Fifty years ago, I was a sophomore in college: between Woodstock and Kent State, at the peak of the campus revolution. The Who’s hit song, “My Generation,” released four years previous, had already become the new anthem. Change was in the air in every aspect of society and culture. Did it mean a radical transformation, or was it just a blip in the astrologer’s overview?
I would have to find my own answers, in a spiraling quest for personal fulfillment and collective utopia. My Generation, A Memoir of the Baby Boom just released this week, tells the story of that journey of half a lifetime, half a century ago.
The year of my birth, 1950, was the pivot of the “American Century.” Driving cross-country, the dream took shape in reality… and began to shape reality in its image. Endless opportunity gave birth to a permanent yearning—requiring, in the national guise, highways to everywhere, and permanent war. I foraged a tunnel through that hunger, tasting a future of loves gained and lost, freedom’s bliss and cost, nature forgotten and found.
Like so many of the Baby Boom, I entered the world sequestered in incubator and crib; was moved by corporate edict from city to city; molded by a society beholden to a suspect suburban dream. In 1965 I exited the public school system and discovered the alternative values of Quakers. Facing the doom of society, by war, and of family, by alcohol, I heard the anthem of hippiedom promising a better way: Live for today.
At Dartmouth College, we in the Class of ’72 saw ourselves as the vanguard of an historical transition. The campus revolution came to a head after the Kent State shootings of 1970; but the Vietnam War raged on. Taking refuge in literature and nature, drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, my peers and I tried to envision escape to a better world.
I plotted my own course of freedom—off to California, mecca of easy money and free love. The blue-collar blues spun me first into a sideshow of experimental arts, then drove me back to the cloister of academics, and self-exile to Canada.
At the University of Victoria I skirted the problem of survival by distancing myself from it. Nature, my constant muse, became an abstraction, an object of study and analysis. At last I saw the dead end and danced out of it, traveling with a woman who shared my dreams of a sustainable future on the doorstep of wilderness.
Three years in the Quebec Arctic as teachers taught us timeless values and skills of the Inuit, who not only survived in the harshest environment, but stood up to colonial rule with their own nonviolent revolution during the Bill 101 crisis. Still outsiders in the North, we envisioned a new life inspired by our summers in a utopian community in backwoods BC.
Finally, at the age of thirty—the very age of adulthood defined by my generation—my spiral of changes landed me in the place I could call “my country.” There my stubborn ideals would be put to the test of nature, my chronic freedom traded for a self-chosen home. I could recreate myself—mountain man and homesteader, peace crusader and new father—and begin a new generation.
Buy My Generation (paperback) now at Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk — Launch Sale – Save 35% on the paperback – 30-Nov to 25-Dec 2019.
Buy My Generation (ebook) now at Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Read more (excerpts from My Generation)
—“The Day Kennedy Died” Medium (November 2019).
–“Woodstock on the Beach” Medium (June 2019).
–“A Sixties Childhood” Numero Cinq (July 2017).
–“First Love” Wattpad (May 2014)
–“Youth, 1974” Wattpad (May 2014)
–“The Boys in the Park” Wattpad
–“Trumped in Peckerdom” Wattpad
