Some Come Here to Get Lost

I did not get here in time for the Summer of Love, which occurred forty years ago. I got here just in time for the Summer of "I'm OK, You're OK" -- and we know that's not quite the same thing. I got to San Francisco when the celebrants of the Summer of Love were still crashing from that high from the three preceding years. Comin' down hard. I was at the St. Francis movie house on Market Street when the Hell's Angles took over the theater to tell their side of the story of how murder and mayhem happened on their watch during the Rolling Stones show at Altamont. The Summer of Love was officially over. The Haight-Ashbury, once the nexus of flower power, eventually became a repository for human driftwood. So many came to San Francisco to find paradise. Every utopian experiment through the ages has failed.


A fellow at the Medical Examiner's office once explained why it is often difficult to identify bodies that end up in his purview -- persons with no friends, no known relatives -- wrapped in a shroud of uncertainty and in a sheet purchased by The City.


"Some people come here to get lost," observed Alan Pringle. Why is San Francisco a landscape of souls who desire obscurity and anonymity -- this cool, grey city of forgetfulness?


"It's true in my experience that people from all over the country come west to shed the lives they had," Pringle said. "That includes family and friends -- everything." He was unceasingly amazed by what his research told him about people who end up on the tables in the coroner's office.


"At times, you're stunned by what they have run away from, never to look back."


Oscar Wilde noted, while visiting the City-by-the-Bay, "It's an odd thing, but anybody who disappears is said to be in San Francisco."


Pringle agreed that old Oscar was on to something. Invariably the Golden Gate Bridge comes to mind, particularly to the mind of the Medical Examiner For some. it's the end of the line. There's something attractive about the notion of vanishing and perhaps starting all over again. But for over the 1,500 persons who have jumped into the cold, swirling waters of the Golden Gate, there might have been the realization we take ourselves with us wherever we go -- including our psyche, our sentiments and our sadness.


But it never crossed our minds in the summer of 1967. The message came in the music, and there was so much of it -- the Jefferson Airplane ... the Grateful Dead ... The Charlatans ... Moby Grape ... The Beau Brummels ... Janis Joplin & Big Brother. It was all so intriguing that George Harrison came here with his girlfriend, Patti Boyd, to see it for himself. He was shocked. "I went to Haight-Ashbury, expecting it to be this brilliant place." Harrison said. "It was just full of horrible, spotty, dropout kids on drugs. It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug culture. It wasn’t what was I thought of all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. It was like the Bowery, it was like alcoholism, it was like any addiction." George was so horrified that he swore off drugs. He was surely one of the who few came to San Francisco and got straight. Years later, he and Ravi Shankar held a concert to raise money for the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic.


Ah, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I have to think with affection about the great adventurers of the time in this great experiment called the Summer of Love. (Remember when we would "experiment" with psychedelic drugs, and "experiment" with all sorts of sex? Well, perhaps you don't) There were the counter-culture adventurers, countering a culture of greed, militarism, and prejudice -- Wavy Gravy ... Chet Helms ... Emmett Grogan, founder of The Diggers ... Allen Cohen, founder of The Oracle, the newspaper of record in the Haight. For the most part, they meant well. It seems attractive in some ways now. Peace and love were apportioned for awhile but reality soon rolled into town. Multitudes came to San Francisco that summer in 1967, as pilgrims once came to the New World, to find fame and fortune -- maybe even to get on the cover of Rolling Stone. But, above all, the goal was freedom. They came here to get away from a life that they were eager to leave behind. They came here to connect with a new family. It doesn't always work out, though. Many simply got lost all over again.



Bruce Bellingham is the author of "Bellingham by the Bay: Bit, Bites, Adventures in Radio and Real Life. He's also a columnist for the SF Northside.