I arrived in California in November 1968 in the passenger seat of a truck bringing a load of vegetables to Los Angeles from Utah, writes John McNamee.
Exhausted after the arduous journey, I had to try and work out the monkey puzzle of survival, just like all the other newcomers to California since the days of the wagon trains.
A song by The Band, penned by Robbie Robertson and popular at the time, summed up how I felt: "I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half-past dead; I just need to find some place where I can lay my head".
Another line from Country Joe McDonald expressed a dilemma with which I became familiar: "Standing on the LA Freeway, rainwater in my boots, standing on the LA Freeway, feeling kind of destitute."
In Santa Monica I found a job as a bus boy, clearing tables in the coffee shop of the Miramar Hotel. The tips were an invaluable asset for survival in the fiercely competitive world of Los Angeles, city of the Angels, but mostly with broken wings. I have many happy memories of Venice Beach, with its lively mix of the Sixties generation. I also frequently visited Shrine Lake, a park in Pacific Palisades on the coast founded by Paramanhsa Yogananda, an Indian Yogi mystic. The park contained a shoot from the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha meditated.
I sometimes made early morning visits by slipping over the fence. The ease and grace of the swans, gliding at their own pace, untroubled by the mayhem of the world, with the morning sunlight reflected in the rippling water, brought me great peace of mind.
Early in the New Year I got a lift up to San Francisco. My memories of that city are like a bell ringing noisily on a cable car, jangling as it goes up, then down, the switchback hills on the sunny busy streets. Burt Lancaster walking into the restaurant near Union Square where I worked on the "graveyard shift". The Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia playing the Filmore West on the same bill as Miles Davis.The Palace of the Legion of Honour where my breath was taken away by the sight of Rodin's "Thinker". Idyllic, youthful moments high on the top of Mount Tamalpias in Marin County, viewing the spectacle of the setting sun sliding into the Pacific Ocean. San Francisco Bay with ships setting out and coming home under the Golden Gate Bridge. The subdued terror of Alcatraz, the island prison visible way down below from the summit of the mountain top on a sunny twilight evening. Standing among the crowd in the Golden Gate Park watching the cast of the musical Hair putting all their talents and power into songs such as The Age of Aquarius.
Native American Indians staged a protest and took over Alcatraz prison. The Dubliners visited and played for them. Later, at the Trident restaurant in Sausalito, Ronnie Drew told a spellbound group of listeners how he could talk to the horses he had at home in Ireland. Also in support of the Indians' demands for civil liberties, a major poetry reading took place in Clyde Memorial Church in downtown San Francisco. It included Lawrence Ferlingetti, accompanied by an auto-harp, rendering a poem titled Big Sur Sunset Trip. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Gary Synder read poems in native American dialects and languages. Gregory Corso recited his eulogy to Jack Kerouac, who had died recently.
In front of City Hall in downtown San Francisco a political protest took place close to the financial district. Country Joe McDonald (without the Fish) sang, "One, two three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam". On Fisherman's Wharf I was in the throng who saw Bernadette Devlin presented with the Freedom of the City of San Francisco by Mayor Joseph Alioto.
In 1969 John Steinbeck died. His obituarist Joe Costelloe of the Monterey Herald pointed me in the direction of a man called Sparky who, by his own account, was a character in the Steinbeck novel The Log in the Sea of Cortez. Sparky's favourite Steinbeck book was Tortilla Flats. My own preference was for East of Eden.
Armstrong and Jones landed on the moon on July 21st, 1969. In Candlestick Park the Beatles played together for the last time. Upstate New York hosted the Woodstock festival.
It was all, I thought in my innocence, the beginning of something which was not going to end - a carousel which could only gain momentum to include the world and all its dominions. Little did I know that it would end so abruptly.
When the Rolling Stones performed at Altamont Speedway on December 6th, 1969, I was in the midst of a surging crowd of 300,000 people as the Stones played their eerie anthem Sympathy for the Devil - and an 18-year-old black man was beaten to death by Hell's Angels, who were, ironically, in charge of security for the event.
That event, 35 years ago this week, is seen by many as the moment when the Californian dream of peace and love became a nightmare - the day the music died, to borrow Don McLean's line. But at the time I had no inkling of such portentous echoes. In the aftermath of the concert, a disenchanted hippy warrior walked beside me, his long hair clinging in despondency, as we made for our separate directions. "You got a cigarette?" he asked.
"I have two" I replied. "I'll give you one".
"I like your style" he chirped gratefully.
John McNamee is the organiser of the Out to Lunch series of free poetry readings at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre, Foster Place, Dublin 2. An anthology in aid of the Barretstown Gang is available at €10. The next reading, at 1.15 tomorrow, features Kevin Kiely. John McNamee's Collected Stories and Prose: A Man With a Hat, will be published by Weaver Publications in early 2005.