Hippie Bro and the Mashed Potatoes

Some places are small on the map but large in memory. Big Oak Flat, California, was one of those places. By the time I was fifteen, it wasn't much more than a scattering of homes, old mining roads, oak trees, and Gold Rush history tucked into the Sierra Nevada foothills outside Groveland. The mines were mostly gone. The prospectors had moved on more than a century earlier. What remained was a place that always felt halfway between a living town and a ghost town.

Summer 1985 moved differently there. Back to the Future had just come out. Huey Lewis and the News seemed to be on every radio station in California. The Goonies was in theaters, and every kid I knew understood it immediately. Casey Kasem counted down the Top 40 every weekend while we spent our days roaming the foothills with very little supervision and absolutely no sense of danger.

My best friend Zack and I had the kind of freedom kids today probably wouldn't believe. We disappeared in the morning and came home whenever we felt like it. The foothills were our playground — we wandered old mining roads, climbed over abandoned equipment, followed forgotten trails, and spent entire afternoons exploring places that would almost certainly be fenced off, gated, posted with warning signs, and monitored by lawyers today.

One of our favorite activities was exploring old mine workings scattered throughout the hills. Looking back, this was objectively a terrible idea. At the time, however, it felt completely normal.

The Gold Rush had left tunnels, prospect holes, collapsed diggings, and mysterious remnants hidden throughout the region. Every hillside seemed to contain some forgotten piece of California history waiting to be discovered. Most of the time we had no idea who dug them, when they were abandoned, or whether we had any business being there. That was part of the adventure.

When The Goonies came out that summer, every kid I knew immediately understood it. To kids elsewhere it was an adventure movie. To us, it felt suspiciously close to a documentary. The treasure maps were mostly missing. Everything else was pretty much the same.

At the time, my mother and I lived in what could generously be described as a rustic miner's cabin. Less generously, it was a small shack that had somehow survived long enough to become historic.

Living there was my mother's boyfriend, Wayne. Technically. In reality, everybody knew him as Hippie Bro.

He wasn't my stepfather, but he was the closest thing I had to one during much of the 1980s. Looking back, that's both reassuring and mildly alarming. To be fair, he had some genuine fatherly qualities. He taught me things. He fixed things. He was around. Those aren't small things when you're a kid.

At the same time, he was also a full-fledged Sierra foothill hippie. Originally from Washington, D.C., he had somehow drifted across the country and landed in Groveland, where he met my mom. They shared a love of exploring old mining camps and forgotten ghost towns. The joke, of course, was that they eventually stopped exploring them and simply lived in one.

Hippie Bro fit perfectly into the local landscape. Long hair. Strong opinions. A healthy distrust of authority. An even healthier distrust of Ronald Reagan. And a general belief that schedules, rules, and conventional wisdom were more suggestions than requirements.

He also moved through the world in a way that matched everything else about him. He drove a baby blue late-1970s Datsun station wagon that always sounded like it was negotiating its continued existence. It broke down often. Then it got repaired often — usually by him and his best friend Crazy Irvin, neither of whom could honestly be described as qualified mechanics. The repairs tended to involve optimism, trial and error, whatever tools were available, and duct tape. A lot of duct tape.

At some point the car became less a machine and more a shared engineering philosophy. Even so, it kept running — mostly.

Hippie Bro also had opinions about politics, government, and what he generally referred to as "the system." Most of it went over my head at the time. Like many kids, I absorbed it the way you absorb weather — you don't necessarily understand it, but you know it's there.

For example, there was the bathroom library. Hippie Bro possessed what appeared to be every Playboy magazine ever printed. They lived permanently in our bathroom, as though they were part of the house's original construction. Like many men of that era, he claimed they were "for the articles."

As a teenager, I found this explanation questionable. Then I started reading them. And strangely enough, there actually were articles — interviews, essays, commentary, real writing. Long before the internet, magazines were one of the ways you accidentally learned about the wider world.

Hippie Bro's best friend was a man everyone called Crazy Irvin. That nickname alone should tell you most of what you need to know. If Hippie Bro was unpredictable, Crazy Irvin was unpredictability with assistance. Together they were part of the strange cast of characters that populated Groveland and Big Oak Flat during those years. The region itself was small. The characters were not.

Which brings us to one summer night in 1985.

My mom had gone to bed hours earlier. Zack and I were supposed to be asleep as well, but summer vacation operated under different rules. We were stretched out in the living room, half-watching television and half-existing in that late-night teenage state where sleep is optional and silence is theoretical.

Sometime after two in the morning, the front door opened. Hippie Bro had returned from the Iron Door Saloon. Now, if you grew up in Groveland, that sentence requires no explanation. If you didn't, it still probably tells you enough.

We immediately heard activity in the kitchen. Cabinet doors opened. Cabinet doors closed. Drawers rattled. Pots clanged together. Something hit the floor. Silence. Then more noise. The operation was underway.

Officially, Zack and I were asleep. Unofficially, we were conducting surveillance.

The mission appeared to involve mashed potatoes and a hot dog. Why mashed potatoes? Why a hot dog? Why two in the morning? These questions remain unanswered to this day. What mattered was that Hippie Bro approached the task with complete confidence. The confidence, unfortunately, exceeded the coordination.

And that was the problem. Watching a grown man fight a pot of instant potatoes at two in the morning, narrating the struggle to nobody, losing a battle with a hot dog — it was too much. One of us let out a laugh. Just a small one. A snort, really, the kind you try to swallow and can't.

In the kitchen, everything stopped.

The clanging quit. The muttering quit. He stopped moving entirely. And then, slowly, in the particular way a person turns when they've just realized they have an audience, he turned toward the darkness of the living room — toward the two shapes on the floor who were, officially, asleep.

Uh oh.

A moment later he disappeared back into the kitchen. We thought maybe it was over.

It wasn't.

Seconds later he came charging back into the room holding an entire pot of mashed potatoes. Not a bowl. The whole pot.

"You think that's funny?" he demanded.

Well — yes. We absolutely did.

Before we could answer, mashed potatoes flew across the room. SPLAT. Against the wall. Then again. SPLAT. Then the line that still survives four decades later:

At that point everything collapsed into chaos. We were laughing too hard to function. The next thing I knew, Zack and I were throwing mashed potatoes back. Somewhere in the escalation, hot dogs entered the conflict. No one remembers how.

Mashed potatoes covered the walls. Hot dogs flew through the air. People ducked, laughed, and retaliated. Nobody was in charge. And somehow, through all of it, my mother slept peacefully in the next room, unaware that a full-scale kitchen incident was unfolding inside her house.

Eventually the energy ran out. The laughter faded. The house went quiet again. What remained looked like evidence of something that should not have happened indoors — mashed potatoes everywhere, a pot sitting in the center of the room like a surrendered artifact, and Zack and I standing there trying to understand what we had just participated in.

Even by Big Oak Flat standards, it felt like a lot. Looking back now, it probably was. But that's the thing about growing up there. Normal was flexible. And sometimes, at two in the morning, it included mashed potatoes and a man from D.C. asking if you thought something was funny.

Forty years later, I don't remember who cleaned it up first. But I remember laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. And I remember a place where the characters were large enough that even a small kitchen could turn into a story you still tell decades later.