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Taylor Camp / In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Kaua’i’s north shore was a home to a thriving–and notorious–community of hippies, surfers, seekers, backpackers and other cultural refugees looking to live free and easy by the sea. Thirty-odd years later, Taylor Camp is immortalized in a new film and two soon-to-be published books. John Wythe White takes it all in, and remembers.

The new generation…discovered the environment, and the damage we were doing to it in our ignorance about the workings of nature…Ecology became the new word, and “Earth Days” the new celebrations. There was great sincerity and honesty among these new nature-lovers. They leaped oceans and continents and are appearing in all the grand beachcombing sites this plundered planet can still provide. So many appeared in Hawaii…that authorities began speaking of them as The Problem…I suggest that what they are calling The Problem may well be the solution to the real problems.

–Euell Gibbons, Beachcomber’s Handbook (Preface to New Edition, 1972).

In the spring of 1969, Eduardo Malapit, an ambitious young prosecutor who would later become mayor of Kaua’i, sentenced 13 mainland-transplanted men, women and children who had been camping out on the Garden Isle (and whose permits had expired) to 90 days of hard labor on charges of vagrancy.

Howard Taylor, an artist and oceanographer (and brother of actress Elizabeth) bailed them all out of jail and invited them to live for free on an oceanfront parcel of land he owned in Ke’e, on the island’s north shore near the Na Pali cliffs trailhead. Taylor–a big, black-bearded fellow with shining blue eyes–was not merely sympathetic to the young people’s plight; he was pissed-off because he had learned after purchasing his land that it was to be condemned by the State of Hawai’i for use as a future state park, and he could not build on it.

Photo Credit: John Wehrheim

Heaven on Earth

These circumstances gave birth to what soon became known as Taylor Camp, an eclectic and serendipitous gathering of hippies, surfers, seekers, draft evaders, Vietnam War vets, world travelers, backpackers and other refugees from the ’60s, who constructed a counter-cultural, anti-establishment community of semi-permanent treehouse structures that mutated, matured and evolved until the state finally obliterated it in 1977. To critical outsiders, it was an eyesore, a threat to tourism and a breeding ground for all sorts of status-quo-threatening behavior. To residents, it was heaven on earth.

In the summer of 1970, I was living in Southern California, where smog had invaded the coastal skies, offshore drilling leakage was stinking up the ocean, police were routinely harassing people with long hair and Governor Ronald Reagan was saying things like, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen ‘em all” and “If they [war protesters] want a bloodbath, we’ll give ‘em a bloodbath.” I was ready for a change of venue.

When I received a postcard from a friend living in Taylor Camp inviting me over with vividly penned promises of great surf, warm waters, rent-free living, powerful smoke and free love, I quit my job, cashed out my savings account ($800), purchased open-ended roundtrip airfare and set off for the Garden.

The year 1970 was a turning point in American history. Everything was beginning to go bad for the “flower children,” as the media had labeled my generation. It was the year when four student protesters at Kent State University were shot and killed by soldiers of the National Guard; when Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin overdosed and died; when the Beatles broke up; when college professor Angela Davis, falsely charged with possession of firearms, went on the run from the law; when LSD guru Timothy Leary was hiding out in Tangiers; when Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers of America labor union, went to prison. Our dream of peace and love and equality had been crushed by the Powers That Be, and nothing had come to fill the void. We were all sitting in limbo. Hawai’i seemed to me like a great place to hang out for a while.

I lived in Taylor Camp for the last four months of 1970. I was 25. I built a small dwelling for myself out of bamboo stalks, ironwood branches, thick clear plastic sheeting, nails and staples and funky found furnishings. It was compact, comfortable, rain-proof, mosquito-proof–and I had created it all by myself, for a pittance.

I surfed or swam every day. Hiked and hitchhiked. Worked in the communal garden and ate the food we grew there: lettuce, tomatoes, collard greens, etcetera. Picked mango and papaya and guava from trees. Friends from outside brought us fresh fish and kalua pig and macadamia nuts still in the shell. I supplemented all this with brown rice, other staples, cheap red wine and candy bars from the Ching Young Store in Hanalei. Learned to spearfish. Played my guitar and harmonica. Smoked pot and dropped acid. Met girls and made love, casually but affectionately. I was having the time of my life, and I am as aware of that now as I was then.

Photo Credit: John Wehrheim

Two years after I left Taylor Camp, I moved back to Hawai’i, to Honolulu, where the jobs were. I was employed as an English instructor and advertising copywriter before the advent of the personal computer allowed me to go freelance. I love O’ahu, especially Hale’iwa where I live, but Taylor Camp will always occupy a large and unassailable compartment of my heart. I can’t get it out of my mind. I have been so obsessed with my memories that I was compelled to fictionalize my experience there in the form of a novel. [Editor's Note: Mutual Publishing will release John Wythe White's A High and Beautiful Wave in September.]

Documenting every treehouse

John Wehrheim moved from Honolulu to Kaua’i in 1971. His girlfriend’s family lived next door to Howard Taylor in Ha’ena. Wehrheim took an interest in Taylor Camp and began to photograph it.

In 1976 the State Foundation of Culture and the Arts and the Kaua’i Historical Society commissioned him to photograph Kaua’i’s historic buildings for a bicentennial book. He was given a list of buildings to shoot and asked to recommend other buildings of interest to include.

“I suggested several plantation camps, as well as Taylor Camp,” he says. “The plantation camps were included in the collection but the Historical Society turned up their noses at Taylor Camp. I then decided that instead of doing one or two photos for the book I would document every treehouse in the camp, interiors as well as exteriors, and make environmental portraits of the residents–all in archival black and white. So being turned down by what I now refer to as the ‘Hysterical’ Society was auspicious.”

Auspicious because Taylor Camp remained as embedded in Wehrheim’s consciousness as it did in mine. For him it has resulted in his documentary film titled Taylor Camp, as well as a book (soon to be published by Serindia) containing his photographs and transcribed testimony from residents.

The book project took some time to develop because Wehrheim wanted some meaningful text to accompany his photographs. He invited me to help him write it. After accepting his offer, I subsequently declined. I had not finished my novel, and I felt more compelled to tell my personal, fictionalized story than to become involved in a historical project. Wehrheim asked novelist and part-time Hawai’i resident Paul Theroux if he was interested. Theroux advised him that the only people qualified to tell the story of Taylor Camp were the people who lived there.

So Wehrheim began tracking down former camp residents and recording oral histories. At the same time, he was working on a film about Bhutan with Maui filmmakers Tom Vendetti and Bob Stone. They helped him put together a 20-minute slideshow-format film about Taylor Camp with period music using his black-and-white archival images and the oral histories. When they screened it as a one-night benefit at the Kilauea Theatre on Kaua’i, every seat was taken and a thousand people were turned away. The production was held over for a week.

Photo Credit: John Wehrheim

This success encouraged Wehrheim to create a longer documentary film, videotaping the interviews rather than just audio recording them.

Tracking down the Taylor Camp “alumnae” wasn’t difficult, and most wanted to tell their stories. “Many are still on Kaua’i,” Wehrheim says, “others on Maui and many live as neighbors in Big Island communities. People came from the mainland. And everyone had a different story. You’d think that they’d want to romanticize the experience, and some did. The bullshit is obvious in the interviews.” But most told it like it was, not neglecting the dark side: drugs, fights with locals, rip-offs and problems with transients.

The high point of their youth

Wehrheim’s Taylor Camp is a somewhat different place than mine, because it focuses on the community’s middle and later years (1971-1977). But the same spirit of freedom, idyllic tranquility and exhilaration that I experienced in my brief sojourn there infuses his film.

To begin with, Wehrheim’s photographs are beautiful, evocative and often haunting, and the camera travels lovingly over them, panning, zooming in and pulling out to reveal their rich detail. They showcase not only the architectural complexity and ingenuity of the treehouse structures, but also the lives and character of their occupants–individuals and couples, with and without children, unselfconsciously naked, or not (clothing was optional at Taylor Camp), cooking in kitchens, working in gardens, fishing, beachcombing or simply standing proudly in front of their homes.

Photo Credit: John Wehrheim

The film begins with several archival shots of the ’60s: the Vietnam War (copters, artillery exploding, bodies of soldiers), war protests, police brutality, the media figures of the day (Nixon, Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Martin Luther King, jr., LBJ) and young people smoking pot. Then the scene changes and bursts into color as we silently fly through white clouds and blue skies to the Na Pali cliffs and Ke’e Beach, the site of Taylor Camp. The contrast sets up what is to follow: interviews with refugees from California (particularly Berkeley), New York and other places, fed up with fighting the status quo, ready to escape for some deep healing–and serious fun.

The videotaped interviews with former residents show them reflecting on their times at Taylor Camp. The main motif running through their remembrances is joy and thankfulness. Invariably, they were all grateful for having had such an unusual and wonderful experience. For most, it was the high point of their youth and remains a close-held, still-vivid memory. As one resident states, “It never goes away.”

The film ends with the destruction of the treehouses by bulldozing and burning. Residents reluctant to depart are gently escorted out by uniformed police. This happened in 1977, more than 30 years ago. Taylor Camp has since returned to wilderness. The film ends with a final comment from one of the evicted: “They said they were going to make the park. They never did.”

Wehrheim does his best to establish a fair and true image of Taylor Camp for posterity. He responded to a story in Kaua’i People by Anne O’Malley with a paid advertisement in the form of an open letter.

“The recent article about our film,” he wrote, “saddened me. It was well-written but had far too much focus on drug and alcohol abuse and not enough about the redemptive nature of Taylor Camp and the uplifting and enriching effect it had on most of the residents…I may have been overly concerned about romanticizing the experience with an overdose of ’60s ‘peace and love’ and clouding the fascinating and complex nature of this community.”

I’m not as overly concerned as Wehrheim. Novelist Robert Stone wrote in his recent memoir, Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, “We were one of the generations to which the word ‘Romantic’ might be applied–the offspring of a period inclined by history to highly value the Dionysian and the spontaneous, to exalt freedom over order, to demand more of the world than it may reasonably provide. We saw–may we be not the last to see–this country as blessed in its most generous hopes.”

Photo Credit: John Wehrheim

For me, Taylor Camp was romantic in many senses of the word: ardent, passionate, fervent… expressing love or strong affection…marked by the free expression of imagination and emotion and experimentation with form. Yes, there were drugs, but nothing beyond pot, LSD and a tank of nitrous oxide somebody brought in one day. Sure, we drank booze, but who doesn’t? We made love freely, but this was pre-AIDS and it harmed no one in those experimental times. We were living an “alternate” lifestyle and it was working. We were “green” and “off the grid” before those terms were used. We had no TV, no radio, no Internet.

Everyone should try it. At least once.

O’ahu – Hawaii Theatre – Sunday 7/13 at 2PM 528-0506

Big Island – The Palace Theatre – Friday 7/11 at 5 and 7:30PM 934-7777

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