Confessions of a ‘60s Moonchild
By Kate Everson
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 Kate Everson
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Finding My Groove
In the late ‘60s I was one of those hippies walking through Yorkville in downtown Toronto, grooving on acoustic music at the Riverboat and the Mynah Bird. Gordon Lightfoot sang there. There were long-haired bell-bottomed kids everywhere and it was a great decade to be alive and to be young.
“Make love, not war.”
“If it feels good, do it.”
“Peace.”
Flower power and a feel-good way of thinking was what we all lived by. At least we wanted to believe we did.
Rochdale opened up on Bloor Street in the late ‘60s and it was the place to be. A tall apartment building designed for “open school” was a choice young people were making instead of going to university. This was the school of life, man. What else did you need to know?
I opted out of going to university, to my mother’s horror and my father’s encouragement. I had tried teaching for four months in a one-roomed schoolhouse and quit. I just couldn’t keep the discipline in a room full of 33 energetic grade threes and fours on my own, so I bailed. There was no principal around, and I was barely qualified after a year at Peterborough Teachers’ College. Dad said I was sure to get another job, but who would hire a quitter? I started looking for other options.
I checked in to Rochdale and got a room with a shared kitchen opening out to a huge common room. I was one of the few people who actually paid rent, paying for it from supply teaching in the big city.
Rochdale was a drug haven. Whenever I baked cookies, I had hippies asking me what was in them. Naïve as I was, I always answered, “Oh, just the usual… ”
But they laughed and got high on them anyway.
Some of the rooms were great places to “crash” for anybody who didn’t have a place to stay for the night, or the week, or the month. It was all one big groove.
“I can’t smoke grass,” I insisted. “I don’t know how to inhale!”
Really?
So they set me up with a hookah and a water pipe with hash. I gurgled away trying to get a buzz off it, but was a total failure. I decided to just pretend I was stoned. That actually seemed to work better for me than the real thing.
“Hey, what are you on?” they’d ask as I tripped around the place, loving every minute of this freedom inspired era.
“Nothing!” I said truthfully, but nobody believed me. I got off just watching others being stoned. I think I absorbed their energy.
But then they set up the tea room.
You went in and sat on the floor in this dimly lit room that smelled like incense and some girl in a long flowing dress poured green tea into a Chinese cup. It was all very mellow. But then there were always drug deals going on in the darkness. Great place. I met this one guy, John, who seemed quite nice and offered me a blotter of acid, just to try it out. 
“It’s just half,” he said, ripping it in two and popping the other half. “You won’t even notice it.”
The LSD was prime and really good stuff, still pure in the days before they were all cut with something else. I put it in my mouth and washed it down with the green tea.
Nothing happened.
Except for that fat boy across the room. He was trying to stand up. He was flat. He looked like a card in a deck. 
“Is he really flat?” I asked my new friend. I stared at the flat boy with my mouth wide open.
“Shhhh,” John said. “Don’t look at him. And no, he’s really not flat. You’re stoned.”
A bunch of my new friends wanted to go for a walk down Yonge Street and they said I was going with them. 
“I can’t move,” I said. “I can’t stand up.” And I really felt I couldn’t. What if I was flat too?
“Sure you can,” one thin guy said, and helped me up. Then he walked out in the hall and was sideways all the way down the corridor, leaning against the wall.
“Is he really sideways, or is it just me?” I asked in horror.
My friend laughed. “Jim, cut it out,” he called to the sideways man. “You’re freakin her out!”
And they all laughed. Except me. I was terrified. This was my first acid trip and I had no idea what to expect.
There were three of us, walking down Bloor Street towards Yonge. I was in the middle clinging to both of them like trees. But it was a strange world out there that I had never seen before. The shadows from the street lights were so deep. And the colours everywhere were so vivid, like I was seeing colour for the first time.
“Does it really look like that, or is it just me?” I kept asking.
“It really does, only now you can see it the way it is,” Jim said. “The doors of perception are unblocked.”
Whew.
We walked by the storefront of a Chinese restaurant. In the window was a miniature village, with tiny trees and little people and bridges. I stopped to look and they couldn’t pull me away. I got lost in that world. “Look,” I said, “Look at that!!!”
Finally, they got me away from the window.
“Look at your hand,” Jim said. “Isn’t that just as amazing?
I opened up my hand and couldn’t believe my eyes. There were fingers and veins and knuckles and it all looked like something I had never seen before in my life. 
They had to tell me to stop staring at my hand, so people wouldn’t notice. It was about 3 a.m. but there were still a few people walking around. It was summer in the city. 
We came to the steps of the University of Toronto campus and walked down into a grassy area. There were stars in the sky, way up between the street lights. 
“Let’s make a triangle, each one standing in a corner,” said my friend. “We can make the triple sign. That would be really intense.”
“Oh, no!” I was horrified. “I can’t let go! I can’t stand on my own!”
“Yes, you can,” John said. “Find the courage. You are strong.”
I did it. I let go. We all took our positions and stared at the sky. Something came over me then that I will never forget. I lost my fear and became one with the stars. I stared and stared. When they came back to get me, I didn’t even care if we rejoined hands again or not. I had found my true self. Somewhere, out there, alive in the cosmos.
We walked downtown to a restaurant and ordered some soup. Some men came in who were dressed as women. I kept staring and asking if they were for real. My friend hushed me, and said yes, they were real. 
We ate our soup with gusto. It was amazing how the soup stayed on the spoon for the longest time, just balancing. Then it went into the mouth and down. What a feeling! Everything we tried to eat was with amazement. I was Alice in a drug-induced Wonderland.
While I was at Rochdale, there were a bunch of people who were going to a cabin in Haliburton for a couple of weeks to make maple syrup. Sounded fun. So I went.
I was also asked if I wanted to go to Woodstock for some rock concert in a field but I declined. Can’t stand crowds.
Maple Syrup and Hitchhiking across Canada
The cabin in Haliburton was more my style. A little log house in the deep forest with a wood stove. You had to bring your own food or catch it. Jack, a guy trying to get off Speed, made a snare and caught a rabbit. He skinned it and cooked it up with carrots and onions. Not bad!
None of us thought to bring food. The only supplies at the cabin were oatmeal, flour, baking powder, popcorn and mustard. We tried popcorn with mustard. It takes some getting used to, but when you’re desperate anything tastes good. I tried baking cookies in the wood stove but they fell flat. We ate them anyway.
Some of us actually tried to make maple syrup. You had to sit out all night around a camp fire watching the maple sap boil. Once the water evaporated, you had syrup. As long as you didn’t let all the water evaporate.
That’s what happens when you fall asleep. We woke up to the smell of something burning. All that sap so painstakingly collected from the maples were burned to a deep brown. A big waste.
I remember waking up in the early morning in my top bunk, being really cold. Somebody had to be the first one down to light the wood fire. Nobody wanted that job. But somebody had to do it. It just was never me!
I shivered until the cabin filled with heat, then struggled into my clothes and got up for pancakes and coffee. There were about a dozen of us, mostly all from Rochdale, so mostly stoned or trying to get off drugs.
One guy walked around with only one boot on. 
“Why does he only have one boot on?” I dared to ask.
“Shhh… he doesn’t like people talking about him,” I was told. “He’s a little paranoid. Don’t get him mad.”
So we talked to him like everything was normal, like he wasn’t just standing in the snow with only one boot.
There were not many females in the camp, and so there was a bit of confusion about who was allowed to do what to whom. The couples were on their own. I was a loner, so I didn’t do anything with anybody. Or at least not right away.
That Jack guy, the one who snared the rabbit and walked all around the lake three times to come down off Speed, was the only one that interested me. It wasn’t long before we were a couple and he was suggesting we hitchhike out to Vancouver.
“Let’s go to Van,” he said. “It’s a really cool place. You’ll like it there.”
So we threw some stuff in our backpacks and took off.
That’s where the trouble began. I should have known better from the time he made me throw out my favourite things, like my coloured stone candle holder and my book by Martin Luther King Jr. 
“But those are my favourite things!” I cried as he threw them in the ditch.
“Have to lighten your load,” he snarled. “You can’t carry that shit around with you all the way to Vancouver.”
I sighed and did what I was told.
I should have recognized this as a bad omen. We would end up hitching as far as the rainy side of the Rocky Mountains, sleep under a piece of plastic stretched over a picnic table, then have a big fight and turn back to Ottawa. We got a room off Bank Street. I went off the pill for one month and got knocked up. We got married when I was five months pregnant. I wanted to keep this baby, no matter what.
Keeping the Baby
This baby I wanted to keep. I had already given one away.
But I’ll never forget the baby girl I left behind.
She was born in a Toronto hospital on October 4, 1968. I was an unwed mother and surrendered the child to Children’s Aid. It was one of those things you did in the ‘60s when being a single mother wasn’t accepted. I had hidden the pregnancy successfully from all my friends, and stayed in a Home for Unwed Mothers for several months. But I’ll never forget that sweet baby girl when I held her for the first time in my arms. It wasn’t her fault. I was grateful that she was going to a happy couple who would give her the home she deserved.
Sometimes, I think about her, my little Johanna Correen, and hope she is doing well.
So this time, I needed to keep the baby. It was a beautiful boy with golden hair and blue eyes. However, the marriage only lasted two years, as long as it took for me to save up enough money to get an apartment and move out. There were no support systems for abused women in those days, and even my parents didn’t know what was going on. I was hit, punched, kicked and controlled every minute of my marriage. It was hell. Thankfully, he never hurt the child. At least, I have that to be grateful for.
It all worked out in the end. I saved up enough money from my government job to take off with my two-year-old son. I rented a small apartment on Zephyr Avenue on Britannia Bay. It was like getting out of prison. We walked along the beach and played in the park. It was freedom.
And that was when I found my guru.
Finding my Soul
I saw a poster of Sri Chinmoy at the health food store. It invited people to come to a meditation on Sunday night. Something in that face spoke to me, and I was forever changed.
I sat with a group of people, disciples of Sri Chinmoy, in front of a picture of the guru and his consort Alo Devi. Candles burned. Incense of sandalwood spread throughout the room. There were a few AUMS and a couple of chants, then silence. 
It felt good.
I was totally in my mind, or maybe out of it, so it was difficult for me to understand the whole theory behind meditation. It was foreign to me. The girls wore saris and the boys wore loose white clothing. Most of the girls had long hair. 
One of the ladies who owned the apartment was the sister of Alo Devi. This seemed strange, but true. Alo had gone to India and met her guru and they had started a meditation centre together in New York City. Centres had spread all over the world, small groups of disciples, or followers, of his teachings. He had written many books and these were read with devotion.
I asked a few questions and then left. But I came back the following week. There was something about this group that left me with a feeling of peace. Inside, my soul soared. Meditation released me from worries of the world and replaced it with a sense of stillness and inner joy. This was priceless.
Over time, I became more involved. I learned to wrap a sari around myself for meditations on Sunday and keep fairly still through the hour. I never really bonded with anyone because it was kind of a cold group. There was no touching or hugging allowed. Disciples were not allowed to date. There was no alcohol or drugs. We were like monks and nuns on the path to God-realization.
That was fine with me. I had had enough of the social thing, and slipped into my little niche. My son was only three at the time, and didn’t really have much to say about it all. Once when the guru visited, we both got blessed. It was nice. For the first time in my life, I had a sense of purpose, something divinely guided. I felt like my guru was with me all the time.
A couple of trips to New York City were taken for celebrations of birthdays or special occasions. A bunch of us crowed into a car or station wagon and made the 12-hour trip to Queens where we stayed with other disciples. The celebrations included some festivities, and long meditations. Some of it was fun, but the meditations were brutal. How could you sit still for so long? It was a discipline I never really got used to.
Still, I stayed with the group in Ottawa for a couple of years. When I moved to Toronto I joined the group there, but left soon after. I had found another, friendlier group that met my needs for social interaction.  It was called The Foundation Faith.
I first encountered this group through their coffee house along Yonge Street. I went in and had tea and found out about their psychic workshops and spiritual events. It was intriguing. Soon I was hooked. Within a year, I had officially left the Sri Chinmoy Centre and become a member of the Foundation Faith. We wore dark blue uniforms and went “funding” on the streets. The funds helped support us and the headquarters in Arizona.
My son was home in the big house we shared with the centre members including three children when I went out on the streets. Sometimes we were sent to other cities to raise funds, staying at whatever free accommodation we could obtain. We managed to get some free hotel rooms or stayed in strangers’ homes. Our spiel was that we were raising funds to help people. When we switched to being “Christian” it helped a lot. We were the Foundation Faith of God, and had suddenly become Christian. This was apparently an insight of one of the superiors in the group. It also helped our bottom line.
After a couple of years there, I was transferred to a centre in Denver, Colorado. My son and I took the train with our meagre possessions. When we got there we were given a spot on the floor to sleep. 
My job was the same. Go out in the streets and raise funds.
Sometimes, my son would come with me. He was a great fund raiser. The ladies felt sorry for him. Once in Laramie Square, he got a $20 bill. He was so excited. When we emptied our jugs at the end of the night, it was a treasure. The head of the house was excited too, and started sending Jason out with me fundraising as often as possible. But he got tired of the gig and wanted to see some return for all his efforts. He started pocketing the cash. The little grade five kid was already an entrepreneur!
I left the Foundation Faith of God after I got tired of it and moved into a small flat in downtown Denver. I got jobs housecleaning while Jason went to school. It paid the rent.
After a few months, I got another job through an ad in the paper. They were looking for someone to help out on a horse ranch in the foothills. They said they didn’t mind me bringing along my son.
We moved into the ranch near Kremmling and Jason went to school while I made beds, washed dishes and helped out. Jason learned to ride a horse.
After that, I got a job in a ski resort. We moved to Leadville and I commuted on a bus each day to the resort at Copper Mountain where I was cashier in a restaurant. Jason and I both got free ski passes and free ski rentals, so we took advantage of that. We both learned how to ski in the wonderful Rocky Mountains!
Coming Home
But someone at the ranch had called the immigration officers and they sent us back to Calgary on a plane. I switched my ID and came back the following week. But after a few months, I decided to return to Canada for good and moved home to the Trenton area. I got an apartment in Bayside and found a part-time job at the nearby municipal air terminal. That led to some great free flights to northern Ontario, to Hudson’s Bay, Attawapiskat and Pickle Lake, Moosonee and Red Lake. Great fun!
Finally, I started writing. I freelanced some articles for the local paper and they took them. I bought a small camera and suddenly I was a reporter! 
The months turned into years. My parents died and left me their small stone house by the river. My son grew up, went to university and got married. He lives in Ottawa now and has two daughters. I am a proud grandmother.
So a moonchild of the ‘60s has settled down, sort of. I still manage to take trips to places that intrigue me. I have been scuba diving in the Bahamas, climbing hills in Sedona, Arizona, drove to the edge of Vancouver Island and been exploring all through the Celtic lands of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Am I still a moonchild? Of course! The fun is just beginning!
The End
Read more about my adventures at Journey of the Soul and Listening to the Light.