Come Dream With Me: A Sequel to the Summer of Love

By Inese Civkulis and Roberta Tracy

Part nostalgic hippie memoir and part travel guide, Inese Civkulis’s fictionalized odyssey begins in Summer of Love Berkeley with a young woman -- Nebraska-born, raised Catholic, and in love for the first time -- discovering the delights and perils of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. But always at the heart of the adventure is a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dream On Productions
• Release date: Apr 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781587905223

Inese Civkulis

Inese Civkulis was born to Latvian parents in a Munich refugee camp and raised in Nebraska. After graduating valedictorian from her 1966 high school class, she dropped out of Northwestern and moved to California to be with the love of her life. Their adventures ended eight years later but her memories, skewed by speed, were tucked away with tabs in the far reaches of her mind. Inese eventually earned an M.A. in linguistics, taught for several years, and ran an upscale catering business. Sharing a pile of string-bound letters with Roberta rekindled Inese's hippie trail memories. They mined the pages for guidelines and filled in the parts Inese hadn't dared write home about. In the end, Inese provided the gems; Roberta polished and strung them together.

Book preview

1

New grads, near grads, drop outs tuned in to turn on, we braided our bodies around a torpedo-shaped cylinder and waited for rapture to unfold. One compact blue tank of nitrous oxide, our version of Vishnu, had been smuggled that very afternoon in the back of a VW bus from a warehouse on Fisherman’s Wharf to a towering Victorian painted lady on the outskirts of Haight Ashbury. A gaudy pink bathroom rug stood in for the lotus blossom, propping our deity upright. Thick black hoses attached to the tank’s exterior branched into smaller tubes, letting us all inhale at the same time. It was the only proof of godliness we needed.

How did you get it past the landlady and up three flights of stairs? I wondered aloud.

Rolled up in a sleeping bag, answered Sharon, our hostess, who leased the violet-walled, plant-laden flat. Looks enough like a bomb for that patri-idiotic Russell woman to turn us in.

I’ve listened in on her party line, she added sotto voce. "She thinks, no, she knows, we’re all a bunch of Weathermen."

Whatever gave her that idea? snorted a wild-eyed version of Jesus sporting a scraggly beard.

"Fair weather friends maybe. We need to get it on tonight and get us out of here first thing in the morning, someone else grumbled, extricating himself from his girlfriend’s cleavage. On the count of three."

Make it twelve, I’m not ready, fussed another.

Too bad for you. I’m going with three, I countered, then counted and inhaled.

Being a nervous virgin, at least where NO2 was concerned, my first gulp was disappointing. I’d expected the gas to cocoon my psyche and draw it up through a celestial gate where I would become one with the universe. My entire body felt more relaxed, but no more so than I regularly achieved through meditation. Or sex, for that matter. It didn’t have the same effect on me as it seemed to have on Ben. I was disappointed as hell.

Ben was my comrade, confidante, and best of all, boyfriend, but at that moment he was flailing and quacking like a duck who’d just found religion. So was the whole sick crew, as they called themselves, Ben’s and my friends from Northwestern whom we’d brought along to the party. Last I heard, one is a Joycean professor at Northwestern, one a professor of English at NYU, and the third, always living on an inheritance, an EST graduate floating around different cults. Four-plus decades ago, they were undeclared majors making barnyard noises.

What would God look like to a duck? I wondered. Green-headed mallard, probably. Big as a pond but not very deep. Prone to squawking platitudes without tending to his flock.

Everyone else lay around laughing and joking while I regarded the tip of the tube with distaste. Not only was I somewhat sober, Ben’s words were still making sense to me.

I was going to say ‘don’t freeze your lips’ but yours barely grazed it, he said.

Will my brain cells die? I whined.

Not the way you’re sampling it. Our bodies process and eliminate the gas within seconds. If you loosened up those icy Nordic internal brakes of yours and actually took part in the pleasure, you’d be in the company of geniuses. Coleridge, for God’s sake. Ginsberg, Corso, Kesey. Inhalers all.

His tone reeked of moral superiority. Or was it immoral superiority? As a recovering Catholic, brought to the states at the age of two by rustic, salt-of-the-earth Latvian parents, I could never be sure.

I was sure no cute, curly-haired boyfriend or our euphoric companions scattered around the room would ever get the best of me, Pius High School in Lincoln, Nebraska’s 1966 valedictorian. Although back then I was a fat loner, except for one amazingly supportive friend and her family, I’d graduated with the Bishop’s medal in religious studies. One semester at Northwestern made me resent feeling damned for drinking, smoking, seeing movies condemned by the Legion of Decency, or upholding moral standards everyone else was always joking about. Absolving myself of guilt, I wanted nothing more than to breathe pure nitrous oxide into my lungs. I inhaled deeply and rocketed to heaven.

A golden universe unfolded. Time stretched like taffy. Untethered from worldly matters, I roamed uncharted space, prodded by a knifelike force on a journey through forever. Convinced of my magic, I scattered starlight until the vision faded. Then I plummeted back to earth, bewildered and astonished.

Never before had I flown so high or fallen so low, and all in the space of seconds, Ben later informed me. I longed to return to a universe of infinite possibilities, unfettered by student loans, parental expectations, or self-doubt. Instead, I was about to embark on adventures of the terrestrial kind, departing from San Francisco the next morning en route to Japan.

2

Between the sheets and mind-altering puffs, we’d mapped out the journey of a lifetime. Pillow talk persisted throughout the day: what if we made love on a tramp steamer? What if we got high in Borneo? What if we made love and got high in Katmandu? The trade winds tickled our fantasy the way no fold-out daybed in a $125-a-month apartment could do.

Our first challenge would be to set aside a thousand dollars apiece plus tramp steamer fare. Such a massive undertaking required 16 percent of Ben’s professional salary and a staggering 25 percent of mine. Getting by in the Bay Area was expensive enough; saving more than a hundred dollars a month nearly impossible. We had contacts galore and access to an exotic array of contraband substances, but neither of us cared to connect those dots. Everyone told us the best legal way to make money fast was to join the throngs of job seekers on pilgrimage to Alaska, starting point for the Trans-Atlantic pipeline. Wages were twice anything we could find in the Bay Area; cost of living was too, but I convinced myself we could get by on love over the next two summers.

But was our relationship the soul mates-take-on-the world kind of love we’d need to pull it off? Ben was all for it and I prayed he was all for me, too. Ben had been my first boyfriend and I worried he was too smart for me. Living with a man whose wit and winning ways sparked interest in others, no matter what the gender or sexual persuasion, had its challenges, mostly internal. Of course, he loved me, in the physical sense of the word. I had proof of that every night and sometimes twice a day.

Whither thou goest became my Old Testament mantra. Thankfully, unlike poor Ruth, Ben was not my mother-in-law.

The prospect of sharing the idea with our families could be far more intimidating. There was no way I could invite my parents out to the West Coast and spring the news on them face-to-face. We wrote back and forth regularly, in reporter-like fashion, sharing the news of the day without comment. Had they already come to clenched-fist grips with the idea of their darling daughter dropping out of college, going to San Francisco, and moving in with a guy? If so, what more could they add about a trip to the Far East?

I began having nightmares about being back in Mom and Dad’s living room, listening to my litany of sins played back on an endless 8-track loop.

Ben and I discussed my dilemma over dim sum in Chinatown. He’d never encountered anyone as old world as the traditional, rooted-to-the-land people I was trying to describe.

At least it’s not an LSD trip, he muttered between bites of har gow and shumai.

I chuckled nervously, picked away at my dan tot egg tart, and did not say a word. I seemed to recall we’d dropped some acid, too.

Bottom line was, Father would never travel farther than Latvian Lake in Minnesota. I detailed our plans to my folks in a rather lengthy letter; they wrote back with news of my best friend’s wedding and a weather report.

Dealing with Ben’s mom Sylvia was a piece of cake. She’d dropped in on us like a dollop of whipped cream en route from Hawaii. Coated in chocolate mink and topped with frosted bouffant hair, she listened enthusiastically to our plans and added quite a few of her own. I listened attentively to her suggestions, knowing full well Ben would never willingly set foot in the luxurious hotels and exclusive shops she favored. Three days later, she scooped us up for the rest of her journey: a trip to New York to introduce me to the city where Ben grew up.

Whether or not she saw me as daughter-in-law material, Sylvia offered to underwrite our entire adventure. Ben flatly refused. Self-reliance had marked his coming of age and there was no way he would let himself back down. As the frisson of chill between them dissolved into three glasses of bubbly, I found myself admiring this independent materfa-milias and her contagious enthusiasm for life.

It took fifteen months and two grueling round trips up and down the Alcan highway to reach our financial goal. We were determined to make it in the 49th state, as much for the experiment in survival as the pay. Neither of us wanted to survey or dig trenches for the pipeline. Lawsuits filed by environmental groups gave us pause, but, like Levi Strauss in the California Gold Rush, we hoped to take on less direct roles in the enterprise and still get handsomely compensated.

We hitchhiked all the way. We read in the Chronicle, most probably Herb Caen’s column, that there are three types of people who pick up hitchhikers: kind, cool, or evil. We encountered versions of all three on our way up. The return trips, usually made in fits and starts with no less than six drivers, left little time for character analysis.

First to open their doors for us was a kind, cool band of hippies bound for the wilds of Alaska in a Day-Glo decorated Volkswagen Westfalia. Some may have been seeking or already achieved Nirvana, but all were immensely practical in a homespun sort of way. Sacks of bulk grain, enough to last the summer, filled every square foot of unpeopled space. Their stated goal was to live off the land, but even under ideal climactic circumstances, growing crops was time and labor intensive and market food prices astronomical.

Once past the broadminded Canadian border guards, we journeyed halfway up British Columbia to Kamloops, a scenic town deriving its rather Dutch-sounding name from a native term for meeting of the waters. Traveling due north for ten more hours along the Caribou Highway, we arrived at Dawson Creek, Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway. From there we traveled nearly 1400 miles in a northwesterly direction past snow-capped peaks, dense stands of bottle green pine, sparkling blue lakes, and a smattering of civilized outposts. Bands of sheep, goats, and moose traipsed by, along with the occasional grizzly, but all kept a safe distance from our gaudy metal monster as it chugged through their territory.

Some 613 miles later, we crossed into Yukon territory. A small troop of Royal Canadian Mounties, Sergeant Preston lookalikes all, rode alongside us for a while. Peace signs and posies on the VW exterior had most likely piqued their interest. The driver’s steady pace, despite the pot cloud around him, must have set their minds at ease. I watched them gallop toward the sunset until their red jackets shrank to dots on the horizon and disappeared.

The highway was paved but not entirely smooth. Its tremendous length, plus weather-driven highway improvement projects, had created chuck holes, deteriorating shoulders, and long stretches of gravel where repairs were taking place. Our painted bug soldiered on to Historical Mile 1221.8, the Alaskan border. The highway came to its official end 200 miles later at Delta Junction but continued in an unofficial capacity for another 300 miles until we reached Fairbanks.

We camped with the hippies in a park until Ben found out he needed a permanent address before any newspaper would hire him. Determined to go straight to work, we took a ramshackle room at an exorbitant rate. It was the first of many dubious places to house us over the next few years but draining our bank account to come up with the deposit paid off. After only one interview, Ben became a reporter for the Fairbanks Daily News. It took a bit longer for me to locate a slice-and-serve for the lunch crowd job at a deli. The dollars began to mount up but the first blast of winter sent us sprinting back to the mainland like a pair of white-tailed deer.

We returned the next spring. It generally took us two weeks to go up. Ben began organizing the trip the day after Thanksgiving.

The sooner we get there, the longer we can stay, and the more money we’ll make, he’d remind me whenever I rolled my eyes over his zealous preparations.

Once our backpacks were mended and sleeping bags cleaned, Ben would have been happy to take off on Valentine’s Day if the weather had only cooperated. I made sure we came prepared with mosquito repellant, an absolute necessity for the intense four-week summer, and enough heating oil to last, if used sparingly, into winter.

This time our host drivers were prospective homesteaders, a black man and white woman on the run from mainland prejudice. There were no kids yet but they wanted to raise a family someday where air and attitudes were more pleasant. We wished them luck and between gulps of hand-squeezed lemonade, gobbled down the tuna and chopped egg salad sandwiches they offered us.

They dropped us off at the Yukon border, where we met another attractive couple. John, son of a right-wing preacher man, had fallen in love with Namid, a native Ojibwa from Canada. Star Dancer was her name, befitting her lithe body and fearless spirit. Abandoning family and congregation, John was following Namid to the ends of the earth. They took us all the way to Fairbanks, center of the aurora oval, where they settled down in domestic bliss beneath the Northern Lights. Eventually, they wrote to tell us about settling down in Idaho and welcoming baby daughter Serene Dawn Lupin.

The newspaper welcomed Ben back with open arms. My deli had closed but canneries were hiring. Although I would have preferred to fend off a drunken surveyor than dissect a dead anchovy, I applied anyway and started the very next day. It was a smelly routine: stick my thumb in an anchovy’s bottom belly, pull out the roe, toss the roe into a tub located in the center of the room, throw the anchovy remains over my shoulder, then do it again, and again….and again.

Our furnished rustic log cabin almost made up for my labor. It was the first place we’d lived in that felt like home. One day, while playing domestic goddess, I rolled back the braided carpet and found $300 in loose bills stashed underneath. I suggested the windfall and the fact we were running out of heating oil were signs we should head back to California. Feeling fingers of frost poke us through chinks between the logs, Ben readily agreed.

On our return trip, we encountered a tall Texan-looking truck driver who would have been hunky except for the pot belly fifty-plus years had given him. He was not Herb Caen’s version of evil but the way his wandering hand always found its way to my thigh made me think he had that potential. He had only picked us up to help with load sliding, a continual hassle on that long, winding highway. Ben, fighting chronic asthma, worked hard restoring the crates of machinery to their original positions. I tried my best but could barely keep up. Ten miles from the California border, we hopped off that truck without giving or getting any thanks and hitched the rest of the way home.

So back to the Bay Area we went for one more mild winter where we began to live and write our sequel to the Summer of Love. We balanced our checkbooks and realized we had almost enough saved except for the tramp steamer fare. Ben had the bright idea to petition the Japanese ferries bringing materials over for building the pipeline to take us directly back with them on the return voyage. The Japanese embassy provided us with letters of support, but no freighter captain would take us. Too much risk, we were politely told. I suspect we looked just too American.

By skimping, and, by that, I mean getting by on Ben’s favorite meal, spaghetti smothered with catsup and topped with parmesan from the famous green cylinder shaker, we reached our goal. A dripping candle set in a green, gourd-shaped, basket-cradled wine bottle set a romantic ambiance. In another three months, we had all the funds needed to follow our dreams.

3

It was just like in the movies. Prevailing winds gently tousled our hair into picture-perfect shape for all the lights, camera, and action happening down below. A contingent of our friends had gathered on the pier. Some pointed and shot Brownie boxes; the more expert fiddled with lenses. Backlit by a rare blue San Francisco morning, we leaned over the railing of our passenger freighter, the MS Brazil Maru, and waved madly as the relentless waves below tested our sea legs.

If it’s this bad now...began the logic tape always stored inside my head, but for once, I switched it off. We were high on ourselves and each other. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if the previous night’s nitrous oxide had crystallized into residual pixie dust and was still coursing through our veins.

One of the first West Coast acquaintances I made was Mary Ann Walker. The send-off was her doing, of course. My tall, Rubenesque friend called herself a flower child but behind those Aquarian sea green eyes, her prodigious right and organized left brains turned visions into reality, including her own appearance— an abundant, luminous package, a la Simone Signoret. Earth mother to us all, she