The Farm

About the time I got back from Vietnam and found a running Indian motorcycle, 300 hippies jumped in 25 buses and left San Francisco to find a farm. They landed in Nashville. This was a cohesive group of young people. Steve Gaskin, their charismatic leader, preached stoic values like honesty, fairness, respect for the land, and staying inside your own hula hoop. They used the Bible for guidance. They weren’t Jesus Freaks. Those came later after Good Christian Children started dropping LSD. These were honest kids looking to get outside of the corporate trap, grow enough food to feed themselves, and just keep on having fun. Their journey, what they learned, spread to the whole youth culture. It represented a bolt of cosmic lightning that clove me in two. A side: The biker. B Side: The Hippy. As time wore on, The Biker entered into a social construct nightmare. Early feminism diluted his essence. After all, when you’re 24, you got to …. several times a day, so you had to please the ladies. The end of Macho should be characterized as an Amazonian victory.The B side, The Hippie, played out until one full moon night at the edge of a Kentucky Burley field, the Devil struck a chord on an old fiddle. This hippy turned down the offer and chose the woman in black. She was headed for the theater. But, that is another tale.