Ancient Chinese Hippie

Over the years I’ve known hippies and so I guess by saying that is that I know what hippies are all about. Well, I thought I knew all about them until I got to Mendocino. That was where all the true old time real deal hippies, the honest to goodness back to the landers who escaped Berkeley and San Francisco in the 60’s and 70’s, went to find themselves, raise families, establish communes, do art, write anarchistic screeds and grow dope outside the scope of government interference and the harshness of the law.

I thought I was hip when I was younger, I have no idea why, but that was far, far from the truth. I knew nothing at all about the real world outside my county but nevertheless I thought I had all the answers. Then my mom's cousin George came into my life and changed all that, made me feel like the punk that I was. Sonny was a real deal hippie, fresh from a commune out of the arid mountains of New Mexico. He was an old time Chicano, a black sheep relative who took a fall for a girl back in the day. He became part of the penal system as a teen when he was caught holding dope and that sent him into a lifelong spiral of bad habits, low wage jobs and hard drug abuse. But before I knew all that I got to know him as this long haired stand-up guy who took care of his mom, my great aunt Carmen, one of the saintliest people I ever knew. Sonny had a knack for working silver and turquoise, had mean looking jailhouse tattoos of naked broads on his biceps and had that tough muscular look that you only get from years of working in fields or pumping iron in the can.

He was edgy, hungry for adventure and mischief, always scamming but he was also very loyal to the family, funny, hip in a beat sort of way, deep into music, bbq and liked to party hard. My exposure to guys like Sonny up to that point were few and far in between. I had no idea how to bounce off him properly and really had no how to “jive”. At the beginning of our relationship he made me feel totally inadequate and quite the pest but as I got older he saw that I was corruptible and that made me fair game. What became more important as I got older was that I had a paying job and that meant, when the time was right and I was ready to have someone buy me and my pals alcoholic beverages, he was there for me, but, as always in the land of scammers, for a price. If I wanted a bottle of brandy, he got half. I wanted a case, well, the toll was a six pack. Fair was fair in his eyes, especially if I was buying.

But Sonny was cool, very hip, very beat. He was my mentor in all things that had to do with partying. He was the guy who taught me when you were out of cash and you wanted to get something to drink you just went downtown and donated a pint of blood. Sonny was the guy I went to if I was in town on liberty and wanted someone to do heavy drugs with. Sonny and I dropped acid a few times, found ourselves stranded on mountain tops with pipe loads of hash and no matches. Sonny and I found ourselves at loose ends when it came to his drinking but we managed to stay friendly and always shared a joint if we had one on hand. He was my cousin and blood had me overlooking a lot of faults.

Since then I’ve always felt that honorable scamming, a big sense of family and the party life was a big part of the whole hippy way of being. Some of the ones I’ve met over the years were cool but the packaged kind, the ones that bought wardrobes to dress up in over the weekend. I’ve met some that opened up fern bars, who dressed a bit too pretty, who smelled of way too much patchouli. I’ve met other who were real hustlers, family men, long haired guys who worked hard and who opened up wood paneled tiffany lamped style salons for men instead of traditional barber shops. I am sure that all that lean exposure to the hippie life had a lot to do with where I lived. Very conservative place, O.C. Besides, being the son of a barber meant that long hair wasn’t going to get within a mile of my household. Not in MY sixties.

My hippie experience was then saved up for my later years. I ran into them at barter fairs, in drum circles at Bumbershoot and in small communities in Southern Oregon. Long hair didn’t qualify a guy or gal to be a hippie necessarily so I had to discount a lot of folks I met in Seattle who were making their way up around the Sound in search of grunge and living a sort of neo-hippie lifestyle. Then I found my way into Mendocino and it was there that I finally met the real deal, the old ones, the old heads who still thought they were still taking it to the man, who were still protesting almost everything, folks whose old great locks and scraggly beards made the look like they got lost somewhere along the way but then found all their brethren on the coast.

That old hippie lifestyle I got to know there in Fort Bragg was the gateway to a life that had been lived long ago but, when looked at closely, had never really gone away. Many of those folks I met there in Mendo had helped to graft and breed the basic strains that are the platform genetics of a lot of the great dope we smoke today. I can remember when my friend Clay would come back with weed from this region back in the 80’s. He and the friends he had worked with up there had it tough back then, with California waging war with the locals through the CAMP programs and such. Those guys grew incredible weed back then and still do today. Many are still living a hard scrabble existence up in the hills, bringing in harvest year after year. But the hippies that I got to know best were affable townies, regular folks who were in and out of the library, who worked hard to parse apart government records, write up letters to the editor, fought fracking and who drank a lot of wine and did a lot of dope. They were the relatively sane ones, somewhat out there, a bit too much into strange religions and fantastical belief systems, but harmless, funny and a connection to a past I never lived.

I suppose that’s why the story I came across in the Cannabist today about the ancient burial site they uncovered in China recently had a such a pull on me. In that tomb they found a man buried with a large amount of female cannabis plants draped across his body. Hemp was an important plant back then for fiber, food and oil. There hadn’t been any evidence of any of that in the tomb they discovered. Rather, it appeared that the man who was buried was more of an aficionado of cannabis instead of just a guy who needed hemp to exist. First the Chinese pharmacopeia, now we now have even more physical evidence that folks, going back thousands of years, used marijuana in a psychoactive sense.

All around the world and all over our county there have been folks who’ve had to run far and away outside of “normal” society just so they could have a life that they thought was worth living. Somehow cannabis has been a part of all that. Cannabis was normal back in ancient times and is finding its way to being that again today. Cannabis was normal until it was outlawed in the 30’s. 

Cannabis was a normal part of a life with jazz musicians, with sailors, with migrants, with inner city folk and apparently just about everyone else, just the way it is still part of life in the Emerald Triangle today. It’s hard to be down on a plant that’s played such a big part in the history of the world. It’s even harder to fault those old hippies to took on a lot just to give us all the unique cannabis tastes that are with us in the world today.

I hope that somehow they can make more sense out what kind of strain that was draped across that old ancient Chinese guy in the tomb and make it available to smoke. I can only imagine the splash that would make in the dispensaries around the world. “Here, man, take a hit of some of this Ancient Chinese Hippie. Good stuff! But an hour later I am ready for another bowl!”

Salud!

Chinese OG Ghost story!

http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/10/13/ancient-chinese-cannabis-burial/65106/