--Terry Adams
Ken - on the rear deck in 1999, after the reconstruction. That’s his I-Ching book under his arm.
Ken Kesey created a transient commune and mega-party enclave in this old log house in La Honda, California, as part of his project to go beyond writing and turn his life into art. He retained ownership of the property for 30 years after being ‘evicted’ from California for possessing marijuana, finally selling to my wife and me in 1997. A few of the old Pranksters speculate that Ken intended, to one degree or another, to let the house be a thorn in the side of the local government, or be another performance art piece – and it has done just that.
Where did all the mushrooms come from?
The house was the scene, and Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Cool Aid Acid Test” made it a symbol of the ‘coming out’ and then the bust of the 60’s psychedelic drug movement. Had the house sat unoccupied one more winter, the flood of 1998 would have doomed it for good. With the bridge gone and the old house damaged beyond repair, Ken’s best choice would have been to sell to the County for the land value only. The County would have absorbed it into the surrounding park and bulldozed the remains of the structure as a nuisance. If houses could be arrested, this one would have been sent up long ago. As it happened, the house did time on ‘death row,’ but won its reprieve through the efforts of some of the doggedly faithful.
You can see everything from anywhere!
What happened here in the 1960’s spread into something like a religion, as Tom Wolfe claimed. In the imagination of those who remember the 60’s, or who revere the 60’s, the house still feels like a redwood ‘Shroud of Turin’ through which something momentous passed leaving a ghostly image.
