Letters from Katherine: Deer camp for the Merry Pranksters?

Another in the continuing saga of the make-do spirit of Up North—or perhaps of our persistent eccentricity.  This from Katherine:

Was on my way home, not the direct route, when I spied a bus the Merry Pranksters would be proud to call home. It is maybe a deer camp because there is a wood stove inside (no, I was tempted but didn’t go in) with the pipe coming through a window on the other side of the bus. It looks like a fine place to me.

Pretty interesting.  I’ll bet it was “not the direct route.”  Then, on my way to finding a good link to the Merry Pranksters so you youngsters out there who don’t know what we’re talking about can read up, I found an extraordinary site at the University of Virginia Library Special Collections Department.  I just spent a long time perusing The Psychedelic ’60s: Literary Traditions and Social Change. I feel there’s a bigger, broader story to tell about that time than anything we’ve produced so far, and UVA’s catolog supports that notion.  I say “The Sixties” began in the 1950s and lapped over into the 1970s, and UVA has an even longer timeline than that.  In any case there was a lot more going on than you might think—many diverse strands in a large tapestry. What we think about “The Sixties” depends on which piece of the tapestry we examine, doesn’t it?  Wouldn’t it be fascinating to piece the whole thing together . . . .

Maybe I’ll collect some more voices from the era.  We can call it I Was There and I Remember It Anyway.  Or Off the Bus, Mostly.