My Generation

What if the system broke down, and you had to find a way to live?

What if you wanted to find a better way, before it all went down?

What if a whole generation faced these questions for the first time?

That was My Generation.

The year of my birth, 1950, was the pivot of the “American Century.” Driving cross-country, the dream took shape in reality… and began to shape reality in its image. Endless opportunity gave birth to a permanent yearning—requiring, in the national guise, highways to everywhere, and permanent war. I foraged a tunnel through that hunger, tasting a future of loves gained and lost, freedom’s bliss and cost, nature lost and found.

Like so many of the Baby Boom, I entered the world sequestered in incubator and crib; was moved by corporate edict from city to city; molded by a society beholden to a suspect suburban dream. In 1965 I exited the public school system and discovered the alternative values of Quakers. Facing the doom of society, by war, and of family, by alcohol, I heard the anthem of hippiedom promising a better way: Live for today.

At Dartmouth College, we in the Class of ’72 saw ourselves as the vanguard of an historical transition. The campus revolution came to a head after the Kent State shootings of 1970; but the Vietnam War raged on. Taking refuge in literature and nature, drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, my peers and I tried to envision escape to a better world. 

I plotted my own course of freedom—off to California, mecca of easy money and free love. The blue-collar blues spun me first into a sideshow of experimental arts, then drove me back to the cloister of academics, and self-exile to Canada. 

At the University of Victoria I skirted the problem of survival by distancing myself from it. Nature, my constant muse, became an abstraction, an object of study and analysis. At last I saw the dead end and danced out of it, traveling with a woman who shared my dreams of a sustainable future on the doorstep of wilderness.

Three years in the Quebec Arctic as teachers taught us timeless values and skills of the Inuit, who not only survived in the harshest environment, but stood up to colonial rule with their own nonviolent revolution during the Bill 101 crisis. Still outsiders in the North, we envisioned a new life inspired by our summers in a utopian community in backwoods BC.  

Finally, at the age of thirty—the very age of adulthood defined by my generation—my spiral of changes landed me in the place I could call “my country.” There my stubborn ideals would be put to the test of nature, my chronic freedom traded for a self-chosen home. I could recreate myself—mountain man and homesteader, peace crusader and new father—and begin a new generation.