This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Pop-Up Reflections On The Poor People's Rally And March In
Washington, D.C. on June 23, 2018
By Si Lannon
[This initial report, commentary is expected to be the
first of several reports this year as the Poor People's Campaign unwinds.
Additional reports through December 2018 will be added to the end of this entry
as needed. Greg Green]
Some stories get written on the fly in our business, the
publishing business and it does not matter if it is on-line or the hardest of
hard copy. The damn thing falls into somebody’s lap and sometimes it is yours-by
default. Here is genesis on my coverage of the Poor People's Campaign rally and
march down in Washington, D.C. on June 23rd. I had originally been
sent down to Washington by Greg Green our current site manager to do a story
about the Cezanne Portrait exhibit at
the National Gallery of Art (with a side trip to the small Saint Francis of
Assisi exhibit and another of the work on display of Saul Steinberg both of
which will be dealt with if I ever get around to actually writing about again
after the curtain falls.
Bart Webber has already recently told in this publication
the other part of this story, the other part of how I was waylaid even before I
was able to write word one about the Cezanne story. Told about how, as is my wont,
since I was in town anyway that I would check out to see what was happening at
the National Portrait Gallery which is open later than the National Gallery and
I figured to do the Cezanne project the next day, a Saturday. The story that
developed by Bart out of that experience concerned seeing a remembrance painting
of Roy Lichtenstein’s iconic Time
magazine cover of Bobby Kennedy in the spring of 1968 which flipped me out when
I spied it on the first floor. Got me to thinking about the late Peter Paul
Markin who was crazy for Bobby and spent the spring of that year working his
ass off for him. My reflections about Markin (always Scribe in the old days) which
that night I conveyed to Bart Webber and Sam Lowell, two old friends of his as
well and who work at this publication, got turned into that article about the
million “might have beens” if Bobby had not been murdered and Markin had not subsequently
wound up in hellhole Vietnam which did him no good, no good at all and led to
an unsettling early grave. You would not believe the speed Bart was able to put
that one together once it got through the grapevine about my “discovery” and others
clamored to get their points in about much missed Scribe. It was almost as if
some portent, some omen, some invisible hand was at play since nobody here had written
word one of original work about the 50th anniversary the effect of
Bobby’s murder and had relied on previous sketches to commemorate the event
since everybody was busy with some other project.
Here is where it all ties together, where sainted Bobby and
wanna-be saint Scribe are reunited in spirit anyway. That Saturday I was
heading to the National Gallery early to beat the crowds. I usually take the
Metro since from the hotel where I was staying it was infinitely easier to do
so than taking a car, so the natural stop on that line, the Blue line, is the
Smithsonian on the National Mall. As I exited the station heading the few
blocks to the museum from there I noticed a huge white tent across from the
Hirschhorn Museum and further down toward 7th Street a stage
complete with a couple of large screens flanking a stage and people milling
around. I stopped at the tent to inquire about the event although on any given
day you will see tents, usually white, strewn on the Mall for some event or
other. It turned out that this was the headquarters for the Poor People’s
Campaign during the week of actions they had planned in D.C. and was to
culminate later that morning and afternoon in a rally there and a march to the
Capitol several blocks away.
Once I understood what was going on, understood that this
might be something to check out further, I made the connection. Make another
stab at figuring out the invisible hand at work this weekend. This year was
also the 50th anniversary of the ill-fated original Poor People’s
Campaign led by Martin Luther King before he was assassinated in April of that year
and which was carried on in his memory through the summer of 1968. The central
physical focus of the original efforts was the establishment of an encampment
dubbed Resurrection City which had been highlighted by a large demonstration on
June 23rd of that year. Robert Kennedy had before his own
assassination put his endorsement of the campaign as part of his political
strategy to spark issues around race, poverty and above all the raging, futile
war being waged in Southeast Asia then and which was sucking up resources which
could have been used to help alleviate the poverty of those times, something still
with us all these years later. ( I use Southeast Asia here although at the time
we mostly thought it was Vietnam little did we know until later and only by
other sources like Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon
Papers expose that Laos, Cambodia and who knows where else were bombed to
perdition as well).I believe that Bobby had also visited the site and I know that
his funeral train passed through the city. I thought about the situation and
called Greg Green to ask if he wanted me to also cover this event along with
the Cezanne assignment. Greg said by all means yes. Actually what Greg said was
that if I had wanted to keep my nice art assignments I had better damn well
(his expression) cover the event. Greg being a half generation younger that most
older writers who go back to the hard copy editions of this publication did not
have the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Poor Peoples Campaign
on his radar so he was as they say “covering his ass” (my expression).
The following are some reflections taken away from that
experience.
Like in a lot of other things that happen without
explanation I don’t believe in resurrection meaning in the context of the Poor
People's Campaign, hereafter PPC, trying to jumpstart something like the war on
poverty which is what this is all about based on something that happened 50
years ago and that was unsuccessful then seemed anachronistic. Seemed doom to
failure as it had previously inthe muddy
summer of 1968 once Doctor King’s hand was not there to guide the thing and use
his huge authority not only in the black and among other minorities but among
white liberals who to this day see him as the guy who could have led his people
out of bondage-and assuaged their guilt
for falling down in the struggle after his demise. His authority unlike his successors,
and from what I could see on stage this June day, could have pushed things
forward. Even then there was no guarantee given the political climate that
anything would happen. I confess after looking around, talking to some activists,
a few who I recognized from other contexts, other political campaigns I have
covered, hearing the endless speeches and trying to decipher what the road
forward would look like since everybody emphasized, correctly emphasized that
this would only be the start of a long uphill struggle, went into coverage of
this event with something of a jaded eye. Whatever I agree with in principle, whatever I believe must be done about the vast social and
economic inequalities in this country, and internationally.
Nothing said or heard that day has led me to believe that
my original assessment was wrong, although this is one time I hope I am. The
portents, that invisible hand I seem to have grown committed to using as a
metaphor for these strange and worrisome times don’t head that way though. Here
is a quick rundown of what the PPC had been up to the previous forty days as
they called it, maybe reflecting some forty days in the wilderness although I
could not get any rank and file activists to buy into that scenario, in what
they have called their “call for a national moral revival.” Such a theme is
always tricky and always capable of misintereptation, mainly since it is
usually other-worldly Christian evangelicals and bare-bones religious folk who
call, usually from the right political perspective or from outside politics,
for moral revival. Usually eschewing the worldly poverty problems around them and
waiting upon the Lord, and you know who that Lord is.
What the PPC, headed by Revered Barber from North
Carolina and others who had been planning this project for several years,
wanted to do was highlight the poverty situation and offer remedies. Organize
the poor to organize themselves the way one youth activist put it. Saying as
well, and I took this as an omen as well, that if it is not done from the
bottom up as opposed to most efforts which are lead by middle class
professional people on some salvation of their souls mission then once again
the thing would be coopted and doomed to failure. Good point.
In order to drum up support locally and nationally the
PPC had the previous five weeks centered their actions, including acts of civil
disobedience, on the state capitals each week presenting a different broad
issue like homelessness or the war economy and the way those affect the poor,
those down at the bottom of the barrel in society. After those five weeks of
gathering from what I could tell, and what was noticeable in the crowd I saw at
the Mall, a middle class professional cadre with a sprinkling of union activists
to further the work, to get to the poor so they can organize themselves they
would gather in Washington to see what they had wrought. From my observations of
who was in the crowd that day, unlike what I remember and have seen photographs
of the original encampment, with a few exceptions this was not the poor masses coming
to act as avenging angels against their oppressors. Which made, makes me wonder
about that portentous statement that young enthused activist made to me in all
candor and which was seconded by a couple of other young people around him who
nodded their heads in agreement.
If Sam Lowell or Seth Garth, maybe even Bart Webber
although he is not given to straying away from straight reportage, were writing
this they would say this was a situation where you “rounded up the usual
suspects,” saw people who had been around these issues going back to the 1960s.
Frank Jackman would have call it preaching to the choir” if you want another
way to say it. These people were good in their time, hell, a bunch of us worked
with them when the world was new and were still all sparkling eyes and dewy too,
but we have a generational “passing the torch” problem between today’s youth
and the generation after ours who came of age under the aegis of Ronald Reagan.
The old ways of organizing, the very heavy reliance after all this time and all
the times we have been showed nothing but ashes and brimstone of voting as the
main organizational tool for change, does not bode well for this PPC program.
And not so strangely given the moral imperative behind
the movement the crowd was treated to such preaching in a literal sense both by
the speakers who has some religious or quasi-religious take on the situation
and by the “feel” of the event, the feeling that it was a revival meeting of
some sort with people being exhorted to join up, to get out there in the mud
and organize, to get “religion” as the late Markin used to say once he came
back from Vietnam about the issues of war and peace.
The several thousand in attendance and/or who marched to
the Capitol were thus treated to this eerie spectacle. But here is where things
got a little awry. Got as confused as they did in the 1960s when strategy,
basically voting for a regime or going down in the mud for fundamental social
change were the two main poles of attraction. Put people, thoughtful people in different
camps. The 23rd of June was an almost chemically pure example of that old dilemma-in
one place-hell, in one speaker at times. On the one hand speakers, including
prime leader Reverend Barber who knew how to work the crowd into a revival
spirit no question, spoke of “revolution” which I assumed was meant in the
traditional sense like the original American or French revolutions. In the next
breath, and this was truest when the Reverend Jessie Jackson brought in for the
occasion, a former King aide and later a Democratic Party presidential candidate
himself, spent his every word talking about heading to the ballot box come
November. Now revolution and voting are by no means mutually exclusive, but I
got a very queasy feeling I had been here before, had been cajoled into doing
the same old, same old. And you wonder why I am a little eye-jaded about the
future prospects of this campaign.
When The Blues Was Dues- The Classic Alligator Records Compilation
CD Review
By Zack James
Classic Alligator Records, many blues artists
Long before Seth Garth became back in the day, the 1960s day, the music critic for the now long gone The Eye published in those day out of Oakland, California he had been bitten by the blues bug. Of course in the 1960s if one was to be a successful and relevant music critic one had to concentrate on the emerging and then fading folk music minute (of which the blues was seen as a sub-set of the genre especially the country blues wings with the likes of Skip James, Son House, Bukka White, and Mississippi John Hurt) and then post-British invasion and the rise of the counter-cultural movement what was called “acid” rock. So Seth’s blues bug, except for an occasional sneak-in was cut short by the needs of his career. Even then though Seth would keep up with the various trends coming out of places like Chicago and Detroit and of the artists who had formed his first interests.
Strangely Seth had come to his love of the blues almost by accident. Back in the 1950s he had been like many teenagers totally devoted to his transistor radio to shutout the distractions of parents and siblings around the house. In those days though he was drawn to the fresh air jail breakout of rock and roll, guys like Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. One Sunday night though almost like a ghost message from the radio airwaves the station he usually listened to WMEX was drowned by a more powerful station from Chicago, WABC. The show Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour (actually two hours but that was the title of the show). The first song Hound Dog Taylor’s The Sky Is Crying. He was hooked, hooked mainly because in those days the blues coming out of Chicago sounded like a very primitive version of rock, like maybe it had something to do with that beat in his head whenever a serious rock song came on WMEX like Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Rock and Roller. He couldn’t always get the Chicago station on Sunday night, something to do with those wind patterns but he was smitten.
Like a lot of things including his later interest in folk music and acid rock Seth always wanted to delve into the roots of whatever trend he was writing about. That was how he found out that a lot of the songs that he heard on the Be-Bop Benny show were the genesis of rock. Also that rock had eclipsed the blues as the be-bop new thing leaving many of the most popular blues artists, overwhelming black artists, behind to pick up the scraps of the musical audience (only to be “discovered” later by some of the more thoughtful rock stars like the Stones just as the old time country blues artists from the South had been “discovered” by folk aficionado in their turn).
Seth also dug into the technical aspects of the industry, who was producing the music. Those where the days when there were many small, small by today’s mega-standards, essentially mom and pop record companies producing blues material. In Chicago, with the huge migration of blacks from the South during the previous two generations there were a myriad of labels. But two stuck out, two were the ones who grabs the very best artists around Maxwell Street and made them stars, from the many one hit wonders to classic stars like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and B.B. King.
Of course most people have heard of those artists who worked out of the Chess Record label. But the other big label, the one under review, Alligator, also produced a shew of stars. So that very first night Seth had heard the legendary Hound Dog Taylor doing The Sky Is Crying he was under contract with Alligator. For more artists check out this two CD compilation of those others who also graced that label. Then you will be up to date on the genesis of the Chicago blues explosion that changed blues from acoustic to electric back in the day.
Activists participate in a protest in front of the White House October 12, 2017 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
With National Security Adviser John Bolton threatening to "come after" Iran this week and President Donald Trump accusing the country of sowing "chaos, death, and destruction," Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) was joined Wednesday by several other members of the Democratic caucus in urging Congress to ensure that the U.S. avoids yet another prolonged war by passing legislation affirming that a preemptive attack on the country would be illegal.
The Prevention of Unconstitutional War with Iran Act of 2018 demands that the president obtain congressional approval for any military action in Iran. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) signed on as co-sponsors.
"Every day, the president and his saber-rattling foreign policy advisers like John Bolton are inching us closer and closer to conflict, endangering our national security, jeopardizing our diplomatic interests and alarming our allies." —Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.)
"The administration's approach to Iran is ripped straight out of the same playbook that launched us into the failed invasion of Iraq, and Congress needs to assert its constitutional authority and halt the march to war," said Udall. "Every day, the president and his saber-rattling foreign policy advisors like John Bolton are inching us closer and closer to conflict, endangering our national security, jeopardizing our diplomatic interests and alarming our allies. The consequences of war with Iran would be catastrophic, risking the lives of thousands of Americans while squandering our global reputation, with little chance of improving our long-term security."
The bill was introduced a day after Bolton told a gathering of anti-Iran activists that there would be "hell to pay" if Tehran "crossed" the U.S. or its allies.
Anti-war advocates praised Udall's proposal, especially in light of the president's numerous aggressive military actions in foreign countries since he entered office less than two years ago.
"The Constitution clearly states that Congress, not the president, is the arbiter of when we go to war," said Paul Kawika Martin of Peace Action. "The Trump administration has repeatedly overstepped its war powers in Syria and Yemen, and seems eager to provoke a war with Iran. Senator Udall's legislation is a timely reminder that Trump has no authority to go to war with Iran without congressional authorizati
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly providing a media organization with a top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into a U.S. election.
Winner has now been sentenced to five years in prison, the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media.
Several months before Winner's arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston was thinking furious thought, fugitive thoughts about what had happened on this his umpteenth trip to California. Thoughts that would carry him to the airport road and car rental return on arrival there and then after the swift airbus to his terminal the flight home to Logan and then up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned. Returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too. But now along the road to the airport he had thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin rose to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he too would pass on the way up.
This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processings at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.
But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.
That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.
Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.
Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).
Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist” writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the best-seller Thrillwere asking about as material for future books about the heady times they had been too young, in some cases way to young to know about personally or even second-hand). So Mac would bring out wiry, wily old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out" that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at just as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.
Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.
Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).
Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting old sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.
The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.
As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.
He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.
In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard.
About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.
But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him, many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk space to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.
See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).
Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.
Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and socks to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too much longer.
Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the relentless oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.
Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be botheredso everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.
Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.
She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.
Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened to the brethren. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to that adventure now though.
