Right, Left and Centre: The Poltics of Some Canadians. Chapter 45. Part One

   The Life and Death of a Canadian Mystic by Dave Jaffe. Part One.


   "I couldn't help it, officer," a driver in his 30's, told an R.C.M.P. officer one dark wet night in March of 2002. "This guy was just walking in the road right in front of me. So I didn't see him till my car was right on top of him. My God, is he dead?"
     Don Graves, a 54 year old man now lay flat on his back. He was indeed dead. He had stopped breathing on a highway in Coquitlam, a growing suburb to the east of Vancouver. As the March rain pelted down, the R.C.M.P. officer took notes in her notebook and finally an ambulance with its screaming siren drew up alongside the dead man. It was yet another death on Canada's highways, one of 2000 that happen every year.
     The dead man, Don Graves, was a divorced father of a daughter in her 20's, who now lived in Seattle, Washington. His former wife Felicia, worked in a bank in downtown Vancouver. Don Graves had searched for spiritual enlightenment in several countries, some of which were thought to be dangerous. Yet he had died in a middle class suburb of Canada. Now his searching was over. He was gone for good.
     "Don was a seeker," his older brother Edward said when he heard about Don's death. "He wasn't satisfied living here." 'Here' was Willowdale, an affluent part of Toronto where Don grew up. He went to primary and secondary schools in Willowdale and seemed to enjoy life. He played several sports but golf was his favourite game.  By the time he was 15, he'd play golf with his father, a salesman for an auto parts company and sometimes Don would beat his dad.
    Yet then in his late teens his life changed. He started to read books by Aldous Huxley like 'The Doors of Perception' and 'Heaven and Hell'. Here the nearly blind Huxley wrote about his use of L.S.D and mescaline.  Dan's focus soon shifted from playing golf to using mostly illegal drugs like marijuana and L.S.D. The English-born Huxley had died in California about four years before Dan started reading his works. Yet now it was 1967 and there were other devotees of L.S.D. and other drugs who were out there, preaching the virtues of taking L.S.D. Timothy Leary the L.S.D. advocate was touring North America, touting the virtues of this drug and other hallucinogens.
     "Tune in, turn on, drop out," Leary told North American youth. Meanwhile the Oregon-born novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters  were out in California, handing out L.S.D. as if it was candy. Thousands, then tens of thousands of Canadian youth became hippies, at least for a while. They flocked to Toronto's Yorkville district and the Kitsilano area of Vancouver. They put flowers in their hair and slept or 'crashed' as it was called in old houses, that soon had ten or more people living in these places. They wore jeans, and colourful costumes and openly smoked marijuana and made love in public. It was the springtime of what was later called 'The Counterculture'.