Two Unusual Summer Vacations

There are many memorable vacations that I can write about like the first time I went to Hawaii which led to my marrying my husband. There's the time my grandmother waited for me to come for the summer so she could take me to the reissue of "Gone with the Wind" in one of those then new Century Theaters with the surround screens and sound.

I remember the first summer when my mother introduced us to the steep streets of San Francisco, on the way to China Town. Without warning us she drove over the edge of the intersection toward the precipitate dip in the road down the hill just to hear us scream. There was the summer when we first were introduced to Santa Cruz and the Boardwalk. I almost lost one of my front teeth on the roller coaster after my brother insisted that I ride it even though I had refused. I also nearly turned into an ice cube when we stepped into the Pacific Ocean.

I remember the summer that we drove with Grandpa to my aunt and uncle's in Oregon. On the way we investigated the really deep and wonderfully blue Crater Lake and the enormous pond with the very huge, tame and truly technicolor trout swimming in the incredibly blue green water. They swam near us looking for a handout. I also remember the summers when we went to the local park and had picnics on special potato salad and poor boy sandwiches, swimming in the refreshing cool water in the very pleasant shade on a drowsy summer afternoon.

I also remember when we were teens, my mother taking us on date night to a drive-in theater to watch very strange d-rated movies. Many of them had major stars in parts that wouldn't even get the Razzie award because they were so bad. For example one of them had the plot where the high school coach was killing the very pretty cheerleaders for no particular reason.

I also remember two summers when I went to camp. The first time, I was a teen and two girls in our cabin had amazing initiative. They dumped one of the counselors into a garbage can on the first day. Then for the rest of the week they chased our counselors through the woods, put bugs and snakes in their beds, tied them up in the chapel and ran their pajamas up the flag pole. The entire camp got to see them because the counselors didn't know that their clothing was there until the evening assembly.

On the second trip I was out of high school and was with a Christian group that spent a week in Berkley showing an evangelistic film and talking to people on the street. For the first time in my life I was talking to people who were gang members, Satanists and criminal types that were not my usual encounter. I didn't realize it until the people with me told me so. I did know that they were a bit different than the people I had usually met. But since I'd never had any previous reference I didn't know how to compare them, so I decided to take them at face value just as they had presented themselves.

As incredible and wonderfully memorable that all of these experiences were, they weren't the most unusual ones. The most unusual summer vacations and two of my favorite experiences come out of a time-capsule, out of a time that movies, tv programs and songs have been written about. They took place in two of the summers in the early/mid 70's during the hippie revival and still during the hippie era. In fact they came out of that scene. When the revival started in the foothills above my hometown in the mid to late 60's the first people to get saved were the hippies.

They came down the hill and went to the first available churches that they could find. They had nowhere to live because most hippies came from somewhere else to live in an alternate communal, coed, back to nature, cultural setting. The churches developed what they called ministry houses for the newly saved hippies. The ministries of the day organized communes. Some came out of existing hippie communes others were established specifically to accommodate the huge influx of newly homeless young people coming to them.

I wasn't one of those hippies, but I did live in several of the ministry houses since I too had come from somewhere else and needed a place to live. This was an even more extreme education and exposure to things that I was not familiar with than the summer I spent in Berkley. I guess you could say that it was unfamiliarity and education on steroids.

When I moved to the San Francisco bay area I moved into a house where the women had just moved from another house that they had shared with the men before they had given their lives to Jesus, They were sleeping on every available surface, and I do mean every surface including the bathtub, the garage floor and under the kitchen table. They were shopping at the Alpha Beta grocery dumpsters for most of our meals and fixing concoctions from ingredients that I had never heard of in the household I had grown up in. Total strangers made sure that I was fed, clothed, safe and with a job.

The first trip was in 1974. One of my roommates asked if I wanted to take a road trip with her as she checked out the various Christian communes and ministry houses up the Pacific Coast of California and Oregon. I thought that this would be a great adventure and agreed to go. We found two destinations to go to, the Jim Durkin Lighthouse Ministries and Commune in Eureka, California and the Agape Ministry House in Portland, Oregon. We drove to both places and back home to Palo Alto, California and stayed at each of those places in a span of about two weeks.

The commune was formed out of a small compound that surrounded a working lighthouse. The ministry had separate quarters for single men, single women, single mothers with children and married couples. We were given our own space in the single womens' quarters even though we were only there for a week. Each woman's built-in space was a large bunk with storage built in along its sides. There was a limited closet and drawer space for each girl. Our room had space for ten people. There were several rooms in the house that were used in this way. Everyone met in the main hall in shifts either to work or to eat in the dining room/kitchen. The other large room was where they had gatherings for teaching, prayer and for singing. Because there were so many people at the meetings most of them sat on the floor. Everyone had an opportunity to share and sing. The teacher taught while everyone else took notes, asked questions and made comments on the teaching.

Those who didn't work in the kitchen either worked in the extensive gardens, where the commune produced most of its food, around the commune doing repairs or cleaning or in town at a business they had. Other members lived in town near the business which they managed. Many of the people who came to this place were either hitchhikers who were looking for a place to stay for the night and chose to stay on, were sent there as a part of their probation or like my roommate were looking into moving there.

Since this place was on the coast the weather was usually very cool and foggy even during the summer. The bathrooms had a faint mildew odor. The vegetables were the hugest I had ever seen. The smallest cabbages were the size of basketballs.

The people were very friendly, helpful and welcoming. We were included along with everyone else. We compared notes between our situation in Palo Alto and theirs in Eureka.

Our other destination, in Portland, was located in a well-kept very large Craftsman era house in a neighborhood full of the same style houses along with older Victorian houses. This area also had very cool weather and tended toward overcast skies. There was quite a bit of rain.

The house was an extension of one of those churches that we used to call "hippie churches", similar to the one we came from. There were a lot of girls in the house and the church had many young people in it. But they still found a place for us in the house. The church had a lot of programs with a high level of individual involvement. They also had a coffee house where some of the girls worked. The coffee house was similar to the one I had worked in at the ministry in my hometown. It was a meeting place for the Christian young people, in the area, where they could eat, attend teachings and concerts and buy Christian books in the bookstore.

The people here were also very welcoming and included us in everything. But for some reason I don't remember as much about it as I do about the commune. I think that is also true of my roommate because after we returned home she later moved to the commune. I had quit my job before I had gone on the trip. When we came back I got another job and went back to school.

Our experience with the commune was as if we had landed in another country among people who weren't like any we had ever met before. This was the first time where I had seen people living, working and going to church together while being on the same piece of property during the entire time, while still getting along. It was a grand adventure and helped to change my outlook on the world. This also helped me later with my work among the Rainbows at their gatherings.

The Rainbow gatherings have many similarities to that commune except most of the Rainbows are not Christians and at a gathering they camp out mainly in tents with a few RVs and converted buses in their own campsites. They operate many individually run kitchens strategically placed throughout the National Forest, where the gathering is located. They also feed all comers for free.

In the second summer trip, my foster parents and I, along with some others from our church, went to a Spirit of 76 Christian happening. It was a music/Christian conference set up in a camp ground where hundreds of us were camping out in tents and RVs for a long weekend. We traveled a couple hours to the spot. But some went a lot further to get there.

We attended music performances and lectures by some the best known Christian musicians of the day like Keith Green and Dallas Holmes. We also got to hear from some of the most well-known speakers of the time.

But the part that really touched me the most was that there were so many other churches that were experiencing the same thing we were. We got to see that we weren't the only "Hippie church" going through the situations that we were dealing with such as; the huge and sudden growth the churches experienced due to all the salvations, and the snide remarks from our fellow "Non-Hippie" churches in the areas that we were located in. It was fun and encouraging to meet and to exchange with others from other towns and states with similar experiences while we attended the meetings as we camped and ate together and shopped at the vendor's booths.

I still have the olive wood Christmas ornaments I bought from one of those vendors. They go on our tree every year, taking me back to another time and another place reminding me that I too can be encouraging to others.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_movement