I wandered again to my home in the mountain
Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me—Albert Brumley, “Rank Stranger”
In the 1960s and 70s, the back-to-the-landers and urban hippies fled the city to a series of small towns in semi-rural Marin County. It was an act of defiance against the military-industrial-consumerist-corporatist complex. The movement was so brief and unprecedented that I’m sure it won’t happen again. Though, as I found out when I visited my hometown the other day, it does persist in a way completely antithetical to its origin.
My kid was attending a mountain-bike ride in the area and I was tasked with picking him up afterward. I anticipated the long drive though those distantly familiar backroads of my youth, which passed through some of the most spectacular countryside on earth. Expanses of coastal tundra, interrupted here and there with lumpy granite outcroppings that geologists call “volcanic mélange.” Riparian valleys of old-growth redwoods. Hills of brown grass dotted with coast live oaks. Shaded vales of bay laurels, maples, ash, alder, hazel, buckeye and manzanita.
Originally the home of the Coast Miwok, the land is tranquil but untamed, beautiful but aloof, expansive but reserved. As a kid, the lonesomeness it imbued was my chief nemesis. I kept it at bey by fishing. But around late afternoon the wind off the Pacific would flutter the poplars and willows, the fish would stop feeding, the lonesomeness would return and I would hurry home.
As I drove through this landscape it invoked memories starting from the age of three. Yet I felt no nostalgia or yearning to return to it. Even the loneliness that plagued my formative years was absent. When I got to the town where my kid’s ride was going to end, I was struck by how populous it was. And by how careless the people were. Pedestrians acted as if getting hit by a car were only a remote possibility. Bicyclists sometimes ignored the new lanes provided by the county and rode in twos in the middle of the road. More than once I had to swerve into oncoming traffic to get around them. Several pedestrians crossed the town’s major artery, not using a crosswalk and without so much as a glance to either side. I was used to living where that kind of thing turned you into roadkill. And I started wondering what would cause people to be so oblivious to so obvious a danger.
The rendezvous point was a new-age supermarket I’ll call Planet Wholistic. When I got there, my efforts to park were continuously stymied by pedestrians walking in and across the lanes and cars doing five-point-turnabouts between other cars. Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Being an hour early and in no rush, I did what the locals seemed to be doing: I mellowed out, chilled, got my Zen on, followed the way of the Tao and waited for them to get out of the way.
One thing I noticed was that they were not dressed alike. Nor were they dressed for work. Many were the colors and fabrics they wore; few were the conventions and norms they evinced. They seemed to silently scream, “I am who I am!” A tautology that, when expressed as fashion, conveys its opposite.
The outfits they wore suggested an active lifestyle. Some looked like they were headed to a yoga retreat. Others to a mindfulness seminar, a Japanese floral arrangement class, a cedar enzyme spa, an arts and crafts fair, a Celtic rock festival, a flea market, a 5K run through the redwoods, &c. They were probably not involved in these activities so much as dressed for them.
I entered Planet Wholistic, which was an air-conditioned version of the parking lot scene: a particolored flow of individuals in the act of “manifestation” and “self-care.” Some were standing in the aisles and gazing at vegetables. Some were reading the labels on forty-three kinds of chocolate bar. None were fat or seemed to have any inflammatory response to life. None were overtly gregarious or strange. A woman examined an onion. A man in gym shorts stood near the juice bar staring into space with a concerned look. I looked up where the concern was and saw nothing but a large redwood beam that must have cost five thousand dollars, which a day’s food-bar revenue would easily cover.
All the slow-mo deciding and intensive spatial awareness made me want a beer. But the health-morality vibe prevailed in favor of the juice bar. On the menu was something called “The Rabbit Hole,” a blend of carrot, beet and apple juices, with ginger and echinopsis pachawhatever. I ordered it and the cashier asked for my name. The juice took a long time to squeeze and arrived in a jar with my receipt taped to its lid. On the receipt was something that sounded vaguely like my name but wasn’t my name.
I took my Rabbit Hole out to a bench and waited for my kid to return. Other kids were coming back early from the ride. I sipped and watched them and began to feel strange. Colors became more vibrant and textures more prominent. My ideas felt more important than they were. I had the feeling that I was at the center of my existence and manifesting my is-ness. I no longer cared about politics or the exact word to describe what I was feeling, which for me is odd. I wondered whether this might be the effect of the echinopsis pachawhatever. If so, it would explain why the drink had cost me ten bucks.
As the kids returned, they appeared to be as heterogeneous as the adults. This felt significant but wasn’t. Kids are usually different from each other. It’s only after they have to assume a useful place in society that they homogenize. These kids still had long hair, short hair, straight hair, curly hair, red hair, brown hair, blond hair and every hair in between. Some even had a volcanic mélange of several types of hair.
A kid with long, brown, wavy hair parked his bike against the railing adjacent my bench. I was a surprised when he went into the Planet Wholistic without locking it. Leaving an expensive bike unlocked like that would have been wrong in my twelve-year-old world. By the time I was his age I’d had two bikes stolen.
About twenty minutes passed. I finished my Rabbit Hole and the kid came out. He stood by his bike and I could sense him staring at me. I glanced over and he mockingly widened his eyes at me. By the time I was his age, I’d seen several kids get their asses kicked for that kind of shit.
I considered saying, “I should have stolen your bike while you were in there taking a dump.” But I didn’t. I sensed that he was well protected against people like me, people who at his age weren’t well protected.
A tall, thin woman in a violet yoga jumpsuit who had skin the color of caramel flan showed up to retrieve the imp. She was inordinately active and hot in the way that women in ads promising relief from irritable bowel syndrome and plaque psoriasis are. But the odd thing was that she in no way resembled her kid. I had to assume that the little dude got his looks from dad. At least, that was my initial theory to account for the difference between tall-tan-active and short-pale-impertinent.
Then I had a revelation: could heterogeneity of offspring be more likely to occur under certain environmental conditions? That is, would humans raised in a safe, bountiful and socially liberal environment be more likely to show greater morphological and psychological variety? The theory warranted investigation, so I whipped out my phone and asked GPT-5, “Is there greater individuation in a safe liberal environment?”
GPT-5’s answer was, “Yes. A ‘safe liberal environment’ provides fertile ground for individuation by removing barriers to self-expression and focusing on individual autonomy.”
I followed up with, “Is there greater genetic variation in safe and abundant environments?”
GPT-5’s answer was, “Usually, yes. In safe, abundant environments, more individuals survive and reproduce, so more genetic variants can persist instead of being eliminated by harsh selection.”
What this scene was missing was harsh selection.
My own kid came back from his ride and put his bike where the other kid’s bike had been.
“How was the ride?” I asked, feeling that warm glow you get when you know your kid is alive and uninjured.
“I gotta take a dump,” he said and disappeared into Planet Wholistic. I felt that warm glow you get when you know your kid is your kid.
In the half hour it took him to take care of business and grab a smoothie, I had another revelation in the afterglow of the echinopsis pachawhatever. This one was a bit more obvious: my hometown and all the people in it were no longer familiar because they were no longer strange. The original weirdness of having to drink milk from an ornery nanny-goat in the back yard had been commodified—that way of life had been packaged, priced and sold. As a friend described it, “The counterculture is now the over-the-counter culture.”
We all live in the same place now, and it’s an expensive place. Everything we do and everywhere we go costs us something, and for many of us, it is more than we can reasonably afford. In the case of my hometown, freedom from pay-to-exist capitalism has become products and services designed to remind you of that bygone freedom. No one actually lives in accordance with the values of the hippies; they consume those values. I drove out of there realizing that “my youth’s early dawn” was not only gone but belongs to the enterprise system, to which none of us are strangers.