At first, I landed the wrong fish. The ad read: “Are You Literally a Child of the Sixties? Did you go to protests and rallies as a grade-schooler? Were your parents members of the counterculture? We’re curious to hear what you’re doing now and how you feel about having been raised during a time of political and social experimentation.” But the voices on the machine sounded a little timeworn, and they turned out to be not hippie kids but aging momma and poppa hippies, eager to relive their commune days: “Yeah, my name is Greg and I’ve got some, heh heh, pretty trippy stories for your article.”

Then I got a few letters. The first from a prisoner who had gone to a rally once and hoped I might do an exposé on his unfair conviction for robbery, the second from Dr. Bennett Berger, a professor emeritus in sociology at ucsd, who had done field research in Northern California communes in the ’70s. He jotted off a stern note on university letterhead, saying he hoped I wasn’t planning to rehash the usual “nonsense written about communes & ‘the ’60s’ ” and said to call him if I wanted to talk.

Where were the people who’d been toddlers at antiwar rallies? Where were the 30-year-olds weaned on sprouts and soy milk? And why were the baby boomers so reluctant to give up their right to define the ’60s?

Reached on the phone, the professor was wary. He’d so often seen the era described in reductive, inaccurate ways: “The press wants to make things cute, ironic, salable.”

I agreed that was often the case and explained a little about my methods. I hoped to hear from a sampling of children raised in the counterculture and protest movements and record their stories — a kind of oral history. And as the person asking the questions and editing the answers, I had my own stake: my father was an antiwar activist and union organizer; my mother threw over her silver-spoon upbringing and traveled the country in a converted mail truck. I have mixed feelings about the ’60s. It seemed to me like a wild time, in which real gains were made for social good, and like any other “movement” it was made up of people of every stripe. I wasn’t looking for a pithy thesis. And the editors at the Reader seemed willing to let the story be as shaggy and wild as the subject.

The professor chuckled and opened up a little: “Journalists point with satisfied irony to the ex-hippies who’ve become the bmw drivers of the ’90s, but the fact is that in the ’60s, the counterculture was made up of less than 10 percent of the youth. The majority of the people were never hippies. So it comes down to numbers. How many justifies a stereotype?”

He had done a study of communes in Mendocino County, on a grant from the federal government. “We camped up there and did what anthropologists do: participant observation.” As part of his project, he had looked at child-rearing practices on the communes. “There’s the middle-class notion of child-rearing: that it requires a lot of time and effort and money to raise children well, and if you don’t have all those resources, you’re a bad parent. But if you don’t have all those resources, you’re also more inclined to say that kids don’t need close supervision, that they don’t need delayed adulthood, so kids in those situations tend to grow up early. Even though the commune members chose poverty, it was still poverty. You’re gardening, building buildings, putting in water systems — putting in a town from scratch. You don’t have a lot of time for rearing children. So they had a kind of old romantic Rousseauian notion: You give them a little food, a little water, they grow up straight and tall.”

I was interested in the professor’s impressions: I’d grown up in those same coastal mountains, though my mother and stepfather were not commune dwellers but back-to-the-landers, trying to fit modestly into a rural town. Our having arrived in a converted mail truck with a smokestack out the side didn’t help. But many of the professor’s observations applied: I’d grown up a little wild — always with a bit of food on my face in the photos, prone to biting other kids — but with a self-sufficiency that came in handy as an adult. Now I was curious about the chance assemblage of people who might step forward in response to my ad — what they thought of their childhoods, what they were doing now.

Then, last fall, I started to hear from the right folks: “My name is Taj, and I’m definitely a child of the ’60s.…” There was a slightly bemused tone to their voices. They had all grappled with their unusual legacies — some were grappling still. Most of them had left behind the trappings of the counterculture — they led seemingly conventional lives — but still they spoke of feeling like “outsiders.” Many of them were doing some form of social service and felt compelled to help those in need, but at the same time they spoke of the pull of materialism, the desire to compensate for things they didn’t have in their youth. More than anything, I was struck by the range of their experiences. The counterculture meant many things to many people, from civil rights to communal living to Eastern religion. The common denominator: their parents had been on personal quests, and they had vivid memories of what it was like to go along for the ride. Listening to their stories, I would often think of the sociology professor: he would no doubt wince at how neatly some of the tales fit the script. And yet it seemed to me that these children, who had been given an enormous amount of freedom — even, at times, more than they might have liked — had grown up “straight and tall.” And they viewed their parents with as much tolerance and thoughtfulness and love as they themselves had once been granted.

Maura Murphy was born in New Mexico in 1964. Her mother was 26 and her father 24. “I was an only child. My father worked on the reservation as a social worker, on a government stipend. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I always had the feeling that there was enough — I never felt that I needed to hoard. I’d come home and my mom would say, ‘Where’s your coat?’ and I’d say, ‘I gave it away to So-and-So ’cause she didn’t have one.’ And my mom would be like, ‘Maura!’ But I always knew there would be enough for us.

“When I was 13 my father had a major heart attack and almost died. After that he went through a kind of midlife crisis thing. He started smoking pot, getting into alternative ideas. That was sort of the end of the family. My mom didn’t understand it, and then she had to leave for a new job. My parents divorced when I was 15, and I stayed with my father. I didn’t have a real gender-bound upbringing. My dad was my Girl Scout leader; he was written up in the paper for that. I think he was one of the first male Girl Scout leaders. I laid brick with my dad. I played softball from the time I was 10 to 20, and he was my coach. My gender lines — there weren’t any. ’Cause I was it, the only child.

“After my parents divorced, I was basically on my own. My father left me the money and the car. I had a checkbook, and I was alone in the house. One time I came home from school and he was smoking pot with my friends. My friends thought he was so cool, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ But they were both trying to do the best they could — my mother and father — for themselves, for the family, and with very little money.

“I started getting into trouble. My father had no clue what to do. Then we got into this communal-living arrangement, and that was what saved me. There was a woman who worked with my father, helping abused children, another social worker, another single parent. She was raising three kids on her own. So they decided to pool households. We all moved in together. They shared their money. They weren’t in a relationship. They were both just trying to get on with their lives, and they thought this would help. And it did. If I hadn’t had this experience of communal living, I don’t know where I’d be.

“We were living in Poway and I was in continuation school, the last-ditch thing before they throw you out. My counselor suggested that I go two days a week to high school and three days a week to the local college in San Marcos along with my communal siblings. They were older than me. I looked up to them. I took a logic class and a class in human sexuality — and I did great. It made me feel successful.”

Does she keep in touch with her communal siblings?

“Yeah. They all live in North County, and we keep in touch. One of them has three kids now. Another one went to Annapolis and then dropped out to become a hippie. I went on to college and then dropped out. Ran with bikers and was wild for a little bit. Now I’m finishing my bachelor’s degree and working with abused and neglected children at the Polinksy Center. I’m a teacher’s assistant in a kindergarten. Before that I taught in a gang unit for six years, but I started to give up. I had ten students that were murdered through gang-related situations. Another ten killed other kids and are doing life. This one kid, Jose, he was brilliant. He and I fought back and forth over finishing his econ class. It was all he had left to graduate from high school. I got the kid through the class, and three months after graduation he went out and shot three people and one of them died. And I thought, ‘Why bother?’ So I switched to the kindergarten. I thought, ‘Maybe here I can make a difference. Maybe it’s not too late.’ But then you start to see these kids get placed in foster homes and then come back to us again. You can just see the trauma. They’re only five or six years old. They’ve got marks on their faces. It’s a feeling of hopelessness, that’s what’s coming from this experience.”

Did Maura consciously follow her father into social service?

“I’m doing exactly what my father did — it wasn’t that he talked about social responsibility, but he set an example. And I was so proud of him. I wanted to be like him, to be a social worker, but he told me not to. He said, ‘It’ll break you down.’ And now I’m seeing it.

“I’m 34. I couldn’t see having a child by myself. But I think that the example that my parents gave me was wonderful. I remember, I was sick one time and my friends came over and asked if I could play and my mother said, ‘No, Maura’s sick.’ And my friends said, ‘Well, can Terry play?’ That was my dad. They loved him.”

Michael (not his real name) was born in New York City in 1964. When he was two years old, his father joined the Hare Krishna movement. “My father was a social worker, and he wasn’t satisfied with what he saw around him. He was ‘in search of,’ as my mother put it. In October of 1966, my father was walking through Tompkins Square Park and the gentleman who brought the Hare Krishna movement to the United States was there. He was surrounded by people, chanting and singing in his orange robes. My father sat down. The founder spoke a little bit, and literally from that moment forward my father had found what he wanted.”

Michael was raised in religious schools both in the United States and in India. “I wasn’t around my parents much at all growing up, though there were periods where we were together for six or eight months. I went to India when I was almost 12 and lived there off and on until I was 16. When I lived in India I was treated — I don’t want to say like royalty, but I would go to temples in South India and instead of having to wait in line for hours, I would be taken on a personal tour by a Brahmin. And I saw some wacky stuff. At one point we lived in a place where things were disappearing, getting stolen, and the Brahmins used divining rods to hunt down the thief. They followed these sticks around, and an hour later they ended up in this place with this guy and there it all was, all the missing stuff. During the rainy season, cobras ran amok; they’d crawl up into the buildings. I remember walking into my classroom once and there was a cobra coiled up on the desk. My teacher, the Brahmin, came in, walked right up to this cobra, leaned his face close to it, mumbled something, and the cobra uncoiled and slid out a hole in the wall.”

For many years Michael’s father was one of the leaders of the movement. But he developed disagreements with the Hare Krishna movement, and finally he moved from India back to the United States and became a social worker again. “My father decided that he wanted to practice religion on a personal level, rather than being in a leadership role. To this day, he practices the tenets of the Krishna religion on a daily basis. But outwardly, he lives a normal life.

“Here in the States, as a Hare Krishna, you stand out like a sore thumb. It was a bit much for a kid to deal with. There are certain segments of my childhood that I really wish I hadn’t experienced. I didn’t need that to grow up. But then again, it’s part of the whole puzzle that makes up who I am. You can’t extract that out.”

I asked him if he talked to his parents about these feelings.

“I’m very close with my mother; we talk all the time. When I talk to her about those times, she’s sorry. She wishes that hadn’t happened, but I don’t begrudge her for it. If I begrudged anybody it would be my father. But he was a man ‘in search of,’ and he didn’t find the whole hippie movement appealing. It had different trappings, but it was still material. He was looking for something spiritual.”

Still, Michael’s upbringing among the Hare Krishnas left him with certain gifts. “My childhood made me mighty independent, probably headstrong, not necessarily in a good way. It made me resourceful. If I wanted to do things, I did them. I also find it interesting that growing up in what some consider a stringent religion has made me fairly tolerant and accepting of other people. One of the things I remember very distinctly growing up was that we were taught that whether you were a Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, or Christian, the most important thing was that you dedicate yourself to God. And I think that idea has stuck with me the most. I don’t remember being taught explicitly to be giving or take care of people, but on my first trip to India I lived in West Bengal, in a very small town where the Hare Krishnas had built a very large temple. Twice a weekend we would feed thousands of people, on these plates made of leaves stuck together with sticks. There was a time during the refugee crisis in Thailand when my father and the Hare Krishnas in general started to collect money and food and send it to the refugees through the various humanitarian organizations. The idea was always that in times of crisis we fed people, as a very basic thing. I think having grown up in a very poor country made me see what I had, not overtly but unconsciously. I’ve worked for nonprofits and in politics all of my adult life, and I think it’s primarily because of the way I was brought up. Right now I work for a nonprofit helping the disabled.

“To look at me, people would not have a clue about my childhood. They might know I had an eclectic background if they looked at my house: Indian instruments and paintings here and there. I can’t speak for everybody, but I think that people who’ve grown up in the counterculture, they’ve lived it, they’ve experienced it, they’ve dressed it, they’ve eaten it. There’s sort of a feeling that you don’t have to outwardly demonstrate your feelings in that way any longer.

“I tell people pretty freely about my childhood now, but I didn’t used to. I had to gain a certain confidence in myself. I had to gain a knowledge of what the traditional Western society was like before I became comfortable telling people about my background. I’m not a practicing Hare Krishna now. I’m a vegetarian, but other than that I’m nothing. I just am.”

When he passes Hare Krishnas on the street now, what does he think?

“I haven’t been to a Hare Krishna temple in years, and I don’t plan on going. I’ve separated myself, and I really don’t want to be bothered by anybody. Where I live, what I’m doing: that’s my business. If someone wants to follow the tenets of the Hare Krishnas, be my guest. I think the people that are in the robes and live in the temples — it seems a bit naïve. When I see them I think, ‘I don’t want to be you. I’ve been you, and I don’t want to be you again.’ It’s not out of disrespect. I just have no particular desire. My life and what’s important to me are light-years different.”

Marg Stark’s parents were active in the Civil Rights movement. “My father was a minister in inner-city churches. He’s from Tennessee, from a slave-owning family with a cotton plantation, and at some point, he developed a great appreciation for diversity and a desire to reconcile people with huge differences. There are some wonderful stories of my parents’ early years. When sharecroppers went to register to vote in Tennessee, they were evicted. My father sent money back to help support the sharecroppers who were thrown off his family’s former land. My mother grew up in Mississippi. She actually baby-sat for Rush Limbaugh and rues that she missed her chance to drown him in the bathtub. When she was young, black women were allowed to shop in white department stores, but they couldn’t return anything and weren’t allowed to try anything on. My mother thought this was outrageous and once helped this prominent black minister’s wife try things on in a back room.

“In the mid-’50s, my parents were caught up in a fervor among young people. They describe going to these organizational meetings where black and white kids were coming together to try to make progress. Very heady, very passionate gatherings. They left with this great spirit. But that passion was gone by the time I was born.”

Marg’s parents have spent 40 years dedicating their lives to civil rights and racial integration, but the candle burned out for them early on. “They lost the sense that blacks and whites were making huge strides. After that initial excitement, they lived to see some terrible backsliding. The deaths of Kennedy and King and the emergence of Malcolm X and the black power movement. This is my interpretation; they would never say this because of their total desire for reconciliation.

“This was a time of massive white flight from the inner city, which left these elderly white women holding down the fort on these beautiful cathedrals in the ghetto. My dad became an expert at going in and saving these churches, but he did it the hard way: instead of moving the congregation to the suburbs, he rebuilt the church where it stood, drawing on the population that was nearby. He would ask white members to pretend it was okay that black members were sitting next to them. ‘Just come for a few Sundays and act as if it’s okay,’ he said. And the very act of pretending had some amazing effect on people. If they could do it, they could make that leap of faith and be transformed. All of his churches have been integrated.”

Marg grew up in an all-black neighborhood. She and her sister were 2 of 9 white kids in a school of 450 black kids. I asked her if she felt ostracized.

“There was one incident in the black school — I must have been in second grade — when I was walking home and some kids forced me to get down on my hands and knees and say that white was ugly and black was beautiful, but for the most part I was very protected. The older black kids promised my mother they would look out for me. We lived in a poor neighborhood, there was a lot of crime. But my memories are of being a kind of star. I was one of the only white kids, so I was in every play, always got picked for things. Kids wanted to play with my hair — I had long blond hair and the other girls liked to braid it. But I became something of a troublemaker. I wasn’t challenged in class; I finished my assignments early and made trouble, and so I was transferred into an ‘academically talented’ all-white school, which was the worst thing that could have happened to me. I was a very street-smart kid, but when I moved to the white school, I was confused. There were all new rules.

“While I wasn’t popular at school, I was popular at church — I had this incredible community. I saw physicians and janitors dancing together, sitting together at ice cream socials. They had these things called ‘lock-ins,’ where the kids would sleep overnight at the church — black and white kids together.

“What was disturbing was to find out that wasn’t the way the world worked. Starting in junior high and high school, we had to move out of the black community, to keep my sister and me enrolled in the academically talented school. My mom then ran for the at-large membership on the school board — it was the most tumultuous environment. There were teacher strikes in front of our house. My mother was called a ‘nigger lover.’ When I woke up in the morning, my mother would lay the newspaper by my plate, with items marked in red ink. She circled the items that I needed to know about just in case I got harassed about them by teachers at school. It was way too much to expect of a kid who was overweight and had bad skin and was just trying to fit in.

“Eventually I became the president of the pep club, and I tried to bring the races together, in my own way. There had been a black drill team at my junior high, but the high school only had a white pom-pom team. And I had been trying to get blacks to try out for the pom-pom team — they used the hand-clapping and rhyming of street games, and I wanted them to bring that onto the team. The white kids did all this stiff, gymnastic stuff. My father remembers me calling from the school office and crying because this teacher decided to start an all-black drill team, and I knew that would be the end of the idea of mixing the races.”

I asked her if she ever felt resentful of her parents’ commitment to their work.

“When I went to college, I remember that on Valentine’s Day the other girls got roses and chocolates from their parents, and I got a card from mine, three days late, that was stuffed with clippings about how public education was going down the drain and all the children in Africa were starving. I was, like, ‘Can’t I just get a goddamn valentine?’ My dad was gone all the time. My mom was working all the time on the school board. For so long, they were so exhausted. They were slogging along in the name of the cause. And I never saw the spark — the passion that had ignited this work — because by then it was largely gone.

“I went pretty far away from my parents for a while. I rebelled. My parents used to have a dinner-party group with other ministers and their wives — all of this very liberal bent. And as it turned out, every one of their daughters married someone not of the Presbyterian faith. My sister married a Jewish man, another woman married a Muslim. I thought, ‘I’d have to marry a Rastafarian to top that.’ But instead I married a naval officer. I spent some time in college as a Republican. I was accused by my family of being a materialist. I tried to go work for Bush as a speechwriter. It’s hard to find a profession acceptable to people who are trying to pull people out of the gutters. To say you wanted to be a writer, to write poetry — my parents considered this a luxury. At one point, I thought about going to seminary, even though I knew I wanted to be a writer. I thought I’d go to seminary to write sermons. So much guilt.”

Stark recently finished a book called What No One Tells the Bride, a self-help guide to marriage for independent women. She is working on a novel and taking care of her one-year-old son.

“For a long time I was, in some ways, very mad at my parents’ values. But I’ve come back to the lessons that I learned, now that I’m raising my own child. We live in Normal Heights. My son is one year old and in a day care with black and Latino kids. And that’s really important to me.

“Still, there are some things I hope to do differently. I intend to be there for my son a lot more than my parents were for me. The cause was always bigger than we were. My father wasn’t there a lot, and it’s been painful for him in his later years — he sees that he missed a lot. And that we’ve been angry. Both my sister and I have taken him to task for missing so much of our childhood. But now with the birth of this first grandchild, he’s been kind of out of control. He’s so in love with my son, it’s crazy. Over the years, when my father and I used to sit together people-watching, I heard him say, ‘Aren’t white people ugly?’ The only babies we thought were good-looking were Asian and black babies. But my son is as white as they come — he has white hair, pale skin, he looks Irish. And yet we can’t take our eyes off him. We think he’s the most beautiful thing. This little baby has given us permission to love ourselves.”

Lisa Tripp grew up on a commune in Northern California. “My parents met through the draft resistance movement. I believe my mom was done with college. My dad was studying Chinese, at Stanford, and was involved in the draft resistance. He was also a Buddhist. There were a lot of people merging different spiritual interests, such as Buddhism, with the New Left. My parents met each other in that atmosphere. They had me in 1970, and they split up a little over a year and a half after I was born. My mom decided to move to a commune called Struggle Mountain, in the hills above Los Altos. There were lots of communes in the hills back then. There were food cooperatives, with over a thousand people pitching in; grassroots political organizing; and other more spiritual ways of, well, ‘being the revolution,’ as they said it back then.

“I was a born-at-home baby. My mom was a midwife — an informal one. They didn’t have licenses at that point. I was there for two of the births of people who were born on the commune. One I remember vividly. There were 30 or so of us watching. I must have been two and a half years old. I was sitting up on a bookshelf and looking down on the birth. I remember being very curious. My grandma made me a doll when I was maybe five, where you could take a baby out. She gave it to me and I took out the baby and said, ‘Grandma, where is the placenta?’ She was a little bit shocked, but she went and made me a placenta.

“My mom, coming out of the feminist movement, was trying to think about parenting as a political activity. What does it mean to parent a child, to educate them? To do it in a way that empowers children without letting them do whatever they want? How to let them be who they are and still give them guidance. Most of my memories of Struggle Mountain are of playing with friends, mainly guys. We played really hard, crashed bicycles, played in the woods, fought sometimes. I went to a preschool that the commune members started and various other alternative schools. From fifth grade on I was in public school.

“When I look back at the pictures that I have from that era, I don’t look that different from the other kids that went to those schools, but I really felt different. And a lot of that had to do with feeling poor, feeling like we didn’t have money. It was weird to be growing up near a fairly affluent community but set apart. I wore used clothing and clothes that didn’t fit right. It made me feel like an outcast. These other kids would go home to various mansions around Palo Alto.

“This issue still comes up for me sometimes because I feel very deeply that I’m not interested in living my life to ‘get ahead’ or to have the right things to wear. That’s not what’s important to me. But I also know that I do have some feelings from my childhood around wanting to fit in and wanting to be ‘normal.’

“I was part of the counterculture, but I also went to some anti–Vietnam War stuff as a child. Mainly I remember being involved in the anti-nuclear-power movement at a pretty young age. When I was 11, I made a big speech at the local city council meeting. I made petitions and handed them out. I remember saying that if we all stood together we could make a difference in ending nuclear weapons. No one was hostile, but a lot of people just thought that it was ‘cute.’ They didn’t take my thinking seriously. Some people might have thought my mom put me up to it. But my mom was just into helping me think about how to make my ideas possible.

“About six years ago I started working on a video called Growing Up on Struggle Mountain. It’s a social history of Struggle Mountain and the neighboring commune, called the Land. The main focus is on the children, what it was like growing up on those communes. I think a lot of people misunderstand what people were trying to do back then. It’s easy to say that everybody’s sold out and gone on, either that they’ve seen the light and come around or that they’ve sold out their dreams and their causes and given up. What I wanted to show is that while I do think they made a lot of mistakes, I have a real respect for what they were trying to figure out. We need to look at how these children turned out in the larger context of how difficult it is to try to do something new when the larger society is against what you’re trying to do. It’s easy to say that the kids from the communes are really conservative compared to the way they were raised. But it’s more complex than that. We need to look at the challenges these people faced.

“Most people I knew that grew up in the counterculture don’t look like the counterculture now. They look pretty straight. But they have a very different inside life. I got my undergraduate degree at ucsc, and there it’s a fad to look hippie-ish. I thought that because the students looked that way, they’d grown up like I did. I remember in one of my writing classes I mentioned, casually, ‘You know, when you’re on welfare —’ and all of a sudden I looked around at all these shocked faces.

“I don’t go to as many demonstrations now as I used to. But right now I’m striking. I’m a teaching assistant at the University of California, and we’re striking for union recognition. And I see a lot of what I do as political. I’m interested in working with young people, working to change the schools. I see the education work that I want to do as political, even though it doesn’t necessarily involve the same style of activism that was going on in the ’70s. Most of the decisions that I’ve made about how I’d like my career and my life to be have involved thinking about what kind of impact I want to have in the world.”

Like any other social movement — if the counterculture could be called that — there were people on the front lines and people at the fringes. Even my friends who’d grown up in the suburbs — their parents had gone through a love-bead phase. This seemed to be the case with Susannah Forman. Her parents were middle-class academics who’d flirted briefly with Eastern religion. “I’m 29, and this is weird, because my parents are Jewish, but when I was 5 they got into TM and Eastern religion. I remember sitting in the room with this woman who was going to give me my mantra, and she said, ‘All right, don’t tell anybody else, but your mantra is “ing.” ’ And I said, ‘Ing. Like washing?’ I was careful to make sure I got the sound right.

“My brother was five years older and he had a mantra too, something different. We had to do childhood meditation for ten minutes each day. You could walk around and do things, and you could have your eyes open, as long as you were concentrating and saying your mantra. I used to walk around the pool ten times, because it took me one minute to walk around the pool, and I’d go around saying ing, ing, ing. The strangest thing, looking back, is that my parents thought of it like a chore: Did you take out the trash? Did you clean your room? Did you meditate? Then as quick as they got into it my parents gave it up. I think because I skipped a grade, my parents thought I was mature enough to make the decision as to whether I would continue without them. They couldn’t very well make me do it if they weren’t, and so I said I wanted to stop.”

That theme came up often in these conversations: the maturity these girls were granted when they were still in saddle shoes. These parents weren’t afraid to let down the mask of their authority — a brave thing in the face of children’s natural insouciance. But it’s strange: you give kids extra rope and they hardly notice it at the time. They swallow that power as if it were their due. It’s only later that these women noticed what a lot of credit their parents had granted them — at the time it seemed perfectly normal to be treated like a rational, sovereign being.

I asked Susannah if she dreaded doing her meditation.

“It wasn’t dread I felt. I didn’t fear it like you would dread going to the dentist. It took only ten minutes of my life, and I could play with my Barbies, as long as I did it saying ing, ing. I remember once, just for a split second, thinking that if I stopped, something bad might happen with the war. I had grown up in the middle of the Vietnam War, and I was used to hearing the death toll on TV, it seemed normal, and I remember thinking, ‘Oh, America is always in a war.’ And I thought maybe we were meditating to stop it.

“My parents were never hippies. My dad’s a college professor, my mom’s a librarian. My brother hung on to the hippie thing for a little while. He’s more spiritual than I am today. I’m not at all what you would consider a hippie. I’m a retail store manager at Lamps Plus. I wear makeup, always want to be in fashion. I don’t like the smell of patchouli oil. When I tell people now that I did TM at five (which is rare), they freak out. I did have my fringe poncho days, but my family concentrated on making sure I knew my manners and how to act in social situations. Back then, I remember seeing this picture — it might have been in Life magazine — of this family living in a commune, and they’re half naked, and the dad’s reading to the kids, and I thought, that’s not us. We were a normal Jewish family, but we hit this period where we went into meditation.”

Taj and Sierra Barnhart spent their girlhoods on 12 acres in rural California. I interviewed Sierra, the younger sister, first, but their stories intertwine and their soft, lilting voices are nearly indistinguishable.

Sierra’s full given name is Sierra Skylila. “It’s an unusual one. My dad named me Sierra because I was born in the Sierras. I was going to be Dawn, but I wasn’t born until the afternoon. Skylila is Sanskrit for Divine Dream. My parents always called me Sky. Taj was born on a commune, Ananda, outside Nevada City in the foothills of the Sierras, about half an hour from Lake Tahoe. Our parents moved off the commune right before I was born, in 1974. There were things going on out there that they weren’t comfortable with. It was based on our church, Self-Realization Fellowship. My parents thought the commune would be run in tune with the values of the church, but the guru who ran the commune was corrupt. He’s been sued by a bunch of people. My dad had to go and testify against him.

“When I was born my parents moved to a couple acres of land outside Camptonville, California. We lived in a trailer on the land while my dad built us a house. They planted a garden, had horses and chickens, they pumped all the water from the creek, had a little water tower. My dad built a teepee on the other side of the creek.

“Taj and I were very shy children. We kept close to home. I think that’s why we’re such good friends today, because we were so isolated as children. We roamed around the property. We have pictures of us dressed in ferns. We went naked a lot.

“My parents formed a community on Moonshine Road. The local people all got together and helped build each other’s houses. They formed a little firefighting group. There was a doctor, a dentist, a couple of musicians. The lead singer for Supertramp, Roger Hodgson, lived down the road. We would go down the road to his studio and listen to the band jam. We would have them over to the house for waffles.

“My dad was just in seventh heaven. He was running around with an ax, long hair down his back, growing dope. My mom was home with the babies. She cooked all vegetarian. She knitted us ponchos and sewed us gingham. It was very Little House on the Prairie. She came from an upper-class family, a pretty awful situation, and she moved down to San Diego and met my dad and said, Screw all that. They got married in Encinitas, barefoot, overlooking the ocean, and then they took off in a blue Volkswagen bus painted with peace signs and flowers and drove up the coast.

“But after a few years at Moonshine Creek, my mom was tired of being a housewife, doing the canning and cooking and all the hard work around the homestead. Even though they practiced an alternative lifestyle, they kept the traditional gender roles, and the woman’s role was a lot more trying. It’s hard work, that prairie life. So we moved to Sacramento and my mom got her master’s in counseling, at Cal State. We lived in Sacramento for two years, but my dad was going crazy. He was miserable in the city; he missed the land. So we moved to Eugene. They still live there, in this house in the woods with a creek — looks amazingly like Moonshine. They’re still involved with the church.

“Our parents have been married 26 years. They’re more in love than ever. They have a real estate company in Oregon. They both drive Beamers and they’re very normal looking, but they’re definitely hippies at heart. Especially my dad. He cried when Jerry Garcia died. He used to swear he would never wear a tie, and now he wears one every day. But he says when he retires he’s going to grow his beard.

“I wish that every kid could have a childhood like we did. It was magical. I wouldn’t keep my kids quite so isolated, because kids who stayed around there, they don’t seem to have the same social skills. We were glad we moved when we did. Or we would have been socially retarded. We had to get over our shyness before it was too damaging. But I want my kids to have the same kind of experience of nature — no TV, healthy food, a spiritual environment.”

Taj seems to share Sky’s views. “It was kind of a fairy-tale lifestyle, out in the woods. We believed in fairies. We believed in magic. We went to summer solstice events; there were a lot of people there who were pretty tripped out. I know that the fanciful side of us was encouraged in the extreme. Having Sky there was wonderful. I can’t imagine not having her, because we were so isolated. Someone to share your experiences with — a lot of other kids couldn’t relate to us.”

Indeed the sisters share an unusual bond. “We’ve done the same things our whole life,” Sky said. “I pretty much follow Taj around. We both got our degrees in journalism from the University of Oregon, both moved to Hawaii, then she moved here and I followed her.”

Taj took up the thread: “Sky and I share a little two-bedroom apartment in La Jolla, near the beach. Most of the furniture is from Cost Plus or Target. It looks pretty unhippie. The only thing that might give it all away is a little picture of an album called Homegrown, put out by friends of my parents, or pictures of our guru, Paramahansa Yogananda. Spirituality was the basis of my parents’ move out to the land. A lot of the counterculture is associated with drugs, but my parents went for the spiritual component. They thought that peace and love would change the world. And we’re still following that path. They never pushed it on us. They left it open to us, but to me it was never a question. I wanted to be part of that path. I admired their perspective: how they reacted to hard times, how they processed grief and suffering. So I wanted to follow their example. I remember when I was six or seven I asked for a picture of Paramahansa Yogananda. My dad was totally tickled. We went to prayer services and convocations once a year where the monks gave classes. When I was in high school we went to a church camp for the children. That’s where I learned meditation techniques. And I’m still using them.

“My parents are definitely my heroes. They had a wonderful approach to life. My dad always said, ‘You do the best you can do, and then you give the rest to God.’ When I had trouble with a classmate or had done poorly at school, I took a deep breath, looked at the ways I could approach it, and chose the right one for me. And then the results are the results.

“Our parents gave us such freedom and respect. They talked to us, let us be part of major decisions. They weren’t giving up their parental role — they were definitely parents. But they treated us like individuals. They encouraged us to follow our dreams. My parents weren’t looking for outside markers of how I was succeeding, but was I living a life that made me comfortable? Was I treating others in a way I was comfortable with? It wasn’t about money and status. But it’s funny, because those things have become very important to me. The pull of materialism. But I’ve learned to be careful and do things in moderation. My upbringing gave me my whole outlook on life. It gave me the tools and the resources I have. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”

— Lisa Michaels

Lisa Michaels is the author of Split: A Counterculture Childhood, out in paperback from Houghton Mifflin. Her work has appeared in Glamour, The New York Times Magazine, and The Threepenny Review.