by Will Gold
Free Time is a “road novel”, exuberant spiritual odyssey, and spirited high-energy ride. It is the story of “Steve Bieler” who has grown up in New Haven, Connecticut where his father works at Yale while retaining murky ties with the “intelligence community.” In spring 1968, at 16, Steve has been hit hard by the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Steve was a volunteer in the anti- Vietnam War Eugene McCarthy for President Campaign. Now, however, he is sensing something more sinister beneath the glossy, sanitized surface of life in America and is drawn to the liberation of the emerging “counter-culture”.
Steve chooses Oberlin for college and falls in love with Suzanne, an All-American Iowa-Ohio farm girl who a year before had been a headliner of the ultra-scrubbed and clean-cut national “Up with People!” show. The following spring, Steve and Suzanne make their first experiments with psychedelics. In May 1970, Steve produces his own anti-war newspaper. In the aftermath of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and killings of students at Kent State and Jackson State, all colleges shut down. Amidst the chaos enveloping the US, Steve takes off on a cross-county hitch-hiking journey to California and then up and down the west coast.
Stops include already-deteriorating Haight Ashbury, radical Berkeley, LA’s Sunset Strip in the aftermath of the Manson murders, camping with an AWOL GI in Big Sur, and a back-packing trek up into the Yosemite high country, along with run-ins with hippie-haters. In New Haven, the local narcotics squad throw Steve, Suzanne, and their friends into jail for possession of a miniscule amount of the worst pot ever grown. January ‘71 finds Steve in western Marin County, California where founders of the hippie movement, the “Diggers”, have established two of their rural cooperatives and are living like a free-wheeling, freedom-loving tribe of wild gypsies. Suzanne’s sister Naomi is at the New Buffalo commune outside Taos and they join her there and together make their way up to Morning Star, the most remote and desperado commune of them all. The following summer, a high school friend gifts Steve with fifty hits of the purest, most powerful “blotter” LSD imaginable, leading to the life-transforming “acid summer of ‘72”.
Back in Ohio in the fall, Steve slogs through the cold, sleet, and snow working for the anti-war McGovern for President Campaign. Graduated from college, Steve and Suzanne head to Northern California and find a home in the woods in the back-to-the-land community of Whale Gulch in Humboldt County located in a spectacular canyon that empties down into the ocean. Hand-made houses. No electricity. No telephones. No hot running water. No paved roads. Just a hundred and fifty fiercely independent outlaw hippies, many with guns, living in the forest. It’s just the kind of place they’d been looking for.
Once again in New Mexico, they take peyote with Naomi in the Anasazi ruins, then journey north for an entire summer high in the magnificent wilderness of the Northern Canadian Rockies. Returning from Canada, they relocate to the counter-cultural/“new age” hotbed of Boulder, Colorado, then move up to a cabin in the old mining town of Gold Hill at 8,500 feet overlooking the Continental Divide. Boulder feels like an oasis overflowing with opportunities for spiritual development. Mystical cults are sprouting like weeds.
The seventies have become the decade of “encounter groups”, of free-wheeling “therapy”, of Gestalt, cocaine, and of Esalen with its nude hot-tubs on the cliffs at Big Sur. Suzanne is studying mime and kabbalah with Uri Ben–Simon from Morocco and Paris and soon a star of his Boulder Mime Theater, along with hand -painting colorfully bucolic scenes on Celestial Seasons tea kiosks. Steve works in heavy construction, then, with a buddy’s truck, launches “Rocky Mountain Movers”. Steve and Suzanne are married in a celebratory ceremony atop the little knoll west of Gold Hill known as the “Center of the Universe”.
Months later, their daughter, the beautiful Ruby Rose, is born in Boulder and the next day they bring her back up the mountain. A neighbor cooks up Suzanne’s placenta into a stew. Faced with needing to support a family, Steve heads to Gillette, Wyoming, still very much the “old west”, to work in coal-mine construction and the oil fields. One of his roommates is a buddy from Boulder, an ex-Nam Green Beret who likes to recount “sneaking around in the jungle at night slitting throats.” Timothy Leary, staying with a mutual friend above Boulder, proposes to Suzanne, but fortunately she turns him down.
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Photo Will Gold
Back from Wyoming, Steve and Suzanne re-encounter Oberlin and Berkeley companion Randall Burley, recently returned from time with Sufis in Turkey and a pilgrimage to Mecca. Randall believes he has discovered “the School”, the esoteric mystery school dating back to ancient times. Randall too falls in love with Gold Hill and moves into his own primitive cabin there. Steve and Randall form “Quality Carpentry.”
An elusive spiritual teacher in the Sufi/ Gurdjieff tradition named “Mr. Gordon”, who lives in the Sierra Nevada, has encouraged his students to initiate weekly “study groups” wherever they are. For Randall this now means Gold Hill and several mountain-top locals join in. A blazing fire in the stone fireplace and lit kerosene lamps high atop the snowy Rockies at night weaves a magical setting. According to Randall, the “school” isn’t just a romantic myth. The key to gaining entry is to find the “servant’s entrance”. In the spring, Steve and Suzanne, together with two-year old Ruby Rose, head west again and embark on their own new quest to find “Mr. Gordon” and “the School.”
(To be published 2021)