During the early 1970s, I lived in a fun house on Lake Valhalla in New Jersey. A group of young people in their 20s, friends from college, had rented a big house on a small lake. We were the only residents on this road who were not a biological family; thus, we were not allowed to join the lake club and swim at the beach. We sneaked in swims and canoe trips after dark. We skated on the frozen lake at night. The neighbors referred to our home as the “hippie house.”

This space was fabulous: huge living room with a fireplace and a high cathedral ceiling, four bedrooms, (two upstairs, two downstairs), a big sun porch with a piano and drum set in the corner.

This was our music room where residents and guests sang and jammed on guitars and bass. We even had a sax player. Our informal house band played at parties. We roommates ate dinner together most nights in the dining area off the sun porch, like a family, a chosen one.

Since the house was so cool and spacious, we four roommates, (which varied over the years), threw many parties with lots of beer and wine and marijuana, which was not as strong back then.

Nor was it legal, like today. Since it was the 1970s the parties always included psychedelics, like acid and mushrooms.

One summer night, party going full swing, the band finished jamming—we did lots of Grateful Dead. I’d put away my guitar and everyone was dancing to party tapes in the living room. Some people were tripping. John, my roommate who was in charge of the house and collected the rent money, came up to me. I was drunk and stoned, trance dancing, when John gestured for me to talk to him privately in the kitchen.

“Hey Kate, I’m really scared. I’m worried about Terry because he went swimming in the lake by himself and he’s not back yet. I’m afraid he drowned. He should have been back by now.”

“How long ago did he leave?”

“Long enough that he should have been back.”

“But Terry is a good swimmer” I said, trying to reassure us both. “He swims there a lot. It’s a lake, not the ocean. No rip tides. It’s calm.”

“But Kate, he’s tripping his brains out,” said John. “I’m going to the shore to see if I can see him.”

“It’s pitch dark, you won’t be able to see anything. Want me to come with you?”

“No, you stay here. Watch the house. People are wrecked.” John left me in charge and told me not to tell anyone else his concern for fear it would ruin the party.

John returned about twenty minutes later. “Nothing,” he said, “and I kept calling his name, walking around the lake.”

Now I got really scared. “Maybe we should call the police.”

And then we looked at each other and took in the scene in the house and decided that was definitely not a good idea. Too many drugs here. People could get busted, lose their jobs.

I was upset and went upstairs to my bedroom to meditate or pray for Terry but when I opened the door, I saw a couple kissing and hugging on my waterbed. They looked up. It was Joe, my former boyfriend, with a man I knew. We’d broken up after he’d come out to me.

I shut the door and went back downstairs. By now, word had somehow spread that Terry was missing. The music had been lowered, dancing stopped, guests were moping around. This woman was crying.

John and I were standing helplessly in the kitchen when all of a sudden Terry came bouncing up the stairs and into the kitchen, dripping wet, shaking the water out of his shoulder length hair.

“Wow, that was such a great fucking swim,” he said, as if nothing had happened.

I grabbed Terry and hugged him. “Thank God you’re alive. You’re OK, you’re OK,” I chanted, shaking with relief.

“Of course I’m alive,” said Terry, totally oblivious. “What’s going on?”

“You asshole,” said John, hugging his friend, “You scared the shit out of us. We thought you drowned.”

As Terry walked from the kitchen into the living room, applause broke out. People started clapping and cheering. The party was back on.

“Turn the music up,” I shouted. And the Stones blasted from the speakers.

The party lasted all night. When I got up the next day at noon, bodies were collapsed on the floor and draped over the couches. The house was a mess—ashtrays spilled over onto the end tables, bottles and cans littering the floor. I made a cup of coffee and started to clean up.

In my last year at the hippie house, 1975, I came out and moved to a railroad apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen, located on First Avenue around the corner from St. Marks Place. The rent was $100. At the time, my ex-boyfriend, Joe, was a reporter and editor who launched my writing career at The Aquarian Weekly, an alternative paper. He soon followed me to Manhattan and we remained close friends until he died of AIDS.

Terry, always popular and charismatic, went on to land government jobs in two hip towns in New Jersey. John had a long career as a high school language arts teacher and sports coach. He and his wife drove into the Village from rural New Jersey to attend a soiree for my first book.

Years later, when I told my therapist about the good times partying in the hippie house with my friends, she had a different take.

“You were depressed and confused, drinking too much and taking too many drugs,” said Dr R. “It’s a miracle that nothing terrible happened to anyone.”