No Left Turn Unstoned in La Honda
Fading Day-Glo paint, rusting buses, the ghosts of Ken Kesey and Kurt Cobain; plus, flashbacks of flashbacks on a hike through La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve.
by Ryan Masters, February 23, 2015
A breeze sweeps through La Honda Creek Open Space Preserve and the lush grasslands shiver with life. Ten miles of green pastures and redwood groves unfurl below me like a tapestry to San Gregorio State Beach.
It’s a warm, cloudless February day. A hawk wheels in the blue sky overhead, hunting rodents in the emerald meadow. Lichen-covered boulders squat like ancient tombs. Redwood wall the meadows and birds flit in and out of their shadowy ramparts.
Today, I’m thinking about psychedelics. La Honda Creek, which forms the eastern boundary of the preserve, runs through the area’s most famous property—the house of author and LSD pioneer Ken Kesey.
This is Merry Prankster country.
The author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest bought the three-acre property in 1963. For two years, his wild, mind-expanding “Acid Tests” explored the boundaries of art and life while changing the course of human consciousness.
Kesey is arguably the most famous of the psychedelic pioneers for a number of reasons:
He was a brilliant author who wrote a legitimate American classic.
He was one of the first Americans to experience LSD as a volunteer test subject in the CIA’s mind control program, Project MKUltra.
His antics were immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
The guy had an epic flare for the dramatic.
Having come to “maturity” in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 1980s, I obsessively romanticized Kesey, The Merry Pranksters, and their house band, the Grateful Dead.
In high school, I once drove to La Honda and walked around Kesey’s property, which was unoccupied at the time. Like an archaeologist I studied the swatches of DayGlo Paint I found on the trees and the moldering audio and light wire strung through their branches. In 1987, the 1960s seemed like they’d been the apex of human culture and we’d missed them by 20 years.
In 2014, I met a long-haired kid who looked and dressed so much like Kurt Cobain, he could’ve been in costume. Born the same year Nirvana released Bleach, he whined about “missing out” on the greatest era of music in rock history—the early 1990s. Of course, I’d lived in the Northwest from 1991-1995 and seen a lot of the bands he worshipped. This kid’s historic perception of Grunge™ was similar to my view of the hippies when I trespassed on Kesey’s property in 1987 wearing a Mexican poncho, Lennon glasses, and a ziggurat of bushy hair.
Into the Deep
While the Preserve remains mostly unmarked and closed to the public, it’s nearly empty map does highlight one point of interest: “Big Tree.” It’s precisely that—one of the last remaining old-growth trees in the area. That thought in itself would normally depress me some, but I’m in a good mood winding my way through the forest.
This particular redwood tree is fourteen feet in diameter and nestled in a shady canyon. “La Honda” actually means “the deep,” as in deep canyon. Before the turn of the century, the area was noted for its lumber and shingle mills. Oxen used to drag these trees out of the canyons and down to the mills. Brutal, backbreaking, dangerous work.
Up until World War II, La Honda remained in a fairly pristine state, visited only by weekend and summer vacationers from the Peninsula and San Francisco. By all accounts, it was a forager’s paradise: strawberries, blackberries, red-ripe thimbleberries and hazelnuts were abundant; La Honda Creek was thick with trout and crawfish; the hunting was good. But after World War II, people discovered the area and ranchers began clearing large areas of forest to graze their livestock and build their ranches.
On the Bus
I actually met Ken Kesey once. On Feb. 28, 1991 in Eugene, Oregon. I’d bought a ticket to hear Dr. Hunter S. Thompson speak at the Hilton Ballroom. I was a freshman at the University of Oregon covering the good doctor’s appearance for the Willamette Weekly.
Hunter Thompson had escaped his keepers while at a local bar and was nowhere to be found. After an hour of waiting, the ballroom’s capacity crowd of hippies, punks, and would-be Gonzo types was restless. Kesey was a local fixture. He’d grown up across the river in Springfield, and returned to the area in 1965.
In an ill-advised attempt to stall for time and mollify the surly crowd, Kesey spun yarns about his adventures with Thompson. I was delighted, but much of the jaded crowd was unimpressed with Kesey’s stale hippie shtick. When one of the hecklers got too mouthy, Kesey pulled out his wallet, gave the guy ten bucks of his own money, and told him to, “Get the fuck out, asshole.” Everyone cheered.
Shortly after the heckler was 86’d, Hunter Thompson slipped in through a rear door and took his seat on the stage. He didn’t disappoint. U.S. troops had just recaptured Kuwait. His thoughts on Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein, and the motivations behind long-term U.S. involvement in the region were chillingly accurate. He also mumbled at length about sex on acid and the state of the NFL, and called George H.W. Bush “the meanest yuppie who ever lived.”
At one point, members of the crowd approached the stage and offered up various drugs—joints, a bindle of white powder, a half sheet of acid—as tribute. He accepted them with a sage nod, his reptilian lips clamped down around his cigarette holder.
When Thompson was done spouting his wisdom and nonsense, the crowd rushed the stage. I had no press credentials and no plan on obtaining an interview so I waited patiently at the rear of the mob lamely clutching my notebook and pen. By the time I reached the stage, it was empty. Feeling foolish and disappointed, I wandered out of the Hilton.
In a dark parking lot beside the hotel, a 1939 International Harvester bus was squeezed in between a building and a semi-trailer. It was “Further II,” a replica of Kesey’s original psychedelic school bus. The shades were pulled, but there were lights on inside and nobody standing out front.
When I knocked on the door, to my amazement, it immediately opened. Ken Babbs, the legendary Vietnam War helicopter pilot and Merry Prankster, was in the driver’s seat.
“Whattya want?” he asked, his hand on the door crank. Struck mute, I simply showed him the notebook and pen in my hand.
“Kid out here wants to ask you a couple questions,” Babbs said over his shoulder.
“Let him on!” Someone yelled from the back of the bus. Timidly, I boarded the fake version of the legendary bus. It was a lot smaller than I’d imagined. Most of the seats had been removed and replaced with furry dwarf benches. In the rear of the bus, Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson held court at a round poker table covered in green felt. I didn’t recognize the handful of other people on the bus. Kesey was looking at me. Thompson appeared to be intently studying the backs of his hands.
“We’re in the middle of something here,” Kesey said. “So I’ll save us all some time and give you all the advice you’ll ever need: Less fact. More story.”
Everyone other than the preoccupied Thompson appeared to find it uproariously funny when I scribbled this down. Thanking him, I stepped back into the dark parking lot and the bus doors swished closed behind me.
I’d been on the bus with Kesey, Babbs, and Thompson. Granted it was a replica bus and they kicked me off in under a minute, but in the immortal words of Kurt Cobain, “Oh well, whatever, never mind.”
The Scene of the Crime
I leave La Honda Open Preserve, drive east on Skyline Boulevard, and turn right on to Highway 84 at Alice’s Restaurant in Woodside. It’s Saturday and the place is crammed with weekend bikers who roar through the mountains in shiny packs of leather and plastic.
I descend the curves of 84 into the town of La Honda. A mile past Apple Jack’s, the legendary honkytonk and biker bar, I pull over to the side of the road and park. Across the highway is a short bridge that leads across La Honda Creek to Ken Kesey’s old house.
It’s been extensively renovated since I was here some 25 years ago. Apparently there are new owners. Kesey had to sell the place in 1997 to pay an out-of-court settlement to a San Mateo County sheriff’s deputy who suffered severe neck injuries after falling off the bridge.
Kesey’s life wasn’t particularly easy after the 1960s. He never published another book with the same impact or power as his first. Although Sometimes a Great Notion, which he finished in La Honda, is also an excellent novel. In 1984, his son Jed was killed in an automobile accident and by many accounts this had a profound impact on Kesey. His last important publication before his death on Nov. 10, 2001 was an essay in Rolling Stone calling for peace in the wake of 9/11.
That said, he had a far better run than Kurt Cobain.
But that’s the thing about heroes, isn’t it? In real life, they don’t ride a palomino across rolling grasslands into a Santa Cruz Mountain sunset. The ones out there on the edge either fall off or are eaten alive before our eyes in torturous little bites.
And while these men and women may have seemed insane in the context of their own time, it eventually becomes clear how lucid they really were.
That, of course, is what makes them heroes.