Hippie Highway

Spiritual Plumbing

Terry and I climb a different hill today,

a narrow trail

weaving among wildflowers

where we search for an old water intake,

finding rusty pipe but no collection box.

Mountain plumbing is constant crisis

as storms re-engineer the landscape

while three hundred houses wait to wash.

Terry, you should know, operated

the water system for years and years

in our old hippie town.

Moving on,

we walk around the former reservoir

that collapsed in the winter of '82.

Now that was a crisis.

I say I used to come to this hilltop

every day at sunset with my dog

to meet a woman and her dog.

Terry says thirty or forty years ago

he used to come to this hilltop

every solstice to drop acid with his buddies.

"When was the last time you took LSD?" I ask.

"Last week," Terry says.

Terry, you should know, is seventy-two

with cardiac plumbing that has

weathered a few storms.

He says the trips are milder now, sweeter,

like spring-water from the little glen

on the hill above his cabin,

gurgles out slowly

but worth the wait,

at the end of that trail

only you and I know.