LOCAL POET KEEPS KESEY LEGACY ALIVE

LA HONDA -- The redwood trees surrounding Ken Kesey's old house seem
strangely peaceful for all they've been through.

Few signs remain of the Merry Pranksters' camp in the woods, their
1960s LSD parties and sound experiments immortalized by Tom Wolfe in
"The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

A blue splash of paint on a tree trunk is the last vestige of the
Pranksters' forest-wide paint job, once a Day-Glo cathedral of pink,
blue and green.

A long wire disappearing into the branches of another redwood marks
their habit of setting microphones on the forest floor to pick up
the sounds of scurrying woodland creatures -- and the occasional snooping cop.

Together with Pescadero's Venture Retreat Center and the Esalen
Institute in Big Sur, the Kesey home is one of the last living
symbols of the Human Potential Movement, a psychotherapy-based
branch of hippie culture born in the Bay Area.

Local poet Terry Adams was cognizant of the history of Kesey's
house, known as "The Nest," when he bought it in 1997. He preserved
everything except the floors and wall paneling. The living room
still contains a Day-Glo piano decorated with a bright collage of
photographs and magazine clippings -- images from the Kama Sutra,
pictures of Kesey in drag, and photos of counterculture icons Allen
Ginsburg and Timothy Leary.

Adams studied Kesey's first book, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo'sNest,"
in graduate school in the 1960s. In 1977, he led a writer's group at
Prometheus, a Palo-Alto based offshoot of the Human Potential
Movement. There he met Vic Lovell, the founder of Prometheus and a
friend of Kesey's who helped Adams buy the house in 1997.

On a sunny afternoon in 1999, Kesey held a ceremony in a circle of
redwoods with Adams, his wife, and several of the original Merry
Pranksters to bless the house. He died two years later.

Sitting by the fire, Adams reflected on how much had changed since
the years that Kesey's drug experiments seized the public imagination.

"One thought is how incredibly dramatic it was. The Kesey part of
the Human Potential Movement was doomed to burn itself out pretty
quickly. But I think there's a slower, more enduring impulse,
particularly out here in California, to keep the Human Potential
Movement alive," said Adams.

Lovell, a resident of Menlo Park, has a different opinion about
Kesey's influence.

"I don't think Ken was interested in the Human Potential Movement,
or the peace movement, or the New Left. Ken was a movement unto
himself," he said.

Lovell, Kesey and many of their friends were early subjects of
government-run LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushroom tests conducted
by the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital in the late 1950s; eventually,
those drugs found their way into the Bay Area hippie scene.

Those tests, which were also conducted at the Stanford University
Medical School, formed the basis for "Cuckoo's Nest," which Kesey
dedicated to Lovell.

"I thought he was a little too overly persuaded by his vision and
the world the way he saw it. I tried to be a rationalist in relation
to him," recalled Lovell.

Prometheus, which Lovell founded in a Palo Alto commune in the
1960s, used psychodrama, or spontaneous theater role playing, to
address personal trauma and interpersonal conflicts. Many of the
groups that met at Prometheus held retreat weekends at the Venture
Retreat Center in Pescadero.

One men's group founded in those days, to which Adams belongs, still
meets at Venture on a regular basis.

Adams tries to honor Kesey's legacy with one wild house party a year
with music and poetry, which always lasts until the police come by
to break it up.

"As far as I know, no one has dropped acid at our parties -- except
maybe once," joked Adams.