Dragon's Eye Summer: A Dispatch from the Melted Horizon

By John Ash, a Hungry Witness of 1967,

BERKELEY—Somewhere in the folds of 1967, just past the soft bend where Telegraph Avenue exhaled incense and memory, there was a place called Dragon’s Eye. It wasn’t on any map. You had to *feel* it to find it. A commune stitched together from warped floorboards, velvet beanbags, and bodies that forgot what clocks were for.

I lived there with a pole dancer named Sky—her name a prophecy, her hips a hymn. She moved like the air between bass notes, like something that couldn’t be choreographed. We slept beneath tapestries dyed in dream colors and woke hungry. Always hungry. For food, yes—cheap pizza slices folded like love letters, falafel that whispered secrets of far-off deserts—but also for each other, for ideas, for the raw vibration of existence itself. Something in the air made everything taste better. Maybe it was freedom. Maybe it was just weed.

We wandered Haight Street like pilgrims in Technicolor. Music bled from open windows, live bands sprouted from sidewalks like mushrooms, and sometimes we danced without knowing whose feet were whose. Someone handed me a tambourine once, and I struck it like it had offended me. Sky sang in a language only streetlights understood.

City Lights Bookstore became our temple. I read *Howl* aloud to a group of strangers who didn’t need to ask what I meant. Ginsberg was our lighthouse. A couple years later, he stayed two days at our commune in San Diego—thin, wild-eyed, carrying a duffel bag of poems and silence. He drank tea on our sagging porch and spoke of visions, then left as suddenly as he came, like a rumor or a passing fever dream.

The Summer of Love wasn’t a summer. It was a liquid thing. It melted across years and cities. It clung to skin. It grew in the cracks of sidewalks and behind the eyes of strangers.

And then there was Esalen. Three days on the edge of the world, where the ocean gnawed at the cliffs and refused to leave. Joan Baez opened her throat and let the sky pour out. The music was too much for speakers, so it drifted into the air unamplified, like secrets from a god. I sat cross-legged in the grass beside a girl named Rain and a man named Maybe. Someone passed a jug of something strong. I drank and forgot my last name. The stars arrived early that night, each one a little mirror of whatever we’d lost.

People say the Summer of Love was a myth. Maybe. But I remember the way Sky laughed when the fog rolled in over the Bay. I remember the echo of drums, the scent of sweat and patchouli, the way poetry felt like survival.

I remember being alive, and hungry, and not quite real.

And that, my friend, is something.