The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 26 March 2020
by Joshua Safran
There have always been individualists. There are periodic movements of great individalists. Some are great leaders, or great artists. Some also are catastrophic failures. There is also a cottage industry in memoirs of people who knew a famous individualist, married one, or most unfortunately, was a child of one. The counter-culture movements of the infamous 1960s infused a wave of charismatic individualism. The lifestyle experiments of the communes and cults, of the protests and the great concerts, empowered many to indulge their greatest dreams and aspirations. This could be quite self-indulgent, of course. It was also an era of a newfound sexual freedom, with widely available and usually dependable birth control and legalized abortion. Nevertheless, one of the great Things to Do of the era was to raise children in this newfound Utopia. Given a clean slate, dreamers and artists aspired to bring forth a generation raised without the hangups of the past. Of course, as we all know, through the self-examinations that followed in the 1970s, we carry generations of baggage with us. Unless we're careful, we tend to inflict upon our children the evils of our own history, that of our parents, and so on.
Such is true of Claudia, the mother of the author of this unsettled memoir. She grew up in the sixties and had her son, Joshua, in the mid 1970s. And though the world was moving on around her, Claudia yet pursued her dreams of a hippie Utopia, the perfect intentional community surviving among the lingering communes of the Pacific Northwest. She was unrelenting in her dedication to living off the grid (though with a regular welfare check), refusing to give in to The Man while surrendering her agency to a series of men. Her adventures take her from the San Francisco Bay Area of the late 70s, aboard a shabby school bus to the wet northwest, living in a series of increasingly dilapidated shacks, and hitchiking to a festival of one of the largest surviving vestiges of late-era hippies, the Rainbow Gathering of 1986.
Now, imagine what it must have been like to be five or six years old, thumbing a ride in the rain along a dirt road in Idaho with the supposedly adult woman who is supposedly responsible for your well-being, education and security. That is the first key image of this book. And it is astonishing to witness the survival of this child among so many fractured adults. And it is a fascinating glimpse into the lives of a desperate counter-culture. Stories like this feed the negative legacy of the sixties and seventies countercultures. And yet one can't help but feel empathy for Claudia's search. Nevertheless, she is swayed by men who promise to take her to that promised ideal she has yearned for all her life. Her devotion to them comes at the expense of true nurturing of her own son and the boy pays for it over and over again, with stark living conditions, unfulfilled dreams, and, ultimately, years of brutal violence.
The second half of this memoir is stalked by the presence of Leopoldo, Claudia's husband who tells stories of fighting among El Salvadoran rebels, but who saves his most violent outbursts for her, driven by jealousy and paranoia. Joshua must endure Leopoldo's excesses, too, watching his mother suffer and yet enduring the betrayal of her repeatedly taking Leopoldo's side over her child. She wants the male influence for her son, but surrenders her protection in the face of violence. For this reader, this was borderline triggering, and Safran's retelling of the tale is vivid and immediate. It is also frightening and sad. In the end, both he and Claudia find a path forward, but the patterns endure. There is a lot more of his story to be told than we find in this book, but his ability to rise above such a nonlinear upbringing is admirable. He even comes to find his personal history informs his empathy for the people he works with in his later career. He is a survivor. With her generous candor in plumbing their mutual history, so is Claudia.
[Other books of the 1960s and Counterculture]