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My documentary “Lost in Time: Druid Heights” began as a tall tale between strangers on barstools.
This bar stool meeting took place five years ago in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. I turned around and saw Ed Stiles' gray face. A twinkle in his eye indicated an excellent yarn. I used to be destined to fall down the rabbit hole.
Stiles didn't mind revealing the shiny shards of his bohemian rhapsody in a barstool reverie. But he reared up like a frightened stallion when he came upon I worked within the documentary department at MSNBC in New York. He didn't want ghost town raiders turning his secret retreat deep in Muir Woods right into a counterculture Disneyland.
Stiles lives in Druid Heights. Now largely a ghost town in Muir Woods, it was once a counterculture haven. When the Pacific fog rolls in, it looks just like the set of a fantasy film.
It is just not shown on any map. But it’s the place, some say, where hot tubs were invented and hedonistic parties dominated the nights. Early LSD experiments also took place there. But it was also a spot where Zen intellectuals and LGBTQ+ activists took root, from which movements developed.
One of the founders, Roger Somers, was an achieved saxophonist, rogue architect and larger-than-life hedonist. He jammed in Druid Heights with Dizzy Gillespie, Carlos Santana and other music legends. The Doobie Brothers and the Eagles played on the lawn.
The other founder, the fearlessly sapphic author Elsa Gidlow, published America's first volume of openly lesbian love poems.
It was a mecca for artists, writers, poets, filmmakers, media innovators, woodworkers, hobbyists and others who lived in cabins, sheds, RVs and fantasy-inspired homes. Somers, a visionary builder, erected what he called “rickety, wobbly” buildings in Druid Heights. While the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young became superstars, two of them found the craftsmen of Druid Heights. Somers designed a sexually charged Art Nouveau coach for Neil Young. Stiles made Graham Nash-inspired, organic furniture and music studio furnishings.
Over three many years, starting within the late Nineteen Fifties, Druid Heights was a chessboard of rotating characters: the kings, queens and pawns of the California counterculture – all the time moving, all the time changing.
Residents were central figures in Beat poetry, Zen philosophy, goddess worship, the Summer of Love, the San Francisco Sound, Woodstock, sex staff' rights, LGBTQ+ consciousness, and the equal rights movement. The “King of the Beats,” Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, lived here within the Dragon House. He was the thinly disguised Japhy character in Jack Kerouac's 1958 book “The Dharma Bums.” Sex employee rights activist Margo St. James was living with Somers in Druid Heights when she founded San Francisco's infamous Hooker's Ball.
But it took him three years to persuade Stiles to open the pages of his story.
Previous media reports have focused on “celebrity” resident Alan Watts, whose books, lectures and videos on Zen Buddhism – e.g. B. “The Way of Zen” – San Francisco and all of America were thrilled. Watts lived between the Vallejo houseboat he shared with narrator Jean Varda in Sausalito and Druid Heights, where he had a library. He was a friend of the Beats, Timothy Leary and essential Zen intellectuals.
But Stiles is the last man standing. When he dies, Druid Heights, its buildings and its history will fall into the hands of the National Park Service. The National Park Service acquired Druid Heights as eminent domain in 1977. Residents without property were evicted. Houses were abandoned. Stiles, a landowner, was given a life plot.
Druid Heights is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. But that may't stop it from disappearing.
It currently sits at the top of a mud road that is just not closed to traffic – a road that’s continuously and currently washed out. Stiles, mentally nimble but physically not, has to park on the treacherous dirt road and hike to his house.
“The failure of the (road) in last winter's rain may well be the defining element, the 'element in the closet,' so to speak, that gives the National Park Service the excuse to simply let Druid Heights fall back to earth.” All there , my vehicles, my workshop, my lumber, my house, and my personal belongings, is basically caught on the “wrong side” of the abyss, rendering them immediately worthless except to future thieves willing to take a chunk of it “To drag you out along the paths down the valley below,” he told me.
Not many individuals feel as strong a connection to “place” as Stiles does to Druid Heights. He lived in a counterculture vortex. It fascinated him, beguiled him and ultimately broke his heart. But his deep connection to his forest paradise was not interrupted.
“I sometimes feel like a coward for surrounding myself with peace and wonder, but I even have decided to live with my guilt, do my best to depart a small mark, and proceed to be smaller and smaller tributaries from the mainstream “To paddle up until, well, you know,” he told me.
Making a documentary is like climbing a rock slide. You dodge, weave and adjust your stance as each interview reveals surprises, recent characters, unexpected events and recent angles to explore. The Mill Valley Public Library became a vital resource. The great thing about the library and its redwood setting made it a remarkable place to work. One of Stiles' heroes, Bolinas furniture maker Art Carpenter, was hired to make the furniture for the library. The library's oral histories of former residents of Druid Heights and Mill Valley provided the context for the non-public interviews I conducted. I discovered that the tapestry of time, 30 years, interwoven with changing characters and events, created a fancy picture of Druid Heights. The story is filled with faulty memories, surprises and hidden explosives. So it's all the time a balancing act putting the puzzle together.
For me, the story of Druid Heights is an unconventional rhapsody. But for me it's not a ghost town. It's alive, a Shangri-La with colourful characters, ugly warts, wonderful “wobbles” and a magical wildness. Like music in your heart, in your head it never stops. It's alive.
“Three-quarters of philosophy and literature are about people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they’ve been lured into.” – Gary Snyder, former Druid Heights resident, Zen monk and Pulitzer -Prize winners
• Details: “Lost in Time: Druid Heights” will likely be shown as a part of the Mill Valley Film Festival on Friday at 1 p.m. on the Lark Theater in Larkspur. While the screening is sold out, tickets could be purchased on the box office. For more information, see mvff.com/program/lost-in-time-druid-heights.
Originally published:
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