Magic bus rolls into La Honda ‘Furthur’ brakes for anniversary trip by Mark Noack La Honda resident Terry Adams got a surprise call on Thursday. He learned a kaleidoscope on wheels was rolling into town for a visit. The legendary ride of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and a symbol of ’60s counterculture, the one-time school bus known as “Furthur,” drove through the Coastside last week on the final leg of a cross-country tour. Kesey’s son, Zane, and a posse of modern-day pranksters trekked across the country in the bus to mark the 50th anniversary of their predecessors’ legendary 1964 bus ride. The group stopped in La Honda to visit Kesey’s old cottage, which is today owned by Adams. Kesey, the larger-than-life author best known for the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” made the redwoods cottage into an art enclave for his commune of drug-fueled pranksters. Standing in the redwood grove behind the cottage, Zane Kesey and about two-dozen pranksters relived some of their memories of the tranquil setting. Everyone threw coins in the circle for the I Ching to see what was in store for the future. With a plucked clover dangling from his mouth, Kesey directed everyone to take a look up. “This is one of the things I really remember about this place,” he said. “Just turn and look up; there’s nothing like the view in the redwoods.” Back in the early ’60s, Ken Kesey and his crew began rhapsodizing about LSD, the hallucinogenic drug that was then legal and being tested by the U.S. government on civilians. The troupe welcomed many artists, youth and transients to join their bacchanalia at the La Honda pad. Kesey’s welcoming attitude and status as a folk celebrity made him instantly a magnet for the positive and negative energies. La Honda, till then a summertime retreat for San Franciscans, found itself suddenly as the West Coast’s ground zero for the burgeoning counterculture and its backlash. Kesey and his friends bought a school bus and painted it in a dazzling rainbow of flamboyant colors. In his famous book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Tom Wolfe described the bus as glowing orange, green, magenta, lavender, chlorine blue, every fluorescent pastel imaginable in thousands of designs, large and small, like a cross between Fernand Leger and Dr. Strange, roaring together and vibrating off each other as if somebody had given Hieronymus Bosch 50 buckets of Day-Glo paint and a 1939 International Harvester school bus and told him to go to it. In 1964, the Merry Pranksters took the bus on a two-month cross-country tour, often tripping on acid along the way. The group filmed its experiences. Along the journey, they met with other prominent figures of the time, such as Timothy Leary, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The trip and Furthur were immortalized in the song “Magic Bus” by the Who and “The Other One” by the Grateful Dead. The Furthur bus itself became a symbol of ’60s counterculture, although it fell into disrepair in later years. For a time, the Smithsonian wanted to acquire the bus, but it ended up parked on a swamp at Kesey’s Oregon farm, where it continued to rust and fall apart. Kesey died in 2001, and in the following years, his son Zane embarked on a project to restore Furthur to its former glory. A nonprofit, the “Furthur Down the Road Foundation” sprung up to help secure donations for the job. To make the 50th anniversary of the Furthur trip, Zane launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money. For a donation of $200 or more, a contributor could send a resume for a chance to tag along for the wild ride. The campaign sought to raise $27,500; it ended up gaining $43,000. Pinky Mengel was one of the lucky donors picked to join the ride. The group originally left Oregon in the middle of July and headed east, picking up Mengel in Ohio. She was originally only planning on sticking around for a week, but she was having too much fun. “I’ve been loving every minute of it,” she gushed. Angie Lee met the Furthur troupe while selling her produce at a farmers market in Pennsylvania. With room on the bus, they invited her to come along and she dropped everything. She left home, quit her job and abandoned her farm in middle of harvest season. Any regrets? “None,” she smiled. “I’ve been having an incredible time.”
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 20:46:30 +0000
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