Hippie Confidential
John Schnick, 1968 passport photo
After my girlfriend ditched me, for paying more attention to mountain climbing and LSD than applying to college or courting her, my parents sailed off to Hong Kong to be missionaries. I was left alone in San Francisco at the age of 18. It was 1968, and the country was falling apart.
The Vietnam War was raging, and black people were burning down their ghettos. I dropped out of high school, and hit the road. For the next three years, I slept in ditches, under bridges, and never between sheets. Traveling by thumb, freight hopping, and shank’s mare, I crossed the US and Mexico, sometimes with companions, sometimes alone.
Those years of homelessness taught me things that I couldn’t have learned in college. I learned patience while waiting for hours beside a road with my thumb out. I learned how to cook a meal on a rock beside a campfire in a snowstorm.
If you would like to read how I survived the sixties, and had some great fun along the way, read the second volume of my memoirs, Lightbulb Coffee.
