By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ The poet Frank O’Hara wrote the following poem called ‘Animals’ (really about a horse who has lost his or her companion):
ANIMALS
Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth
it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners
the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water
I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days
This poem reminds me of things once emblazoned under a sun casting Tremendous Daylight, but now consigned to the shadows of time, smudged out of existence by new preoccupations: O the curious business of our strange lives that seem exasperatingly preconditioned: Reaching upwards to touch the sacred, we tire, turn, and embrace the sordid instead. Not all of us, of course. But too many to count.
Or maybe we are just taught wrong in the first place.I have never figured out why Innocence, which is both a word and a concept, is not allowed to continue in us, but must give way to the drumbeat of experience, and thus lose itself therein. A journey from purity into, at best, ambiguity. Or ‘evil’ as the Christian Church imagines. We are taught (we who grew up in Christian culture, although I resigned from that club a long time ago) that Innocence was taken from us by two impulsive teenagers, one of whom stood naked before a cunning snake that talked her (and then she talked her guy) into making the kind of mistake that naked teenagers often do. In this case it was an apple. It might have been something even more delicious.
I bring up the topic of Innocence because I remember a time when Innocence blinked its rosy eyes and then closed them for good. That was back in the 1960s – yes, the much discussed, celebrated, and maligned ‘60s. I was an ‘impressionable’ teenager then, and so I heard the Pied Piper pulsations of its tambourines and sitars and harmonicas, as if I were being led by a chanting holy man into a brave and wild new place with flowers and long haired girls wearing soft ankle length dresses that would fall easily from their shoulders when one smiled at them and they smiled back like two birds circling opposite ends of a field at mating time, then wafting toward each other to join in the act of procreation.
I have done a lot of thinking about those days. For my students, I might as well be talking about something that happened in a different century…wait a minute…well, I’ll be damned, it was in a different century, wasn’t it? What a gobsmacking revelation !! The ‘60’s were 60 years ago! Maybe that’s why, when I mention ‘Dylan’ to my students, they stare at me like they’re waiting for the punchline to a joke. “Yes, Dylan. And?” – their eyes seem to be saying. If I said “Peter, Paul, and Mary”, they’d think I was talking about characters in the Bible, but since they haven’t read the Bible, they wouldn’t say that either. Joan Baez? “Ouch, that must have hurt like hell when they burned her at the stake, huh?”
In the angry fires and smoldering ashes of late life cynicism, I am inclined to pooh-pooh a lot of the platitudes that Left Wingers still attach to the 1960s; besides, in their ‘woke progressiveness’ and divisive ‘identity politics’, they give no evidence of understanding the (lost) spirit of those years at all – unless they are old like I am and thus remember it firsthand. This was the Age of Hitchhiking, and that’s something I’ll get back to because it is the central theme of this essay in more ways than one.
First things first. For most Americans, the ‘60s never happened. It’s like, for most Europeans of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Renaissance never happened either. Hmmmm…you ask: “What kind of bullshit is that?” But it’s true. As Yuval Harari (author of Sapiens) pointed out:
Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites — kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers — who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”
It was true of the Renaissance and it was true of the 60s. Most American kids were riding bicycles to no destinations in particular; teenagers were in school and either getting into trouble or trying to stay out of it; and most adults who saw the long haired generation trading ‘bong hits’ in Haight-Ashbury on the evening news of ABC, NBC, or CBC would swear under their breath,”Them goddamn hippies” and turn the channel to watch “I Love Lucy” or “The Price is Right.” At least that’s what white people did, and, one way or the other, so did the black folks – which I found to be true when I got to know them. For most, the ‘news’ was something that happened somewhere else. Gossip was ‘news’ that happened locally.
So the 60s actually ‘happened’ only to people who wanted to change the world. Now I understand that this concept smacks more than a little of elitism, and for some it was. For others, it was trendy as long as the rednecks didn’t catch you alone with your long hair and beat your ass. Some became radicals in the extreme sense, and the Vietnam War became the Palestine of those days, with outraged students and other ‘persons of interest’ disrupting college campuses, occupying buildings, and bellowing out their slogans.
And, in spite of the communal spirit that led many to go for ‘alternative’ societies in abandoned barns and ghostless ‘haunted’ houses, there never stopped being hierarchies. These top-to-bottom arrangements emerged as surely as anthills in the hot summer months and often just as fast. The leaders and followers soon sorted themselves out even if they refused to admit it – which would have been uncool. In point of fact, the coolest and best-looking hippie guys were fucking the coolest and best-looking hippie girls because, because – Aw Shucks! – that’s just how it is, ain’t it? The communes never lasted long. Mostly the comrades just couldn’t tolerate each other for more than a few months and a half dozen arguments about how they were going to pay the rent. And then along came Kent State (cops shooting into a crowd of students), a slew of assassinations, the police riots at the Democratic convention in Chicago (1968), and finally – like a cherry atop the Sundae – the world finally said Hello to Charles Manson. Bye bye Flower Power.
Ok, what have we got so far. The 60’s mostly didn’t happen, and most of what did happen was fake, yeah? And its legacy wound up being as much for mass murder as for peace signs, trippy mushrooms, ‘grass’ and psychedelic music. And, never discount it, a lot of fucking, albeit the idealistic kind – coitus followed by soul searching. The rednecks used barnyard horseshit and axle grease from their pick-up trucks to set the mood, and the hippies burned incense from India and sipped tea from China.
I don’t mean for it to sound like ‘sour grapes’ because I was in on it too, though the closest I ever got to joining the anointed was moderately long hair and a scraggly beard, and boots that I bought (with my grandmother’s permission) after seeing the cover to a Dylan LP record where he was walking along in the Village (Greenwich Village in New York) on a snowy street with Suze Rotolo (his girlfriend before Joan Baez). I wanted to ‘Be Like Bob’ just as a later generation wanted to ‘Be Like Mike’ (Michael Jordan). So while the ‘bros’ bought Nike tennis shoes, I bought Dylan-style boots. Well, conformity is a bitch at times, right?
The great thing about the 60s – in addition to the sex, drugs, and groovy music which a lot of them/us were partaking of with unbridled pleasure – was the presence of two qualities that I still consider to have been genuine about that era. One was idealism and the other – here I come back to this word again – was Innocence.
In spite of the posing and posturing, in spite of the lost stoned souls wandering around ‘looking for love’ (in all the wrong places), in spite of the inevitable slogans and ‘Power to the People’ bullshit, I remember folks back then who, without the self-serving jargon and finger pointing of identity politics that gets up our ass today, actually believed that human beings of all kinds could come together in one grand celebration of life. It wasn’t a matter, for example, of white people and black people and straight people and gay people and men and women being able to put up with each other but – take a deep breath – LOVING each other. I still see them as having been essentially good and decent sorts who believed that RACISM, SEXISM and WAR could be ended with kindness, wisdom, mutual respect, and – again – Love.
They were as wrong as anybody in the history of the human race has been wrong about anything. But they were nice people. Open-hearted, sincere, well-meaning. And intelligent. Just too trusting in the potential of the human animal. Simply naive.
Among those trusting, naive people were the hitchhikers of the day, of whom there were many. Multitudes even.
Back in the ‘60’s it was normal for young Americans to hitchhike from one end of the country to the other: NYC to San Fran or Ann Arbor to New Orleans, or from Boston to a Pueblo Indian (as they were called then) settlement in New Mexico. To their everlasting credit, they wanted to discover America. They were looking for their own roots; they sought to rewrite all the history books with their own firsthand perceptions. They wanted to hear the music of old black men and women, the sound of slavery still sobbing in their rough melodies, or the laughing outbursts of joyous queens of a distant past reviving to the rhythm of beaten up, scarred, hand-me-down guitars. They wanted to listen and taste and savor things that their comfortable parents would have laughed at, run from, or thrown up their arms in despairing incredulity about. To those callow young white explorers, the deep-lined faces and mysterious mahogany eyes of people they never knew existed but wanted to look for anyway must have been better than meeting God.
It is easy now – and very fashionable in some circles – to cry that they were simply ‘weekend warriors’ out on a bit of a lark – slumming it, as they used to say when rich white folks went up to Harlem to dig the jazz and have a night out with the ‘darkies’. And it’s generally true that these were nothing more than typical middle class white kids (with a few good-hearted country bumpkins thrown in) who might have to sleep rough or do without their favorite food for a few days, but who could always run home to Mom and Dad when funds got low or they got bored. Yeah, maybe it’s true that a lot of them were just winging it, and that when the time came most of them put on suits and ties and became ‘Yuppies’. Yeah, I suppose so. But I’m not blowing smoke when I say they were looking for something. In some of them I saw sincerity as I never saw before and have rarely seen since.
Do you ever encounter someone made beautiful by a single moment? Like that girl from Afghanistan with the fierce green eyes emerging from a refugee tent into the daylight, her family members all butchered and dead? The photo captured her essence, and it doesn’t matter that she changed over the years, or whether she was really like that or not. At that moment, she was. Don’t we often remember lost lovers, husbands or wives that way? Places too? Sacred moments? Or at least, moments that seemed to define everything that was good?
The flower people were the same. Briefly. Ever so briefly.
When they started to hitchhike, to find the America that Kerouac made to appear real, they stuck out their thumbs in trust. The miscellaneous cars and trucks and vans that stopped for them were part of the adventure. They went alone or in pairs or even groups of three or four. And someone always stopped and carried them part of the way, and then someone else would take them the rest of the distance. To wherever.
I did it too. I too stood by the side of the road and watched America go by. Sure, most of the cars ignored me, or slowed as if to stop, then whoever was beyond the wheel changed their mind and went on. Or whizzed past me, then, for reasons known only to themselves, slammed on the brakes and waited for me. The occupants of some even hooted and made funny faces and obscene gestures as they tore by. But sooner or later, someone would stop – either because they took pity on me or just wanted another human being to chat with during a long drive. Truck drivers would do that, although you couldn’t hear much of what they were saying over the roar of the engine. I would just nod and smile.
I remember smoking a joint with some kid who picked me up and we found ourselves riding through the pumpkin orange twilight of the Tennessee countryside in autumn. I knew that maybe 100 miles up the road I’d be back out there, wishin’ and hopin’. But I remember the feeling of This is it. America. And it had nothing to do with patriotism. More like the heart’s love we all want more of. Tennessee, 1967.
The fear came later. Somebody always has to show up and ruin things, don’t they? And sure enough, the predators caught on, and before you knew it, people, usually young women, were said to have disappeared. And their mutilated bodies would eventually turn up in a cornfield.
That was the end of the Age of Innocence. The psychopaths had moved in next door.
Of course people still hitchhike, but it’s widely known to be dangerous. In fact it’s sometimes the hitchhikers themselves who are deadly, not the ones who give them a lift. In some cases, I’m sure it’s like a tarantula riding shotgun next to a rattlesnake. So I don’t do a lot of hitchhiking these days.
But I can still imagine the Innocents, the ones by the side of the road back in the 1960s. Despite the advanced stages of the disease of cynicism that has built a cell next to my heart, I know that those young people thought they were doing the right thing for the right reasons. Their hearts and souls were open.
They had made up their minds that there was a real America no one had told them about or even didn’t want them to know about. And they desired to discover what it was. It is to their everlasting credit that they went out looking to find America. It almost doesn’t matter that a lot of what they found wasn’t worth looking for. The journey itself was what counted.
Gazing back, I realize this. So I say to them, those long lost children of sex and flowers and songs and sunlight: You were the best of all my days. And for all I know, the time may come when we are all hitching through outer space, trying to catch lifts with three-headed guys in rockets with souped-up engines and Jefferson Starship written on the side.
