Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture

by Chelsea Cain

  I’ve heard the tale many times. I listen, still drawn to the way my mother’s eyes deepen when she speaks of waking up early to find the world coated with a thick layer of glass, as if the brightest stars had indeed fallen overnight, leaving ashes softly flickering. I listen because her eyes tell me again and again that I am her daughter. In the country of memory, there is a place that resembles winter. It is here that my mother stands in front of the farmhouse, inhaling the quiet breath of snow. She does not move, for with any tiny movement the delicacy of such a starry winter morning will be shattered. The tightly wrapped bundle in her arms is me, and I am warm against her breast. She calls to a figure some distance away, but I don’t know her words. This memory is silent. The figure is my father. He is scraping ice from the windshield of the car. He looks up when she calls and nods in response, taking a moment to remove his leather work gloves and blow on his numbed fingers. The gray of his stocking cap is almost imperceptible against the sky. Despite the cold, he is at ease. My mother lingers on the front step a moment longer, wondering how the brutal winds of the storm last night could result in a morning so fragile as this.

  There is a photograph from my parents’ days at the Wisconsin farmhouse in which my father sits in a worn-out chair, wearing rusty orange corduroys and a brown argyle sweater. His hair, uncombed and shaggy, hangs to his shoulders and his winter beard is just beginning to form. My mom is bent over him with her arms around his chest and her chin on his shoulder. Her hair is dark and rich, coming nearly to her waist. It falls over one side, framing the shared contentment in their faces. The photo was taken twenty-three years ago in the early days of November, before I was born. Behind them, the potbelly wood stove radiates warmth, making their cheeks flushed.

  During their time in the country, my parents planted seeds that grew into fresh tomatoes, homemade basil pesto and a daughter who was just as nourished by the dark soil as the wild-flowers were. Listening to my parents’ stories, I am filled with a strange sense that I am reliving their experience, caught on an invisible thread that winds itself in circles. I wonder if the time elapsed between generations has made it impossible to really understand each other’s experience. When my parents were my age, this country was in the throes of an influential stage, with an atmosphere of experimentation and rebellion. People everywhere were questioning the basic structure against which many American standards stood.

  Although my parents and I have been referred to as hippies countless times, I still don’t know what the word means. It is a label spawned by popular culture during my parents’ youth, but its use has persevered through my own. How can so many scattered concepts over so long breed concrete definition? Of course there is a pile of stereotypes, as with most labels used to define human beings, but my parents were not the strung-out, stoned-to-the-bone drifters on a perpetual search for the next Dead show; they were not the freaked-out screaming radicals, the starry-eyed tie-dyed dreamers or the vegetarian environmentalists whose moral purity could wound the soul. Instead, my parents were calm, quiet, creative individuals who happened to be alive during a dynamic time.

  Inevitably, the period influenced the people they are. But while some people might have changed to fit the movement of the sixties and seventies, in my parents’ case, the movement just seemed to fit them. If being a hippie meant wearing plaid bell-bottoms on your wedding day, sporting a dandelion instead of a corsage to the senior prom, protesting the Vietnam War, and smoking marijuana and remembering to inhale, then my parents were hippies once. If it has anything to do with honesty, compassion, appreciating the silence of a winter morning, remembering to listen when the leaves fall and believing in magic, then my parents were, and still are, hippies.

  When I imagine the sixties and seventies, I am filled with a sad sense that something important has been lost-something that connected people, regardless of their many directions. Growing up in the aftermath of the ‘hippie movement’ has fragmented youth identity. We are propelled headlong into the age of anxiety, afflicted with tunnel vision and distrust of our neighbors. The powerful influence of the hippie decades on American culture depended on the participation of a great number of people. It was a movement in the true sense of the word, a collective effort toward a common goal: personal freedom.

  Now there are only separate movements in opposing directions and a seeming ambiguity of purpose. My generation has been characterized as thoughtless, cynical, unmotivated, apathetic and generally uninterested. Although I have known several people who fit the stereotype, I cannot blame them, but rather the circumstances of their experience. For many my age, our childhood took place just as our parents’ euphoric awakening was drizzling into a confused haze of dissatisfaction. Families broke apart, divorce became common practice. During the past twenty years, technological innovation has become the dominant factor in defining the pace of our culture. Perhaps our brains seem a bit numb because they are saturated with too much information, too many media images repeating themselves in the reflective surfaces of our shiny new world. American culture thrives on appearances, swallows the grit and beauty that lies under its glassy facades and spits out the remains in dilapidated, dirty dollar signs. The disease of overcon-sumption is as familiar as the threat of being infected with HIV. Growing up amid all-you-can-eat buffets and Slim-Fast programs, we were taught early on to follow our appetites rather than our ideas.

  As we move closer and closer to a new millennium, I am unsure of the space I occupy. I am compelled to walk away, backwards, away from the cars and blaring artificial lights, away from computer-generated greetings and complacent barstools, away from the mentality that caring about anything equates to naivete. So here I am, driving through a landscape that has seen the last thirty years go whirling by in a blur of ever increasing traffic, rising decibels and thickening exhaust.

  If we are moving in circles, they seem to be getting tinier and tinier. Maybe the equator is tightening its grasp on the earth. It’s difficult to remember that we are just passing through, mere vessels complete with supple exteriors to accommodate the shifting states of our souls. When I turned twenty-three and moved to the country, I felt as if I could finally exhale that little bit of breath I’d been unconsciously holding in my lungs. Time is not so relentless when it is possible to watch the sun make an uninhibited arc across the day, when the stars take up more of the night’s space than the darkness, when a footprint lives for days in its moist soil bed, when the only motor to be heard is the occasional tractor several miles away. I understand why my parents chose to spend this stage of their lives away from the commotion of urban America.

  I am watching Iowa go by. This midwestern countryside is the place that possesses part of my childhood, the place where I caught snowflakes on my tongue and fireflies in Mason jars, imagining that I had captured things born of the stars. I don’t know where I’m going, and even as I drive amid familiar territory, I wonder where I’ve been. Yet I have inherited a certain essence, a philosophy perhaps, from my parents, and it’s not important for me to know. Possibility is a wind so strong it sometimes blows right through you. The same wind, perhaps, that carried the kite my parents and I flew recently on top of a big hill in Cedar County as the sun was setting one evening. That is where I will be-where I am-and all around me, Iowa is humming.

  Diane B. Sigman

  A Dual Life

  I smoked my first joint three weeks before my eleventh birthday. With my mother. My mother had smoked her first roughly three years earlier, at age thirty-four. She got high with our neighbors, Michael and Caroline, who lived two houses down from us in suburban Detroit.

  Prior to meeting Michael and Caroline, my middle-class parents listened to Johnny Mathis, wore polyester pants, ate Saturday night dinners at Joe Muir’s Steakhouse, and socialized with other young Jewish couples who were beginning families and paying on starter homes. My father was a ham radio enthusiast; my mother played Mah-Jongg every Wednesday night with four other women. Bowel habits of the children
dominated the conversation.

  My brother’s birth in 1971 made our starter home too small. My parents selected our new house from a tract going up quickly and cheaply over empty fields. All the houses were thin-walled and leaky. During winter months we put towels on the windowsills that stuck to ice in the screen tracks.

  My mother met Caroline when our schnauzer, Margo, crapped on her expensive, chemically maintained lawn. My mother apologized-Margo had an annoying tendency to bolt when let out-and they fell to conversing. During the next few weeks, whenever I couldn’t find my mother in the house, I’d stand on our driveway and look down the block. My mother would be sitting on Caroline’s porch, the two of them chatting and smoking cigarettes bought by the carton.

  Then Caroline introduced Michael to my mother, my father was brought in and my family experienced a sea change. I was seven, my sister, six, my brother, three. Born in 1967, I remember vast expanses of ‘before,’ including the Vietnam War, Watergate, my mother’s bouffant hairdo and my father’s leisure suit.

  Michael and Caroline were thirteen years apart in age, smoked pot and listened to music we’d never heard before. Dionne Warwick, Eydie Gorme and Johnny Mathis records were soon shelved to make space for the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. I came downstairs one morning and wandered over to the stereo, where an album lay out from the night before: Led Zeppelin IV. The gray man bent under his load of twigs looked a hell of a lot different from Dionne Warwick, insouciant in her Pucci sheath on the cover of The Windows of the World.

  ‘Something is very different here,’ I remember thinking. ‘Something has changed.’

  Indeed. What Michael and Caroline offered my parents was a way station into something they were longing for but could not articulate. They were bored by those Joe Muir’s dinners, talk of how many bags of grass clippings each garnered from the Saturday lawn mowing and whether or not the kids shat according to Spock. Michael and Caroline read books and listened to this weird music and talked about ideas. Michael liked to cook exotic foods. He belonged to a beer club and ordered aged steaks through the mail. Issues of Gourmet began turning up in our family room.

  My mother stopped using lipstick and put her frosted blue eye shadow away. She stashed her hot rollers (whose smell while heating I loved) under the bathroom sink and threw away the CFC-laden can of Aqua Net. She began wearing flat shoes. My father abandoned his hair spray, grew a full beard and mustache and allowed his thick hair to grow in. Both began wearing jeans. They dropped their straight friends swiftly and without explanation.

  Yet they did not become hippies. Detroit didn’t produce hippies any more than it manufactured reliable cars. Instead, they became more open-minded, aware. They began to see societal mores as false constructs. Their relationship with Michael and Caroline deepened into an extended marriage.

  Detroit wasn’t a swinging L. A. or the remote hills of Humboldt County, where open marriages and casual attitudes toward drugs were more prevalent. The Detroit I grew up in was about White Flight and ostentatious money and moving to a house in West Bloomfield with a Cadillac-always a Cadillac-in the driveway. The mothers of my peers wore gold jewelry and tight designer jeans. Black women from the inner city cleaned these women’s homes while they shopped and swapped divorce lawyers.

  Although my parents never told me to be discreet, I intuited that ours was not a lifestyle discussed outside the house. I was in training for the dual life I maintain to this day. When I was younger, this meant getting a decent education and a job, limiting my drug exploits to weekends and keeping my counterculture views quiet among my peers. Neither of my parents had college degrees, and we thought that magic parchment meant financial security, infinitely more appealing than macaroni and old coats. So while I toked up with my folks on free Saturday nights, I also began accepting babysitting jobs whenever possible, spending those Friday and Saturday nights at somebody else’s kitchen table, buried in American history or Spanish verb conjugation. Sometimes I’d get home around one or two in the morning, still silently conjugating the verb ‘to be’ in Spanish, only to find my parents huddled around the table with Caroline and Michael, tapping Quaalude powder-still commercially available-into vitamin E capsules. Or they might be snorting a few lines. Pot was always around. I was frequently invited to join and just as often declined.

  Sometime in my early teens, Caroline decided she didn’t want to be married to Michael anymore. I have no idea why. I’m not sure anyone did. Michael moved to New Mexico to be with his son, lan, the child of his brief first marriage. My parents were devastated, but continued their intense relationship with Caroline. Robert H. Rimmer’s The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31 lay out in the family room. I read Rimmer’s careful analyses of extended, loving relationships and felt they made perfect sense. A group of consenting adults wanting to share lives: sex, children, home, money. Yet I compared Rimmer’s Utopian world to my parents’ lives: missing Michael, dependent on me for child care, low on cash and living in a house deteriorating under harsh midwestern winters. I resented the metal key chain that gave my neck a rash. Going off to live with a like-minded group of people who took care of each other sounded fine to me.

  By high school I had my life down to a science. I attended classes in the morning, then worked in the high school’s main office during the afternoon as part of the cooperative education program. I studied madly, enrolling in advanced placement history and English, hoping my good grades would get me loans or maybe a scholarship to Wayne State University. With my paychecks, I bought corduroy pants, matching sweaters and low-heeled boots. I kept my wavy brown hair shoulder-length and clean. Years later, readingyane Eyre, I instantly identified with the protaganist’s need to deflect attention from her person, keeping her shabby but neat clothing ‘in quaker trim.’

  My school job freed me from babysitting, so Saturday nights, my books neatly stacked in my dusted bedroom, I’d get high with my parents. My father had befriended some younger co-workers who were into cocaine. They’d come over with their girlfriends and assorted buddies and we’d party all night.

  One buddy was a tall, shy young man named Dean. He came from a working-class Catholic family of nine brothers and sisters, many of whom worked alongside him at a Ford plant. Though he was sharply intelligent, college was never encouraged in his family.

  So despite his desire to attend, he abided by his father’s wishes and followed in the family footsteps into the safety of the United Auto Workers.

  I fell madly in love with him. I was drawn to his quiet demeanor, the way he’d sit cross-legged on the floor at our parties, leaning forward occasionally to utter nearly inaudible comments. He liked to read, do drugs and ride motorcycles, and he turned me on to Neil Young. Our relationship encompassed all the cliches of passionate nights and dazed happiness. I was sixteen; Dean, twenty.

  But we needed to score some birth control for those passionate nights. This was the early eighties, when the worst fears surrounding sexual contact could be cured with a script for penicillin. How innocently lucky we were, the last children of a halcyon era. Dean offered to buy condoms, but I felt wary: My sister was the product of a broken condom. I wanted the utter security of the Pill.

  Even given their liberal views, the idea of hitting up my parents for birth control alarmed me. But one of our closest family friends, David, was an ob/gyn and my regular physician, so skulking off to the clinic my peers ducked into seemed ridiculous. While I screwed up the guts to ask my mom to make an appointment with David, Dean and I planned a trip to northern Michigan, where his family had a cabin.

  My mother, of course, was no fool.

  ‘So I guess you’ll be needing some birth control,’ she said as we drove home from the supermarket a few weeks before the trip. I thought I was going to fall out of the Buick onto Southfield Road. ‘Uh, yeah, I will.’ Off we went to David’s office, where he gave me six months of Ortho-Novum and the freedom to fuck unfettered.

  Driving back, my mother told me never to have sex in
cars, as Detroit at night is not only dangerous, but often chilly. ‘Go in your bedroom and put the stereo on for privacy,’ she suggested. ‘That way, I won’t have to worry about where you are. And you won’t catch cold.’

  Dean and I were together for just under a year. Initially we were happy, but our differences surfaced quickly. His family was openly anti-Semitic and they made their dislike of me plain. I didn’t allow the rush of sex and late nights of coke-fueled talk to interrupt my studies. Dean, who did differential equations on grocery lists when bored, was openly jealous. I pushed him hard to borrow money and attend a local technical college. It was none of my business, and he told me so. In truth, the college argument was indicative of deeper, irreconcilable differences. Dean came from a family that attended church on Sundays, sought other churchgoing, blue-collar people to marry and continued the tradition of large families. What I naively saw as somebody longing for more, as my parents had years earlier, was simply a boy having his wild youth before settling down to a nice housewife who would dutifully produce babies and obey the man of the house.

  And then there was the cocaine. Lots of it. More than I’d ever seen. One of his brothers was a dealer, so we paid little for pure eight balls-an eighth of an ounce-folded into intricate paper squares cut from Playboy. Dean and two of his brothers were addicted. Lines in the morning before work, lines in the bathroom, lines in the car off a hand mirror while driving. (I never understood the mechanics of that maneuver. And didn’t other drivers, specifically the police, ever notice?) While I liked cocaine, my gaze never wavered from my savior from poverty: a college education. The drug waited in my night-table drawer, tucked into my blue leather ‘concert kit’ until Friday night. ‘How can you have it in the house and not do it?’ Dean would ask. ‘When I have it, I do it until it’s gone.’