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All Roads Lead to Wells: Stories of the Hippie Days (Caitlin $26.95)
After susan safyan edited memoirs for the 25th anniversary of the Vancouver Folk Festival, she twigged to the fact that she could do the same thing for Wells, near Barkerville, where she had lived from 1980 to 1985.
The memories and photos she collected on her returns to the Cariboo over an eight-year period now comprise All Roads Lead to Wells: Stories of the Hippie Days (Caitlin $26.95).
Like a high school annual for an entire town, it's a fascinating and intimate chronicle of how back-to-landers mixed with rancher-types to make a remarkable community, one that has since evolved into one of the foremost centres for the arts in B.C.
"I loved those amazing, end-of-the-road stories,"; she says, "from the days when the town's population was still around 300.";
All Roads pays tribute to oldtimers such as Lucky Swede and Fred Ludditt (author of Barkerville Days); then tells how Wells' "first hippies"; Brian Humber and Dale Ruckle established Filthy Larry's Leather Shoppe in the late '60s as the area's first "head shop"; and hippie hang out.
Initially newcomers with long hair encountered resistance from the old guard; then things kind of mellowed out as the hippies were integrated into the community and took on roles of responsibility.
All Roads Lead to Wells reflects what was happening in the macrocosm across North America. Most of the experiments at communalism splintered and disappeared, but there has been a residue of idealism that survives.
978-1-894759-76-2
[BCBW 2012]
The memories and photos she collected on her returns to the Cariboo over an eight-year period now comprise All Roads Lead to Wells: Stories of the Hippie Days (Caitlin $26.95).
Like a high school annual for an entire town, it's a fascinating and intimate chronicle of how back-to-landers mixed with rancher-types to make a remarkable community, one that has since evolved into one of the foremost centres for the arts in B.C.
"I loved those amazing, end-of-the-road stories,"; she says, "from the days when the town's population was still around 300.";
All Roads pays tribute to oldtimers such as Lucky Swede and Fred Ludditt (author of Barkerville Days); then tells how Wells' "first hippies"; Brian Humber and Dale Ruckle established Filthy Larry's Leather Shoppe in the late '60s as the area's first "head shop"; and hippie hang out.
Initially newcomers with long hair encountered resistance from the old guard; then things kind of mellowed out as the hippies were integrated into the community and took on roles of responsibility.
All Roads Lead to Wells reflects what was happening in the macrocosm across North America. Most of the experiments at communalism splintered and disappeared, but there has been a residue of idealism that survives.
978-1-894759-76-2
[BCBW 2012]
Submitted on October 30, 2012 in By David.
