My First Hippies

In the summer of 1970 I was nine years old, and I still hadn't seen a real hippie. A few high school kids had Sonny Bono long hair, but in rural Montana, that was as good as it got. True hippies lived in a world of TV news and Life magazine, holding protest signs and twirling around to rock music. They were mellow and wore sandals with soles made from used car tires, and smoked marijuana. They lived in California. They were free. 

I wanted to be a hippie. It looked like a lot more fun than riding a horse and driving a tractor. I was tired of old cowboys with big bellies walking into the living room and pointing at my little bowl-cut head and saying, “Better get-cher god-damn hair cut. Hell, I'll get out my knife and do it right now!” I wanted the hair and the sandals. I wanted to twirl around in a city park to evil rock music. I wanted the free love, whatever that was. I wanted to flip the bird to the cowboys, and make people all riled up with my hippie ways. 

I even wrote a paper about hippies for fourth grade class. In this incisive commentary, I expounded upon the social implications of the American hippie: “As part of their protest against the Vietnam War, hippies use drugs like marijuana, LSD, and others. These are called heroin.” 

That summer, hippies finally came to Montana. Newspapers splashed before and after photos of two hippies, with beards, long scraggly hair, and wild-looking eyes. The before shots showed two smiling young men with short hair, in full military uniform. The two were traveling from Wyoming, and had been hitchhiking near Yellowstone Park. A young guy pulled over his car and gave them a ride. The three stopped at a campground for the night. The hippies killed the driver, hacked up the body, ate some of the flesh, and tossed the headless torso into the river. A few days later, police arrested the hippies in Big Sur, California, driving the victim's car. Among their possessions were a copy of the Satanic Bible, and a recipe for LSD. As one was handcuffed, he blurted out, “I have a problem. I'm a cannibal.”

I wasn't sure I wanted to be a hippie anymore. The state was numbed with fear. News articles followed the trial of the “Hippie Cannibals,” detailing gruesome facts of the crime. One Saturday, as my friends and I walked the dusty streets to a matinee movie, we discussed the issue:

“Ah heard they's on LSD when they did it.”

“They cut out the guy's heart and ate it raw!”

“Some people in the park saw one of 'em eatin' a live frog!”

“When the cops caught 'em, they had finger bones in their pockets.”

During the trial, one of the hippies referred to himself as Jesus. He claimed he had magical powers to change the weather, and that he was responsible for the death of Jimi Hendrix. These guys weren't like the hippies on TV, or on the cover of Danny Lynch's brother's copy of the Woodstock album with the naked girls. They were bad hippies. Could there be two kinds of hippies? How could you tell which were good and bad? They all looked the same. One minute a hippie is flopping around at a rock concert, all happy and friendly, and then he cuts out your heart and eats it raw.

The cannibals were sent to prison. About a month later, my parents announced we were going on summer vacation. My father rented one of those campers that sits in the back of a pickup. On the sides, big splashy letters read, “Mac's Frontierland: Chevrolet, tractors, rentals.”

We drove west through the state. After 300 miles or so, my father pulled into a campground for the night. To this day I don't know if this was intentional or an accident, but it was the very same campground where the hippie cannibals had killed and eaten their victim. We parked in a slot and cooked hamburgers on the barbecue. All around us, campers were uneasy, weird, keeping to themselves. It was as if the more quiet you kept, the better the odds that you wouldn't attract hippie cannibals.

The next morning I went for a walk. Sunlight seeped through the pine trees. The air was crisp and still. I followed the sounds of a stream, turned a corner, and stopped. A VW van was parked at a campsite. Inside it, a man and woman, both with long hair and headbands. I looked at the license plate: California. The guy wore a beard, dirty Levis, and no shirt. He wandered off, and I watched the hippie girl rearrange things in the van. It was messy, filled with blankets and sleeping bags. A hippie cat with a bell on its collar was sniffing the tires. The girl noticed me staring. She smiled and said: “Oh, hi there!” 

My voice stuck in my throat, I couldn’t speak. At any moment she could pounce on me with a knife and cut out my nine-year-old heart and feed it to her cat. The moment hung in the air. I mumbled a hello and quickly walked away. I found the stream, and stuck my hands in the cool water, trembling. Did I really want to be one of them? They seemed kind of unorganized. But they were friendly, and they had a cat. I had a cat, too. That was cool. Maybe some hippies really were better than others.