Aloha also means goodbye
Taylor Camp / It lasted less than a decade, only eight years, but the Taylor Camp experience on Kauai’s North Shore remains a cultural touchstone in the minds of many. It began in l969, when l3 hippies were arrested, sent to a dilapidated jail and sentenced to 90 days of community service. Tension over the presence of the hippies had been brewing off-and-on, and xenophobic little Kauai, suspicious of the real (and imagined) lifestyles of these transients, finally put the law on the case. The arrests, however, produced an unexpected result.
Also having trouble with authorities on the Garden Isle was Fred Taylor, the brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor, in the midst of what we today call a zoning issue. Taylor saw the chance to populate his seven acres of shoreline and jungle with the arrestees and others of their kind.
“We were looking for a place to get away,” explains one of the original l3, “and we looked at a map of Kauai and saw that the main road didn’t go all the way around the island, but just stopped, and that’s where we went.” That voice belongs to one of the originals, interviewed for Robert C. Stone’s Taylor Camp documentary, now on DVD, just 30 years shy of the pioneering choices of the l3 Hippies, as they were invariably called.
Taylor Camp grew (with lots of turnover) in the next few years, becoming a village of sorts, with temporary housing (bamboo-pole tree houses, some of them elaborate), a small store, church service, and a notable absence of rules.
The lifestyles–that word was invented in the ‘60s–were classic for the era: nudity, drugs (mostly pakalolo and ʻshrooms), a huge vegetable garden, and various notions concerning “freedom”. Most were opposed to the relentlessly ongoing Vietnam war and what was called the oppression of students. Many sojourners arrived in their teens, and some children were born in the camp, which, perhaps surprisingly, was mostly about couples and minorly about “free love.”
Stone’s film, wisely without a voice-over narrator, provides archival footage of the camp and of the era in general, with a generous helping of popular music of the era. The director has gathered several ex-campers 30 years after the fact, and asked them to reminisce. All give the experience high marks, some declaring it the highlight of their lives thus far.
The serpent in this garden was, of course, hard drugs, and gave authorities license for search and/or seizure. “The real druggies lived in the back of the camp, and gave the rest of us a bad rep,” one interviewee says. Nearly all the l00 permanent residents of the camp began to see what was coming. In l977 Camp Taylor was burned by authorities, and another hippie dream, in the words of John Lennon, was dead.
Stone’s doc is well-done–and fascinating if you’re into the topic, another moment of Hawaii history, which like all others, is really about human nature at its best–and not-so-best.
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