I don't know when the hippies came to Orcas; probably they were born out of fern-spores, kind of like the Smurfs. They would probably like that if I suggested it, depending on what herbs they were actually taking as 'supplements.' You see, I often wonder how Orcas changed from being an American Native land and edgy pirate's hiding ground into a place where Green Rules (who is Green?) and the Solstice Parade is the highlight of the summer. The people who seem to be the heads for the Solstice stuff live, oh yes, close to Enchanted Forest Road...well, not quite. That'd be perfect. They down a ways into town on Beach Road, which is one the main downtown streets with the co-op and yoga center, the Island Market, and the wonderful Island Skillet.
The Solstice house has big stone turtles all over the front lawn, and it looks perpetually ready for a party, with lots of picnic tables, flowing silk flags with incomprehensible symbols, and cartoon-level-perfect lovely flowers planted everywhere. I often wonder how tolerant they'd be if I decided to sit on one of the turtles and drink my fresh co-op kombucha. Wouldn't they take me in as one of their own?
In fact, they might. I am a kind of hippie, and as I get my grey hair and am just too lazy to color it, I look more and more authentic. When we moved to Santa Cruz from "You Must Wear Black at All Times" New York in 2005, I looked around and said, "Here are my people." I love herbs and organic food and long flowing East Indian skirts and hair, guitars and folk music, Bob Dylan, being shoeless on the sidewalk with sand still sticking to you. But I'm also not a hippie. But I guess that depends on what you mean by hippie.
I like that the original hippies said 'no' to the Vietnam War; I like that they decided to wear clothing that was natural and something Eastern, and stopped trying to look successful. I like our friends from Santa Cruz who were part of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties. But like so many ideologies and movements, when one essential element is missing, the whole thing goes wrong. Many hippies became a symbol of the very excess they hated, which probably one is fated to do if not pursuing Truth.
But here on Orcas, many years after the Vietnam War, I wonder what hippies are now. I sense hippy. But what kind? Perhaps, really, the neo-hippy organic farmers here are not fake but a kind of continuation, perhaps, of the pirate survivalists and also the Native Americans. Or maybe they are Smurfs living in a kind of fantasy-land.
And all this makes me think of Ed Lavender. Ed's cabin was the last house on our beach before PS (Purple Starfish) Point. In the 90s, I remember feeling from Ed's cabin a sense of silent peace, some loneliness, and the sense of an ending life holed up in the homemade structure. The cabin looked as though it was leaning up for dear life against the huge pine tree and the river-rock chimney; the only sign I ever saw of Ed was a thin wisp of smoke going straight up into the sky. I would look for that and smile at the faceless windows, just in case he could see out. His driveway, up on the end of Blanchard Road (it was a place used by early settlers to load supplies off to take into Eastsound), had an ancient sign with simple letters carved in it: "Ed Lavender." The letter-groves were entirely filled with a beautiful blue-green moss, and this to me in some weird way, was the face of Ed.
Ed was an Old-Timer here; he was a self-sufficient man who lived almost a hermit's life; he owned a lot of land on Orcas, and there is a place downtown, a housing unit area, called "Lavender Hollow." His property near the beach included a virgin forest area of about five acres. As he got older, people stopped believing he was there and slowly began to encroach: dumping garbage (cars, even--and a fridge) in the forest, partying on the point.
One year, I saw no smoke and I was told that Ed had been taken to a nursing home to die. Apparently, he did have a daughter, but we saw no sign of her, and as the years passed, the house began to fall into ruin in earnest. But as long as that house stood, we felt Ed was alive and a part of Orcas.
Ed, to me, was the kind of person Old Orcas was made of, and he became an amorphous symbol, a giant presence, simply because I'd never seen him. He seemed to live the life close to nature off the edge of the continent, a full-day travel of car and ferry ride away from full civilization. His permanence, his ancient connection to sailed ships and no medical care made us feel like temporary flotsam brought up recently by the tide. In his lifetime, he probably knew the last of the Native tribes who summered here. He was probably a boy when Helene Glidden and her family left Patos in the teens.
Helene and her family were also Old Orcas, or rather, San Juan hippies. Helene moved with her something like twelve siblings to Patos Island so that her father could man the lighthouse sitting on the edges of the US and Canada; they moved out of Bellingham to escape the dirt, disease, and poor-quality food of the port in the early 20th century. Helene's mother forced the move so that they could have chickens, a cow, and some fresh air. Green Rules and Organics are Life. Helene records her father as saying, "Please don't make me move out to that G-damn island." Their life was, perhaps, unpalatable to him because it was a hippie one...a return to nature, a certain stepping out of the stream for certain values. Helene's autobiography, The Light on the Island, is hilarious, sad, loving, and full of delight in life. She herself, with her independent spirit and wild ways, was a San Juan hippie (the special brand I am trying to define); she did not follow rules for the sake of worldly success, it seems to me, but valued for real things, like love and adventure and so she was, like many true hippies, a careful and passionate observer, standing a little on the edges of life.
So it seems to me that the San Juans are where the physical reality perhaps does create a genuine organic culture: the islands of great beauty and magical sunsets, and dangerous currents, off the edge of Washington help create people of observation and adventure, people a little off the edge. So perhaps the new age hippie veneer here (turtles and silk flags and solstice) is that: a veneer. Orcas really does have the hippies that just--are--hippies by the very fact that they'd choose to live on an island. I'm getting good at spotting them. They are in a spectrum from the guy at Island Market who wears marbles around his neck with his jeans pulled way up (looks kind of excruciating) almost to his chest and big boots, or the lady who has worked at the spot where, now, I've seen three-or four? natural food stores come and go. The stores change, but she doesn't. Her hair just gets longer and whiter, like a Rip Van Winkle sign of time passing. Don't know how she's managed to stay in one spot, but every year she acknowledges me with an ironic smirk. I don't know why. I keep the tradition going and smile back submissively, which seems to placate her. I wouldn't change it. I am beginning to wonder if she is an Evil Genius Hippie who has been secretly in control of the Natural Food Market Concept and somehow undermines each incarnation so that she maintains a kind of control through chaos. It is that ironic smirk that does it. Okay, I think I drank too much kombucha.
Now, being a kind of hippie myself ( I do stop and observe plants carefully and have been known to pat them affectionately and to me there's not much better than a truly eclectic, challenging, open conversation), my idea of a mini-vacation is to go to the natural foods store. I find them wherever I go. Here, the health food store is now a co-op, which I think is great although I do miss the first one...it was so, so--herb-y and more like a barn than a store, and even had old wooden plank floors. Or maybe I imagined that. This one, though, is member-owned, which means it is supposed to reach, therefore, deep roots into the the community and encourage local produce, a more distributivist life. An island is, in some ways, by its position as an island, necessarily local. But is it all fakey, or the good part of hippie?
Perhaps, really, now, it has moved from 90s and 00s more neo-hippy stuff to just regular people really just living here, or committed to learning local farming, like Maple Rock Farm (the mrf van is a fixture here and there are even T-shirts that just have 'mrf' on them) and Black Dog Farm, just up the road from us. Is being a local, though, under fifty on Orcas, tantamount to having a kind of hippy identity? I just look around downtown.
There's the Village Market, where all the young Orcas Specials go. They wear crocheted snow hats all year, maybe at all times (maybe the crocheted stuff is really their hair in a complicated dread-lock), and they look like they shave themselves with shells off the beach. They drive cars that they may live in, and look a little daunting, but they ignore you with great friendliness. The ice cream is cheap in there and these types suddenly lose any danger-hippie-mystique when they start licking soft-serve.
There's also the wonderful second-hand store world of Orcas. An intensely loving Orcas native, a young woman, runs one. She spends lots of time with each customer, hoping their karma will be good in future. She is genuinely kind, though.
There's the interesting housing co-ops here, Opal land grants set aside for locals to have pretty nice little homes: brightly painted, with nice gardens, they look like little Scandinavian homes, somehow. They can buy the homes, but are only allowed a certain margin of profit upon sale--to keep the prices affordable. Interesting idea. Hippie idea.
There's Portofino Restaurant, where there always seems to come some dish of conflict with every order. Once, the owner got in a drag-out fight with a customer; another time a waitress was weeping...there's really rude jokes hung up on the kitchen wall in the back. We now go there partly for the pizza, and partly to watch for the soap-opera. Don't know if that is hippy, or just eccentric.
The locals, the natives, the Real Hippies: I don't know what they think of us Summer People, those of us who yearly swell the population from about 5,000 to 15,000. They are the people who live through the dark and stormy winter, the bar owners and farmers and restaurant owners who have to make it through winter with almost no income.
There's the young people who come here to learn organic farming, and I love their ambiance. They exude grass and herbal scents, mixed with clay and something like manure. They are the ones that I think are born from fern-spores. Where did they come from?
Where do hippies come from? It could that their measure of success, their identity, is somehow rooted in being different. That means that they don't wear deodorant or shave their legs or face and eat raw foods because they are trying to be different--why? Because it makes them feel special. Those are Insecure Hippies. It could be that their identity is about being authentic. This means that they want to express themselves as an individual, to be themselves. This can end up as a grouping with other Smurfs and looking exactly the same, eating the same stuff, smoking the same stuff. In a place as small as Orcas, the draw to authenticity can also be communal...to have, in other words, a community that one can function in--not as a Back in Black object in the sea of people on Fifth Avenue, but as the guy who is trying to make the Co-op work and is limited in acquaintances by the shores of an island. It can be that the natural beauty that is here makes a person want to think about things, to steward nature, and to try and make Small and Local and Green and Organic values that help, really, sustain a healthy community.
I don't know, though. I bet some of that is true. I bet a bunch of it is not. Can it simply be isolation from the real problems in the world? An escape? Or a meditation? Navel-gazing? Or just being yourself in a small town (which you can't really escape being in small towns)? Maybe the Orcas hippie is all of those things at once.
But the hippies and the edgy people are just one layer of Orcas. This has been also a getaway place for rich people, too--probably starting with Mr. Moran, one of the more interesting people to have made his mark here.
TBC.
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