The Caravan by Stephen Gaskin
New Revised & Annotated Edition
 

Copyright 2007 Stephen Gaskin.
ISBN 978-1-57067-195-1.
$14.95, paperback nonfiction, 255 pps.

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Three decades after first publication, the new revised and annotated edition of Caravan follows Stephen Gaskin and the Caravan of 50 school buses, as they travel around the United States on a speaking tour arranged by preachers who wanted to know what this hippy thing was all about.

This new edition adds background to the speaking engagements, by sharing the road stories, the scenes behind the scenes—cowboys and cops, birthings and poop, peyote tea and White House security guards.
 

An Excerpt:  

The genesis of the Caravan was really when a group of preachers from all over the United States came to San Francisco to study the hippies.

In San Francisco we had been doing this large meeting called Monday Night Class for about five years, and first off people said we couldn't do it at all.

All kinds of people came, but I have to admit most of them were hippies. There were old people and retired people, college dropouts as well as graduates, and a generous sprinkling of ethnic and religious diversity. There were Vietnam vets as well as war protesters and some who were both.

Then we started being together in a spiritual community on a love and trust basis and being peaceful and pretty happy and pretty healthy and pretty sane, physically healthy and good-looking, a good healthy monkey place.

The preachers who came to study the hippies were addressed by cops and social workers and psychiatrists, and I was the only hippy who got to speak with them. I told them that actually what we were having was a spiritual event, and that they were in the right business and they didn't have to change business. I told them the idealistic view of hippies I carried, and they liked me and they went back and they set me up on a speaking tour in all their home churches all around the United States. And that's what started us on the Caravan. I spoke in 42 states on the Caravan.

Many people wanted to come on the road trip with me, so I said they had to get their own buses.

My first lesson in leading something big that moved was when we left in the evening. We went out around the United States going first to Washington State to speak. We left on Columbus Day, October 12, 1970, from The Family Dog on the Coast Highway in San Francisco, and I got up almost to the Golden Gate Bridge and looked in the rearview mirror, and there weren't any buses behind me.

So then I turned around, went back to where I lost them, and proceeded at a much more sedate pace, as one must when one is leading a caravan of 25 school buses.

Our first real idea of what it was like to be on the road came at a rest stop just inside California, almost up to Oregon, where we were going to stay for the night. A policeman came in in his car, and he said, "I'm sorry, you can't stay here. You'll have to move on."

I said, "Well, we're just stopping for the night. It's kind of late to keep driving."

"No, you're going to have to move right on." 

I knew he was doing something to us but I didn't know what, so we moved right on. When we crossed the line into Oregon, the full horizon erupted in red white and blue lights, and there were sheriffs and cops and county mounties and city kitties and all the different kinds of cops there are.

They stopped us all and they checked us out, and then one of them came into our bus and says, "All right, we got orders to arrest the registered owner of this bus." 

And my friend Michael, whose bus it was, said, "What!?" because it was obvious that they wanted me.

They came back in about an hour and said, "Well, actually, who we're supposed to arrest is Stephen Gaskin."

They arrested me and took me and put me up in the jail up in Grants Pass, Oregon. And the Caravan went out and parked and came in to make my bail. The cops were embarrassed when the hippies made my bail with a great messy pile of ones and fives and a huge pile of change.  

We had to go in front of the judge, and we told the judge what we were doing, said we were the peaceful hippies and we were about peace and we were on a national tour about peace.

And he said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. You go ahead, make your speaking engagements, and then you come back here and we'll look and see what you were, and then we'll know what to do about you."

An Excerpt from
The Caravan:

We're pretty durable, and we need to bump up against the universe a little bit to find out where it's at. Also we need to bump up against each other a little bit. We shouldn't think that we're so fragile that we can't lean on each other a little bit and interact kind of heavy and still be friends.

Getting away from the small village idea has done a funny thing to the whole country, because in a small village, if a fellow turns up obnoxious one day he's still going to be living there the next day, and he's either going to have to straighten up or nobody's going to talk to him anymore or something. He's going to get cooled.

But here in the city you can get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood, and get obnoxious and move to another neighborhood … and people get the idea that if you're going to have to come on heavy to somebody to make them straighten up that they might not like you anymore, and they might move, and you'd never see them again or something. But we should all think that we're all good enough friends—we're all kind of like cousins anyway, we're all the same kind of monkey—that we can say, "Hey, man, how about it," once in a while, and the other fellow isn't necessarily going to say, "Well I'm going to go home."

That's another part of interacting, getting into that learning experience. We learn how we be by bumping against each other a little bit, and it's a good deal all the way around to have a learning experience. We've really learned a lot on the road too. One thing I learned … I said in my book that the country was so corrupt that it was falling down, which is what it looks like from San Francisco. But it looks a lot solider out here. It looks a lot solider. It looks like these folks would be easier to make friends with than to do anything else.

Q: About compassion and politics … if you go mess up a draft board, is that being compassionate for one's brother?

No, if you go in and tear up somebody's thing it's going to blow their mind and wreck their head, and that means that there's one more wrecked head that we've got to pick up, because we aren't going to be cool until we pick up all the wrecked heads, it doesn't matter whose they are. We can't be cool until we get everybody cool and sane. There's no final enlightenment until everybody can get off. You can only go so far, and then you've got to stop and help everybody get off, and that means everybody. So it's immoral to mess up folks' heads—anybody's. I try to leave everybody's head a little better than I found it, it doesn't matter who he be.

I will tell you the best way for your revolution to be successful: You have to run your revolution in such a way that you can win the love of an honest square.

People don't hurt people that they know well, so just make yourself know everybody well and let them know you well. Be wide open. Don't hide anything and don't act like you're superior to them a little bit or anything. Get right in there with them, and if you do that they'll have compassion with you, and if they have compassion with you they can't hurt you; they won't want to, they won't want to hurt anybody.

We make a lot of difference: There's a string of hundreds and hundreds of cops halfway across this continent who are well-disposed toward the next long-hair they meet, because the last two hundred of them they met were a groove. And we're going all the way around the country doing that—trying to get other folks to do it too, because if we can build enough individual human bonds of love and trust, we can raise the whole love-trust thing for the whole country and for the whole world, and it's really necessary that it be done.
 

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