to move up and down
My Father, His Firebombs and Me, Part IV: A life laid out in court documents
The fourth instalment in the five-part series My Father, His Firebombs and Me, in which Post reporter Peter Kuitenbrouwer, in Ukiah, California, describes growing up with a hippie father who was on the run.
Encapsulated in these pages is the whole arc of my father’s life to age 35, which bears similarities to those of others of his generation: from his childhood in occupied Holland, through immigration to Canada, aged 19, his early success founding a steel company in Vancouver, then overwork, leading to the collapse of his marriage to my mom and his embrace of the hippie culture, emboldened by the people he meets in Mendocino.
“My life took a new turn,” my father, who wore handcuffs, told his lawyer, Merle Orchard, during his sentencing hearing on Dec. 23, 1969. “I felt I should probably spend more of my life in, in helping people, looking for a new direction in which people should live.” These sentiments may sound lofty to some but to me they drive home how he entirely stopped thinking of his own three children; he even misstates the year of my birth. (As I type these words, back in Toronto, I am preparing to stop in at my son’s Grade 3 class at lunchtime, to present a soufflé that he and I baked together, to celebrate his 9th birthday; I can’t help but reflect on my own childhood, and a father who was not there for me.)
What emerges from my father’s court documents, more than any grand tale of 1960s heroism, is a portrait of a man who, scarred by the squalour of his youth during World War II, then fuelled by plentiful drugs and easy sex, makes a series of bad judgment calls, flees at every sign of trouble, and ends up a remorseful shadow of the hero he had styled himself.
Part I: Growing up with a father on the run
Part II: Eviction and retribution
Part III: A back-seat view of my father’s arrest
A back-seat view of my father’s arrest
In this five-part series, veteran National Post reporter Peter Kuitenbrouwer digs into his remarkable childhood and the life of his father, whose Bob Dylan hairstyle and On the Road lifestyle embodied the drug-fuelled freedom dance of the ‘60s. He travelled along the California coast, where his father built a hippie commune in the redwoods and became a wanted man after plotting to blow up a lumber company’s model home. This is the story of a generation which is just now coming to terms with the dark side of their peace-and-love upbringing. In part 3, Peter writes from San Francisco:
On the afternoon of August 9, 1969, three towheaded children, aged 10, nine and seven, tumbled out of the Arrivals area at San Francisco Airport and into the arms of a tall, thin man. The man’s eyes glowed electric blue; topping his head was a wiry mass of brown curls worthy of Bob Dylan on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. My two elder sisters and I were arriving in California for a summer vacation with the man we called Papa.
My father wore a serape, a kind of poncho from Mexico, multicoloured pants and leather Mexican sandals called huaraches. Showing his huge teeth in a grin behind the impressive forest of his beard, he greeted us with warm hugs; from his clothes and hair rose a pungent smell of cannabis. Paul Kuitenbrouwer loves theatrics, and for him, August 9 proved a show-stopper. We walked to his latest boat of an automobile, a white 1961 Ford Galaxie, and saw it already contained three children. Two were our old playmates from La Jolla, California: Lareine and Rachel.
The third, a boy named Sean, is someone that my father’s later correspondence mentions, but whose identity, otherwise, is lost in time. My eldest sister believes there may have been a dog, too. After we piled in (who had heard of a seat belt?) my father steered us across the Golden Gate Bridge and swung the car onto California Highway 101, heading north. This crazy car trip seemed normal; the only constant of our childhood was chaos.
Part I: Growing up with a father on the run
Part II: Eviction and retribution
My Father, His Firebombs and Me
In this five-part series, veteran National Post reporter Peter Kuitenbrouwer digs into his remarkable childhood and the life of his father, whose Bob Dylan hairstyle and On the Road lifestyle embodied the drug-fuelled freedom dance of the ‘60s. He travelled along the California coast, where his father built a hippie commune in the redwoods and became a wanted man after plotting to blow up a lumber company’s model home. This is the story of a generation which is just now coming to terms with the dark side of their peace-and-love upbringing.
Part I: Growing up with a father on the run
Part II: Eviction and retribution
Photos: From his Roots in a Big Dutch Catholic Family, Paul Kuitenbrouwer Started His Own Family In the New World
Photos: In the Hills of Eastern Ontario Lives Paul Kuitenbrouwer in Rustic Splendour, Removed from the Modern World
