Amid Sandpoint Hippies

By Steve Bunk

I moved to Sandpoint for a while long ago and shared a property with a couple who had descended upon the hippie concept like politicians on babies. Conversely, I regarded the decade-long Summer of Love with skepticism that nevertheless dragged behind it a kind of gunshot hope.

This difference became evident upon my arrival at the property, when I deposited my few things in the little cabin and moseyed over to the big house to say everything looked grand. Kami, the young woman who lived there, stood beside a garden hose that gurgled into the dirt and said, with the bliss of someone freshly dropped on her head, “We’re about to have our enemas. Do you want one?”

My vision panned from her to the coughing hose and back. Much as I approved of the open-heartedness and idealism of hippiedom, this invitation underscored that not only did I not know how to participate, I couldn’t even visualize it.

I had arrived to become sports editor of what was then the Sandpoint Daily Bee, a meandering step on a path difficult to describe as a career. A more conventionally ambitious young journalist wouldn’t be in Idaho, yet I wanted to be here because it wasn’t the city, it was Nature, it was, yeah, all that hippie stuff, with a sunburned nape.

This property was in a great big meadow surrounded by great big trees. The edge of the meadow declined into a bowl where ingénues who probably wore gossamer and their admirers whom I like to picture in jodhpurs pirouetted amid the wildflowers.