......................................................................................................................................................... In the 1950s, when the Cold War was at full boil with the poisonous rhetoric of Congressional witch-hunting, in coffee houses and bars in New York and San Francisco fresh voices were broadening the range of our cultural veracity. Then, one day in the the mid-1960s, "two bearded young hikers traveled along a ridge in Oregon's Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, and the creative spirit of the two coasts walked together. One was of slight build, with a scholar's Vandyke and close-cropped red hair hidden beneath an Alpine climber's hat. His companion, broader in stature, wore the dark curls that surrounded his balding crown at shoulder length, and sported a full, flowing beard." [R. Phillips, "Forest Beatniks"and "Urban Thoreaus." New York, 2000] In the 1970s, the hiker "with a scholar's Vandyke and close-cropped red hair " looked back to when "In the spiritual and political loneliness of America of the fifties, you'd hitch a thousand miles to meet a friend." [G. Snyder, The Old Ways. San Francisco, 1977] Odysseus of the Open Road has morphed into Polyphemus of the Rush Hour. Now even poets usually stay home and phone, text, or Skype a distant friend. Although the last romantic American literary movement has become the stuff of dissertations, I can still hear one of the best minds of that generation chanting: "No imperfection in the budded mountain / Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together, / daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble, / green atoms shimmer in grassy mandalas..." [A. Ginsberg. From, "Wales Visitation."]