You try to put two and two together when you’re a kid. You’re sixteen or seventeen, and you have these long talks with close friends about life and death and what it means to be here. You do it by instinct, I guess. We had a lot of influences from people who took life pretty seriously. There were heavy doses of humanism from our older sisters and brothers, and there was also that anti-establishment buzz that zinged through the world, and that was still zinging and vibrating, resonating everywhere, and that was always just perceptible under the surface, in the background of everything. It was as though a gigantic bell had been struck sometime around 1965, when we were just leaving fifth grade and it was ringing still, and we said, did you hear that? It was like the giant bells at Buddhist temples with big logs swinging from ropes for ringers, and it reverberated over the hills and dales of the whole world for years, ringing, resonating and singing to our untrained ears in every back woods hill and dale, giving us subliminal instructions.

It really seems looking back on it as if the whole world were under some sort of spell, but as teenagers it was impossible to get any perspective, impossible to tell the difference between the spell the world was under and the hormone spell we were under anyway, being teenagers. I’m still not sure which it was, just hormones, giant bell reverberations, or some of both. We heard the sound, although apparently lots of people couldn’t, but we could not interpret it. The Pepsi Generation. Summer of Love. the Tet Offensive. This strange mix. The weird way that events shape you; more than just family, local events, or peer pressure, there really seems to be a vibration, a tribal sense, a primal call that everyone responds to whether or not they're aware, and no one is. This baby boom vibe was so strong, so overwhelming. But in our little world the effects were strange, unexpected.

My best friend Roger and me got moral. When the going gets tough, the tough get moral. I don't know how to explain it, we were grooving on the Band, the Beatles, seemingly buying into the culture, but at the same time we were of the old world, more conservative and moralistic than our parents, staunch, grimly righteous, prim, almost. We took our other friend Rick back home from our aborted camping trip to upstate New York in this fog of self-congratulatory martyrdom. But to salvage the trip, we decided that the three of us left after Rick jumped ship, Roger, Gary and me, would go down to southern Ohio and camp for a few days. So we dropped Rick off at home and drove down to the hills, the beautiful southern Ohio hills and camped at Old Man's cave near Athens. We set up camp, and settled in for a good time. Maybe we'd try smoking cigars or something. Roger smoked cigarettes anyway. The Athens county fair was on; we decided to check it out.