I came to California at 15, from an East Coast town I remember mainly for gray skies and short tempers. It was 1968. Back East, I’d been receiving scattered signals of the hip California attitude—jangly songs on the radio, mostly—but now it was in hi-fi and Day-Glo, all over my high school and large parts of nearby San Francisco.

I felt delivered by that attitude. It was curious, sometimes credulous, nostalgic for eras of magic but equally dazzled by science—fractals, planets, Fibonaccis in the garden. Heliotropic, as interested in the weather as in politics. Optimistic about the short term and search me about the long. Self-decorating to the point of spectacle and then gravitating to open-minded neighborhoods because you couldn’t walk around like that just anywhere. There was a cheerfulness and sidelong humor that the mass-advertising culture couldn’t imitate no matter how too-hard it tried. Above all, there was music. Above even that was a feeling of knowing something that bound you to other people. At the time, it seemed like an attitude that could see the world through crisis and float me through life.

Where did it come from? A lot of places. But years later, I learned about one big, older, underdocumented source whose influence has rippled through the past hundred-plus years. Learning about it gave me a new window into our California ways. Also, a novel.

Bookstore-browsing in the 2010s, I came across Gordon Kennedy’s Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology from Germany to California 1883–1949. It was full of photos like the one on this page, from 1917. In some, people danced in circles, performed farm chores while naked, or lifted their faces to a sun that seemed always warm, never blinding. When they did don garments, the clothes were long, draped, colorful, and accented with feathers, glass jewels, headbands, and lots of hair. Seeing these images from fifty years before the hippie movement was like finding out how much of modern civilization the Romans had going, but with flower chains in place of aqueducts.

I did some more reading, especially books by Martin Burgess Green (Mountain of Truth). I learned about a movement in early-20th-century Germany that combined the back-to-earth philosophy of the Naturmenschen (nature-men) with expressionist art, anarchism, spiritualism, and sun worship. The renegade psychoanalyst Otto Gross’s ad hoc community of rough houses around Switzerland’s lake-village Ascona drew Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Isadora Duncan, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, and many others. Their involvement ranged from active adherence to using Gross as a model for comic characters in their work—and sometimes both.

Some people influenced by these ideas came to California, “the America of America,” in the 1910s. In a few years, there were raw-food restaurants in Los Angeles, rival spiritualist communities in Ojai, and people living in the canyons around Palm Springs, wearing loincloths, lifting rocks for exercise, and subsisting on fruit from the trees.

Digging through books of expressionist art and poetry at the UC Berkeley library was a late-in-life education. Increasingly fascinated by this chapter of California history and the birth of the cool in America, I started to wonder if there might be a fictional story here. Then characters showed up: a working-class family of four from Berlin, with the right combination of yearning and squareness to be beguiled by the Naturmenschen and follow them to San Bernardino County in 1914. I imagined them making a place called Sunland, a tenuous island of artistic and sexual freedom.

Sunland and my characters are fictional, but some parts of the real history were too good not to use. I learned, for example, that the undoing of many utopian communities was the bicycle. The kids grew up in the dirt, knowing no other life, till one day they got hold of bikes, rode to the nearest city, saw its wonders, and went home and asked their parents, “Are you kidding?” The kids in my story get a bicycle.

My research wasn’t centered only on books. I wanted to suffer along with my characters, so I walked with a full pack from San Bernardino to Redlands on an 80-degree day. In the rippling heat, I could see my kid self from the ’60s. The self I saw led to Benji, the teenager in my novel The Current Fantasy, who experiences the wild music and costumes at a Sunland Sunday concert in 1916 and thinks, “No one knows what a map of the world will look like a year from now, or civilization either. It could look like this.”

It came naturally for parts of my book to foreshadow the Beat, hippie, and contemporary eras because so many elements of those times were already there in the 1910s—the expressionist art that echoes through Burning Man and the Americana songs and modernist poetry that Bob Dylan and others combined to make a new kind of music decades later.

The dream of influencing the world by dropping out of it must have seemed painfully naïve after two world wars. But that vision keeps coming back, in slightly different clothes, adapting and refining itself, slipping in where it can. Fleeing the modern machine for a new, improved family is just too strong a fantasy for some of us to let go of. The Naturmenschen’s footprints, however faint, are always around. Once you start looking, in California especially, you don’t stop seeing them.•

Please join us on Thursday, February 20, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when author Manuel Muñoz will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Talia Lakshmi Kolluri to discuss The Consequences. Register for the Zoom conversation here.