POINT REYES LIGHT - July 23,
2015
HELLO AND GOODBYE TO PETER
COYOTE
by Jonah Raskin
To call Peter Coyote a hippie would be neither fair
nor accurate, though he spent a lot of time in the
great unwashed American counterculture and helped to
shape its members. “I don’t like the word or the
concept of hippie,” Coyote told a packed house in a
hot second-floor auditorium at Commonweal last
Sunday afternoon in Bolinas.
He said the term and the idea were used to
“infantilize” the rag-tail army of dissenters and
protesters who joined communes and turned to
alternative institutions and ways of life. “We
failed at almost everything. We didn’t end racism,
imperialism or private property, but culturally we
succeeded,” he said. “The movements we started for
slow, organic and local are still around today.”
If you can call that a message—it sounded like one
—then it was the sort of message the audience,
mostly veterans of the ’60s and ’70s, wanted to
hear. There is and was no one better to convey it
than Coyote, an author and actor, the narrator for
Ken Burns documentaries and a member of the San
Francisco Mime Troup and the Diggers. He recently
moved to Sonoma County because Marin had become too
expensive, too crowded and too busy, and too much of
an outpost of the yuppie empire, he said.
Near the end of his interview with Steve Heilig, an
environmentalist, a health care ethicist and another
veteran of the ’60s, Coyote told a story about
traffic in Marin that touched enough of a nerve to
bring down the house. A woman in a Mercedes, after
nearly driving into Coyote’s car, had told him, “Get
on your side of the road.” He replied, “There’s only
one side of the road.” Then he got out of his car
and walked away. When the woman asked him where he
was going, he told her, “You’ve gotten me too upset
to drive.”
The audience probably didn’t need to be told what he
said next: “Old timers know to pull over when
someone is coming from the other direction.
Newcomers never do.” To the audience, he added, “I
still have issues with anger.” Indeed, he does. But
now he knows that he does. Long ago, he didn’t.
The conversation between Heilig and Coyote felt in
part like a therapy session acted out in public,
with Coyote peeling away the many layers of his self
until it seemed as though he had undressed
emotionally and psychologically. He talked about his
father, who hurt him mentally and physically, his
mother, who told him he was a loser, his life on a
commune in Olema and his close encounters with free
love that he described as “a great thing until your
own wife doesn’t come home.” Part stand-up comedian,
though he sat the whole time, Coyote made fun of
himself as much as anyone else.
“I’m a Jew with an animal name,” he observed,
adding: “Coyotes are the Jews of the animal world.”
(He then made a plea for the protection and survival
of coyotes as a species.) When he switched from
English to Yiddish his accent was superb. About
Vietnam he was resolute. “We invaded their country,”
he said. On Robin Williams he was compassionate and
yet unsentimental. “His imagination failed him,”
Coyote explained. On Zen Buddhism he was fiercely
proud: “Zen Buddhists concentrate on the right here
and the right now,” he said.
For two hours, Coyote offered a lesson in how to be
present, how to listen and how to turn an interview
into a meditation. After his time on stage with
Heilig, he signed copies of his new book, “The
Rainman’s Third Cure,” a memoir in which he traces
his life from boyhood to the present day and that
makes for vivid reading.
Still, there’s nothing like seeing and hearing
Coyote in person. A born performer, a great mimic
and an elder in the tribe of ’60s veterans, he knows
how to hold himself, how to hold an audience and how
to let go and bring listeners along with him.
“I’m not a great actor,” he said, though he “loved
the bedlam of the film set.” It wasn’t bedlam at
Commonweal, but Coyote seemed to love the occasion
anyway, perhaps because it enabled him to say hello
and goodbye to the community that had sustained him
for half a century and that he’d infused with his
passion, his humor and his empathy.

[ The
Official Peter
Coyote Web Site ]
|