Author: Ben Brazil
E-mail: benbrazil99@yahoo.com
Title: “Dear Mr. Vagabond”: Letters to a Hippie Guidebook Writer
Abstract:
Between 1969 and 1983, a hippie writer named Ed Buryn published a series of
guidebooks to the low-budget, long-term, drifting style of travel that he termed
“vagabonding.” Most importantly for this paper, his major titles – Vagabonding in
Europe and North Africa and Vagabonding in America – also named travel as a
religious practice. Taking an increasingly New Age perspective, Buryn described
vagabonding as means to rupture old patterns of perception, release Energy, and
expand consciousness. At the same time, his books also situated travel within a
broader religious trend – the emergence of what sociologists have described as
religious “seeking.” While not neatly definable, seekers tend to reject institutional
religion and ascribed identity in favor of individualized quests for sacred experience
and authentic selves.
This paper, however, touches only briefly on Buryn’s guidebooks and their
ruminations on the spiritual meaning of travel. Instead, it examines responses to
his works – responses reflected in approximately 250 letters (and some travel
journals) that readers sent to Buryn in the 1970s. Buryn provided me access to
these letters, held in his personal archives, in June 2010.
The letters provide something new: fine-grained evidence of how the advent of a
hippie “tourist imaginary” participated in a change in the broader American “social
imaginary,” to use philosopher Charles Taylor’s term. Sociologists generally agree
on the nature and timing of this larger shift – the countercultural era catalyzed a
move toward religious “seeking” among the broader American middle classes. Still,
historical research is only beginning to explore the specific channels that carried the
counterculture’s values beyond a relatively small group of hippies. Buryn’s guides,
fairly representative of hippie travel writing, suggest travel practices as one such
channel. But letters to Buryn provide something more – evidence of the various
sorts of readers exposed to his hippie tourist imaginary, as well as the varied ways
they reacted.
After summarizing Buryn’s imaginary, I begin by describing the diverse people who
responded to his work. Although the bulk of the writers appear to be single people
in their teens and twenties, for example, parents and 30-something housewives also
wrote. Men and women wrote in similar numbers, and letters came from all over
the United States and Canada.
Second, I examine reader responses, which vary with life experience. Many letters,
for example, come from the institutionally “trapped” – high school students, military
personnel, and at least one prison inmate – who often thank Buryn for helping them
dream. Others come from veteran “vagabonds,” who (among other things) thank
Buryn for articulating their experience. A few, bristling with intensity, come from
hitchhikers who write of the illuminations that come between rain storms and
swollen tonsils. Yet even amid such differences, most writers embrace at least some
aspects of Buryn’s spiritual outlook, especially the core seeker values of individual
freedom and self-determination. Still some also view Buryn as a node in a hippie
“underground” community – a network for sharing tips and personal connections.
Finally, I note evidence of the strains within the hippie tourist imaginary. Such
tensions cluster around gender and sexuality. A handful of female hitchhikers, for
example, address the balance between their fierce love of hitchhiking’s “existential
freedom” and their knowledge of the real dangers women face on the road. In the
end, then, this collection of letters shows that Buryn’s hippie tourist imaginary
resonated with a diverse group of readers, almost all of whom used it to frame their
individual experiences, fears, and desires.
Author Bio:
Ben Brazil is a Ph.D. candidate in Emory University's Graduate Division of Religion,
where he is in the American Religious Cultures track. His main interests are in
history of religions and "spiritualities" in America, the sociology of religion, and the
multi-disciplinary study of travel and tourism. His dissertation focuses on
"spirituality" and travel in the 1960s and 1970s, especially as it relates to youth
culture and the counterculture.