beginnings.
Our parents offered us a rare freedom to create our lives as we chose. It was part of a larger commitment to freedom that came to define the hippie counterculture. Free love, free speech, freedom from societal restraints. Those of us who felt safe in this freedom reveled in it, those of us who did not feel safe pined for structure, curfews, limits. Freedom without a safety net can have dire and lasting results. In collecting these stories, I wanted to explore what hippie kids had learned about freedom from coming of age in an environment that valued it so highly yet may not have considered all of its consequences.
I have chosen to focus on girls, because I think that raising a girl ‘outside’ of society has particularly radical implications. These hippie girls were raised in an era that was just beginning to liberate girls from the expectations that accompanied generations of social and sexual repression. They were being raised by young women who had
