LET YOUR FREAK FLAG FLY – Episode One

The One About the Infamous Hinton Hippie Revolution of Spring 1968

A Circumbendibus* Historical Comic Book Rather Loosely Based on a True-Life Adventure

(What King Arthur, King James I, Betsy Ross, Jacques St-Cyr, the Litkes & Me All Have in Common.)

by Wayne Arthur Melvin

 (Ne’er-do-well, Vexillographer, Trifler, Punstar, Alleged Allegorical Alliterator & Hippie Fugitive)

SERIALIZED IN FIVE EASY INSTALLMENTS

• Episode One: Life & Times – Hinton, Alberta, and Environs, Circa 1968
• Episode Two: Music, Music, Music & The Power of Flowers
• Episode Three: Vexatious Vexillology and Applied Vexillography
• Episode Four: Birth of the Freak Flag
• Episode Five: The Freak Flag Finally Flies
• With Special Bonus Addition – The Freak Flag Flurry & Aftermath – With Apologies & Acknowledgements

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EPISODE ONE

(Of Five)

LIFE AND TIMES – HINTON, ALBERTA & ENVIRONS, CIRCA 1968

Well, there we were, once again, sitting around the kitchen table at the many-storyed Litke house on Chetamon Drive. Lloyd and me, late of a Friday night, feeling the vibe, looking cool, and spewing the usual hippie BS. We were pretty good at talking the talk by now, what with a couple of years of hippiedom under our macrame belts. That meant we were now eminently qualified to talk earnestly, passionately, and endlessly about things we knew little or nothing about.

So, over bottomless cups of Constant Comment tea, we yabbered away about the great issues of the day: Lobsang Rampa and the mysteries of Tibet; was Pierre Trudeau really going to make pot legal (and did he and Margaret really smoke up?); the state of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement in the USA; Cosmic Consciousness; the riots and strikes in Paris; Cowboys vs Hippies in Hinton; the prophecies of Edgar Cayce, Black Elk and Jumping Mouse; the latest news about psychedelics (See God or Meet the Devil?); the engineering and musical marvels of Rickenbacker electric guitars. And, of course, we dissected and pontificated upon the heroes and villains of our generation. Villains included the usual suspects – “The Man”, “The System”, “The Straights”, “The Military-Industrial Complex”, and the evil perpetrators of “Bubblegum Music”.

Heroes, on the other hand, included musicians such as Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Moody Blues, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seegar, Joan Baez, and Rambling Jack Elliot, Tim Buckley and Donovan. As a musician, Lloyd also had guitar virtuosos, lyricists and singers – country, rock, folk, blues – who inspired him. But, to my ever lasting regret, the subtleties and complexities of his rich musical world greatly eluded me. I was simply not graced with the gift of music as he had been, despite his best efforts at explaining chords, and notes and how to pluck a string with a finger. Totally lost on me. I did, however revel in his intricate guitar playing and marveled at his versatile singing voice. How is this even humanely possible – to make such incredible sounds with voice and strings, and to stir such deep feelings from profound sadness to laughter, anger and joy?

I remember one time how ecstatic he was when he found a Buddy Holly and the Crickets album amongst a handful of otherwise nondescript LPs mouldering away in a dusty wooden Canada Dry Ginger Ale box at the Entrance General Store. In those days us hippies were infiltrating the little enclave outside on Hinton, much to the horror of the trappers, cowboys and others who lived there at the time in a collection of shacks and tiny houses scattered around the bush, hills and fields of Gordon Watt’s ranch. Mrs. Litke turned us on to Entrance as she lived there for a time in a small, but charming little green house located near the old wooden water tank. After visiting her there, and falling in love with the place, Lloyd became the first of us to move out there. He rented one of the one-and-a-half room houses on the ridge behind the store. Graham Glass and Bill Osborne rented the other, until one cold day it burned to the ground when the oil heater leaked and exploded. The place was gone in minutes. I later salvaged Bill’s melted saxaphone from the debris and returned it to him. Not too many tunes left in it, I’m afraid. Herm and I and an everchanging cast of characters lived at Big Lonely, the infamous hippie house located in a clearing in the bush about a mile up a dirt road from the store.

On one of our frequent trips to the store for provisions and to warm ourselves at the pot-bellied stove. Lloyd was rummaging through some of the weird odds and ends on sale there – hardware, beaded jackets and moccasins made by local Natives, food stuff, trapping supplies and a million other things – and he spotted the record album, stashed in a box with a few other obscure albums, some well used Zane Grey pocketbooks and some of those pungent smoked cured moccasins. Mr. Watt wanted a buck for it. Lloyd negotiated mightily and eventually got him down to 75 cents, with a promise to pay at some unspecified later date. Within the week Lloyd had mastered the album. Such was his way with music. (Might have taken him just a while longer, however for him to come up with the six bits needed to repay his weighty debt.)

As for myself, that day of hidden treasures, I scored a tattered Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage that looked like it had suffered through and somehow survived many a rugged pack trip back into the Tonquin Valley, Exceptional Pass and beyond. A mighty fine read.

Besides the musicians who we religiously followed, there were also the writers, thinkers and poets who captured our attention and fueled our imaginations. Burke, Hesse, Cohen, Seuss, Kesey, Kerouac, Castaneda, Alpert, Williams and Jung – to name just a few of our favorites, shown in the insert below. Oh, yeah, and Zane Grey, of course.

Who, we frequently argued, was to be included in our venerable list of worthies – and who was to be summarily stricken from it over some political, personal, spiritual or other transgression that offended our hippie sensibilities. Such debates led to many late-night hours and the consumption of copious gallons of tea as we deliberated their fate. We stood judgement over the greatest and most illustrious icons of our time and of ages past as judge and jury, prosecutor and defender, executioner and rescuer. Like, I know, totally fair, right. We might not have been particularly qualified as stand ins for St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, but we were so very, very earnest and so very, very opinionated. Typical, I suppose, of revolutionaries, recent religious converts, multi-level marketers and similar zealots the world over. They can all be a righteous pain in the butt. We certainly were!

With politics, philosophy and mysticism out of the way, we switched our late night musings to the many exciting travel and career options open to us. Under travel options: 1.) Take a Magic Bus to Haight-Ashbury; 2.)  Jump a tramp steamer to Marrakesh or a camel caravan to Timbuktu; 3.) Trek to Rishikesh or Kathmandu. 4.) Hitchhike all the way to Edmonton – if we could only think of some way to safely bypass Edson, where the local good-ol’-boys often took exception to us long-haired hippies thumbing, shuffling, or strutting through their gritty little burg that straddles Hwy 16, fifty miles East of Hinton on the yellow brick road to the big city. In those years of open tribal warfare, crossing the Himalayas, traversing the Sahara or surviving the mean streets of Vancouver or New York was far less risky for us hitchhiking hippies then getting stranded in Edson, especially on a Saturday night, or a Sunday morning, or any day or night of the week, for that matter. Hunting season on vegetarian, dope-smoking, Trudeau-loving, commie hippies was open year round, 24/7. No license required. Still get nervous traveling through that town, which, I must reluctantly confess, is my one true and only birthplace. Funny how they don’t celebrate my birthday there. Perhaps god does have a sense of humour after all, or maybe a sense of irony, or maybe, she was on the side of the truckers, cowboys and RCMP after all. Geez, never thought of that before.

Under career opportunities, dreams, and ambitions before us: 1.) Join a free-love commune in sunny California (despite being deeply suspicious of any such commune that would have us); 2.)  Get a cabin out in Entrance, become vegetarians, and live off the land; 3.) Start a rock-n-roll band and travel the world (Lloyd) – Become a Joni Mitchell groupie and travel the world (me). 4.) “Or, you could even become a librarian”, joked I, teasingly. “And you could even become a real estate salesman – or a history professor,” joked he, sarcastically. “Har, har, har,” laughed we, both heartily and prophetically. Like I said, we covered all the usual BS in our late night ramblings, and then piled on a bit more, and more again.

Then, round about the midnight hour, Mrs. Litke was eventually roused from her peaceful slumber by all the yabbermouthing and gobbledygook frothing over in her kitchen. She stormed into the room to let it be resolutely known that she was none too pleased with neither the volume nor the substance of our learned discourse. Now, my friends, before we go much further with this tale, you should know that what Mrs. Litke lacked in physical stature, she more than made up for in sheer personal presence. Not to be trifled with, is what I’m trying to say. Only at your peril. And I, being a notorious trifler from way back, was feeling the heat. I tried my best to look as inconspicuous as I could while sitting, one of two, sipping tea and eating cookies at her kitchen table in the middle of the night.

Mrs. Litke had been widowed at a young age and left to raise six kids on her own. To take care of her household, she took a job as a laundress in the steam-filled labyrinth of the Fabricare Drycleaners on the hill. Every day she walked the six miles to and from work. Nobody else ever walked between the Valley and the Hill parts of Hinton in those days. Just not done. Never-not-ever. Especially not every day – summer or winter – rain or shine, snow or dust – or on those days in the foothills of the Rockies when you could experience all four seasons within the hour. She was loving, caring, funny and strong, and a devoted fan of country stars Charley Pride, Mel Tillis, Johnny Cash and Hank Snow and Wilf Carter, five of the truly cool dudes of country music. Of course, we added Hank Williams, Woodie Guthrie and Jimmy Rogers to the list of chosen ones.

She was also a no-nonsense kind of woman. Of course, it must be acknowledged that she did have those four free-spirited Litke boys to contend with, meaning that non-stop nonsense kind of came with the territory. Nighttime blathering was but one of the many trials and tribulations the boys delivered daily to test her formidable patience and forbearance.

It was not, however, only the prattleracket that irked her on that night we speak of. Mrs. Litke wasn’t at all pleased with my being in her house in the first place. See, here’s the thing. I had been kicked out of school, yet again, and she saw me as a rather corrupting influence. Well, looking back, she probably had a compelling case to make. Lloyd was a well-rounded student adept at art, music, writing, and most other things, including mastery of the slide rule, the periodic table and, most amazingly, the arcane mysteries of the Dewey Decimal System. I, on the other hand, was more of a hit and miss kind of guy. Mostly miss, I will admit, but with the occasional moment of glory in English Lit or Social Studies (history). Part of the problem was that I was not so very keen on homework and, consequently, also very much averse to pop quizzes, deadlines, exams and report cards.

I was also perpetually tardy (you could charitably say I was slow to catch on to the virtues of punctuality). I was likewise prone to daydreaming and writing poetry when in class and wandering off for weeks at a time when I wasn’t. Irresistible lures were Christmas train rides through the Rockies to Vancouver to see the Collectors playing their mega anthem “What Love” at the Retinal Circus, famous, in part, for their fantastic psychedelic light shows. I would return to the coast again, when the daffodils were blooming and in time for the Easter Be-Ins in Stanley Park. What with transportation systems being as unreliable as they are, and unscheduled adventures being frequently encountered along the way,there might well have been some gaps in my attendance records. No big deal, right?! Life experience and all that. Glad to see you see things my way, but not everyone shares our appreciation of a liberal arts education. Instead, they saw these multi-week gaps in my formal schooling as being damning evidence of my corrupting influence on all the sons of mothers. And, here I was, the corruptor himself, in living technicolor, smiling meekly and partaking of Mrs. Litke’s tea and cookies.

[For more on the Stanley Park Be-In, See: http://vancouverartinthesixties.com/archive/383]

“What are you two up to anyway?”, she said with a fearsome glare. Not waiting for an answer, she continued her tirade, “Some of us are trying to sleep and you’re out here talking all this…, all this…. all this nonsense. Either keep it down or take your party somewhere else! And don’t eat all the cookies,” she ordered, as she stormed back to her bedroom. “Save some for the rest,” she muffled from behind the closed door.

Oops! Those cookies she was referring to? Spicy sugar cookies, they were. And mighty fine. In fact, they were already pretty much gone by the time of her injunction. I will, nevertheless, personally attest to them being extraordinarily yummy, even addictive, especially when they also counted as my breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We slightly extended our now tenuous lifespan by delicately stacking the few remaining cookies in the jar to make them look more numerous and voluminous, then tidily thumbing up the crumb evidence and licking it away. There would surely be hell to pay once the fragile cookie construction inevitably collapsed. But, for now, I, though trembling and sweating mightily, had at least a brief stay of execution. Lloyd and I resumed our intense conversation in a conspiratorial hush worthy of any resistance movement or subversive uprising – we had a world to save after all.

To Be Continued in

EPISODE TWO

(Of Five)

Music, Music, Music & The Power of Flowers