By Gary Topping–
None of my readers need to be reminded that our country is beginning to emerge—we hope—from a very difficult period in a variety of ways. My mind’s eye can begin to see on the horizon a few glimmering rays of optimism, of idealism, and of healing.
And my memory reaches back to another time in which those qualities were at the fore: the 1960s. I spent a couple of years in San Francisco during the middle part of that decade until my motorcycle was stolen from an alley off First Street one night while I was working the swing shift at Wells Fargo’s data processing center. It was such a blow to me that I decided I had had enough of big city living and returned to rural Oregon where I had grown up. I was no longer part of San Francisco, but San Francisco remained a part of me, as did that wonderful sense of changing times and new possibilities that the decade of the Sixties represented.
Hunter S. Thompson wrote about that time and place much more eloquently that anyone else I know of in a passage in his outrageous and side-splittingly hilarious Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. The book appeared in 1971, in the midst of Richard Nixon’s first term as President, when it seemed that the hopes of the 1960s had largely come to naught. Thus perhaps it is no wonder that I, almost fifty years later, have been recalling Thompson’s words as I look back on happier times in the past and hope for better ones in the future:
“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . . .
“History is hard to know, . . . but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. . . .
“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
Dare we hope, in the fluctuating tide tables of history, that another wave is starting to roll in?
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
