The Hippes are comming, the Hippes are comming!

Actually, they are in Davis already. Yes friends and neighbors, its time once again for the Whole Earth Festival.

Now, before you go off thinking I am a loud critic of these folks, let me assure you, I like them. I do.

They take me back to my youth where once upon a time someone came up with the bright idea of selling 5 acre parcels of red dirt covered in manzanita brush and poison oak to unsuspecting hippes fleeing the hustle and bustle of LA. I am not sure why you would want to build a geodesic dome or put up an army tent on a brush pile in northern Shasta County where temperatures reach 109 in the summer and it can snow in the winter, but I guess it was better that living in your parent's basement enduring the torture of Perry Como on the 33rpm stereo.

Anyhow, these people would set up their camps and 'live off the land', or so they thought. One day during the summer, I was irrigating our lower meadows when the irrigation ditch stopped flowing. I told my father and we went to see if the water meter gates had been shut up at the head end of the ditch. Nope, the water was still flowing into the ditch at the head, so where was the water going? We drove through some of the back roads to find a guy with a plywood house had borrowed a backhoe from a neighbor and was damming up the irrigation ditch and diverting it through his property. My father was far from amused. After notifying the rather dirty and bearded hippie, who was wearing cut off shorts and no shoes, that the water in the ditch belonged to the land owners who had purchased the water rights for it, my father told him to remove the dam from the creek or my father would be back with his D-8 Caterpillar to remove it. The guy agreed to remove the dam and my father let him put a small gas operated pump in the creek to get water for his house.

The Hippies were generally nice people although a shower now and then could have done wonders for their public relation efforts. Most of them just wanted to raise a family, grow some dope and be left alone. The school I attended was 50 kids k-12 so we knew everyone. I had a few friends whose parents were 'free spirits' and spending the night at their house was as interesting as it was educational. A 2" pvc pipe and a wooden pallet makes a good shower, but it is cold, maybe the lack of hygiene has something to do with that.

I remember one summer the Hippes decided to have a 'Woodstock Light' on 640 acres of BLM ground where we had our cattle. About 300 to 500 hippes came from all over to drink lots of beer, smoke lots of dope and have sex anywhere they could find shade. That was definitely educational to a 14 year kid ridding his horse, chasing cows, to see women with no clothes on walking though the hillsides picking flowers.

Back to Davis. I walked through the Whole Earth Festival Friday night and while most of the booths were closed, I did see at least half a dozen places selling hemp clothing, along with crafts, jewelry, workshops on how to be a peace activist, and three stages of music and crowds of old, young and everything in between dancing and singing. Lots of kids and dogs as well.

I even saw a distinct and rare subspecies of Hippie, the drum circle hippies. Alas, I had no camera.

So if you feel the need to buy an organic hemp shirt to go along with your tie-dyed tank top, run, don't walk to the UC Davis quad and relive the 60's with those who were there and those who wished they could have been.