In the Patchouli-Scented Footsteps of the White Rabbit

Refreshed from enjoying the sand as our mattress by the ocean, we headed back down the beach to the dune at the end of Judah Street, where we put on our shoes and waited on the curb until the next N train arrived and turned around to head back towards downtown.

Once on the train, we both relaxed in peaceful silence, alternately staring out the window and leisurely reading news articles on our smartphones. The train passed blocks of Chinese businesses, herb stores and acupuncturists, in two-story buildings that reminded Red of Mexico.

The train mounted the long hill on Parnassus and arrived at the west portal of the Sunset Tunnel,  where we disembarked at the corner of Carl and Cole streets. There we walked down the hill a few blocks to the heart of Haight-Ashbury, into the midst of the postmillennial incarnation of San Francisco's longstanding counterculture.

Red had wanted to see the neighborhood out of historical interest, and I had thought it would a nice addition to our itinerary on the way back to downtown.  It had been part of the tour that Coop and Elisabeth had given me a couple years back.

As we walked down Cole towards Haight,we passed ancient Victorian mansions crowded side by side and augmented by rusting security gates installed decades ago. I narrated to Red a little of the history of the neighborhood, how in the 1960s it had become a cheap refuge for post-beatnik types fleeing the higher rents of North Beach. One could imagine the waves of slackful youth that had occupied the floors of houses we passed, at least until they became prohibitively expensive.

I pointed out the direction to the east end of Golden Gate Park, the location of the Human Be-In in January 1967 that had launched the Summer of Love, and which gave early exposure to the Timothy Leary, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. It was amazing to realize the degree to which the counterculture had become the mainstream, something that would have been difficult to imagine back then.

I generally can't stand to listen to the old pop standards anymore, the ones you still hear so often on classic rock stations. But if you play the original album in sequence, interspersed with the songs that never became singles, it can be a quite different and pleasurable experience, and evokes what it must have felt like to have heard them for the first time, turning the vinyl over after each side on a stereo and dropping the needle. It was the Youtube of its day, a viral form of postmodern communication now long outdated and primitive.

At Haight one could see an appropriate urban collage of funky boutiques, secondhand clothing stores, cafes, a Tibetan gift shop, and a smake bodega selling hookahs and other pipes.  Above them, on the second floors of the buildings, it was obvious many of the apartments along Haight had been renovated to accommodate wealthier yuppie tastes.

Almost stereotypically, the aroma of patchouli and cannabis alternately greeted us as we passed open doorways, the latter scent being detectable nearly everywhere throughout the city, as Red frequently noticed.

The thin sidewalks were crowded with folks of all size and shape that one might expect in Haight-Ashbury,  including more than a few homeless youth in clusters. Almost if as cast in a movie, a bearded old man wearing tie dye shirt and dark sunglasses staggered by us into the entrance of a tobacco shop, as if he had walked the same path daily since the Sixties.

We had a light lunch at a burger place, where we watched with amusement as a homeless man outside picked condiments off a sandwich and threw each little piece onto the street with abandon until the concrete with littered with the ingredients he refused. Ten minutes later a city sanitation worker in an orange vest came by and scooped up the food debris into the trash with a broom. The cycle could start anew.

After lunch, we walked down the bus back to our hotel. At the legendary corner of Haight and Ashbury, Red used her iPhone to take a photo of the street sign and then sent it to her parents and one of her girlfriends, saying "Guess where I am."

Her parents immediately texted back "San Francisco!" but her friend, who is of the same age as her, replied "Berkeley!" which made us laugh.

The generation gap is alive and well.