He reminded me that San Francisco in the late sixties may as well have been another country, so different were its customs and mores. I was sympathetic, to a point. By then I’d spoken to so many people about this period that it felt at once totally near and completely alien. So many of my sources, even the most reliable, had trouble explaining their feelings and motivations, not just because so much time had passed but because some schism stood between them and the past. It was irreparable—wherever the sixties had come from, they were gone, even in memory.
