Florence’s Life in the Counterculture (Chapter One)
In high school I prayed that I would not be called to be a nun. I wasn’t. Instead I was called to be a political activist, a writer, and back-to-the-lander.
It was the Sixties. I dropped in and out of college, worked at sundry jobs, read the L.A. Free Press, hung out at coffee houses, heard Allen Ginsberg read “Howl,” tutored kids in Watts, joined the anti-war movement, and went to meetings organized by Hopi spiritual elders opposing the government’s policy of terminating American Indian reservations. In 1967 I was at Century City Plaza, standing in the back of a pick-up truck with other war protesters including Muhammad Ali, when the riots broke out.
On a vacation in La Jolla (with PHS classmate Penny Kenck) I met my husband Tom, AWOL from the Marine Corp that weekend with friends. A year later I said I’d marry him -- if he got a job and bought a car. So he did. I found out later that the job paid only on commission and that our ’53 Dodge dropped a linkage on the ground every time we drove it! We lived on Melrose in L.A. and then in Santa Monica a few blocks above the old pier. We started a family and I finished my degree in English Lit. After our second daughter was born, we packed up the green VW bus with the leaky roof and headed for San Francisco where Tom could pursue his M.A. in History.
In San Francisco we lived in a duplex owned by a clairvoyant who gave weekly séances and collected life-size statues of Jesus and Mary in her basement, and later across from Delores Park on Guerrero in a walk-up apartment with a jumbo size American flag on the wall. I wore braids and long skirts, burned jasmine incense, boycotted sugar, saw Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, listened to KPFA, went to concerts at Golden Gate Park, and ate a lot of brown rice.
Ronald Reagan was Governor, and S.I. Heyakawa, President of SFSC. During 1968-69, there was a bitter student strike led by the Black Panthers, and supported by the Third World Liberation Front, Students for a Democratic Society, and others. When I took our girls to the campus day care, armed guards were stationed on the roofs of buildings. Riots also broke out on the Berkeley Campus against the expanding Cambodian war. The American Indian Movement occupied Alcatraz. Rolling Thunder, a Shoshone medicine man from Ruby Valley, Nevada, often stayed with us during this time. On April 24, 1971 at the largest anti-war protest ever on the West coast (156,000), I pushed our daughters in a shopping cart down Mission Street.
In 1972 we moved to Mammoth Lakes in the Sierras. Tom got hired as a carpenter and I ran the cooperative pre-school. We were the only registered members of the Peace and Freedom Party. We bought and remodeled a small fishing cabin, and I had our third child a son. I wrote and published an op-ed article in the L.A. Times, the first of many freelance articles I would write and sell over the years.
It was the start of the back-to-the land movement. I wanted a vegetable garden and the Sierras got snow even in July. Moving is always my idea. So in 1978 we sold our house, rented a U-Haul, loaded the family into the “new” VW bus, and headed out across the west. After a couple of months traveling we bought a few acres on the Big Wood River 20 miles south of Sun Valley, Idaho. From a set of plans in the Mother Earth News, we built a cordwood house. I peeled and skinned logs, hand-mixed cement, and with the kid’s help, did most of the mortar work. I planted a garden. We raised chickens, geese, rabbits, sheep, and a pig or two. I milked goats every morning. We heated our house entirely with wood.
In 1980 tragedy struck. We lost our six year old son James in a drowning accident at a friend’s house. How does a family recover from their worst nightmare? After almost 30 years, I still don’t know. For me, I had other children to care for and a barnyard full of animals. Day by day, inch by inch, they carried me through this dark time.
A few years later I became the Director of the College of Southern Idaho’s Extension Office here and spent the next decade developing and promoting adult education classes. I later served as Executive Director of the Sawtooth Botanical Garden where I administered a sustainable agriculture program, wrote grants, and newsletters. (Thank you, Sister Esther, for nourishing my writing skills which have been crucial to every job I’ve held). I continued writing for other publications and was awarded a five week fellowship to Ragdale writers’ community in 2000. In 1996 I founded the Ezra Pound Association to save the poet’s Hailey birthplace. I organized cultural events with poets like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti who slept and ate at our house. I went to Paris and lobbied to bring the 2Oth International Ezra Pound Conference here.
Today I do research and writing for historic preservation projects around the state. I enjoy reading, walking, cross country skiing, cooking, genealogy, vegetable gardening, making plant medicine, camping with grandchildren, and idling over breakfast with a cup of strong black tea. I participate in the annual Rocky Mountain Poetry Festival and other Idaho writer activities. I confess to owning at least a thousand books. Tom works part time as Bellevue City Administrator, chairs the Idaho State Historical Society, and lectures on Idaho mining history. We remain politically active, especially on environmental issues. I also volunteer with Friends of the Howard Preserve. Summer lives in Tucson, teaches Montessori school, and is the mother of two boys. Jill is a water resource engineer and meditation teacher. She and Jeff live in nearby Smiley Creek.
Two years ago I got nostalgic for a Peace march. On the Internet I found one in San Francisco. I arranged to stay with my friend Marcia in North Beach, and we walked down Market Street with a few thousand others holding signs and banners just like old times. Guess my counterculture days are not over!
Well, I’ve left out a lot. Like the trip to India. But hey, classmates, I better end this -- never ask a writer to write her bio.
POSTED BY FLORENCE WEIGAND BLANCHARD
