Now to look toward how this locality has altered over time....
I can easily summon vivid impressions of my arrival in this town in 1979. I saw it then as more of a residential stepping stone to San Francisco. It was coupled with my first impressions of California specifically Northern California. In the wee hours of the previous day I had flown into SFO from Massachusetts, and spent the day resting at a family member's home in Hercules in nearby Contra Costa county. I remember of course the weather after leaving frozen New England in early January. It felt to me like early Spring-- green grass was growing, some flowers were around, and there was a terrific smell of the Eucalyptus trees that bordered the rolling hills of mainly cow pasture.
Then the next day we drove to Berkeley for a tour of the university campus and environs. My tour guide identified with the former and was conflicted about the latter. He liked the bourgeois good life available here but felt no connection to the counter-culture. There were more visible surviving counter-cultural institutions around then--it was after all still the seventies. I had brought with me a version of the new east coast punk generation idea but a lot of Berkeley appeared to be still back in the Aquarian Ages.
The first notable Berkeley personage I observed I later came to learn was named Serge. Rumor had it that he was an academic who had had a nervous breakdown after much dosing with LSD. He was tall, had long gray hair and beard, and was dressed in tatters. His skin was reddened and below his fierce brow peered opalescent eyes. He seemed immersed at that moment in a complex lecture on a simultaneous observation of photons and their nature. There were no ostensible listeners to this lecture which fact in no way diminished the determination he put into it. Over the following years I concluded this lecture never concluded. I frequently heard parts of it on my strolls through bustling Telegraph Avenue where it was generally given.
I do recall seeing Serge (I think it was him) not long after he began sporting a styrofoam float from a marine crib tied atop his head. It was up in the Berkeley hills at that drizzly time of year when copper-colored salamanders cross the hill-traversing roads in large numbers. I rode in a friend's car past a figure in tattered robes carrying a cross-shaped picket across his back walking on a steep and remote incline. It was an apparition of a psychedelic martyr of the Berkeley Hills.
I also noticed that Serge was accepted and even popular with younger somewhat less eccentric frequenters of the over-crowded comic strip of Telegraph Ave. I'd see him catching a lift on the back of a motorcycle with some young hep cat. He died by the end of the eighties and was eulogized with a big photo in the local weekly "alternative" newspaper. It felt like losing a fond, familiar tree.
The Avenue then as now catered to University students, but it appealed as much to a larger world. It offered diversion to book lovers, record enthusiasts, and high school kids eager to make the scene. Bookstores, record stores, head shops, cafes, eateries, and clothes stores were the mainstays, as they are now with the addition of various tattoo, piercing, and cell phone service centers. There was in addition a large floating population of what were then called street people and are now generally thought of as part of the nebulous population labeled "the homeless".
I have long been interested in itinerant people, in those who attempt to lead lives without being dictated-to, who may be unemployed, but, in a idealistic sense, are unbowed. I read about hobos and wobblies; I was compelled by the myths and texts of Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan; and I hitchhiked and camped-out a bit myself. It goes back to childhood interest in native ways of life and in early explorers--in how a human being manages to survive on basic materials and ingenuity. But while growing up, aside from the coming of the hippie generation, I had seen few people who were rootless. Most of the migrant hippies were on a lark or were intentionally being "poor in spirit" as the Gospel would have us be. Aside from a few individuals who seemed to outside society around my hometown and maybe the alcoholics who used to hang-out on a few benches in the Boston Common, very few people who would fit the now sadly commonplace notion of a homeless person ever crossed my path. I don't miss much that does cross my path.
I did see homeless people when I came to California. Ever since a certain former governor of California became president the following year, the dispossessed in this society have proliferated exponentially.
I will return to this thread of encountering Berkeley in a later blog.
