A Couple of Kooks by Angie Ryan Comia

"Will you stay in a lovers' story? / If you stay, you won't be sorry / 'Cause we believe in you / Soon you'll grow, so take a chance / With a couple of kooks hung up on romancing"

These David Bowie song lyrics always make me think of my childhood. My parents, Terry and Pat Ryan, with their long hair and red-and-yellow plaid, bell-bottomed pants, were a "couple of kooks," who moved out of the city to a rundown house with no plumbing, in the middle of nowhere, in the early seventies. Peace, nature, freedom, and love were on their minds. They were after a new beginning, and took on the challenge of making a life on an old farm in the small community of Sunderland, Ontario. The farmhouse should have been torn down. There was garbage everywhere, and the walls were crumbling, but my parents liked the view of the sky, so they bought it. They also bought two horses and let them run freely around the property. They cooked on a hibachi outside, and took baths in a washtub in the middle of the floor with water they boiled. They went to the bathroom in a hole in the ground. Everyone thought they were crazy, and maybe they were, but they were in love and they were happy.

My parents weren’t the kind of hippies who do drugs and have sex with lots of people (at least not that I know about!), but they did love rock and roll. They spent their time in the country listening to the Beatles, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones. I was named “Angie” after the song—that is how much they loved the Stones! Mom also wrote poetry, and Dad made sculptures. They rode their horses for fun, and had picnics in the woods. Dad would climb the tallest tree around to take breath-taking photographs of the rolling hills and the sunset. Mom would pack a lunch in the saddlebags, and meet Dad after his long day of digging postholes with a kiss and a smile. Mom had huge vegetable gardens where she grew their food. They also bought some pigs, a cow, ducks, and chickens. My parents experimented with nature by switching the duck eggs and the chicken eggs. The little banty hen would go nuts when her adopted babies would swim in the puddle!

After two years I was born, and then a year and a half later, my sister Ellen was. We were truly supported and loved. Our artistic talents were nurtured, as we had an easel and access to paint at all times. We were always dressing up in costumes from Mom’s dress-up box and putting on plays. We had a multitude of pets, including cats, dogs, turtles, rats, guinea pigs, rabbits, birds, hamsters, mice, gerbils, and, of course, horses. When I wanted to do a science project with rodents and a maze in grade eight, my mom drove me to the pet store and let me pick out a new rat, hamster, gerbil, and mouse. I kept them all in our house in cages that Dad built for me. We always had fun searching our farm for new kittens in the spring. Later, when I was in high school, I had a pet rat. I wanted her to have babies, so Mom and Dad let me go out and buy a male rat. I watched the miracle of rat-childbirth. Soon we had ten rats, all known by name.

Throughout my childhood Mom and Dad always got Ellen and I out into nature. We’d walk down to the creek in the warm weather. We’d wade in it with our rubber boots, catch frogs and crayfish, and bring frog’s eggs home. I always managed to get a soaker. Dad created hiking, riding, and skiing trails throughout our property. In the spring, summer, and fall, Mom and Dad would take Ellen and I horseback riding almost every day. I remember the signature line from Mom in a singsong voice: “Get your riding clothes on!” In the winter they’d drag us cross-country skiing. We had to ski across two ten-acre cornfields to get to our apple orchard where the hills were. As soon as we got there, Ellen and I would take off our skis and slide down the hills on our toboggans.

My parents always fed us healthy food. Whole grain (often homemade) bread and organic vegetables filled our plates. Mom used to pick apples from our trees and make applesauce and apple crisp. We would feast on wild asparagus that grew by the roadside. Mom would save the juice from cooking vegetables and freeze it. She’d make soup with her collection when the containers were full. Mom went through a sprouting phase where she’d sprout beans, peas, alfalfa, and onions. She also had her own herb garden. I always enjoyed our food, but I do recall secretly wishing ice cream was as good for you as carrots. My parents were very supportive with my choice to become a vegetarian when I was twelve. Ellen and Mom joined my diet of choice soon after, and Dad pretty much did too. Lentils, brown rice, chickpeas, and tofu became regular household foods.

My family’s health care ideals are somewhat different than most people. We have always focused on natural health care and used natural remedies. We’ve always tried to avoid medications and instead chose herbal tea and garlic. Echinacea and St. John’s Wort were common in our medicine cabinet before they went mainstream.

Dad continued to renovate our farmhouse throughout my childhood. He cemented two full walls with large stones that he found on the property. He was always tearing down a wall to put in more windows and wound up installing four skylights! Both my parents produced paintings that hung on our walls. Dad also painted stumps and called them “Goons” and hung them around the house.

Respect and appreciation for one another were values that my parents instilled in my sister and me. Even today, our family continues our tradition of making one another homemade valentines with poems expressing our feelings of love.

My parents raised my sister and me to have open minds. Perhaps it’s because we never went to church that I feel totally open to other religions. I see how Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Baha’i faith all have wonderful things to offer. I don’t feel that just one is right. I’ve also always been open to other people. I remember playing with the underdog in elementary school, and sticking up for the kid whom no one liked. Interracial marriage is something that came naturally for both my sister and me.

I consider myself to be an environmentalist. I get frustrated when people don’t recycle, and lawn pesticides infuriate me. When a law was passed in Ontario banning the use of lawn pesticides for cosmetic reasons, I cheered! My concern for the environment started with my parents. To save energy, they heated our home with a wood-burning stove. Dad would roll the wheelbarrow full of hand-chopped wood right into our living room, and Mom would hang our clothes out to dry on the clothesline. They also always had a compost pile. For as long as I can remember we were sorting eggshells, carrot peels, and apple cores. (The horses, dogs and cats always liked to investigate the compost for anything tasty.) As a child I was concerned with saving the rainforests and endangered species and became a member of the Jane Goodall society.

Mom and Dad taught Ellen and me to stand up for what we believe in. They were actively involved in protests and petitions. They protested against plans to build an airport in Pickering and against plans to put in a gravel pit on a farm down the road from us. When I was eleven I organized a school petition against McDonald’s Styrofoam packaging. A year later I was proud to hear that McDonald’s had switched to cardboard, and that a major factor influencing its decision was letters from school groups. I had a part in that, and it felt amazing.

My parents are now retired and, as always, happy. They’ve made their rundown farm into a peaceful haven complete with a greenhouse full of flowers year round and a homemade pond with waterfalls. The pond is their favourite feature. Dad lugged rocks from all over our property to the pond, so it looks as though it were part of the natural landscape. The pond is full of lily pads and weeds, fishes and frogs, and water trickles over three different waterfalls. Dad built a deck right beside it, and Mom and Dad eat many meals there.

Mom and Dad have recently overcome hardships and trying times: my father survived a heart attack, and my Mom beat breast cancer. But today, they can often be found skiing at a local ski resort, and when they’re not hitting the slopes, Dad is active with his carpentry and woodworking hobby in the deluxe workshop he built inside an old shed. He still creates his quirky sculptures, a few of which pay tribute to Monty Python. There’s a nine foot tall, four foot wide tin man, “the Knight who Says Nee,” and three variously sized “Icki-Icki’s,” who have pails with horns for heads. Mom tutors, paints, and keeps up a dollhouse hobby. She also has the greenest thumb of anyone I know. I send my limp, dying plants to her, and she has them in full bloom in no time. Mom’s gardens are full and alive with colour. They still have horses, dogs, and cats.

Mom and Dad can be seen working on the farm or relaxing by the pond. Dad might be reading in his hammock with dogs napping beside him, the wild birds feeding from the bird feeder, and the cats with their new kittens playing in the flower gardens. Mom might be weeding the garden or feeding the fish in the pond as the frogs watch her, unafraid. The horses are just on the other side of the fence, grazing and swishing their tails.

Being raised by a “couple of kooks” was fine by me. I remember Mom singing that song as we picked wild raspberries from our bush, and when we went barefoot together practicing on the balance beam Dad built for us. A lot of my parents’ values are now mine. I long for peace, nature, freedom, and love. I compost, have pets, and have an art room in the basement. Perhaps my love of wild colours and bright clothing also stems from them. Even as an adult, I still find joy in making dandelion chains and wearing them in my hair. My “hippie” parents taught me to celebrate life and to be myself. They gave me a love of learning and of discovery. They taught me to be creative and to express myself. Most of all, they truly made me believe that I could do anything I put my mind to. Now as I rock my own children to sleep, I sing “will you stay in a lovers’ story? If you stay you won’t be sorry . . .” And I look at my husband, with whom I’m so in love, and wonder, have I become a “kook” now too?

I Walk Among You by Leida Finlayson

You may not know it, but I walk among you. I conceal my origins in wool suits and makeup. My blow-dried hair and patent leather shoes hide any sort of barefoot background, my heritage as a child of hippies.

When I started this project, Dad said to me, “But Leida, Mum and I weren’t really hippies,” and I suppose they weren’t—not in the free-loving, drug-smoking, hard-core cave-dwelling kind of way. They were, and still are, more of the low-key, steady-as-she-goes hippies. But in Newfoundland a little hippy goes a long way . . .and the picture of a poncho-swaddled me under a peace-sign-topped Christmas tree speaks for itself.

Mum and Dad met in a bar at McGill in March of 1968. She was coming from a protest, he beginning a weekend of partying. Three weeks later they moved in together. They did eventually get married, something for which my prissy self has always been extremely grateful. As I understand it, Mum and Dad were standing at a crosswalk in 1969 when Mum proposed the idea. She once told me it was so both of them would be invited to family parties.

They had one of the first civil weddings in Quebec, timing it in December for tax reasons. Mum wore a green velour minidress, and Dad donned a sport coat he still wears. They took the subway to the ceremony and opted for a honeymoon at the movies. A reception was held in January where the “cool” aunts smoked up upstairs. (Knowing them as Lithuanian-accented 80- and 90-year olds, I have a hard time picturing this.)

With their tax refund, Mum and Dad came to Newfoundland for the summer of 1970. Dad needed a place to study, and a ship’s captain had told him the island was “God’s country.” They returned in the fall of 1972, ten months after I had been born. They thought they’d go back to land, which was cheap, so they bought a house and three acres in Woody Point on the province’s west coast. They supported themselves on Dad’s occasional contracts, family allowance cheques, three large gardens, and samples from a cousin’s clothing company. Dad had lobster traps one year and cut his own wood while Mum started weaving and attended her first craft fair. Work wasn’t steady, however, and my parents started to want things like swimming lessons for my younger sister and me. At the end of 1976 we moved to St. John’s.

Since we arrived in the city in December, it was impossible to build a compost heap. So greatly did it pain my mother to throw out good compost that that winter she filled empty milk cartons with banana peels and apples cores, stapled them shut, and stacked them in the freezer until spring.

In elementary school I started to notice that my family didn’t fit into our neighbourhood. I was attending a Catholic school and since we were half-Jewish, half-United, all agnostic, I was kept out of religious events. Then there was the grey barley soup and the egg salad sandwiches Dad would pack in lunches when Mum was away. No blue cans of traditional Newfoundland Vienna sausages for me.

My name was different. I was dressed differently—no frou-frou lace outfits or dress shoes for me. My parents looked different—Mum with her big curly hair and wool sweaters, and Dad with his shoulder-length hair and beard. On top of all this was a layer of “come-from-away.” I was not a born and bred Newfoundlander: I didn’t have the accent, or ever go “around the bay,” or eat Sunday dinner that included carrot and turnip mashed together, and I had an Oma, an Opa, and a Grandma, but no Nan or Pop.

All I desperately wanted was to be normal. I wanted sliced white bread! I wanted fuzzy wallpaper upstairs, and carpet on the basement walls! I wanted my mother to wear makeup and join the PTA. I wanted American cars, trips to Florida, and family friends with short hair. I wanted church!

I wanted a cabin, not a sailboat, and I didn’t want family friends who fed you gritty soy burgers, or wore their hair in ponytails. Mum and Dad were part of what was called in St. John’s the “rubber boot crowd,” or at least they were on the periphery. These were artsy/hippy “townies” who wore rubber boots for convenience, not because of their occupation. Mum still tells of how at age twelve I wouldn’t walk beside her on Water Street because she was wearing boots on a sunny day. I’m ashamed of myself now, but at the time I was tired of being teased.

Then there were the whales and the weaving. Our first winter in St. John’s we drove for hours to see whales trapped in the ice in Springdale, then illicitly cooked chili on hot plates at the hotel. Dad did some research on whales, and one summer we joined him camping under tarps and studying a tethered whale. Mum wove whales into her tapestries. One spring she gave whale ear bones she’d found to family in Montreal—I wonder what they thought? But the whale that was the real bane of my existence, however, was the mortifying green whale skull that sat on the porch. The other day Mum told me someone had borrowed it. “You mean you’re going to get it back?” I asked.

While I was in elementary school Mum began weaving quite seriously and attending craft fairs two or three times a year. She was really good at what she did and won awards. At the time it was a little unusual that my mum worked, even if her studio with her large and noisy loom was in the basement. I’ll always remember the pre-fair stress in the house and the production—the smell of dyeing wool and finding mohair strands in the butter. It was exciting to help my mum set up her booth and fun to hang out with other kids I only saw at craft fairs, but, once again, there was a discomfort I always felt when the “society” mothers and daughters came through. There was something too exposed and sort of poor about sitting in my mum’s booth as the world walked by. Of course, I know now people’s compliments were genuine, that they really did admire my mother’s talent.

The one arena of hippie culture I didn’t rebel against was politics. By and large, my parents were voters and grumblers, not activists, although I do remember Mum taking my sister and me to a peace march in the early 80s. Family friends were more the button- wearing, protesting types, but by grade three I knew Nestle was bad, and that there was somewhere in Africa where minority whites controlled things and majority blacks had no power. Oddly, I became more politically involved than my parents—as a columnist, a campaign volunteer, and with aspirations of my own. In grade six I dressed up for career day as Canada’s first female prime minister.

Life improved in junior high when I began a French immersion program. The program attracted kids whose parents cared about education, and who, in many cases, were as hippy, or nerdy, or just plain “come from away” as me. I didn’t become popular, but suddenly I wasn’t the only one with a name that wasn’t Murphy or Campbell. Shopping at the health food store was actually de rigueur, and there was nothing wrong with reading books. Lots of kids in my class weren’t affiliated with any faith or had one they and their families didn’t practice, although being half-Jewish was still kind of unusual. It was a godsend to find these peers, and, according to my dad, I became a happier child. Of course, there were still moments that felt particularly embarrassingly hippy—like the 1969 Volkswagen van we got from my grandparents. At one point the hand brake had gone and in hilly St. John’s that could be a problem. Mum took to carrying a large rock with her that she would wedge under a front tire when she parked, and then pop out again when it was time to go.

Today I appreciate the fact that Mum and Dad gave my sister and me the freedom to make our own decisions. We were free to travel by ourselves from a young age and to choose our own career paths. For a time I was well on track to becoming the parents I wanted to have: I wore frou-frou clothes, became a Girl Guide leader, sang in a church choir, and made myself meals that included grilled cheese sandwiches made with Kraft slices and white bread. I planned to be part of the establishment—to carry a briefcase, sit at boardroom tables, and wear a matching suit, but these days that is having less and less appeal.

Like Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton in “Family Ties” I have found the bred in the bone values have come home to roost. I no longer hide the fact that I can and do make granola from a family recipe, and I occasionally vote NDP. And compost, man, I do love the stuff! I love to look at it, take pleasure in creating it, and don’t mind spreading it. I’ve even tried vermiculture. Yup, it, too, pains me to toss out an apple core.

Making My Own Choices by Anonymous

My parents met at a peace march in 1965. They participated in the first be-in in Victoria, British Columbia. My mother was a naïve art-student daughter of upwardly mobile suburbanites; my father was a long-haired, bearded son of Alberta farmers. He was building a boat with his brother and had plans to sail around the world, while my mother was going to be a gypsy peddler on the streets of Victoria. Then my mother got pregnant with my brother, and my parents moved to a little island off the west coast of B.C., built a shelter, and started a garden. In 1969 my brother was born. I was conceived in Mexico and born in 1972 at home in the one-room cabin, with only my father and three-year-old brother present to help my mother.

Growing up, it was entirely normal to run around naked, have communal parties, lick my dish, wear hand-me-down clothes, use an outhouse, and live without electricity or a telephone. Money was pretty scarce, but both my parents were around most of the time, and I got to do whatever they were doing—getting firewood, gardening, doing yoga, cooking, milking goats, building things, or just taking it easy at the end of the day.

Early on I got the impression that mainstream society was messed up, and my folks had figured out a better way to live. Running around naked was normal and natural and right in the family or at the local beach, but not in town. Licking my dish, having my elbows on the table, and leaving the table whenever I wanted was all right at home but definitely not at my grandma’s house. Sexual exploration between adults and children was presented as a logical outcome of my childish curiosity about naked bodies, but my parents made it clear that “other people wouldn’t understand.” Growing and smoking marijuana was also a natural part of life but also not to be talked about with anyone outside the family.

As I grew older, this dichotomy between some of our family values and mainstream values became confusing. I have been forced to decide for myself which values make sense and which do not.

My hardest struggles have been (not surprisingly) around money, sex, and drugs. Maybe everyone finds these issues difficult, since society itself gives out very contradictory messages. Being “raised hippie” both added to my confusion and allowed me more freedom to make my own choices.

My brother has chosen to focus on making money so he can “retire early.” As a teenager, I decided I was not interested in pursuing either the standard forty-hour work week or working at a job I did not enjoy and living for the weekend. Consequently, I have a lifestyle similar to that of my parents: marginal money from work I enjoy with lots of time for other projects and pastimes (including parenting).

Unfortunately, I have also pretty much accepted my parents’ equation that enjoyment and quality of life go down as income goes up. Obviously, the equation isn’t necessarily true. I don’t even know if it’s true for me. I do know that my upbringing led me to believe that I could either have time to do things I enjoy or I could have money to buy things I want, but not both time and money.

In terms of sex, I sometimes found it difficult to have clear boundaries as a teenager and young adult. I love to flirt, and for a long time assumed that sex was the logical consequence if I flirted and turned someone on. Therefore, I tended to go along with whatever the other person wanted and was often out of touch with what exactly I wanted. I have gradually gained confidence around intimacy and now have a wonderful and understanding partner that I feel comfortable communicating with about sex.

Growing up, the only time that I got the message that marijuana, mushrooms, or LSD were “bad” was in junior high school—far too late, considering that I had already experienced their effects. Once again, I have had to try to figure out for myself what makes sense in my life. Of course, the subculture of teens and young adults who drink, smoke, and toke added another layer of confusion to the whole issue. Essentially, I know that such drugs do affect my health and my mental abilities, but I don’t agree with the standard North American approach of waging “war on drugs,” as it does little to decrease usage and much to increase risk.

All that said, I’m pleased and proud to have been raised by hippies. My parents made difficult choices and have had to see how their decisions affected my brother and me. I feel that I chose my parents to raise me, and I haven’t met anyone I would rather have as parents. My parents treated me with a lot of respect for my intelligence, creativity, and individuality. They didn’t talk down to me, and made every effort to teach me about the things I was interested in, and to allow me to make decisions for myself. Given the state of our society, it is inevitable that I have challenges and struggles to work out. Everyone does, regardless of how they were raised. At least I think I got a head start in thinking for myself.

The Toilet by Anne Correia

Growing up as a hippie family wasn't quite enough for my parents, so I grew up in a hippie community. Seven families in our rural Vancouver Island area bought a fourteen-acre piece of property together in the early 1970s, and everyone helped each other build their houses out of scrap lumber and recycled nails. No one put locks on their doors, and us kids (eleven altogether) lived from house to house, eating whatever oat-bran-sprout-carob cookies whichever tie-dyed braid-and-bandana-wearing mother passed to us on our way through. (My first groceries after moving away from home were Cocoa Puffs cereal and chocolate-fudge Pop Tarts.)

The nice thing about the 'community' was that although we may not have fit in, we at least had each other. However, even among our group, my family seemed to be the last to do anything—we were the last to get electricity, hot running water, a TV, an electric stove, and a flush toilet. Somehow, everyone in the neighbourhood was lucky enough to have a real flush toilet but me, and the greatest pain I suffered as a hippie child was the lack of a water-guzzling piece of porcelain.

At first the outhouse was outside and away from the house, but things got worse when my dad devised a digester system in the basement and moved the 'toilet' onto the porch. The digester system was a giant barrel that boiled and bubbled, and which eventually filtered stuff through an underground hose into the garden. Waste not, want not. This meant that we couldn't throw toilet paper into the pot, which was brilliant in the eyes of my parents, since it gave us the opportunity to save our used toilet paper in a basket to be employed later in starting the fire (naturally, our only source of heat). Nothing was a secret in our bathroom. A glance into the basket told you anything you might want to know about the regularity or health of your housemates. Yikes.

Dad eventually built a real bathroom (with a real bathtub, although still no hot running water), and he moved his toilet into it. The toilet was a square box with a regular toilet seat on it, except that the seat was glued to the box, and the lid weighed a ton because of the 'seal' Dad had built onto the underside of it. This was supposed to keep the smell to a minimum. The toilet bowl looked like a funnel, which led down to the digester, and you had to hope that your 'business' headed in the right direction, or a bit of manoeuvring with a stick would be necessary. Cripes.

Still, all of this was bearable—a little embarrassing at birthday parties, but bearable—until I hit my teens. I avoided bringing school friends over on the weekends, and I hated—loathed—the fact that everyone in my house knew every bit of action going on in my confused teenage body. One day, I accidentally dropped a feminine hygiene product down the chute, and although I longed desperately to ignore it, I knew I had to tell Dad. He had to break into the digester and fish it out, and since, at fourteen, everything that happened on the planet was about me, this was the ultimate humiliation. I never even considered how awful it must have been for Dad, but in true hippie fashion, he was as laidback as ever.

My worst moment of longing for a flush toilet was when I brought my first boyfriend home at the age of fifteen. Even now, the memory brings back that lurch in my stomach and a flush to my cheeks as I hear Lon ask the dreaded question, "Where's the bathroom?" Oh, the horror. I felt sick and hot, and I wanted to ask him if he could just hold it, but instead I pointed the way and didn't say a word. Of course, my parents didn't think anything of it, chatting and carrying on as if the world wasn't about to end, while I stood shell-shocked, waiting for Lon to emerge from the bathroom and tell me that he couldn't see me anymore.

When he did come out, he looked embarrassed, and I looked embarrassed, and we never, ever mentioned it again. We dated for almost a year, and he surprisingly never listed the lack of a flush toilet among his reasons for breaking it off (although I secretly suspected it was on the unspoken list, along with "and I can't stomach one more of your Mom's rice-flour-carob-oat-cakes"). Another teenage romance down the pipes, and no thanks to hippie life.

Well. The part of the story that is silent—the part I only acknowledge now— is that the digester fertilized a garden that fed us good vegetables, and a lawn (of sorts) that we lolled in on hot summer days, slurping on home-made orange juice popsicles. We learned not to waste water, and we learned that the accepted way of doing things is not the only way of doing things. We learned to think critically and creatively by watching Dad invent our household out of bits and pieces of scavenged junk, and it has served both my sister and I well in our lives. We are both known as problem solvers, and my work partner calls me her 'engineer' because I can always rig something up when we come across a problem.

The house now has hot water, electric heat, home electronics, and everything else you could imagine in a modern household, including a plain, white, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary flush toilet. I sometimes think my dad waited to install it until I was nearly over the embarrassment of it all, just as a character-building exercise.

It's difficult for me to look back on any part of my childhood now without some degree of gratitude and sentimentality. As I get older and realize what kind of dysfunction can exist in a family, I see that my fear of a flushless toilet was a blessing if it was the greatest thing I had to worry about. My embarrassment has turned to pride as I marvel at my father's ingenuity. I think it's appropriate that his ashes now fertilize a Japanese maple in the same yard that we all fertilized as a family for so many years. Sometimes when I visit Mom and use the bathroom, I laugh as I flush the toilet, remembering how achingly I longed for it as a teenager; and I cry as I now care not one whit about it, but long instead for another minute with him.

The Man by Shaun Armour

Who needed The Boogie Man when you had The Man? The Man was scarier than The Boogie Man. He was real. Sure, an imaginary Boogie Man could send me shrieking into my parents comforting, clothing-optional bed, but it was The Man who could send my parents shrieking into mine. The downside to fighting authority is that authority usually fights back. It didn’t help in our numerous encounters with The Man that my stepfather had questionable legal status in Canada. Nor did it help that he was not technically my stepfather, since the bonds between he and my mother were primarily spiritual, not legal. An American, and one small step away from being a full-blown draft-dodger, he’d flitted back and forth across the border on a mission of love courting my mother throughout the late sixties and early seventies. While Canada, to its great credit, occasionally ignored these transborder peregrinations, the US was far less forgiving of their long-haired sons fleeing north.

It is questionable whether the tale of our border woes went deeper than our long, stringy hair, and our dented, powder blue Volkswagen van. Most likely, that was more than enough to draw the baleful ire of The Man. For all the childhood fun of being part of the counterculture, our merry goodwill rarely softened the hearts of anyone in a uniform. It certainly had done no good years before when my stepfather had attempted to cross into Mexico at Falcon, Texas, only to have his van stripped to the metal in a meticulous search for contraband. The reward for the concerted efforts of a small army of Texas Rangers armed with crowbars and tire thumpers were a few seeds of marijuana wrapped in a cotton ball and stuffed in an ashtray. These seeds of weed, which have grown in the pantheon of family lore, to be known simply as The Seeds, were a left behind artifact from a German hitchhiker who had been using the purported medicinal efficacy of their oil as an earache cure. And though no time was served for this piddling transgression, a permanent note was dutifully inserted on The Man’s naughty-and-nice list.

You might think in the Luddite age before computers, that a minor notation, referencing a verbal warning, for an unprosecutable offense wouldn’t amount to much, but you’d be wrong. Somehow, that little scribble dogged us everywhere we went for years to come. Imagine trying to get excited about a family trip to California with the specter of a full body cavity search hanging over your head. It made concentrating on the Zen-like joy of the alphabet game infinitely more challenging.

Nothing is more frightening for children than seeing their parents afraid. My stepfather was the coolest, hippie rogue either my sister or I had ever known. He’d been in his scrapes, and he recounted them with the joie de vivre of an itinerant bard. From armed bandito roadblocks in Latin America, to hopped-up killer bikers at Altamont, he had seen a lot. Nor was my mother one for taking shit. A runaway at sixteen and a divorced single mother of two by twenty, she could hold her own against the best. Still, on the nights before we crossed over into the United States, the lightness of our little utopian existence dimmed to a bleak foreboding black, and the reek of fear commingled with the scent of sage and incense. On the bright side, it was also the only time I was guaranteed a haircut. It was nice for a change, not to be mistaken for a girl.

Christian children have their church clothes; hippie kids have their border clothes. My remaking into a poor man’s Bobby Brady was almost a metaphysical transformation. It was only as my long blond curls fell before the scissors and my six-year-old fingers fumbled with the buttons on my collared shirt that I honestly caught a glimpse of how the other 98 percent of society lived. Self-aware enough to know that many people despised us simply for our appearance, I imagined during my backseat Rockwellian conversion that I was a spy infiltrating the enemy camp. Even then, I understood a few things with instinctual clarity. I recognized that my parents were not on the path of least resistance. They were tilting at windmills, inspired by a resolute faith that in time the unjust windmills would fall. They understood that if you don’t make a choice about how you live, someone else will make it for you. I also grasped that freedom was no small burden.

So even as I daydreamed secret agent fantasies, another side of my inner child toyed with the notion of being a double agent, joining the other team, for my hippie parents had made it clear, that this, too, was an option. I could eat meat; I could become a born-again Christian, even a stockbroker. All things were theoretically permissible. My role as a child was not to make my parents happy, nor to take them at their word; it was to discover my true nature. Self-determination was my human birthright. This was a great deal for a six-year-old to wrap his head around, especially one who regularly got beat up at school for looking different. Years later it’s still a lot to deal with, even without the beatings.

Though I was a talented little actor, which was no doubt attributable to a parental emphasis on all things artistic, our familial best efforts to appear to be something that we were not invariably ended in failure. Every trip to the border was a self-betrayal for my parents, the fake clothes, the hated haircuts; we even took time to practice smiling and appearing at ease. This was all done because the stakes were so high. The Man could do things. The possibility of my stepfather being arrested or deported was not inconceivable. Worse had happened to people we knew.

Sitting in the idling van, waiting in line at the border crossing near Kingston, we invoked every mantra and blessing available to us for safe passage. Scanning the waiting cars, we even tempted karmic retribution, secretly wishing that other disreputable vehicles might draw attention away from ourselves. But in the sea of American-made, four-door behemoths there were rarely more suspect modes of transportation than our bumper-sticker-adorned, mattress-in-the-backseat, floral-curtained German van. We’d traveled over three hundred miles out of our way on a second-hand rumor that this border station might be more ‘easy going’ than the Peace Bridge or Windsor-Detroit. Looking at the booths manned by crewcut, mirrored-sunglasses-wearing archetypes of authority, we began to consider the intel suspect.

As the lineup inched forward, we scrutinized our possible interrogators from a distance, searching for any hint of latent humanity, a friendly nod, a smile, anything. We watched and analyzed, each picking our favorite, the one we hoped we would get, the one we prayed we would not. From the backseat, I watched my father’s knuckles turn white from gripping the steering wheel. The hooked thumb of an exasperated border agent jerked into our consciousness, summoning us to our fate. Attached to the thumb, was a man who looked uncannily like the road boss in Cool Hand Luke. Our nerve browned and wilted as quickly as sprouts out of water.

Seconds into the interview between our hippie clan and The Man it was clear that what we had between us was a failure to communicate. He gave us a look of mild disgust and his jaw churned as if he were attempting to dislodge a piece of fatty gristle from between his teeth. Only when we stumbled over the answers to his most basic questions did his face register any hint of personal satisfaction. The agonizing encounter seemed to last forever, even though it was probably less than a minute before he gave us the fateful utterance: “Pull it over.”

Making the crawl of shame, we cut across the lanes of free-flowing traffic and headed towards the inspection station. We didn’t say a word; partly because of a hippie urban legend that claimed border stations had high power dishes that could pick up conversation in cars, mostly because we felt so defeated.

From the backseat floor, to the roof rack on top, our van was loaded to the gills. Most families don’t give notice on their apartments before going on vacation. Mine always did. Though in theory our excursion to California was simply a pleasure trip, in actuality, our travels were generally open-ended, with the possibility of an impromptu move never far beyond the fringe. With this potentiality in mind, the van was filled with everything not haggled away at our most recent garage sale. The remaining contents of our lives rolled along with us on four bald tires and three functioning forward gears.

As a pair of eager inspectors rifled through our belongings looking for any reason to justify digging deeper, we sat on the hard curb watching nervously. With a noticeable smirk, one of the border agents approached us holding a backpack and a purse pulled from the van. The purse belonged to an occasional traveling companion and family friend named Mary Ellen. Why, exactly, we had Mary Ellen’s backpack and purse remains somewhat of a head-scratching mystery to my entire family. But people came and went. Friends would travel with us for a time, part ways to pursue their own quests, and then find us again in some far off city with the uncanny skill of homing pigeons. Not surprisingly, this ethereal explanation failed to satisfy the border agents. They promptly hauled my mother and stepfather into separate interrogation rooms, leaving my sister and I to sit in the noonday sun and watch the dismantling of our van.

Two years older than me, my sister held my hand protectively as we watched them toss all of our belongings out of the van and onto the concrete. It felt like a garage sale in hell as the uniformed agents pawed through our clothes and personal items. As morbidly interesting as it was, after a few hours we grew bored. With naïve pluck, my sister approached one of the agents and asked if we could have a couple of our dolls to play with. This prompted an invasive and grueling strip search of Barbie and Captain Kirk before they could be released into our protective custody.

Things livened up somewhat with the arrival of the drug-sniffing dog, a gimpy German shepherd clearly counting the days until retirement. The dog took a few lackadaisical turns around the van before plunking himself down in a convenient patch of shade. Showing uncharacteristic concern, the agents gathered around the old dog. After an intense debate, it was agreed that the dog had a cold and was incapable of smelling anything whatsoever. This only goaded the agents to redouble their efforts. As they broke out the screwdrivers and crowbars, the sweet old dog watched with mild disinterest.

As the day wore on and nothing was discovered, it dawned on one of the agents that my sister or I might be a valuable source of information. After hours of sitting alone without our parents watching armed men tear through our stuff, we were offered juice and cookies. This was a dilemma. The prohibition against accepting candy from strangers was weighed against hunger, and the fact that these were real cookies. Not homemade carob-sawdust cookies, but genuine store bought Oreo’s, with that heavenly white lickable center. We never stood a chance. As we scarfed them down, a smiling man in uniform knelt before us.

“Do your parents have any drugs in the van?” he asked, focusing his attention on me.

I looked to my older sister for guidance. She gave me her patented bug-eyed evil-death stare that unmistakably compelled me to remain silent. The agent dangled another Oreo towards me.

“Yes,” I said tentatively, inching towards the Oreo.

“Really?” said the agent. “What kind of drugs?”

For a moment I wavered, unsure whether or not to divulge more. Finally, I crumbled.

“My mother’s birth control pills,” I confessed, snatching the cookie from his outstretched hand and stuffing it into my mouth. At six, I was already well aware of the relative merits of the pill, diaphragms, and rubbers, even if only in a theoretical sense.

Laughing, the agents lost their professional zeal, and with it, their desire to continue the search. My mother and stepfather, who had somehow cobbled together identical explanations for the purse and pack while in separate detention rooms, were released with a stern warning.

As we picked our lives up off the ground and put the van back together, the man who had bribed me to squeal spoke to my father.

“Well,” he said, “if you got something hid in there, you sure got it hid good. Better not let me see you again.”

We never did see him again, though we saw plenty of others like him as we continued our travels.

I married my wife almost a decade ago. It wasn’t a church wedding, but it was legal. The daughter of a Republican stockbroker from Pittsburgh, somehow she’s grown up to be a vegetarian, yoga-practicing, semi-Buddhist. I’m an occasional meat eater, who still gets stressed, cuts his hair, and buttons up his best shirt before crossing the border. My wife laughs at this phantom fear of authority, this hangover from my crazy hippie childhood. With family and friends in both Canada and the United States, we regularly make the trip across the Peace Bridge in our little fuel-efficient Honda Civic. She always drives, laughing and joking with the border agents, while in the passenger seat I keep my mouth shut and try not to appear nervous and nauseous. We never get stopped.