It was late in the afternoon, and as I watched the fireflies slowly flicker on like tiny moving streetlights, I wondered where John could have gotten to.  After all, this entire plan hinged on his arrival precisely at eight.  I had already packed the car with our supplies:  several pounds of Jimi Hendrix tapes, at least two weeks’ supply of Ramen Noodles, and a map of the greater San Francisco Bay Area.  However, if John didn’t get here before my parents returned from work, I would be in huge trouble.  How was I going to explain the presence of all that powdered soup in my mom’s old van?

            I decided to settle down and watch some Seinfeld to take my mind off this increasingly dire situation.  Thankfully, as soon as I sat down, I heard a knock on the door.  It was John. 

            “Where have you been?!” I panted.

            “Gosh, chill out, Sun Child.”  John waved off my demand with an infuriatingly casual air.

            “Sun—What?  Why are you calling me that?”

            “Hello?  Fake hippie names, duh.  We better get used to answering to them if we’re going to infiltrate that commune and free all those anemones from being used to make purple tie dye.”

            “Oh.  Right.  Well, speaking of our mission, let’s get going before my parents come home, John.”

            “What?  Who’s John?”

            “Oh—er, Moon Flower, I mean.”

            As we careened through the night in my secondhand minivan, my spirits lifted considerably.  I knew the hippies were wreaking havoc on the entire anemone population of the Pacific coast, and we were finally on our way to stop them.  That night we stopped at a Motel 6 in Sulphur and opened up some Ramen Noodles.  As we relaxed with our processed soup in the vaguely ominously smelling armchairs, John began to seem a little worried.  “Sun Child,” he said, “Do you think we smell enough like patchouli?  I mean, if we’re going to pass for real hippies, we should probably douse ourselves with some more of that stuff.”

            “Good idea,” I replied.  “And let’s light some more incense.”

This second idea turned out to be rather counter-productive.  Around the time we ignited the seventh stick of incense, an intermittent and high-pitched shriek began to assault our ears.  It was, of course, the fire alarm.  The authorities lost no time in tracing the sickly sweet aroma of incense to our second floor room, and promptly evicted us from the motel.

            “Great job, Michelle.  What are we going to do now?”

            “It’s Sun Child, dear.  Remember?”

            “Well, frankly, my enthusiasm is lagging a bit.  Where are we going to sleep?”

            We ended up camping in the minivan in a Walmart parking lot, and getting jeered at by some real hippies in a VW bus who thought the blue-green Dodge was a rather poor excuse for a hippie van.

            The next day we set off in a westwardly direction.  The next few days blended together in a haze of motels, hostels, and state parks when we ran out of money.  John and I began to worry that our effort to emulate the counter-cultural movement was taking a toll on our real identities:

            “Sun Child, I think the government is trying to take over our minds using this can of tomato paste.  I mean, stop the war machine, you know?  PEACE OUT!”

            This second interjection was to a group of bedraggled people who were attempting to emulate Jimi Hendrix’s colorful look without much success, and who had ended up looking like a gaggle of frizzy-haired, androgynous bag people.

            “Er, John? …John?  You’re kidding, right?”

            “Whoa.  Kinda lost it for a minute there, didn’t I?”

Shaken, we decided to high-tail it to ’Frisco—er, San Francisco, and complete our mission before we became completely submerged in the amenome-murdering counter-culture.

            We finally arrived there, smelling adequately sweaty and patchouli-ified, and located the commune without much incident—perhaps due to the stream of tie-dyed people leading to the place.  We blasted Jefferson Airplane and were welcomed with open, if fringe-clad, arms.

            After a few hours, I scraped together enough courage to ask: “So, um…how about that tie-dye?  It’s pretty groovy, right?  So…where do you guys make that stuff?”          

            They led me to a group of several large vats—one of which, as I had suspected, was filled with a rich purple solution.  “Wow,” I ventured, “what about that purple dye?  What is that made of?”

            “Well,” replied one, “it’s a mixture of natural herbs and…”

            “LIAR!  WHERE ARE THOSE ANEMONES?!  WHERE ARE THEY, YOU CRAZY HIPPIES?!”  This was from John, who had by now been driven to recklessness by the incessant rain-dancing and happiness.

            “John,” I whispered, “You just totally blew our cover.”

            There was an uncomfortable silence, which was mercifully broken by a quiet boy with huge, doe-like eyes and a peace sign hennaed on his forehead.  “Hey you guys, it’s cool.  We understand that you don’t want the anemones to die.  I mean, we’re against violence toward animals too.  But, you see, anemones haven’t been used to make dye since the days of ancient Rome.”

            “…Really?”  John asked.

            “Yeah, man, we can show you how we make our dye.  It’s totally vegetable-based.”

The hippies then proceeded to demonstrate the process of dye-making, which turned out to entail nothing more than crushing some herbs with a make-shift mortar and pestle and mixing them with spring water.  Sure enough, the result was identical to the solution in the pot.

            John and I were pacified, and the hippies even offered to let us stay and live with them.  We thought about it, but in the end decided not to.  I mean, we’re all for peace and love, but how would we live without our processed food and heavy metal?