Once in San Francisco I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I expected, exactly. I walk up and down Haight Street, looking at posters and the cheap kaleidoscopes and more of those little colored plastic boxes, stuff to play with while you’re tripping, but I don’t seem to connect with anybody here. The song they’re playing everywhere in the Haight is Donovan, “Season of the Witch,” a moody, edgy ballad about—what?

You’ve got to pick up every stitch,

Two rabbits running in the ditch,

Beatniks are out to make it rich—

So strange—must be the season of the Witch.

I love the clothes—shawls and sarongs, beads and bells—on the hippies I see on the street, but all the faces look guarded and closed, tired; at home my new look helped me forge some connection to people, but not here. I’m a tourist, an amateur. In the afternoon I go to the Fillmore Auditorium to hear Country Joe and the Fish. There aren’t a lot of people there, a little throng of dancers near the stage, couples and solitaries scattered here and there around the big dark room. The band looks anemic, their pallor lunar. I sit cross-legged on the floor, my duffel bag beside me. A little ways away there’s a man dancing alone in a beam of black light, which illuminates some Day-Glo paintings, a scatter of swoops and swirls on the floor. He’s rocking, shifting his weight from hip to hip, and then he’s completely still except for his head, which is doing all the dancing; he looks utterly alone in all the world, turned on, sealed off in his own vision, blissful but oblivious, emblem of his age.

Out on the street, someone says, “Hey, would you like to come to a Buddhist meeting?” and I am relieved to have something to do. The meeting’s upstairs in a crowded little apartment. We face an unrolled scroll with a single flower in a vase before it and are taught to chant in Japanese: Nam Yo Ho Renge Kyo, which means: “God is the Jewel in the Center of the Lotus which is My Heart.” We’re told to wish while we chant, for anything we want, and not to be embarrassed about wishing for material things. Happy Buddhists give testimony, in fact, to how they wished for nice cars and good apartments and got them, then realized those aren’t the things that truly satisfy. I wish for a place to sleep, and sure enough as we’re filing out of the room a guy who looks like a longshoreman, a white-haired and red-nosed fellow in his fifties, asks me if I need a place to crash.