Dirty
Hippies
The hippy life can be demanding and time consuming, what with
all the chanting, meditating and overnight vision quests to be
undertaken. I suppose the early Hippies saw that something would
have to give to allow them time to deal with that kind of important
stuff, so they took one requisite aspect of “normal” society
and declared it optional: hygiene.
During a recent family slide show, my younger sister vented, “Are
there any pictures of me as a child without dirt on my
face?” Sad to say, we couldn’t find any.
Look, we lived in the country and got dirty very quickly. If you’re
gardening and digging outhouse holes all day, what’s the
point of cleaning up? You’re just going to get dirty again
anyway. It’d be like a construction worker taking a shower
after lunch; why bother? And while one might assume we would clean
up between the daytime labor and the evening’s random acts
of sexual deviance and drug experimentation… well one would
be wrong.
Numerous Hippy theories were espoused, claiming that excessive
bathing was unhealthy and undesirable. In fact, there was a very
superior attitude toward mainstream folk who chose to obey the
norms of society – shampoo led to “thinning hair”;
washing the natural oils from one’s skin would “dry
it out.” Hair would go unwashed for weeks, armpits unclean
for days to test these theories. But looking back what it came
down to was that we were all just too lazy to bathe and since no
one was ever that clean, it didn’t seem to matter.
Ultimately, everyone made their own decisions as to how far off
the skank-o-meter they were willing to drift. We kids had to go
to school, and we quickly learned that regular bathing was essential
to avoid the wrath of our teachers and fellow students. But laundry
was another matter entirely. Unless we were willing to beat our
clothes against river rocks, we had to get into town and hit the
Laundromat. This required transportation, a roll of quarters and
the better part of an entire day.
We tried to avoid it. We tried to live with dirty trousers. But
country living and pre-teen shenanigans are hard on clothes, and
when the school principle sent us home one day with notes to our
parents threatening a visit from the County Health Inspector, a
meeting had to be called.
My naïve hope was that this humiliation would at least result
in some kind of regular laundry routine. We had a cooking schedule,
a gardening schedule, even a hot tub fire-stoking schedule. Why
couldn’t there be a laundry schedule?
Never underestimate the power of Enlightenment as Self Interest.
Our parents saw this as an opportunity; since we had to
have clean clothes to go to school, they would provide us a lift
to town and the quarters… enough quarters so we could wash
not only our own clothes but theirs as well. Everybody wins!
Some of us questioned this logic. All of our schoolmates had their
laundry done by their mothers. What was wrong with that? Our own
mothers were aghast. “We aren’t your slaves,” they
replied, “and we live differently here. Would you rather
live in the suburbs and TV dinners every day?” Of course
we did, but we knew enough not to respond honestly to that one.
Do you have any idea what a rare treat a TV dinner is to a granola-eating
Hippy kid? Oh, beautiful, succulent TV, with your tasty meatloaf
and suculent peach cobbler that I don’t have to wait until
the end to eat… but I digress.
Our hygiene high jinks became more complicated when the county
Building Inspector showed up one day, probably tipped off by the
school that there was some funny business going on in our neck
of the woods. He instantly “red-tagged” every one of
our homemade domiciles, proclaiming them to be “unfit for
human habitation.” He pointed out that the construction was
not to county code and the lack of running water did not allow
for proper grooming.
A meeting was called. It was determined that our particular corner
of the universe, which was zoned “agriculture,” could
also be zoned as a “summer camp.” This meant that if
we brought just one building up to current code and it
had sanitary cooking and bathing facilities, the remaining structures
could be designated as “sleeping cabins” and would
not be held to the same standard.
A common “community house” was constructed with all
of the proper plans and permits, and before long the newly installed
communal showers and tubs became a wet soapy wonderland for frolicking
sex play. Suddenly it was cool to be clean. Some, of course, eschewed
the new plumbing and continued to use the communal hot tub for
their “weekly
washdown.” And those of us who had discovered that group
showers and “buddy bathing” were good clean fun made
sure we did our tubbing before the Great Unwashed swamped up the
works.
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