rejected the roles prescribed to them, for the promised liberation of the counterculture. I was interested to see what type of feminism this would spawn. How would that early empowerment affect their gender politics? The writers in this book all have strong independent voices; they are the daughters of mothers who were courageous or desperate enough to walk away from a lifetime of gender roles and boundaries. For many of these women, the promised liberation of the counterculture proved to be an empty one, as traditional gender roles followed them to the communes and the farmhouses. For their daughters, the promise was to prove more fruitful.
I started this project in an effort to understand my own experience, through the experience of my peers. Of my values, beliefs, propensities, quirks-of who I am today-what do I owe to my upbringing, and what is simply a result of my own inevitable peculiarities? Yet, this anthology has taught me much more than that. Its lasting value will not be only in the anecdotal memoirs themselves, but in their collective insight on the unique impact that this specific social experiment had on its children, and how that impact, and its implications on child rearing, has not yet finished reverberating.
This anthology begins with a birth and ends with another. We come full circle, from girl-child to woman to girl-child. To begin, Zoe Eakle writes of her home birth to hippie expatriates on the Canadian island of her childhood. To end, Suzanne M. Cody writes a letter to her infant daughter about her own girlhood, and what she would and would not change. In between, Ariel Gore laments what was lost when the world, the counterculture and her childhood changed. Poet Paola Bilbrough remembers her New Zealand counterculture girlhood in poetry that is evocative of the strange magic particular to her hippie outback home. Elizabeth She describes the darker side of free love run amok. For a perspective of another sort, Angela Lam writes not of her own girlhood in the counterculture, but of her friend, Summer, and how a brief encounter with Summer’s family challenged Angela’s sheltered world. These and the other essays recount a particular American childhood in ways that shed light not just on their parents’ choices, but on the radical implications of attempting to raise children outside of mainstream society.
A social experiment only becomes revolutionary when its implications transcend the moment, when it pervades and changes the society, when it ripples through the generations. The legacy of the hippie trip is not merely in its children, but in the fact that we are still working through the lessons of our upbringing, the successes and the failures. What we take from that experience, what we incorporate into our own lives-that is the legacy. We are sex-addicted, atheist, communist artists, after all. We are the people our grandparents warned us about. And we are having children. It can only lead to more ‘uncivilized’ behavior.
Our parents laid down their weapons long ago, but the hippie kids in this anthology, and all the hippie kids I know, still struggle with questions: questions like when to take on society, and when to go along; when to live in the straight world, and when to abandon the rat race and take a summer off to follow Phish; when to march against clear-cutting-animal-testing-ozone-destroying-pro-life-legislating-poor-people-exploiting-fundamentalist- special-interests, and when to stay home and watch
If there is anything that these essays teach us it is this: There is just no way that you can escape being influenced by a childhood designed specifically to influence you. We were raised in a culture intended to teach us to challenge everything everybody else was telling us-to subvert the dominant paradigm. No matter that this sentiment has more currency as a bumper sticker than as a core cultural value of the nineties. You can take the girl out of the counterculture, but you can’t take the counterculture out of the girl.
Chelsea Cain
Portland, Oregon
August 1999
Wild Child
Water Baby
I guess my folks were trying out something new, but me, I never knew the difference. By the time I showed up they were already in British Columbia on the west coast of Canada. I was born in Sointula, the island of their destination.
Faded color photos create patchy images of who my parents were then. Snapshots of Dad with grown-out hair and thick dark beard, his jeans tucked into his gum boots, posing with home-grown hemp plants as tall as he is or sitting at the kitchen table pitting cherries from the tree in our backyard.
My mom’s hair was long and straight and parted in the middle like a smooth dark stream around her freckled face. She said she didn’t know what hard work was until they left the city. Pictures usually catch her in the middle of something, her sparkly eyes half closed from blinking at the camera. She is bending over a baby, or the dishes, or a row of weeding in the garden. Sometimes she is singing with a band on the front porch with a beer in her hand. Like my father, she is younger than I am today. Her long neck curves gently down into her back. She is beautiful.
And there’s me, too young to remember myself, naked except for a hand-knit cardigan, crumbs or dirt on my face-it’s hard to tell. I’m gazing earnestly into the camera. Staring up from a past turned to myth by memory and this word, ‘hippie,’ which apparently encompasses my childhood.
Sometimes when I introduce myself as Zoe, people ask, ‘Are your parents Creek?’ And so I say, ‘No, they were hippies.’ I don’t tell them the name presented itself to my parents during a particularly stellar acid trip. That would feed too much into expectation. Nevertheless, everyone gets an instant picture in their head. They are, of course, no closer to knowing the people in those snapshots.
When I go back to the island I try to imagine what my parents would have seen the day they moved there. What were their thoughts as they rumbled over potholes along the dusty gravel road? Blue-gray speckled rocks, driftwood and ocean on one side and on the other, merciless blackberry bushes guarding tall evergreens that stop just before the ceiling of the world. The forest interrupted here and there by clearings with small wooden homes.
It was late May, 1970. My parents had successfully crossed the border having declared their intention to emigrate, and had driven all day, anxious to reach the island. My mom was seven months pregnant with me, her first of two children. They were traveling in a CM panel truck, lovingly altered with a blowtorch to create Plexiglas skylights in the ceiling. They had asked a friend to install the windows right above where their heads rested on the sleeping platform. Underneath the platform lay all their worldly possessions.
The sun would be sinking low. Their truck would have just been transported from the ferry to the island by a Jaws of Life crane, with their dog barking on the passenger seat: The ferry didn’t yet have a ramp that could support vehicles. They would be tired and eager to get to Sue’s house, a drop-in mostly for American folks who had heard about Sointula and wanted to check it out. Did my father question the sanity of this venture? Did my mother wish for even a moment that she’d kept her job at the telephone company?
What the locals might have thought of all this activity is a book unto itself. Sointula was founded by Finnish immigrants in the late 1800s, who started a commune before communes were cool. They were sick of being used as cheap labor and decided to pool their resources and create a Utopian community from the best of the communist and Marxist philosophies they had discussed back home. Sointula suffered many birthing pains but finally flourished in its small-town, island-unto-itself way. Although the Utopian dream eventually fell by the wayside, it has never been entirely forgotten.
Then, along come these trippy hippie types to start a new way of living. The American hippies were mostly city folks and had no idea how to relate to the locals or even that they should. There were lots of Canadian alternative types all over doing the same thing and they undoubtedly had mixed reactions to these Americans coming in and taking over just by the sheer decibel of their enthusiasm.
Sue was Finnish, but had been raised in California. That afternoon when my parents turned into the gravel drive at her place, the first thing they saw was Sue’s cedar-shake homestead to their right. Eight wide steps led up
