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    Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69: Adventures on a road trip across North America
    Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69: Adventures on a road trip across North America
    Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69: Adventures on a road trip across North America
    Ebook105 pages1 hour

    Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69: Adventures on a road trip across North America

    By Ernie Dainow

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    About this ebook

    Journey back to the summer of '69 in this captivating memoir of a road trip across North America to California and then up the coast to Oregon and British Columbia. It is an incredible series of adventures, from discovering marijuana growing wild in Nebraska to swimming at a nude beach in Vancouver to living in a driftwood shelter on a remote beach on the coast.

     

    Penned 50 years after the events and supplemented by photos and videos, Looking for Land in the Summer of '69 chronicles an unforgettable exploration of the burgeoning back to the land movement of the 60zs. Dive into a vivid tapestry of counterculture, nature and discovery that defined a generation.

     

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherErnie Dainow
    Release dateJul 4, 2024
    ISBN9798227747396
    Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69: Adventures on a road trip across North America
    Author

    Ernie Dainow

    Ernie Dainow was fascinated with mathematics at an early age. In university he became more interested in how people think and he began graduate work in psychology. The emerging field of using computers to understand the brain by simulating learning and thinking captivated him, culminating in a Master's degree in Artificial Intelligence in Computer Science.  Ernie's interests evolved from doing research to building systems. He started working for Univac, the company that had built one of the first commercial computers. This marked the beginning of a long and varied career in the computer field, working on large mainframe computers, personal computers and network systems. His expertise spanned software development for academic and scientific research, business and financial applications, data communications, computer hardware products and the Internet. Ernie never lost his fascination with computers. After he retired he began writing, sharing insights and interesting discoveries that are not widely known or understood outside of the computer field.

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      Book preview

      Looking for Land in the Summer of ‘69 - Ernie Dainow

      Foreword

      I spent the summer of 1969 when I was in graduate school driving across the continent exploring the back to the land movement that had become big in the 60s. I traveled across the Midwest to California and then up the coast to Oregon and British Columbia. It turned out to be an incredible series of adventures, one after another, from discovering marijuana growing wild all over Nebraska to swimming at a nude beach in Vancouver to living in a driftwood shelter on a remote beach on the Pacific. That summer of adventure had the great makings for a book. It took 50 years, but after I retired I finally wrote it.

      With the aid of the Internet, which was not available at the time, I looked up some of the things I had seen on my travels to provide more background and explanation. I didn’t have many of my own photographs from that summer trip, but I filled in the stories with pictures and videos from the web that matched my memory of some of the places I had been and seen.

      Ernie Dainow

      Toronto, Canada

      Contents

      Foreword

      Wisconsin

      Iowa

      Nebraska

      Colorado

      Utah

      Nevada

      California

      Oregon

      Vancouver

      Vancouver Island

      Kootenay Lake

      Banff

      Yellowstone

      Nebraska

      Wisconsin

      About the Author

      Wisconsin

      It was a fine spring day in May of 1969 when I hopped into my Austin Mini Cooper and headed west out of Madison, Wisconsin. I had just completed my first year of graduate school and was off for the summer. I had worked as a research assistant in the Psychology Department which paid $400 a month. My room and board at the International Co-op where I lived was only $100 a month so I had saved enough money to take the whole summer off.

            

      My Austin Mini at a farm outside Madison

      I was heading out west. Not in search of gold or fame or fortune, but in search of land. The 60's had been a time of unrest and people were dropping out of established society in many ways. Having lived most of my life in large cities, I had grown weary of the congested urban life. I was oriented towards co-operative living. I was a graduate of a co-operative nursery school in Montreal and now, after a year of living in an adult co-operative environment, I was convinced that communal living was the best alternative to escape the rat race.

      I had read about communes being established on the west coast, especially Oregon. My plan was to go to see some of them and then head off into the wilds of British Columbia to try and locate some land for a co-operative commune where like-minded people could escape conventional urban life. This may sound kind of idealistic and unrealistic, but in those heady days of the 60's counter culture, with guidance from The Whole Earth Catalog, this was what was happening.

      Whole Earth Catalog, 4th edition

      My best friend Ron from undergraduate years at McGill was now in medical school in Vancouver. He was also interested in such a summer of adventure. We had made plans to meet in Oregon and explore some of the communes there. Following that we planned to make our way over to Vancouver Island, in our minds an idyllic place that would be a wonderful place to find some land. It was going to be an exciting summer.

      Go West, Young Man!

      Iowa

      But first it was a long drive across the midwest to get to the west coast. This was long before Google maps. I had to get maps along the way. Most gas stations had state maps that were usually free. In some ways these old maps were better than Google because they had more information and showed the rural routes more clearly.

      State map of southwest Wisconsin

      The impression that most people have of the midwest or the prairies in Canada is of an endless flat, boring landscape. That was also my impression at the time, having never been to those parts of the continent. But as I crossed the border from Wisconsin to Iowa and headed west over the rural country roads, I was struck by the quiet beauty of the land.

      Flat? On the contrary, the land was gently rolling. The road often descended down a river valley and then up and over a hill to the next stretch of land. Iowa is known as the corn state and I passed field after field of young corn just starting to grow.

      Iowa country road

      As it was nearing sunset, I started to look for a place to camp overnight. I turned off the highway down a country road and easily found a place where I could pull off the road out of sight from the main road and any neighboring farms.

      I had only the most basic camping equipment: an army surplus sleeping bag,

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