Fourth Avenue is in fact a trove of evidence, new ways to live. There’s the macrobiotic food store, with its tubs of miso and scary-looking umeboshi plums, and tales of cures effected by the proper balance of yin and yang, contagions banished by brown rice. The art cinema’s movies are British, Italian, other. The sandal shop custom-crafts their wares, and in a burst of feeling flush—my father’s slipped me some money for clothes and shoes for school—I order a pair of sandals, Roman centurion style. The sandalmaker says I’ve got the longest, skinniest feet he’s ever seen, and three days later produces a fabulous product: they’re flat soled, and sport thick straps which crisscross up my ankles, inevitably calling up associations with Galilee.

I plan to leave altogether, to hitchhike to San Francisco for the summer after the Summer of Love, 1968, with the notion that I won’t be back anytime soon. I am going to a city of loving youth who will build a new order founded on peace and freedom. I love that cheap song on the radio, with its odd electric poignancy, its quality of sadness so overt beneath the invitation: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair….” It’s a kind of revision of Petula Clark, but I cannot hear then how much more cynically knowing it is, just under its promise of hope and change.

I’ve written farewells in my friends’ yearbooks, at the end of sophomore year. My parents drive me to Los Angeles and drop me off on Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, a fact which seems now to demonstrate the Leave-Him-Alone policy at its most bizarre; I don’t remember anything of the drive at all, not even who was in the car—some vague echo of memory wants to suggest my mother drove me, alone, but can that be true? I am divided, I think, between my anticipation of adventure and something else, something unspoken underlying my conscious excitement, which is this: it is one thing to run away, and another thing for your parents to help you run away, to aid you in your going, which is a form of abandonment.

I make it to the Bay Area in only two rides; in between them, I scramble down a rugged Big Sur slope to study a tidal pool in the chilly half-fog: a yellow sea anemone opening and closing its fist of ribbons; starfish; cold, cold water. I remember a passage from James Joyce I read in my favorite bookstore: “He was alone and close to the wild heart of life…” That’s how I feel, at fourteen, solitary, and glad of it, I think, and near the edge of more than these sea cliffs.