One of the hippies with some carpentry skills built a little house on the back of the truck with a shingled roof and shuttered screen windows, with shelves that folded down from the sides to serve as tables by day and beds by night. In October they all piled in and drove to Washington to march on the Pentagon. They drove all day and all night, taking turns sleeping on the little shelf beds. Roger got beat up and the carpenter got tear-gassed, and Alice heard Norman Mailer make his speech. Then they drove all day and all night back home, dirty and exhausted. They didn’t stop at the house, but drove straight to Blue Hole Spring, left the hot truck ticking on the bank, and dropped one by one from the rope swing down into the clear, icy blue.

The truck never ran right after that. It gave its whole heart to the March on Washington. And the commune didn’t last either, of course. Roger went to Vermont and joined up with Bernie Sanders and the Liberty Union Party. The carpenter who built the house on the back of the blue truck signed on with Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity. Alice read a startling book called The Population Bomb, and when she finished nursing school, she joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Africa distributing condoms. She got her first real job working at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston.

That was all so long ago now, but the new hippies stranded at the Wal-Mart with their Volkswagen bus got Alice to thinking about those long-ago days, the old blue truck, the sunlight dappling the eelgrass in Blue Hole Spring, and the idea she had lost along the way: that things were bad, but people could make them better.

So all that was in her mind when she came out of Wal-Mart with her groceries on a hot summer afternoon and went over to the green bus. “Do y’all need help?” Alice asked. “A cool shower, a home-cooked meal, away from this hot asphalt?” She hadn’t really meant to invite them to move in with her, but the next thing she knew, the green bus was parked in her front yard, ticking and smoking just as the old blue truck had ticked and smoked after the March on Washington forty years ago. The new hippies, named Crystal and Jeremy, hauled grocery bags and plastic laundry hampers up onto Alice’s front porch, back and forth with their dirty, bare feet.

Crystal had a way of carrying the little dog tight under one arm, mashed up against her bosom, and when she put him down, he still retained that curvature. He sidled up to the corner of the sofa and cocked up a little leg. One side of his lip hung up on a protruding tooth, which gave him a perpetual snarl. His name was Doobie.