Long, strange trip

A group calling themselves the Merrymakers Caravan stopped in Ashvegas on Monday, parking their big buses next to the Vance Monument and inviting people aboard.

The group’s members, who were also promoting something called the Twelve Tribes, seemed to be espousing a certain religous belief system and lifestyle. There was a tent sent up, with a big banner stating “Open Forum,” and people were standing around debating Scripture.

But the group also seems to owe something to the famous psychedelic followers of Ken Kesey, who penned “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest,” freely experimented with LSD through “acid tests” and inspired the hippie aesthetic of 1960s San Francisco. The Merry Pranksters took their brightly colored bus across the country, a bus similar to the one that stopped in Ashvegas this weekend. Kesey and his group met up with everyone from Hunter S. Thompson to Jack Kerouac to Timothy Leary.

Tom Wolfe immortalized the Merry Pranksters in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” Here’s what one web site says about that period:

“Tom Wolfe did not catch up with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters until their long, strange journey was almost at an end. He met the elusive leader of the Merry Pranksters at the San Mateo county jail where Kesey ended up following his faked suicide and subsequent exile to Mexico. The psychedelic movement was just about to explode onto the world stage, and it was Kesey and his Pranksters who originated nearly every aspect of the new ‘hippie’ aesthetic bizarre dress, communal lifestyle, psychedelic drugs, light shows, and self-expressive rock and roll music. Tom Wolfe’s breakneck, frenetic style captured the wild and turbulent years when the Merry Pranksters rambled across the country and back, hiding out in Mexico, and staging some of the most outrageous public events ever conceived.”