whispering tree

By James Millhouse

He found her then lost her in a crowd of thousands. Now how does this lovelorn eighteen-year-old guy find the hippie flower child dream come true?

That's the question for a fugitive draft-dodger hiding out among the masses drawn to San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love, a dynamic social experiment toward a utopian society where free love, sex, drugs, and rock and roll reign.

He must look for Chelsea Morning, with federal authorities in hot pursuit. Their determination to capture him following his attempt to contact her via a series of televised interviews creates a firestorm of media exploitation with him in the center of it all.

Can he be reunited with the woman of his dreams?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638812067

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Table of Contents

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whispering tree

James Millhouse

Copyright © 2023 James Millhouse

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2023

ISBN 978-1-63881-203-6 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63881-206-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

The greatest love story ever told happens in your imagination.

1

Am I getting through all right? Can anyone out there hear me? How am I wired? My god, where do I start? Well, I could start with my fleeing here to Valleyview first, but I think the best place for me to start is Frisco. After all, that's what this is all about.

All I can tell you is that the world would not be the same had it not been for the Summer of Love. As revolutions go, I would have to call it a fiasco. But I can say with certainty that the whole experience affirmed who I am and what I am all about. It didn't go down the way we thought it would. But the sun came up every morning and set in the evening, the weed was the best in the world, the bands were top-notch, and for the first time in my life, I was in love.

I arrived in the city of San Francisco the last day of May, just as everything was warming up. The Volkswagen bug inched its way down on heavily congested Haight Street heading for the intersection of Ashbury, the driver kind enough to drop us carload of passengers off in the very heart of this circus. I was relieved to get out of the cramped back seat, a guitar handle in my face the entire trip from where I hitched a final ride just north of Sacramento. The driver had accumulated quite a motley crew, three of us backpackers on an inexplicable exodus to a place where flower power rules, peace and harmony reigns, and the allure of a utopia that was drawing in thousands like us.

What compelled me to forsake the security of Valleyview for a psychedelic madhouse, I don't know. I suppose it was the song that inspired me to return to Frisco, to risk being arrested back in a country that no longer cared about freedom. I'm sure you know the tune. It topped the Billboard Charts in the middle of May 1967 and the flower children really dug it. The song now is considered an oldie, but I refer to it as an artifact harking back to what could have been. As I became part of the crush of people and blended into the color, I could see the evidence that many others had heard the song. Flower crown headbands were abundant, worn by the female hippies, their male counterparts either accompanying them or slouched against buildings of obliging merchants, playing guitars. Others were actually passing out flowers indiscriminately, to those of the counterculture and gawkers alike. I accumulated quite a few flowers, daisies that I tucked into every pocket, looking like I were sprouting into some kind of freaky monstrosity. I was quite decorated.

Funny thing about decorations. Memorial Day, which happened to be on the day before I arrived in Frisco, used to be called Decoration Day. I knew then as I know now that those daisies would be the only things ever to decorate me. It is like an indictment you can't shake off, something that follows you no matter where you go to hide from the guilt and shame. The holiday passes but not the indictment. I remember the way it was when I was growing up in suburbia Pleasant Hill, before everything went sour and the shouting started between me and my old man. Back then, everything seemed to be black and white, no shades of gray, like the shows on our old Philco television set. When the holiday came, we gathered as a family for the annual Memorial Day picnic, including all of our relatives and their offspring. It never seemed to occur to any of us why we were gathering, I mean the significance of the day, as though the actual reason were relegated to that of a mere obscure backdrop. But now, as I found myself roaming the streets of Frisco in aimless wonder, the word memorial blazed before me afresh, as a censure, like I myself am supposed to be one. But I digress.

As I neared the familiar intersection of Haight-Ashbury, the crowd began to bunch up, and I approached with curiosity. I kid you not when I say I actually found myself looking upward at the sky to see if there were some kind of mother ship waiting to beam them up, like this were some sort of cosmic event, a rendezvous or something. What prompted me to look up is that I actually had heard about a whole bunch of UFO clubs springing up everywhere, starting in London, England. It was where psychedelic musical bands attended play dates and put on light shows. From this stemmed the so-called human be-ins, hangouts in the parks and streets full of young people who let their hair grow out and grooved to whatever, you know, the whole psychedelic thing. I had actually attended one of these be-ins the previous January. But more on that later. Anyway, the phrase turn on, tune in, drop out came about at that time. I really liked that phrase. It was so catchy, like an epidemic, the light-bulb-in-your-head-lighting-up solution. And I did just that. It was on that January day I decided that I would do better by dropping out of Berkeley University and exchanging it for this one-liner transcendental bullshit. Well, that and also I had to go on the lam before I could be thrown in jail.

The hippies dug foreign travel in order to find themselves and to meet others like them, I suppose to forge relationships with those of like beliefs. These excursions were called hippie trails. My own hippie trail was for a different reason entirely. As I said, it was get out of Dodge or deal with the law, quite an ordeal to decide which. I can only tell you it was difficult to shave without looking in the mirror. I didn't really like myself and what I was about to do. I struggled with the fact that maybe I was the problem and not the rest of the world. That's what my old man would have told me, that it's me and my, as he put it, rebellion. So I solved the problem by not shaving at all, then, since I had a beard, I thought maybe I might as well grow my hair too. If I'm going to be branded as a hippie, I might as well look like one. That is how I became a hippie, at least in appearance, although it would take a while for the psychedelic aspect to catch on. I'm sorry. I keep digressing.

Okay. Where was I? Oh, so I'm on the intersection of Haight-Ashbury, right, and it's like quite a scene. Satisfied that it was no cosmic event, I decided to go around asking people who were hanging out why they were gathered at this particular spot. What was so special about this damned intersection. All I got were weird answers like It's all about groovin' to each other or You can feel it in the air, man or cosmic consciousness or some other hippie nonsense. But some made coherent sense, using words like unity, awareness, compassion, and from the more literate words like renaissance and revolution, the latter sticking in my head. Personally, I came to the conclusion that maybe everybody simply confused the street name Ashbury with Hashbury and gathered there by Haight to score.

By this time, I had the munchies like real bad. I inquired about a place called the Free Store that I had heard about before embarking on my hippie trail. It was made possible, among other things, by a council of residents that I later learned about. This council was necessary for the long-anticipated influx of young people verging into the Haight-Ashbury district. I eventually came to learn that the council was made up of organizations called The Family Dog, The Straight Theatre, a counterculture newspaper called The San Francisco Oracle, the Diggers. And, get this, the council eventually added a Free Clinic, organized housing, sanitation, music, and arts! No wonder it lured so many there. Except my reason was I got sick and tired of living as an alien in Valleyview. But that's another story. Anyway, so I'm following a group of grungy hippies to the store. Come to find out the store had only furniture and stuff, but one cannot eat a chair. However, I did find what I'll call the Free Store with all food.

I went in there and started to snatch up everything I could find, not really trusting this phenomenon, me functioning on survival mode, like instead of a revolution, I was hunkering down for an apocalypse. While grabbing items, I saw this dude stripping a banana to presumably eat it right there on the spot. I thought nothing of it until he pulled out his lighter and began to light up the peel, discarding the banana. At this point, I thought maybe he was high or something, but when I asked him what he was doing, he said it was to get high. Wow, I was thinking, psychedelics even in banana peels! He offered me a hit, and just as he did, the manager kicked him out of the store, I suppose out of concern he was going to burn the place down. Well, come to find out, later the Food and Drug Administration reported there are no psychedelics in banana peels. So whatever became of the poor guy, I don't know. I never saw him again. I had visions of him resorting to eating the peel, then throwing his guts out in some alley or something. A lot of kids were doing just that. But more about that later.

So now I had this bag of food, but I wanted to find a place to chill and eat, and the nearby Golden Gate Park came to mind. At the end of westbound Haight, you ran right into the park, conveniently located for this movement. Others were entering the park too, hippies in droves. It made me feel safe because at this point, I was still trying to stay in big crowds so I could blend in and not stand out. The last thing I wanted was to have come all this way just to get arrested by the police or FBI. I let the crowds carry me to a huge gathering spot, that same place I told you about the previous January, at Polo Field. Except this time, it was not an antiwar rally but a pot rally. Anyway, I could hear loud music, something out of my genre, like really wild stuff, and the next thing I saw were guys carrying placards, signs that had something written on them. By the time I reached the perimeter, I could smell marijuana like really heavy. I mean, like the whole area reeked. I got close enough to read the signs, all of them matching the activity. The signs read God's Herb Don't Disturb and Legalize Pot Now, and whatnot. I was thinking, All right, this is where the action is, a pot rally. There were scores of kids there, gyrating in place to the music, others sitting on the grass passing around joints, all just groovin' to the scene and being free. And chicks. Oh my god, the chicks. None of this coupled-up stuff that makes you feel alone in a crowd. Everyone there looked sovereign, together yes, but no us-four-no-more stuff. Yeah. This is for me, I said out loud. I done died and went to heaven.

Well, maybe not exactly heaven. My elation was mixed with a bit of paranoia. My eyes latched onto a suspicious-looking character who seemed to not really be there, there but not there, if you know what I mean. He was keeping his eye on me. It was like really freaking me out. He was dressed about the same as everyone else and sported long hair, but it was his demeanor. I got to thinking the FBI can use somebody undercover, can't they? But why single me out? Maybe they're waiting for several young guys to gather, enough to throw us all into a paddy wagon and cart us away, like this was the hornet's nest where they could get as many as they can, so my paranoia went. I started for the shade of a tree, curiously vacant, but I supposed everyone was so high, the hot sun didn't bother them. The guy wouldn't stop staring at me. So I decided maybe I need to blend in even more, figuring that the weirder you are the more you fit into this strange environment. I set my grub down at the tree stump, then started passing out the daisies that were in my pocket, see, like the when in Rome thing. I was alternating my own stare between he and random hippies as I was walking backward, when all of a sudden, the next thing I knew, I was down on the lap of the most gorgeous chick I have ever seen in my life. She didn't seem to mind at all that I'd literally stumbled onto her, tossing back her long, stringy blond hair, sprinkled with flowers, it as wild and free as was she, and taking a hit from a joint, swaying to what seemed to be the music, but I thought she was actually on a trip. So instead of climbing back to my feet, I just obliged myself to sit there next to her, compelled by her beauty, and stared at her lovely face.

I forgot all about the suspicious guy. I was about to introduce myself, maybe get through to her, when this big fat joint comes my way, handed to me by her, she still nonchalant, as though I'd been there the whole time, which indicated that she was still on planet earth or at least this version thereof. I inhaled it too fast and broke into a coughing spasm, to which she first took notice of me, and she giggled, embarrassing me. A second, more dignified hit restored my dignity. Opposite her was a young hippie guy, grooving to the spectacle, who had a very conspicuous tattoo of a colorful butterfly on his forearm, and after he took a hit, they started making out. Okay, I'm like, Don't mind me.

Now at this point, things started to get really wild. The girl turned toward me and pressed her lips into mine, open mouth. All right, I was thinking, Free love, right? So I was waiting for the tongue when all of a sudden came smoke from the joint shooting straight into my throat and instantly into my brain. I'm like, What the fuck. Oh, I'm sorry. I said I'd watch my language. Anyway, that was the first time I'd ever gotten a shotgun from a chick.

All of a sudden, she took notice of me, I mean me personally not as a toke partner, and I thought that that's when I got hit by Cupid's arrow. And I thought she did too. I say that because her attention shifted completely from the other guy to me, unless it was the free love thing being passed around like the joint. We got to talking about little things, I don't know, about the quality of the joint we were hitting on or how pleasant the park is. I wanted to ask where she met that guy next to her, more like wanting to know if they are going together, then just came right out and asked. She said no, he can't possibly be the one for her. I said, Why not. She said karma would have manifested itself and let her know. I asked her to explain, and as she was talking, it didn't make much sense. So while I'm bogarting the fat joint, I asked her to explain it again and again and again, and she did so, and by this time, I was so high it actually made sense, you know, like those 3D glasses you must wear in order to watch a 3D movie, otherwise it's a blurry mess.

Anyway, she went into this long explanation about the different types of karma which I don't want to go into here, but I'll give you the gist of the thing. She said that the dominoes of past karma keep falling and catch up to the present and keep falling into the future as well, and that we're all affected by it one way or another. In the case of her knowing who the right mate for her is, she referred to it as instant karma, a pleasant warm rush that goes deep into the soul and lets you know with certainty.

Now, at this point, I could have made a rebuttal to the effect that it's just the weed talking, but I wanted this connection, you know, and I sort of pandered to her as an opportunist. So I was just nodding my head as though I was on the same page.

One thing we were on the same page about was that we both got the munchies at the same time. I remembered my lunch which I left at the tree and looked over to see it still there in the distance. So I invited her to join me, and she obliged. I didn't know about her, but the moment I rose to my feet, I thought I was going to black out for the dizziness, and the sudden movement made me slightly nauseated. I looked back at the guy we left behind, and he didn't seem to mind. In fact, he appeared to be completely oblivious to everything in his own world. She and I headed for the tree, and when we reached it, she told me she knows of another tree we can go to, a place that is on the other side of the park where we can get away from the noise and crowd to talk. I'm like yes! I scored with both weed and a girl at the same time. Okay, so now I've decided this is heaven again.

We continued on, she guiding me along, and the park suddenly appeared as a surreal world, like I had stepped into a painting that features a solitary, beautiful young woman and joined her. It was the weed talking, I'm sure, or whatever it was laced with, but I suspended reality to enjoy it. Anyway, I wanted to take her hand but didn't want to ruin anything, sort of like warm up to her slowly. I asked her what her name was, and she said it was Chelsea. I asked for a last name, and she answered, Morning. I sensed that that was too strange a name to be real and was a hippie name. But I'm like in pander mode, so I didn't say what I thought, that it's just bullshit. I was about to properly introduce myself when she cut me off and told me my name is now Micheal. Micheal Rainbow. I asked her why she said that was my name, and she replied, Because that is the name just given to her to call me. She said the first name was her favorite male name, and that the last name means hope. I asked, Hope for what? She said, What else, love. All right, I was thinking, I double scored, meeting the girl and nailing her down, well, triple score, if you count good weed. Actually four, if you count the hit of acid she turned me on to.

We crossed a vehicle street, and I could hear the spectacle behind us, only fainter now. Then we proceeded through a meadow surrounded by a breathtaking swathe of trees and pedestrian walkways, chance persons walking by and becoming scarcer as we cut through a field and still another walkway. She guided me beyond that, through still another field, and I was thinking, Okay, just how private are you wanting this to be? And my mouth was dripping because I was figuring she wanted to like really get it on. So we like went to the edge of a steep grassy slope that reveals a huge valley at its precipice, and we paused, taking in this vast panorama of field framed by tree lines. In the very middle of the clear field is a tiny little tree all by itself that looks like it doesn't belong there. We continued on down the slope to the field and cross to its very center at the tree. She told me this was her favorite place. There's like not a soul around, like it was put there just for us. I didn't know whether to undo the bag of food or my clothes, but I refrained, letting her take the lead. And boy did she.

She wasted no time pulling her shirt off over her head, and she shook her long hair loose, and I followed in like manner. Should I go into this? I might as well skip it because this was going to air on TV. And anyway, I don't think I can put it into words. But you get the picture. Boy, girl. After all, we're two young kids charged up with hallucinogens and screaming hormones and in a culture where drugs, sex, and rock and roll reigned supreme, and sex. All I can tell you is it was like the ultimate trip. Getting it on under that kind of influence was like doing it during a parachute jump.

So anyway, fast forward. After finishing our feast on each other, I began with the other primal need, hauling out food so I can ravage it too like a jackal. Not only was this area surreal but also the whole affair, everything coming down so fast, me just barely arriving there and then all this, and all before noon! But I figured this private little spot was the ideal way to catch my breath and try to process best I could the rapid blur of events, falling like, well, dominoes. Catch my breath. Like, yeah. Not gonna happen. All of a sudden, she hitched herself on my back, her arms wrapped around me in a choke hold. Then I heard, Give me a piggyback ride. I'm like, All right, it's the smoky treat and acid talking. So I rose and took her on a little jaunt with her on my back a ways from the tree on this big field, looking all the nutcase we appeared to be had anyone seen us, two naked kids carrying on like we escaped from the lollipop farm. Even for the counterculture, it was bizarre. It actually threw me into a euphoria as we bounced around in this impossible instant-made union in a cartoon world where nobody else existed except she and I, and I gave myself over to it.

All this horsing around increased my munchies like on steroids, and so I galloped my rider back to the tree, and we collapsed in one heap with raucous laughter. We stared out of breath on our backs at the morning haze peeking through the thick branches as it was being slowly burned away by the sun, breaking into last gasps of laughter.

I turned and noticed a small tattoo on her upper back near the left shoulder when she went to her haunches to get into the food bag. It was a daisy severed at the stem, and it looked fresh, like it was just done. I asked her where she got it, and she said from a little shop just north of Haight. This prompted me to inquire about when she arrived here, and she said on the previous Friday and that she got the tattoo that weekend. This in turn led to me asking if she was a runaway, for I was aware of the huge number of runaways that were in the area at that time, and she just handed me a sandwich as though for me to cram my mouth full and stop asking questions. But I was persistent. She became evasive, saying that we're all running away from something, that that was why we were all here, and this struck me dumb for I knew she was dead-on about me there. She changed the subject as she partook, turning the tables, asking me where I was from. I talked about my upbringing, but when I got to a certain point, I realized it was killing my buzz, and so I stopped. I decided right then and there that the respective mysteries about each other was probably best kept a mystery, at least for the time being.

She began to talk about instant karma again as she turned on her side facing me, propping her head up dreamily by her elbow. She said that this very moment was meant to be and said she was feeling a pleasant warm rush come over her, harking back to the soul mate thing. After my inevitable follow-up question, she came back with it was because of the daisies that I had in my hand when our encounter took place. I tried to explain why I had broken the guy code with the daisies, but she would have none of it, insisting that it was a sign of karma. Okay, I was thinking, karma it is. At this point, I wasn't sure about the soul mate thing, but I knew I could sure get it on with this chick.

As I leaned in to kiss her, she rose with a kittenish giggle and headed for the field again. I thought it was a cue to play, but it looked like she was looking for something on the ground. Then she picked something up and returned, and in her hand was a sharp twig. She went to the tree and began to chisel something into the trunk with it, and when I got up, I could see she was carving her initials into a clearing of bark, that of her assumed hippie name. When she handed me the twig, I chiseled in my own hippie initials. She took it again and framed the initials with a heart.

The hunger came back, and after getting it on several more times, she and I dressed, then head out for a stroll to the westernmost half of the park. Now by this time, I was thinking, All right. we've done everything under the sun to consummate our union, and there's like no ice left to break, so yeah, I'm going to hold her hand. It was at that moment, while our fingers were interlocked, me feeling her warm hand in mine, slightly swaying them leisurely, that I realized that she was maybe just maybe the right one for me, beyond the sexual and the law of averages for a romance, that I had actually hit pay dirt. We proceeded to cross a pedestrian walkway into still another field when we saw some poor old soul sitting on a park bench, and she unexpectedly took the diminished bag of food from my other arm and placed it next to him with a warm smile. At that moment, I saw her inner beauty as well.

The rest of the afternoon was the ultimate. A natural high was braking subtly into the drug-induced one. We continued on to a beautiful place that I hear is now called Dahlia Garden. I don't know what it was called then, and really I didn't care, not only about its name but names in general. With this refreshing newness, I suddenly realized why she went by a new name, assuming it is a hippie name, and why I should be consigned one. It was like we were erasing the chalkboard and washing it clean, then starting everything over again. And that was all right by me, especially since I was on the lam. I wasn't paranoid anymore, despite the fact that we had strayed away from the crowd and could be more easily spotted. It was like her presence gave me a sense of security, like I was shielded not by the camouflage of people but by love. She held something to her nose and sniffed it. It was the daisies. She must have picked them up when they fell from my hand to her lap. Then she tucked one of them behind her ear.

After visiting the garden, we mingled with a crowd at a conservatory. We went in. Inside the huge, stifling greenhouse was a manmade world, including a difficult walkway that wound through the jungle of vegetation, we looking at the flowers and plants, it feeling really humid, more like a hellhole. The amount of people there had swollen more than the usual. We saw lots of children. A butterfly exhibit was being held deep within the greenhouse. At one point, while roaming around, we found ourselves separated by a display of captive butterflies in a spacious glass cage. What began as a pleasant stroll gradually turned to oppressive, then depressing. I don't know if the thought came to both of us at the same time or to me first, but we decided there on the spot that the butterflies should be free, that they did not belong there. So we began to formulate a plan in hushed tones.

She went to the rear door which led to the outside and opened it while I busied myself at the cage. Spectators just seemed to assume I was somebody in authority, that I knew what I was doing, not so much as questioning me. Many had their backs turned, more interested in other attractions. So I'm prying the thing loose, see, how I don't know. I didn't think anybody else knew how to open the damned thing. But anyway, I managed to remove the base off the back end of it, and then little by little, the butterflies all started escaping the contraption. The children were in awe while these things were fluttering around, jumping up and down like crazy, their parents confounded. I made my way to the exit with my girl as the people in charge there began