Going to see the Dead, thumbing it down the Pacific Coast

The early days of Eneput Day Care Center.

Back when I was 14 and my sister was 11, mom got this great idea to see if the Grateful Dead would do a concert in Fairbanks, Alaska. Back then, the Dead would give a portion of the gate receipts to benefit nonprofits in the area.

Mom had inherited a bunch of money and like a good hippy used it all to create a foundation for a day care center and day camp that she called Eneput, which in Yupik means "our house." The place took care of scads of kids, mostly those of single mothers so they could get work in what was then a pretty godforsaken economy up North.

It always needed money. We had nothing. Mom was a true believer. We lived the life of the Last Whole Earth Catalog and Diet for a Small Planet. We raised our own food. We didn't have a car. We got cold and hitchhiked every day. Eneput always needed money. Mom was a fundraising fiend. She was into politics, and she helped write the Alaska Day Care Assistance Act, which subsidized day care for poor people.

But the Dead was a wild idea. Greg Herring was a friend of all the hippies who ran Eneput. Everybody called him Bigfoot. He was bearded and had the hair and persona of the day. He said he got to know the Dead following them around on tour.

He was an original Deadhead. He really did know them.

I didn't care. I was 14. However, one Friday after working all day as a camp counselor at mom's day camp — which had several hundred kids at Fairbanks' AlaskaLand — I found Bigfoot at the house. Not a good sign. Bigfoot always had big ideas. And he had no money. Neither did mom. I rode my bike home the 12 miles from AlaskaLand. I hated hitchhiking. Back then we mostly got picked up by people with trucks and rode in the back. That sucked in the cold.

"So," mom said. "Bigfoot will take us to meet the Grateful Dead."

"Oh?" I said, knowing that he was usually full of malarky. Then she explained. We would travel by plane to Seattle and thumb a ride at Sea-Tac. No big deal. It was 1975. Hitchhiking isn't legal on the freeways until Oregon but we wait at the on-ramps.

"It will be an adventure," mom said.

It was. We bought one-way tickets to Seattle from Fairbanks International, landed in Seattle with no cash. Of course the banks were closed. Mom had a check book and her voter registration card. Nobody took her checks. I had $20 I didn't tell her about until later.

We got a ride immediately from the airport. Some insurance salesman in a rental. He was nice. Loved the Dead story. Then we got stuck at every on-ramp on Interstate 5. One place had a line of us hitchhikers. One group had been there over night. It didn't look good.