By Peggy Sue McRae, Journal contributor
The so-called “Hippie Invasion” of San Juan Island refers to a real demographic shift that happened here in the early 1970s. Some of us remember those days with wistful nostalgia. Quite a few of us are still here.
For me, the journey began one summer day in the 1960s when I was a young teenager. I didn’t grow up on the island but was lucky enough to spend my summers here. My older sister and I had a beachy bunkhouse that our granddad built for us out of “Aunt Tot” Charlotte Sutton’s old porch. Hanging out in the bunkhouse reading magazines was a favorite activity of mine, and on that day I was reading a “Life” magazine.
I believe it was the first time I was introduced to the concept of hippies as young people seeking more authentic lives. Mostly I remember the photographs. The end photo was of a handsomely hairy blond couple looking real dreamy in a teepee. Sometimes in life, you come face to face with your own destiny. From that time on I aspired to be a hippie.
We weren’t quite at invasion levels yet. Throughout my high school years in the late ‘60s, I worked summers at the Friday Harbor Café. Hippies were still a rare breed around here but if hippies came into the restaurant I got to wait on them.
Across the entire country, a counter-culture movement was bursting forth in an explosion of flower power. Motivated to bring an end to the war in Vietnam and channeling youthful exuberance into music, the stars aligned, and in 1969 Woodstock happened. Joni Mitchell sang, “We are stardust. We are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” The hippie back-to-the-land movement was underway.
After my second year at Washington State University, I came back to Friday Harbor to work in the salmon cannery. By then, the whole crew were hippies, and what great parties we had! The next year I dropped out of school, went on a hippie pilgrimage to Morocco and then settled into a little house on Argyle making jam, candles and folk art … all that hippie stuff.
I remember entering canned goods at the County Fair at that time. (Not to brag but I got a blue ribbon on my Douglas fir needle tip jelly.) The woman accepting my entries told me how glad she was to see more young people taking an interest and entering our homemade goods in the County Fair. That was good to hear because not everyone appreciated hippies.
Following World War II, rural America was losing young people, like my own parents, who headed for the city. Against that stream, the hippie invasion provided an eddy of young people heading “back to the land.” Much to our own surprise, we who are still here are by some crazy miracle now among the new old-timers. We are stardust and we are golden. Did we get ourselves back to the garden? I think maybe we did.
