The ‘Furthur’ Bus’s Long, Strange Trip, and Why It’s Returning to San Francisco

Among the rolling hills outside Eugene, Ore., down a winding gravel path and inside a big barn sits a school bus built in 1939. Its once-blazing colors have faded. Its roof is crumbling. Its windows are cracked. The only regular occupants these days are insects.

It might look like a hunk of junk, but the muted technicolor splotches tell the story of one of the most exuberant periods of San Francisco history.

Sixty years ago, this bus symbolized the city’s counterculture revolution, the embrace of psychedelic drugs and the live-out-loud, love-your-neighbor ethos for which the era is remembered.

With the nation once again facing war, polarized politics and cultural battles, Zane Kesey thinks some of that old bus magic is needed. And that is why he has agreed to send the bus, the one he helped cover in swirls of Day-Glo paint when he was 3, back to the city that spawned a movement.

“I would love to see it adored again,” he said. “And for people to feel that pure, innocent love that came out of it.”

His father, Ken Kesey, who died in 2001, had just written the novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” when he purchased the former school bus that a large Bay Area family had tricked out with beds, benches and a refrigerator for road trips. Mr. Kesey and his free-thinking friends, called the Merry Pranksters, painted the bus in psychedelic colors, cut a sun roof into it, added a powerful sound system and installed a balcony on top.

A sign on the back read, “Caution: Weird Load.” Above the windshield, where a bus typically displays its destination, somebody painted the misspelled word, “Furthur.” And the name for the bus stuck.

The pranksters set out on a cross-country trip, smoking weed, tripping on LSD and spreading the gospel of opening your mind, man.

The journey was doblockented in Tom Wolfe’s 1968 book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” hailed by The New York Times back then as not only “the best book on the hippies,” but also “essential.” The bus and its beatnik driver, Neal Cblockady, appeared in the Grateful Dead song “The Other One,” which references “Cowboy Neal at the wheel of the bus to never-ever land.”

The bus became part of the landscape of San Francisco’s counterculture movement. In 1967, Mr. Kesey drove it into Golden Gate Park for the Human Be-In, a gathering to protest a California law banning LSD. The event was a precursor to the city’s Summer of Love later that year, during which tens of thousands of young, idealistic people poured into the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the park to protest the Vietnam War and promote hallucinogenic drugs and free love.

Those days are long gone, and San Francisco is now known more for A.I. than LSD, more for billionaires than beatniks. But Zane Kesey aims to bring some of that old flavor back — with his dad’s bus.

So later this month, it will leave the Kesey family farm in Pleasant Hill, Ore., a short drive from Eugene, for the first time since 1969. A flatbed truck will carry it down Interstate 5 to California, over the Bay Bridge and into the city. In the dead of night, when the streets are quiet, it will trundle into Golden Gate Park and into its Hall of Flowers alongside the botanical gardens.

There, starting Sept. 5, the bus will be on display as part of a show called “Forever Grateful, Golden Gate Park,” put on by the Haight Street Art Center, which aims to preserve and showcase art and cultural artifacts from the city’s counterculture movement. The exhibit will also feature Jerry Garcia’s BMW, live performers, puppetry and storytelling.

Kelly Harris, the center’s executive director, visited the farm and said that while the bus looked like a relic now, it still exuded an energy that was “magical and connective.”

Roger McNamee, the chairman of the center’s board, called the bus “the Rosetta stone of San Francisco’s counterculture” and said he hoped that those who view it, including young people who have never heard of it, see parallels to today.

“There is this expectation that we will live in a world dominated by technology, dominated by capital, where everyone is expected to play their role and have very little control over their own futures,” he said in an interview, noting Mr. Kesey and his pranksters had decided not to conform and instead forged their own wild, joyful path.

“If everybody went and sat with this bus for a bit and thought about what it meant, I think they’d be happier,” Mr. McNamee said.

Zane Kesey, 65, sure hopes so. He is the kind of man who offers hugs to strangers, wears tie-dyed shirts and talks about the bus as if it were a person with feelings.

“She’s happy, you can tell,” he said, noting that the crescent-moon-shaped silver bumper, which was restored to its front for the journey to California, resembles a smile. “She’s thrilled to have people talking about her, paying attention to her and all that she meant.”

He has never known life without the bus, he said. He remembers getting blue paint in his hair when the pranksters decorated it. And he recalls riding on its balcony as Mr. Cblockady practiced driving it, tearing around the bends a bit too fast.

“Dad was a magician, and the bus was just one of his tools,” Mr. Kesey said. “I didn’t know it was unusual. If you grow up in the circus, the circus is all you know.”

His father grew up in Oregon and moved to the Bay Area for a graduate writing program at Stanford University. As the 1960s wound down, he returned to his family farm to write, teach and raise his four children, and the bus has remained there ever since.

Zane Kesey gave a tour of the farm, including the small cemetery where his father and brother, Jed, are buried. Jed Kesey died at age 20 after a van carrying the University of Oregon wrestling team plunged off a cliff. Ken Kesey died at age 66.

Beyond the cemetery, past a thicket of trees and a now-dry creek bed, is the spot where the bus sat for many years, hidden from view with blackberry vines growing over it, before it was moved into the barn for protection.

According to Stephanie Kesey, Zane Kesey’s wife, the news anchor Walter Cronkite once came to the farm to film a story about the bus, and his cameraman plunged through a rickety wooden bridge and into the creek.

Officials with the Smithsonian have also visited, wanting the bus but leaving instead with a plywood sign that the Merry Pranksters used as a makeshift bulletin board on their bus trip and that was found covered in feathers in a chicken coop.

“A family of foxes occupied the rear seat of Furthur, moldering in a field, so Kesey decided to donate this sign instead of the bus,” reads the museum’s website.

Stephanie Kesey said the idea after the exhibit ends in late October is to store the bus in a Burning Man warehouse in the East Bay while a fund-raising campaign proceeds to restore it and permanently display it in San Francisco.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see it come back to the farm,” she said, adding that it was important for the public to view it again.

“Our need for color right now is very real,” she said. “And peace and love, exploration and kindness.”

Zane Kesey said his father would be a little sad that the bus is leaving the farm but thrilled that it is returning to San Francisco.

“You know San Francisco,” he said. “You leave your heart there.”

Stephanie Kesey grew a little misty and nodded.

“I think it’s going home,” she said.