After spending the rest of my first day in California exploring the Berkeley campus and Telegraph Avenue, I spent the second day taking from Shattuck Avenue the bus that took you back into San Francisco and headed out to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco for the first time. When I got to Golden Gate Park in the 1970's, there were still a few groups of hippies handing out there on weekdays. But nobody walked over to share a joint with me or seemed interested in approaching strangers, like some hippies of the 1960's had often done. After getting bored with walking and then sitting on the ground in Golden Gate Park for a few hours, I eventually took a trolley to the beach to see the Pacific Ocean. And then, before heading back to Berkeley from the Bay Transit terminal, I went back downtown to explore the area near Fisherman's Wharf and afterwards, like more culturally straight tourists, took a ride on one of the San Francisco cable cars.
Starting to get bored with hanging out around Berkeley's campus by my third day in Berkeley, I decided to check out what the 1970's scene was like near Stanford University's campus in Palo Alto, California. Still being into protest folk songwriting in the 1970's, Palo Alto also interested me because that was where Joan Baez seemed to be living in the 1970's; and I probably subconsciously felt that, maybe if I spontaneously walked around Palo Alto, cosmic forces would cause me to bump into her and, as a result of this chance cosmic encounter, lead her to start singing cover versions of the non-commercial protest folk songs I had written, which her mother had liked.
But when I got to the Palo Alto bus station after taking a bus from Berkeley back into San Francisco, walking to the Greyhound bus station and buying a round trip ticket between SF and Palo Alto, I walked around a bit, couldn't find the way to get to the Stanford University campus from the Palo Alto Greyhound bus station, didn't bump into Joan Baez on the street, and decided I should just get on the next Greyhound bus going back to San Francisco, rather than hang around on the streets of Palo Alto.
The town of Palo Alto in the 1970's didn't seem to have enough of an interesting street scene for me to want to wait another 3 hours for the last night bus that would take me back to San Franciso's Greyhound bus terminal. So I ended up getting back to SF from Palo Alto by returning on an earlier bus. And once back in SF, I walked down Market Street again and into the still busy commuter bus terminal, where I then got on the Alameda County Transit bus that would again take me back over the Oakland-SF bridge and back to Berkeley.
After spending the rest of the week just hanging around the U. of California's campus, walking up and down Telegraph Avenue and Shattuck Avenue and streets like Dwight Way and in and out of bookstores and vinyl record stores a lot, I began to realize that I was not destined that week to then cosmically bump into either any old Movement friends from the 1960's, or any new 1970's Movement freaks who lived in California, on the campus or streets of Berkeley, during this trip to the West Coast.
So, despite my vague hope before I got on the road on the east coast that I would spontaneously stumble into some kind of housing situation in Berkeley that would make it unnecessary to quickly get back east to my Jamaica, Queens basement apartment, I concluded that I would spend most of the rest of my money on a ticket for a Greyhound bus that would leave San Francisco near midnight on Sunday; and then get me into the Los Angeles Greyhound bus terminal early the next morning on Monday. Taking the night bus also meant that I would not have to worry about finding a place to sleep for that night, since I could just try to doze off somewhat during the night, while the bus took the interstate highway southward, for the long drive down to Los Angeles.
(end of part 5)
No comments:
Post a Comment