This morning I discovered where I
was on Christmas Day of 1967. I’ve been
digitizing old slides, plowing through the memories, and there it was. A picture of a bathtub in the Los Altos Hills
dated 12/25/67. The tub was on its side,
having served dutifully as a cattle trough for many years, I am sure. Beside it was an old wooden gate. There were brown hillsides and a few oaks.
And far in the background, I could see vestiges of the San Francisco Bay and
the megalopolis surrounding it. I have
no other recollections of that afternoon but I bet I can reconstruct it pretty
well.
That morning I would have spent
with my family down in the flatlands of Mountain View, happily opening presents
and sharing that all too rare feeling of togetherness. My parents were no doubt worrying about the
lengthening of my hair. And my
proclivity for wearing an old Army field jacket everywhere. Little did they know that only a week before,
I had dropped acid for the first time. Had spent the night in a crash pad in
Santa Cruz with close friends, listening to Jefferson Airplane on headphones
and being overwhelmed with color and sound. Feeling an overwhelming peace with
the world, even as the spector of Vietnam lurked on the fringes.
But this was Christmas morning and
I wasn’t high...yet. And I cannot, for
the life of me, remember any of the presents I may have gotten that
morning. But I’m sure we prolonged the
process because it was that one time of the year that we were truly
family. We would have cleaned up all the
wrapping paper, deciding which ribbons to keep.
Gone off and made inventory of our newly opened gifts. And I might have stuck around until lunch
time. But at some point, one of my
friends must have called me and said, “hey, we’re going up to the Field today. Come join us!”
The Field was a large chunk of open space in the Los Altos Hills, a piece of land that had probably been a
sprawling ranch at one time but now seemed abandoned save for one big water tank at its crest. The rest was quintessential California terrain. Rolling land with dead gray grass, dotted with gnarled and twisted live oaks, bay laurel and chaparral. We had “discovered” it about a year earlier while driving around the back roads getting stoned. No one ever seemed to go there. The land was open and inviting. So we just called it “the Field” and began making regular pilgrimages there. It was especially inviting in the spring when the grasses were a verdant green, and the mustard was blooming amid the apricot orchards.
More than likely on that
Christmas afternoon, Phil and his sister Nina would have come by. Or maybe my old buddy Stan. Or any of about half a dozen co-conspirators
who would whisk me away to our haven in the hills, smoking weed all the way as we
climbed the winding roads beyond Foothill College and into the
eucalyptus-tinged air of the coast range.
I am sure Nina would have been with me.
I was madly in love with her at the time. She was my hippie ideal. Skinny to a fault. Long brown hair combed down straight. Sharp features and deep, brown eyes. Dark Italian skin to match my Greek-bred
melanin. Short skirts. All done up in
paisley and beads. Full of clever asides
and laughter.
Our little group would have turned off the paved road
onto a short, dirt drive ending at a locked aluminum gate and, to the right, a
small opening in the neglected barbed wire fence. From there it was a short walk uphill, toward
the water tank, where we could all sit and smoke and look out over slate gray
water of the bay, the winding sloughs, and the industrial onslaught that was
usurping the shoreline. We were likely
bundled up against the December chill, but feeling the warmth of our
companionship, the unspoken bonds, the outright laughter, and the blessing of
many years spent together, nurtured by the same little community at the base of
the hills.
Eventually the time would come to get up, lightheaded
and silent, and walk back down the hillside toward the vehicle or vehicles that
had brought us to this secret place. And
I think that was when I saw the old bath tub, lying on its side, rust stained
and forgotten. But a fitting memento to
this place where the Ohlone once roamed, where the Spanish created a sprawling
land grant that was eventually taken from them, and parceled out into farms and
ranches overlooking the Valley of the Heart’s Delight below. And now this precious little bit of acreage
that was somehow spared the incursion of the wealthy. The rambling ranchers and sprawling “starter
castles” now hovering over what was soon to become the Silicon Valley.
But that Christmas Day was such a pivotal moment for
all of us. An exclamation point on the
Summer of Love. The lead-in to a year
filled with intense highs and lows.
Assassinations. The fear of Selective Service. Nixon as president. The joy of outdoor
concerts, zoned-out camping trips, great bands at the Fillmore. And toward the end, the dissolution of my
romance. The heart ache of once again
being alone and having to navigate a world in confusion. And a future that seemed both hopeless and
hearkening.
*Afterthought: “The Field” has long since been subdivided
and filled with high-end homes, but a portion of it still remains as Byrne
Park.
