Pacific Coast Highway
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by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

At the end of the psychedelic 60s I was a very precocious pre-teen, tuned in and turned on. I was predisposed to the anti-authoritarian, non-conformist movement of the day by the upbringing, or lack of it, that my fiercely independent parents did, or did not, provide me.

A few months before my 19th birthday, in late May of 1976, I hitched a ride with a college acquaintance, a woman I knew (in the biblical sense), out to California. She and a friend of hers, another woman, were driving someone else's pickup truck across the country. That third person in the pickup, seeing me as an obstacle to her romantic intentions with the second person, my acquaintance, arranged to throw me out of the vehicle just outside of Salt Lake City. What an inhospitable landscape that was, stuck beside Route 80 on an enormous plain of salt, glittering white under a blazing sun.

But, as it often does when you're 18-years-old, fortune smiled on me. In no time at all, I got a ride with a 20-something-year-old sailor, who was driving a convertible Chevy Impala from leave in Ohio back to base in San Diego. That night we slept in the car somewhere off the road in western Nevada.

Pacific Coast Highway
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The next day we drove through the Sierra Nevada, San Francisco and then down the magnificent, but treacherous, Pacific Coast Highway to my destination, two friends' house in San Luis Obispo. On that drive, high above the Pacific, careening around those tight curves, often only several feet away from sheer precipice and eternity, that corn-fed, very American sailor kept gleefully shouting, "I've got radials." After a few choruses of that, I remember shouting back, "I don't care what you've got. Slow down!"

The sailor dropped me off at the door of my friends' house in San Luis. They were a couple, whom I knew from Connecticut; she, the older sister of an ex-high school sweetheart and he, an ex-radio talk show host, from a family familiar with mine for generations. The Mexicans say: El mundo es un pañuelo, which, depending on how life is treating you, translates either as "The world is a handkerchief" or "The world is a snot rag."

Life was treating me pretty good; ah, California! After ten or so days in SLO, I hitchhiked up to Berkeley. I had in my backpack the address of a house there, on Pardee Street, given to me by a musician I met, a member of a band, which was playing in a bar back in Connecticut: "You can stay there," he smiled at me. I did, showing up unannounced and made welcome in that very alternative household, the only member of which, whom I can still remember was a girl named Johnny. And all I remember of Johnny was a story she told me of her escaping from a mental hospital out in the country. She went over the fence and got out on the state road where traffic was slow. Not caring where she went, just wanting to get away, she was hitchhiking in both directions, running from side to side, as she put it, "Trying to connect east with west."

University of California at Telegraph Avenue
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I remember sitting in Berkeley, which was revolutionary decades before the hippies made the scene, in the California sunshine, on a grassy knoll (I think it was) right where Telegraph Avenue meets the UC campus. I was pretty skinny then. (And except for this small pot belly, I still am.) Which led, there, at the heart of the counterculture, a black man to come up to young pretty me and ask, "Are you doing additives?" by which he meant speed, amphetamines. I laughed and answered no. He continued, observing, "[If] you miss too many more meals, you won't be there." Then he asked me if I liked boys, and walked away when, again, I answered no.

I left Berkeley on July 3, hitchhiking north up Interstate 5. A vintage, black pickup truck picked me up just south of Santa Rosa. (Four years later, attending naturopathic medical school in that area, I identified that same highway entrance ramp.) When the driver, who was in his late twenties, asked me where I was going, I replied, "I just want to sleep in the Redwoods tonight." That was the right response made to the right person.

Jamie Myers, the driver, had just delivered a load of drugs, the first he had ever run for himself. "I get a call. I fly down to LA. I drive a pickup truck up to San Francisco with cocaine concealed in every part of its body and camper. I've been arrested five times. Each time I call my man and the cops just let me go. I just drove my own load up for the first time." And, sitting there in the passenger seat, I silently noted that the vintage, black pickup truck that he was driving had a lot of large, hollow, hiding spaces to it.

Jamie was on his way home to northern California, to Myers Flat, a county founded by his great-great-grandfather. He told me stories about the Redwoods: his grandfather taking him to see the deer mate; people living in complete houses inside trees hollowed out by fire; communities along the coast in places only accessible by boat; seeing his girlfriend for the first time as she slept at the base of a redwood, miles from any road... As a long-distance hitchhiker I always saw my job as entertaining the driver. But this ride I just listened.

It was dark when we left the highway up north. He drove along a network of dirt roads deep in among the big trees, let me out, let me set up in the light of the headlights and said that he'd be back the next day. There in the dark, I crawled into my sleeping bag and fell asleep.

I woke up the next day in another world, in a forest of giants. It was the American bicentennial. As seemed appropriate to the place and occasion, for my patriotic breakfast, I took a large capsule of what I had been told was organic mescaline. Looking back, I identify it as dried, powdered peyote. That was my firework experience that Fourth of July.

Back in that day, hippies divided the world into, outsiders and insiders, "straights" and "freaks." On another timeline, in a parallel universe, where I was not so influenced by the counterculture, I became a big city lawyer or made a lot of money in international finance. But here in this world, I made the California pilgrimage and fell "victim" to the hippie movement, at least its tail end.

Later in life, Jerry Garcia made the following assessment of the hippies and San Francisco: "For just one afternoon, in the summer of 1967, everything was perfect."

Years after that Summer of Love, Grace Slick, of Jefferson Airplane fame, regretted having advocated the hippie ethos, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," to her fans. She lamented, and I'm paraphrasing here, "We were in a rock and roll band; they'd all have to go on and earn a living."

Kids these days may not be weaving flowers into their hair, but they have a similar starry-eyed optimism about change; just tear it all down and the Garden of Eden will sprout up in its place.

Dissatisfaction is part of the human condition. To suspect that the grass is greener somewhere else, to wonder what might be on the other side of the mountain, keeps us motivated.

But measuring the already-known, limited concreteness of our actual place against the untried, infinite possibilities of everywhere else is not a fair comparison. We locate utopia somewhere else, because, in fact, the word means "nowhere": οὐ ("no") and τόπος ("place").

I've done my share of wondering what might have been. But here, ever closer to the end of the game, I'm feeling pretty good about how I've played the cards that I was dealt. I say, comically apologizing for this or that personal shortcoming, "You have no idea what I've overcome." Sitting here, writing this memoir, warmed by Mexico's winter sun, I am awash in a long overdue spirit of self-acceptance. Just "lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been."

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, our local social network, the community online and off, Atención robustly reborn for the digital age. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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