The summer of 1967, the “the summer of love,” was a heck of a time. The war escalated in Vietnam, protests intensified in D.C., hippies held a love-in in San Fran, and my family took the most memorable vacation I ever took with them. My family at the time consisted of my 36 year-old dad, 32 year-old mom, almost 2 year-old brother Curt, and soon to be born sister Gwen, who was still in the oven, as they say. I was 11. Oh yeah, and there was out little mutt beagle dog, Sam. He came for the ride too.

This was first and foremost a road trip; as such, the car in which we traveled played a prominent role. It was a gray-bodied, black-hooded 1964 Bonneville Pontiac convertible. In 1965 or thereabouts, my folks traded in their much smaller Pontiac Tempest and bought this behemoth used. Its most remarkable feature was how long it was. The trunk was so big it could have held a kiddy pool, fully inflated.

Per Google Maps the drive from 101 Holly Road in Broomall, PA, to Lake Utopia, New Brunswick is 679 miles, almost all of it by Interstate. It was surely more than that in 1967. How much more, who knows. The point is we didn’t make the trip in one day. Where we stopped is forgotten. Mom’s friend Arlene and her husband lived in Boston at the time, so maybe Beantown, but I doubt it. Or perhaps somewhere along the scenic coast of Maine. Maybe it was even a two-day trip up; I don’t remember a thing about it.

Once we reached Lake Utopia, however, I recall Dad driving along a rural two-lane road and looking for a place to stay. For some reason, I’d long thought he had a particular place in mind. One that he’d perhaps seen an ad for and made reservations at, but he has assured me that was the not case—we simply drove up there and looked for suitable accommodations. And that apparently was at the first place we stopped, although at first glance one might differ as to whether it was entirely suitable. On the grounds of a wooded lot overlooking the lake, stood about six to eight wooden cabins or cottages, take your pick. They weren’t dilapidated but they sure were rustic. Ours was the last one on the left nestled in the woods atop a low rise above Lake Utopia. It lacked some of the basic amenities people take for granted, even in 1967, like an electric stove (it had a wood burning one). I assume the place had electric lights, but given that it’s daylight that far north in June and early July till past 9:30 PM, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. And there was certainly no television. What the place lacked in amenities, it had in spades in character. Just picture a rustic white cabin in the woods overlooking a beautiful lake with row boats, a small dock, and sunshine dappling upon the water, and you’ll have a good idea of what it was like. To me, it was paradise . . . or utopia, take your pick.

Where exactly we stayed is a mystery that has confounded me for years. We took no photos of the place. And there are no records or other mementos to indicate what it was called, its address, or where it was along the 9-mile, hourglass-shaped Lake Utopia. So I’ve searched countless times online, scouring Google and Bing maps, poring over online photos. But nothing was ever found to suggest the place even existed, much less where it was. I even drove up there in 2002 with Sharon and the kids, in part so I could scout the area. But again no evidence of the place was uncovered.

I can’t explain why it matters as much as it does where the cottage was located, but it does. I like to know where things are. Perhaps it’s a subconscious flight of fancy that fuels the quest—if I could find the place, I could return and recapture the essence of the time. Of course, even if I did know where it was and if it were still there in the same condition, I could not recapture the essence. That bird has flown. Besides, the ramshackle cabin in which we stayed a zillion years ago is almost certainly long gone, which is yet another reason “you can’t go home again.” But even so, I kept hunting. And to my surprise, I did locate a postcard online depicting three cabins on a lake with the caption “Cabins at Lake Utopia, N.B.” The pic is undated but looks to be at least 50 years old (as of 2019), and more likely quite a bit older than that. I can’t say for sure that this is where are cabin was, and in fact, no useful information is provided on the back of the postcard. But it looks like the campground, if not our particular cabin.

As best as I can remember, once we reached, the lake we didn’t drive for long to find the cabins. So that would place them near the southern end of the lake. Also, I recall that the lake couldn’t be seen from the road because of trees but was nearby, maybe 100 to 200 yards away. That places the cabins along the eastern shore since no roadway runs along the western shore. Looking at a map, my guess is that the place was off New Brunswick Route 780 either along the southern spur of the lake, an area called Woodbury Cove, or a bit farther north (see map). Our photos in which the lake is seen also resemble the lay of the lake along its southern shore, so that’s my best guess as to where we lodged. As mentioned, our cabin was the last one on the left (while facing the lake) and was set off by itself.

Wherever it was we stayed, we had a week of great fun and adventure. Right off, we climbed into one of the rowboats for the use of guests. It took a little getting used to, but soon I was a master rower, or so I thought. The boats were big and clucky, but that didn’t diminish our love of rowing about the lake. It did, however, limit our range. I recall that we made a habit of taking an evening row on the lake. Very tranquil and intoxicating that was.

Another thing we made a habit of doing was catching fish. There was a floating platform about 50 to 75 feet offshore where we’d dock our rowboat and drop a line or two. The fish must have loved that spot—I never caught so many in all my life. And seldom have I have tasted any better than the perch that came out of Lake Utopia. After a hauling in 10 to 20, we’d fillet the perch, that is my dad did, and immediately after cook them on our wood burning stove or more often than not on an open fire near the shore.

Fishing I suppose would have been perfect had it not been for this nasty looking eel we caught time and again. The eel, off-white and about 2 feet long, would help himself to the worms on our hooks. He’d then put up a prodigious fight not to be reeled in. But once we had him up, we had no idea what to do with him. The creature had a razor-sharp fin that ran the entire length of its back, so we’d just have to cut the line and say goodbye to another hook, line, and sinker. We got awfully tired of catching this menace and decided to play a little rougher. One time we pumped a couple of BBs into its throat. Then we caught it again and dragged up on shore for 2 hours, figuring that had to kill it. It sure looked dead. So we flung the carcass, along with another hook, line, and sinker, into the lake, and in an instant watched it swim away. I’m telling you that creature was indestructible, and as a consequence it earned my respect. Quite possibly, and in fact probably, there was more than one eel in that big lake, so it may have been several eels we caught. Funny, we never considered that idea at the time.

Another thing we never thought about at the time, because we’d never heard about it, was the monster in the lake. There are, so I learned, lots of folks who over the years claim to have seen him. I say “him” because he’s been christened “Old Ned.” Per https://bouncingpinkball.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/the-lake-utopia-monster/ “Old Ned’s fame began way back in the late 1700s, when local Mi’kmaq passed on the story of a group of native hunters being chased in their canoes by a gigantic lake creature to the newly-arrived Europeans.” Enter “Lake Utopia monster” in any search engine, and a great many sites on the folklore of Old Ned will pop up. Perhaps our eel was a baby Ned.

A few cabins down from us was a vacationing family with a boy about two years older than me. I’ve long forgotten his name but remember well hanging with him most every day. He had a small aluminum boat with an outdoor motor, which I guess his family rented from the owners of the resort. We motored all over the lake time and again in it. He’d let me steer, which was a load of fun for an 11 year-old kid. As I recall, we also swam on the beach in front of our cabins. But with the thought of that eel in the water, that was a little nerve wracking. It seems that kids, at least back then, could make such tight bonds so fast, and then loose them just as fast once whatever it was that brought them together ended. I think my friend and his family left a day or so before us, and that was the last I ever heard from him. Wish I knew what became of the fellow.

As I mentioned, our cabin did not have an electric stove, so we cooked everything either in or on the wood-burning stove or on an open fire outside. Other than the perch, the only thing I remember eating was bread. It was homemade bread, the first loaf my dad ever made. He baked it in the wood-burning stove, and though he would through the coming years make many wonderful and more complex loaves, none ever tasted as divine as that first one. Man, was it good. As good as any bread I’ve ever tasted. No doubt there’s much more involved in taste that what’s recorded on the receptors of one’s taste buds.

One other notable event took place while staying at the cabin by Lake Utopia—I read my first novel. Since there was no television, I had some time to kill, so I read Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. It moved me like nothing else and remains one of my favorite novels of all time (no. 15 when I last ranked them in March 2015 https://sites.google.com/site/moonscheme/Lists). I can’t say I started reading vociferously from that moment on, but it was the beginning a lifetime devoted to reading, particularly great novels. That novel, the time, and the place, I believe, all had a lot to do with that.

The most memorable part of the trip without any question was the week in the cabin on Lake Utopia. It’s one of the most memorable episodes of my childhood. But there was another week to this trip, and it too produced some indelible memories. After we checked out of the cabin, we drove from New Brunswick to Quebec City. The drive is anywhere from 350 to 425 miles depending on the route taken, which of course is a long drive for one day but not so long that my parents wouldn’t have driven straight through. Besides I don’t recall stopping anywhere, not that I recall anything about the drive, or for that matter where we stayed once we reached Quebec City. I do remember hiking about the city by day, admiring its many impressive buildings, splendid view of the Lawrence River, and, as pictured, big cannons. But what I really remember, and what would have a lifelong impact, were the people, mostly young men, that we encountered one night in this fabulous city.

In the summer of 1967, hippies were famously having a love fest in San Francisco, but we didn’t live anywhere near Haight-Ashbury. We lived in Broomall, Pennsylvania, and in 1967 long-haired hippies were not to be found in Broomall, hardly even in nearby Philadelphia despite the lyrics in the 1963 song “South Street” that go, “Where to all the hippies meet? South Street, South Street.” So I was overwhelmed to see them on the streets of Quebec City. We had eaten dinner at a Mideast restaurant in town and then walked the streets on that warm summer evening, and everywhere there were young men with long hair, and young men and women dressed as I’d never seen anyone dressed before. Did I mention the young men had long hair? Let me clarify this—at the time I had long hair for those times, but these guys had really long hair. Hot damn!

Over the years I’ve written reminisces that I call “Random Notes.” Perhaps I can best convey the meaning to me of that summer night walking the streets in Quebec City by quoting the first paragraph of Random Note #22:

In the summer of 1967, my family vacationed in Canada. We spent a week in a cabin on Lake Utopia in New Brunswick and ended up at the World’s Exposition in Montreal. In between we stopped in Quebec, where we toured the city by foot on a warm summer evening. I walked down the quaint streets apart from my parents, so as not to be thought a little kid, and looked on in awe at all the young guys with their incredibly long hair. I had never seen anything like it. I had thought my hair was long—it was the longest in 5^th grade, but it was nothing compared to the manes on these young Quebecois. They were truly hippies. And it was quite apparent to me that hippies were as cool as cool got. So of course, as much as anything else, I wanted to be a hippie too. So I fought my folks (mostly Mom), social sentiment, and Mr. Sheely, the junior high vice-principal, and grew my hair as long as I could. And I waited to get a little older. In time, I sort of had the hippie thing working, even if my timing was a bit off.

Quebec City has much more to offer than being the place where I discovered my inner hippie on a summer evening in 1967, but that’s how I’ve always remembered it.

The trip of course didn’t end at Expo, for we still had to drive about 500 miles to get home. But since I don’t remember any of that, for all intents and purposes, the trip did end there. In another sense, however, it never ended. This was the most memorable road trip of my childhood and can be regarded in the most meaningful way as the only one. When I was too young to remember, we traveled across the country. And all through my childhood years we traveled by car to Cincinnati at least once a year, and usually to Orlando once a year as well, but they were just long drives to get somewhere. This trip was an out-and-out road trip, traveling from place to place. And it instilled in me a lifetime love of the road trip. That love has taken me and Sharon and my adult family to so many wonderful places.

Once we got back home, I mentioned something to the effect that the linear distance we traveled was zero miles, although I doubt I used the word “linear.” That impressed my mom a lot, although not nearly as much as she had been years before when we lived on Windermere Avenue and I guessed “24” as the value of “x” in a math problem she was working on with my dad. The answer to that particularly sticky math problem was in fact 24, so you could imagine why she was so impressed with me deriving it so effortlessly at the tender age of 7 or 8. Gushing about what a genius I was, she asked how I solved the equation. I explained that “x” was the 24^th letter of the alphabet. I could tell her enthusiasm was dashed. She pointed out that the problem was not solved by that method, but it was still smart of me to think of such a solution. Of course, smart is one thing. Lucky is another. And genius altogether something else. Even at the age of 7, I felt bad about breaking my mom’s high hopes that she had a math prodigy on her hands. Oh well, throughout high school and college I did get mostly A’s in math, and then I went on to do other things, like write journals about recent travels and one I took 52 years ago.

As I mentioned earlier, my family, that is my wife, Sharon, and kids rather than my childhood family, went looking for the cabin on Lake Utopia in 2002 during what was also a two-week road trip, mostly through New England but with a brief stop in New Brunswick. The account of that trip was written long ago, but isn’t currently online. Once it is, it should be accessible from https://sites.google.com/site/moonscheme/file-under-travel. That year, 2002, however, wasn’t the first time Sharon and I were in Canada at the same time. We both visited Quebec City and Expo in Montreal in the summer of 1967. And in fact, we both had our picture taken on a cannon in Quebec City. Clearly we were destined to be together, although it probably had nothing to do with our being in Canada during the same summer. She was only 3 years old at the time, so even if we had crossed paths, which of course is extremely unlikely, I’m sure I wouldn’t have taken much notice, as I did years later when she started at Reliance Insurance Company in January 1986.

I’ve done something on the order of 35 travel journals. For whatever the reason, I’m compelled to record personal history. Perhaps because it saves the memories for posterity, my own, my fellow travelers, and any others that might possibly give a damn. It is, of course, best to record the experience as soon as possible so that events are fresh. That obviously was not done here. Rather I’ve waited over 50 years. And that’s a shame because it’s best to have input from one’s fellow travelers, who may recall things differently or have a different perspective. That was not an option in 2019. My mom died in 2011. My dad, now age 88, doesn’t recall much about the trip. And Curt wasn’t even 2 years old at the time, and Sam was just a dog. So I had to piece it together as best I could. Fortunately, so many of the memories from this trip are implanted in my mind and in my stories, that I can still play the loop, even if the picture is fuzzy, but then most pictures from the 1960s are rather fuzzy. I hope anyone reading this account, and I certainly hope some do, will find it worth the effort.

A substantial portion of this log was researched and written on or prior to 5/7/2014, and then not touched again until 12/11/2019. It was completed on 12/20/19.