Back to the Garden

I first went to San Francisco in February 1967, the winter before the Summer of Love. The trip was more pilgrimage than planned vacation. I had just turned 19, and was living on St. Mark's Place in New York City's East Village.

A few weeks before embarking on my journey westward, I'd been in the audience at the Fillmore East when Timothy Leary issued his psychedelic rallying cry, "Turn on, tune in, drop out!" Like someone swept away by religious fervor, I heard the call and followed. But after turning on and tuning in, I wasn't sure what to do next, so I set off to find the answer in the place where dropping out was invented.

As it happened, I only stayed for a couple of party-filled weeks (actually, it was one continuous party, interrupted by the occasional be-in in Golden Gate Park), crashing with people I had just met. But I fell in love--with brightly colored gingerbread houses, staggering vistas and a robin's egg-blue sky that licked the bay and gave off a diaphanous light unlike anything I'd ever seen in the bricked-in East. I promised myself that someday I would return for good.

It took seven years, one divorce, numerous pit stops (Boulder, Colo.; Topanga Canyon; British Columbia) and one small child finally to arrive at my destination. I was not disappointed. The San Francisco Bay Area was more than a breathtakingly beautiful place; it was a state of mind--the edge of the culture as well as the continent--that embraced the misfit, dreamer, bohemian, gay, artist, hippie, rabble-rouser types who had been flocking there in successive waves since the Gold Rush and in whose company I counted myself. My first digs were in a feminist communal household on Potrero Hill, where we shared meals, child care and feelings for a grand total of $500 a month rent, or $150 for my share. It was the perfect arrangement, allowing me to live well (with "vu") and follow my bliss as an actress and writer for a song. Practically everyone I knew was on a similar track. We felt smug and superior to our arty counterparts who were toughing it out in New York City.

"Generation after generation has repossessed San Francisco physically and imaginatively as the expression of their ideal life," says Kevin Starr, California state librarian and a fourth-generation San Franciscan. "In the '60s and '70s people saw San Francisco as an alternative to escape the competitiveness of American life. There was an enormous availability of housing stock. You could go out to the Castro or the Mission and find Victorians built for working-class people that are just stunning."

We had our cake and ate it too (at Chez Panisse, when we felt like splurging) without having to worry about such pesky grownup considerations as having a real job or buying real estate. This was still true in 1988, when I followed my new husband to New York and gave up a $600-a-month, shabby but charming three-bedroom Victorian flat in sunny Noe Valley. As the movers drove off with our belongings, I vowed--as I had back in 1967--to come back someday.