Author: Matty Timmis

By Matty Timmis

I embarked on this degenerate pilgrimage in pursuit of a mercurial goal, strung along by reams of seductive yarns, from a previous visit Miles had spun me over the past year. This was the promised land of free food, free drugs, and naked women, nestled in some idyllic pastoral scene. This was a teenage eden. And Miles’ descriptions weren’t too far fetched, as it turns out, we had tracked down a sort of hippy commune reminiscent of the flower power ideals that proliferated in the 1960s, that I imagined had dissipated after Charles Manson and the end of the summer of love. This established an interesting binary for us – the difference between the hippy and the beatnik, something we considered in the haze of our languorous sojourn.

Our arrival was by increments; first having to sleep in the wooded area adjoining the place the cars were parked in, for fear of making the three hour hike up to the commune in the dark. The following morning, as we were slurping up our breakfast of greasy canned meatballs and pasta, and pilfering some naive hippies’ kombucha, we were approached by a smartly dressed journalist, wanting to ask us some questions and take our photos. We consented and were elated to find, a few days later, our scruffy faces on the front page of the local paper, beneath a headline warning of a “hippie invasion”. It amused us though to think of ourselves as hippies, surely a hippy would never pinch a comrades kombucha, or entertain the thought of ingesting such grimly processed food – these people were vegan almost by definition, in a way a beatnik could never be.

We had finally made it to this hallowed ground, tramping upward through seemingly endless coniferous forests, humming with the honeyed vitality of a summer morning. As we climbed further into the foothills,  the landscape opened up in segments – little glimpses of majesty when the tree line broke and the country poured forth from the path. Vivacious bounds of swaying verdant hills and winsome chocolate-box villages stretching out to the horizon. Were we being immersed unknowingly in the hippy mindset? We were wholly beguiled by the flourishing countryside, its quaint details, and its vast scope enthralling our sundered minds. We later found out that beneath that specific area there was an enormous old Nazi munitions dump. 

Such brutality was as far from my mind as is possibly conceivable on that almost pious day. I shan’t ever forget my first glimpse of the commune. A lake lazed louche in a large divot in the foothills, reaching out into its depth were numerous gaunt fingers, little spits and abutments jutting away from the shore, heavy with wildflowers and luscious perfume. Surrounding it a gentle pine forest swelled gently, lulling its way up the rolling hills that, far in the distance, turned into more rugged ivory capped peaks. And surrounding the listless shoreline, perched on the spindly abutments, flocks of unsullied nymphs frolicking  in exaltation, in the euphoric torpor of the midday heat, jumping naked in the water as glimmers of diamonds arced across the unblemished sky. It was akin to the middle panel of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights – a naive but liberated image of emancipation from the stifling of the human spirit. Silvery wisps of incense drifted through the air, its languid smoke curling in time with the rhythmic pulsation of the strange instruments being played on the lakeside.

We stayed at the commune for three days, each one a kaleidoscopic tapestry we sunk further into, toward the flower garland centrefold. We floated through the rambling, ornate camp some 2000 people strong, stoned and inquisitive, around a strangely resplendent vision of primitive man. I cannot think of a site comparable – there was no money, nor modern technology, little clothing and, in its ideal state, no ego. Each day we would twice convene, in a communing circle round the peripheries of a meadow, to eat with our 2000 brothers and sisters. This woodland lea would then transform into a hive of activity as different people would set up workshops in their area of knowledge to collaborate on improving the body, the mind, and often the commune itself. We joined some fascinating and balmy workshops, from meditation to naked yoga to resisting policing, meeting some absorbing and unusual people as well; Dutch anarchist squatters, Google AI developers, Oxford phd students and people claiming to be in touch with cosmic vibrations and frequencies. Here we were not hippies but true beatnik, people besotted with the mere idea of living, wanting to be fully immersed in all the myriad ways one may go about that. 

The dinner circle, often occurring around 10 or 11pm, was a much more spiritual experience, illuminated by the dancing licks of flames swirling through the cooling August air. It was here, before dinner, that we would take each other’s hands, forming a pulsating chain of 4000 hands, and ground ourselves before the sacred fire. On our final night we consumed the mushrooms we had smuggled and stayed by the fire, awe struck into the early hours of the morning. At 3 o’clock in the morning I found myself in a place I could not have conceived of existing were I not then there. The fire before so brandished with exuberance was now a pile of embers pulsating two metres across in the blackness of the night. Chiselled and sweat soaked hippies would occasionally strut toward the fire and throw large logs into it, in doing so illuminating their rugged visages with a cacophony of trembling embers bounding up into the night. Gliding in ethereal, seemingly timeless robes, men and women made fluid dancing moves round the outside of the fire, their strange positions quivering in the light of sparks. The 200 or so left of us all found ourselves playing some obscure Mediaeval seeming instrument or humming deeply along to shared, primal rhythms.

The next day, my UK passport now having run out of permitted days in Europe. I had to return home – a fraught process. Miles and Rory awoke at 11 in the morning to a large crowd control policing unit systematically dismantling the community, leaving in a mass exodus accompanied by men and women with shields and batons. We were each left with the distinct feeling that the strange paradoxical course of our journey was somewhat totemic, was as close to those kids’ original blindly dreaming adventures as we could hope to get.

So tomorrow night I will watch the long long skies and think of the raw land neath it, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and see the evening star drooping and shedding her sparkler dims, on the bristled forests and the rippling meadows, the shimmering lakes and the slender blackened scars of road that sweep this world, that contain within their gap infinite possibilities, a million ways of existing in the roaring vitality of life.

So I’ve ended back at my source, the last burst of Kerouac’s On the Road, 

before darkness blesses the earth, cups the peaks and folds in the shores. I think of the road.

As a footnote I would like to add, and my friends will no doubt point this out, there is probably nothing less ‘beatnik’ than spending ages writing an article justifying how you are a beatnik!

By Matty Timmis

Now I am not trying to insinuate that being a beatnik is akin to a quasi-religion or a cult; such blind faith, such lack of curiosity, must be diametrically opposed to whatever it may be. Neither am I claiming Jesus was a promiscuous, drug taking chancer scraping together a living with his questioning ideas – that’s for you to judge. What I am trying to communicate is the strange belief in the journey you have to embrace, finding satisfaction in the fact you may never reach your destination, that whatever you are travelling toward may well be a mirage. Implicit in that piece of mind is the notion that you never look in the rear view mirror, that the visceral feeling of movement is sacrosanct, that the horizon, whipping towards you, is all that really matters. As Kerouac said, “nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road”.

We met in a very suitable jumping off place, a hostel come campground in a Munich park, heaving with hippies, faded upholstery, guitars and fire pits. Miles and Rory arrived replete with a large tin containing 400g of Golden Virginia and an ambitious quantity of drugs they had smuggled up their arses. We were down and out now, so 10 euro a night to stay in the 100 man communal tent seemed exorbitant. We schemed to pitch our tent in the adjoining campground after dark, hopefully making it free. The problems began after some hash, many steins, and a dismally German dinner consisting solely of sausages; we were hopelessly drunk and it was far too dark to pitch our tent. Luckily, a French man we had been jamming with that evening offered us the underside of his truck to protect us from German weather adversities. We settled down then, taking care not to smash our heads on the axel or the shock absorbers inches above us.

Slightly groggy and a tad grimy, we convened in the morning to formulate a plan. We had come here as ‘beatniks’, with a suitably elusive goal, to find a very special place called the rainbow. We soon learnt however that we were entirely in the wrong part of Germany, the rainbow currently taking place in the black forest in the North. We had to make our way up the length of much of the country, but buses and trains were soon out of the question on account of price, besides we had a beatniks faith, the logical thing to do was to hitchhike.    

Before we departed, ebullient and expeditious, we paid a visit to Aldi where, for cultural as much as economic reasons, we decided to steal as much as we could carry. Sitting at the suburban bus stop out front we inspected our plunder, tucking into a pasta-meat tin. This was not an elegant sight, necessitating a jagged stabbing through the lid, then raising the can to one’s lips, sucking up the cold oily fluid and gelatinous pasta, hoping not to choke on the circumspect white meatballs that bobbed ominous in the broth. Such slurping debauchery felt like a probing of the nihilist depths of counterculture, feeling greasy sauce dripping down from my mouth and off the end of my chin, soaking across my shirt, all whilst 4 or 5 elderly German ladies looked on in stupefied horror. We then jay walked, much to their chagrin, across the street and fixed the traffic with our salute, outstretched thumbs of faith upon the road.

We soon found our first lift, a cherry red convertible AMG Mercedes we both sneered at and revered, our driver the kind of suave, bourgeois epitome we wanted to despise. I suspect however he picked us up for our strange spectacle; 3 shambling beatnik protégés, standing on a small road in hope of a ride 500 miles north. He certainly couldn’t take us that far, apologetically explaining he was only going about 2 miles further. No matter, it was a tantalising start to the journey, top down in the afternoon sunshine,  tearing down the street, elated with the simple speed and power of a snarling engine. Thus deposited at a junction, we made our communion with the road again.

This time we were less successful. Hours went by, our food reserves depleted, and we began to feel the burn of the road in the barren afternoon heat. To restore our faith in the journey we blasted not the frantic amphetamine jazz of our bible, but Willie Nelson’s ‘On the Road Again’ and Canned Heats ‘Going Up the Country’, dancing deranged in the oozing tarmac. Eventually a Mini pulled over and picked us up, transported us a short distance, and ejected us in a cramped and now noxious smelling car at a shopping centre 5 miles further north of Munich. With the now necessary addition of beer, we found ourselves another lift, dourly confident we would still be in Bavaria in the morning.

We were dropped amongst billowing smoke stacks and gurgling, besmirched factories; a desolate industrial estate just a stone’s throw from the first concentration camp, Dachau. At least we had beers now, and the promise of a huge truck stop nearby. In our desperation to escape Bavaria and avoid bedding down in the stark landscape, we rapped on the window of any cab that showed some semblance of occupancy, enquiring in whatever languages we could cobble together if they could take us North, all to no avail. At this point we were weary, particularly tired of lugging our cumbersome packs around with us. But our faith was not to be dimmed and the road, in its clemency, now designed us with the blessing of an abandoned Ikea trolley with which we could cart our bags.

After a final, pleading attempt at hitchhiking in the ebbing sun’s hazy light, standing stately by an arcing flyover, we accepted our hobo fate. Between the autobahn and the industrial estate lay a scraggly patch of brush and woodland, into which we flung ourselves, building a fire and bracing for the night. It was not a comfortable or pleasant sleep, our tent pitched atop a bush, the air within swarming with insects, and the nerves from a recent scabies scare passing between us. A fraught atmosphere helpfully exacerbated by a feral sounding party in the nearby lorry park, it’s strange music throbbing like a ketamine fuelled nightmare amongst the clang of heavy industry.

We felt the down and out sting implicit in ‘beatnik’ when we woke. Our faith in the road was waning, and after failing to secure a lift for the entire morning we felt prepared to abandon it, deciding in anguish to catch a train back to nearby Munich. After being bollocked by a passerby for pushing our trolley off a small bridge in sacrificial farewell, we found ourselves at the station feeling wretched. Across the track was a similarly ragged figure waving at us, squinting in the midday sun. We recognised him for one of the hippies we had met in Munich, someone also planning on attending the rainbow. We regaled him with our pitiful story. Illuminating us with a wry grin he explained he was there to catch a ride north with a girl. He offered to enquire about our situation, and soon we had secured a lift exactly where we wanted to go. We repented, the road had provided.

This lady had the trusting faith of a beatnik, happily driving with 4 men she didn’t know across the country in her friends knackered 2002 Golf. Little more than an hour into the journey, she asked if any of us could drive. I was the only one who had a licence and so she asked me if I had ever driven on European roads before, and if I was happy to drive uninsured. I assured her that I was an experienced driver, but the truth was I had only driven on the motorway once, a long time ago. I was wholly enraptured with faith in the road though, setting off zealously on the derestricted autobahn in blazing afternoon sunshine. I considered it a moral obligation to drive quickly, but, at one point, emerging from a tunnel onto a soaring empty bridge in the shimmering gold of sunset, Rory put on The Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ and my foot turned leaden. I ragged that ancient old banger to 115, shuddering and groaning as if it were about to disintegrate. 

Our faith was truly vindicated, as we swept shambolic, beatific through the sun dappled valley.