The Adventures of Superfreak

[Music]
COURTNEY WILLIAMS: From KVMR and in partnership with FREED, this is Disability Rap.

 

CALEB DARDICK: There were very few families traveling the Hippie Trail, but there were tens of thousands of young people traveling from the West, traveling from Europe and the United States. It was a time where people were searching for hashish, but people were also searching for nirvana.

 

WILLIAMS: Today we're joined by author Caleb Dardick to talk about his new memoir, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail, and his family's connection to the independent living movement.

 

DARDICK: This idea that disabled people should somehow have a life less than able-bodied people is unacceptable, and so living a life of freedom as people with disabilities.

 

WILLIAMS: That's all coming up on Disability Rap. Stay tuned.

 

[Music]

 

WILLIAMS: Welcome to Disability Rap. I'm Courtney Williams. Our regular host, Carl Sigmond, has been promoted to executive director at FREED, so we'll be hearing less of him here on the show, but we congratulate him on his new role.

 

For today, we're joined once again by guest host Brian Snyder, FREED's emergency preparedness specialist, who brings his extensive film and television background to the show.

 

Our guest today is Caleb Dardick, here to tell us about his new memoir, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail, which was just released on September 21st. The story follows Caleb's parents, FREED founders Sam and Geeta Dardick, on a 20,000-mile trek in a Volkswagen bus with Caleb and his siblings as they follow the Hippie Trail from Amsterdam to India. After their wild adventure, the Dardick family moved to Northern California in 1973, making their home in North San Juan and ultimately building Nevada County's independent living movement.

 

The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail is a humorous and heartfelt insight into the early life of the family that pioneered disability rights in our community. The story explores disability, family resilience, counterculture, spiritual seeking, interdependence, and the mix of wonder and instability that shaped Caleb's early life. Brian spoke to Caleb last month.

 

BRIAN SNYDER, HOST: Thank you, Courtney, and welcome, Caleb Dardick. It is an honor and a pleasure to reconnect with you again. Thank you so much for being on the show. How are you?

 

DARDICK: I'm great, and thank you, Brian and Courtney, for bringing me on Disability Rap. This is really exciting to be part of FREED history and KVMR history and present. [laughs]

 

SNYDER: Absolutely. Before we get into your book, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail, can you please tell us about your connection to FREED?

 

DARDICK: Well, sure. As Courtney alluded to there, or actually said, my father and mother, Sam and Geeta Dardick, were the cofounders of FREED almost, gosh, over 40 years ago. I grew up in the independent living movement, grew up in the disability rights movement. My parents, before I was born, were civil rights activists, women's rights activists, and always very community-oriented. They brought that spirit with them to Nevada County.

 

My father did not immediately identify as a disability rights activist, which I always think is interesting, but in many ways, it makes sense because of how he grew up in the-- we can get into more detail, but when my parents shifted into disability rights activism, boy, they did it with gusto.

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: The days of putting up with subpar access in Nevada County really ended, and FREED evolved from their consciousness. There were also other people here: there already was a disability rights presence and activism that predated my parents' involvement by many years. Really, just bringing people together. There was an opportunity to form FREED. There was funding. That's a story we could go into on the call as well. Long story short, they got that funding, brought that money, and formed FREED. I'm just so proud that we share in that legacy and that FREED is still doing such great work for people with disabilities throughout Nevada County and some of the surrounding counties as well in your service area.

 

SNYDER: Thank you so much for what you've shared. It's important because Nevada County, especially Grass Valley and Nevada City, are historic old gold mining towns, so they are not designed for universal accessibility in any way whatsoever. Your father, as a wheelchair user, it must have been very, very difficult when he arrived here to get around. It's so amazing that he got into this and became a disability advocate and has helped shape this community as it is now, with truncated domes on the sidewalks and more accessibility than there was definitely in the '70s and '80s, for sure.

 

Let's start at the beginning. You had an amazing life traveling all over the world to Mexico, to India, Canary Islands. What was that like?

 

DARDICK: Oh, it was a wonderful childhood. It was full of adventure. Every day was something new. I was born in St. Louis, and by 1970, I was five years old. My parents decided, which is really detailed in the memoir, to drop out. They were very much disillusioned with where America was going, the politics of the day, and they just decided to chuck it all aside.
My father was a professor at Washington University. He was a partner in his own city planning and architecture firm, very active people. They had three little kids under five. I was the oldest. My little sister was 18 months. They decided that they would just sell it all—this was not a vacation—and that they would fly overseas.
They used the proceeds from the sale of their house to buy a new 1970 VW van we called Brünhilde,-

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: -and proceeded on this relatively open-ended trip. You can drive from Europe to India in about 10 days, 4,000 miles. We spent almost 12 months just getting to India and then another year and a half living in India, and over 20,000 miles on that poor VW.

 

SNYDER: Wow, that is incredible. What was it like for you just as a child feeling-- I mean, that's a lot of moving around and being in transit during the formative years of your life. How did you feel about all of that?

 

DARDICK: Oh, "How did you feel?" I think it varied. Sometimes it could be very claustrophobic and intense in a confined space, but there was also a community out there. There were very few families traveling the Hippie Trail, but there were tens of thousands of young people traveling from the West, traveling from Europe and the United States, North America to India. As I say in the book, it was a time when people were searching for hashish, but people were also searching for nirvana. This was a route very popularized by The Beatles and Allen Ginsberg in the late '50s and early '60s. There was an excitement about this, and so we fell on and off the Hippie Trail over and over again.
There was a period in the Canary Islands when we were living in these stone cabins with lots of other young people from all over Europe who were making leather goods and selling the leather goods. That was how they were making money. For a long time, we were looking for different ways to stay on the road indefinitely. Make and sell leather goods, buy and trade African glass beads. Constantly looking for ways to make that just traveler lifestyle be open-ended.

 

As a kid, I was surrounded by like a million babysitters because young people, probably between 17 and 25 years old, and I knew they weren't my parents, but this whole superfreak image came. I was a little kid in a Superman costume, and then I would run into these freaks who would outfit me with a big leather floppy hat, oversized sunglasses. On the cover of my book, Brian, it shows me a Polaroid of me standing in front of this stone cabin in the Canary Islands where I have the Superman shirt. I had this black floppy leather hat with white lacing, these big Jackie O, Elton John sunglasses.

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: I have leather bracelets, a leather stash bag with my initials on it, leather sandals, all of which were made by my parents or friends. I really embraced this just precocious little kid, hippie kid energy.

 

SNYDER: Right. Do you still dress that way now?

 

DARDICK: [chuckles] I have for the last two nights.

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: I've been wearing a Superman shirt to my readings. I had two wonderful readings on the ridge and last night in Nevada City Public Library, but no, I think many people will be surprised. I've been in government service and nonprofit service for a long time and certainly in the years that I worked in Berkeley and for the University of California at Berkeley, I wore a suit and tie every day.
I think some folks who know me all my life won't be surprised at all because I grew up in the countercultural back-to-the-land movement on the San Juan Ridge, but people who maybe have known me more professionally and in the last decades, this might come as a surprise.

 

SNYDER: Right. Let me go back to India. You arrived during a war. What are your memories of that time?

 

DARDICK: We arrived in India in 1972 on the eve of the Indo-Pakistani War. My father had just started his visiting professorship at the University of Ahmedabad, and our welcome packet from the university was a stack of newspapers and masking tape.

 

SNYDER: [chuckles]

 

DARDICK: They'd given us faculty housing, and we had to plaster over the windows because there were nightly blackouts. Every night the students' patrols would run up and down these faculty apartments demanding that every bit of light was off, that the windows were covered, that there were towels rolled up under the door to ensure that the Pakistani Air Force couldn't bomb us. I definitely had a great deal of fear about dying in my sleep and us being bombed. The period of being there during the war was a very intense memory for me and a great relief when the war was over.

 

SNYDER: I can imagine that you have PTSD from that, and it probably took a while to process all of that.

 

DARDICK: Hard to know how a little kid processes it. I don't have any direct memory of that, how I felt after the fact, but I definitely remember the fear, which I write about, and then the relief when the war was over.

 

SNYDER: Let's talk about your dad a little bit and your relationship with him. When did you start to understand his disability? When did that come into your consciousness?

 

DARDICK: I think I always understood it implicitly because he was always disabled. In St. Louis, we had a three-story townhouse with an elevator. We loved to play on the elevator as little kids, as you can imagine. My mom-- it had a sensor, so she would stand under it, and it would come down, and people would freak out, but of course, it would stop. [chuckles] I grew up with that.

 

My father was mainstreamed. He got born in '33, got polio in '46, and so he was mainstreamed. In high school, at first he was—we'll talk about this later—but he learned how to use crutches and braces. He was on either crutches and braces, and his wheelchair at home, but going out into the world, and especially navigating stairs, was done on crutches and braces.

 

One of the things that I wanted to do in the memoir was to really capture that child's perspective of having a disabled parent and share what was unique, something that you wouldn't necessarily notice as an adult nondisabled observer, things like clinging to his leg as you would to a parent, but feeling the steel braces underneath his slacks. Being embraced by my father in his wheelchair and just the love of being pulled close, but also the pain of the wheelchair armrest cutting into the side of my chest. Sort of the tactile, the refuge of his lap, which was a beautiful thing. Then just a contrast of his bony little legs versus this really warm and broad chest. Some of the physicality.

 

SNYDER: I'm sure his arms were ripped.

 

DARDICK: Oh, yes, totally. Pictures of my father as a young disabled athlete is very athletic from the waist up. Then also these funny polio atrophy legs with these puffy pink feet that have no calluses. Just those details I wanted to share with readers.

 

SNYDER: I can imagine always having a metal barrier between you and your father in one form or another must have been very-- I don't know. It always reminded you of his disability, I would assume. There was no way to think otherwise.

 

DARDICK: Yes. I don't know that there's any judgment around it. I think more just awareness. There's a scene in my book where I haven't seen him in a while, so I go to give him a kiss and he's on leg braces. These are rigid leg braces. There's no bending in the knee; they're straight. For me, as a little boy, I am pulling myself up his crutch, with my feet on his hard-shelled shoes, and reaching up to him, and he's reaching down to me. It's a little bit of acrobatics to it.

 

The sound of his movement is something I really remember: this sort of clump, whoosh, clump of where you plant your crutches and then sweep your legs through. Plant. There's a fluidity, but a clumping sound to the way he moved in the world on crutches and braces.

 

SNYDER: You always could hear him coming and probably gave you comfort knowing he's on his way.

 

DARDICK: Yes.

 

SNYDER: Let me ask you, he had an interesting way of going downstairs. Can you describe that?

 

DARDICK: Pretty hard to watch because it seems so dangerous, especially on steep staircases. If there was a handrail, which was ideal, he would have his hand on the handrail, and then the other hand would hold both the crutch that he's using down the step, and crosswise, horizontal, he's also holding his second crutch. He's basically planting his crutch on the down step, moving his legs off the step, and then to the next step one leg at a time, and then repeating this three-step movement over and over and over again. To my knowledge, he never fell down a staircase.

 

SNYDER: Ana Acton, the former executive director of FREED, told me that he used his wheelchair going downstairs. It sounded dangerous.

 

DARDICK: Sam would definitely jump curbs, or a few steps, but you can't go down a flight of steps in a wheelchair. He certainly could do a couple steps, yes. This is interesting because--

 

SNYDER: The way she described it, it sounded like he was flying down the stairs.

 

DARDICK: I love a well-told tale as much as anybody.

 

[laughter]

 

SNYDER: He also had a relationship with one of the founders of the disability rights movement, Ed Roberts, correct?

 

DARDICK: He did, yes. Ed and my father became friends through an interesting circumstance. My mother was a freelance writer, and we'd heard about Ed through a mutual friend. My mom thought, "Oh, this sounds like a really great subject for a magazine article." She reached out to him, and he agreed to it. Both of my parents went down to meet Ed in his Berkeley home and interviewed him in his iron lung.
Local photographer Hank Meals accompanied him and took all the photos, some of the most beautiful black-and-white photography, just phenomenal pictures of Ed with his kid, and with his attendants, and in his iron lung, and in his gigantic wheelchair that was fabricated for him. Yes, he and my dad--

 

SNYDER: His mother Zona was there?

 

DARDICK: Yes, Zona Roberts. Yes, they grew close. Ed came out to the San Juan Ridge and visited us in the cabin, which was really quite a visit and fantastic. Very good-humored guy, funny guy. Real education, though.

 

There's two quick stories about Ed and Sam that I'd like to share. The first is that there was multiple interviews. The first was when Sam said, "Wow, you should start an ILC, an Independent Living Center, in Northern California. We really don't have anything like what you're doing in Berkeley." Ed said, "You're right, you guys do need one up there, and you're going to do it."

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: Ed definitely had that leadership quality of like, "Yes, it needs to be done, and you need to do it." The other is that later in their relationship, he really pointed out to Sam that what he did as a quadriplegic, as a paraplegic, where he would jump a curb, sent the wrong signal politically. By doing it, he's basically telling non-disabled decision makers, "We don't need a curb cut because look, Sam Dardick gets around just fine." Really, when you're in community, in the disability rights community, we're looking for an accessible world for everybody.

 

My father stopped jumping curbs even though he could, and he stopped wheeling in traffic, which you would naturally do. That ended. We stopped eating at inaccessible restaurants. That was an interesting thing. My mother writes about this in an article she wrote called Confessions of an Access Junkie, a really funny article. She talks about going out to dinner in Nevada City, and I won't embarrass the restaurant.

 

SNYDER: [laughs]

 

DARDICK: I don't even think they're in business anymore. They went out for an anniversary dinner, and Dad excused himself at some point, towards the end of the dinner, to use the restroom. He gets to the restroom door, and it's too narrow for his wheelchair to pass. He drops out of his wheelchair, scoots across the bathroom floor, and uses the toilet. This was not something that hadn't happened before, but this time, for my mother, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. No way.

 

This is probably 1980, and they've already been married since '64. "We've been married 15 years; we have three kids. No, no, not going to stand for this." She starts doing research and realizes that California has all sorts of laws that should prevent this thing from happening. She and my father joined the Community Access Network, which is a volunteer network, which was basically reporting and citing lack of access in the community. They started by trying to bring this forward to the Nevada City Council, which at that point was meeting in an inaccessible location. One of the things I love about activism is that people sometimes will say, "Oh, you can't ask too much of activists." I actually feel the opposite of that. Because as people get more outraged by what they see, they want to do more.

 

The job of a community organizer is to provide more and more opportunity for people to have their voices heard and to be effective. That's really what my parents began doing and ultimately did with FREED. Their own process was becoming local volunteers, testifying local, then testifying in Sacramento by becoming part of a statewide network, going down for big protests for accessible transportation in San Francisco. It's just—What do you call that? It's just one thing after another—snowballs, I think is the word. That's what happened.

 

When Ed Roberts first alerted them that there was state money to form an ILC, it needed to be applied for by the county board of supervisors. Their request that the county apply for the funds was rejected on the basis that there really aren't any disabled people in Nevada County.

 

One of the first things that my parents did was go to the Nevada County Fair. I think they were just there at the fair for fun, like anybody. My mother started noticing, "Oh, there's a guy in a wheelchair. There's someone." There are visibly disabled people that they started spotting. Then they just went up to them. Mom pulls out a notebook and starts taking their name and number. I think over the course of the three-day fair, they identified over 1,000 people with visible disabilities who were Nevada County residents and brought that information back to the county. That ultimately broke down the reluctance to go forward and seek the funding, which was readily available.

 

SNYDER: I feel that we, as a community, owe you and your family a great debt of gratitude for helping create change for better access for people with disabilities. The work that you and your family have done has really helped everyone. I can attest to it as somebody who's blind, been so grateful for sidewalks that were put in. It's much easier to get around. It's all due to the work you and your family have done. Thank you.

 

DARDICK: I appreciate you saying that. I don't think that my parents would like to hear it said that way, just because it was so much of a community effort and so much of building coalition, and nobody does anything alone. Certainly, myself, I can't take credit for anything at all other than being an ally. Thank you for the sentiment of that. I do think that bringing people together was a strength of my parents as community organizers and building a consumer-based board, which means if people don't know, 50% or more of the board members are people with disabilities, and then really serving the community, and then doing it in multiple ways, not just as political activism, but through wheelchair sports, through tennis, through basketball, and through education, barrier awareness training, things that we might not do today because I think we're more sophisticated in terms of activists.

 

We were pretty radical in the early '80s, just getting elected officials to understand. Today, we know that awareness is not enough. You need awareness plus action. It built. It built over time. Yes, I'm very proud that our family contributed to this legacy. Thank you, FREED. Keep it up.

 

SNYDER: Thank you. I can imagine it must have been really difficult for your father growing up in the silent generation. My father was born the same year. Just knowing him and how his thinking was about disability and basically not really wanting to recognize my brother and I's disabilities in any way, I can imagine that him experiencing it, and also experiencing the prejudice and just rudeness of people and how they talk about disability from the 1930s all the way through the '80s and so on. It must have been really difficult for both of your parents. I'm sure to think about it today; somebody getting out of their wheelchair and dragging themself across a bathroom floor is really disturbing to think about. That was the norm for your father.

 

DARDICK: I could read an excerpt if you're interested from the book that captures some of that background with him. He also grew up where the idea about disability was: you did everything you could to overcome barriers and what was called mainstreaming, to be as much like an able-bodied person as possible, hence the crutches and braces, for example. Would you like me to read something from the book?

 

SNYDER: Please.

 

DARDICK: I'll tee this up. It's a chance for the listeners just to know a little bit more about my dad as a kid. I'll just jump right into it.

 

"Look, Caleb, do you recognize your father? Uncle Steve, Dad's younger brother, was showing me an old home movie he'd recently transferred onto VHS. I must have been 10, visiting St. Louis on my own for the first time. It was an out-of-body experience for me to watch this sepia-toned Sammy, as they called him, my father without his wheelchair. Dumbstruck, I stared as Sammy played stickball outside his house on Stanford Avenue with his brothers and the neighborhood kids, clean-cut boys with Brylcreemed hair and slicked-back pompadours.

 

The herky-jerky footage was taken during the summer of 1946 at one of the family's Sunday barbecues. It was a muscular, confident, postwar era when my dad, an upbeat 13-year-old, All-American Jewish kid who idolized FDR, worshiped the Cardinals, loved to eat barbecued ribs, and grew up in suburban St. Louis, could walk. Not long after this footage was taken, Sammy woke up feverish, shaking. They rushed him to the hospital. The doctor's prognosis was grim. They didn't know if he'd pull through. He was paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to breathe on his own, they enclosed him in an iron lung for months. He slowly regained the use of his upper body, but he was now a paraplegic, permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

 

For two years, from age 13 to 15, Dad lived at the Veterans Administration Rehabilitation Center. He never spoke of the painful spinal taps, the many falls, or the indignities of being a teenage invalid. Instead, he entertained us kids with stories about cafeteria food that was so terrible he and the other guys used the hard, inedible meatballs as hockey pucks. He'd give us these play-by-play actions as he and the other men, mostly older World War II veterans, rode their metal gurneys with canes and crutches, AKA hockey sticks, spraying the drab VA walls with tomato sauce as they whacked the hard-packed beef orb toward the nurse's station net, sending the starched nurses scrambling for cover.

 

Perhaps it was Dad's good nature and complete lack of self-pity that allowed him to slip in with these war-hardened men, men who left arms and legs behind on Iwo Jima and the beaches of France, and like him, faced new challenges and hard adjustments. Mom always said that Dad gained his rare ability to connect with people from all walks of life without prejudice or judgment from his time there, and later as an All-American wheelchair basketball champion.

 

He was not only athletic, but smart. When Dad returned home from the VA, he was mainstreamed into public high school. Although his able-bodied friends carried him up staircases in his wheelchair at first, he soon learned how to use crutches and leg braces to hoist himself up and down steps, his withered legs encased between steel bars and leather straps. Good-natured and positive, Dad was a popular figure on campus. He ran and won the election for senior class president. His campaign slogan was "Roll Along with Sam," and his parents' basement was crowded with student volunteers making campaign posters.

 

I have this picture in my head of Dad at 25. It's 1958. He's graduated from Washington University with a bachelor's degree in architecture and is off to California to get his master's degree in city planning at UC Berkeley. He's behind the wheel of his green 1949 Oldsmobile Coupe Convertible, driving solo, headed west. The top's down, his folded E&J wheelchair pulled tightly behind the driver's seat, Kerouac's On the Road riding shotgun. He rests his arm on the window frame, hand light on the steering wheel. He's wearing stylish Ray-Bans and smoking a pipe. It's clear, he's beaming.

 

By day, he studied with Cal's leading thinkers in urban planning. At night, he was in North Beach, discovering the beat scene, digging poetry readings at City Lights and jazz and late-night bars. When he returned to St. Louis in 1960, his career as an architect, city planner, and then professor took off. He'd embraced President Kennedy's challenge, "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country," determined to help alleviate urban poverty.

 

Sociable, he dated and played the field. Many years earlier, Dad had wanted to marry Ruthie, his high school sweetheart, and even turned down an undergraduate scholarship to Dartmouth to stay with her in St. Louis, but her parents, who had humored the teen romance, quickly quashed the idea that the two would marry, certain that Ruthie would regret marrying a cripple who they assumed couldn't have children. Barely 19 then, this devastated him and shook his confidence he would ever find love, but as a busy 30-year-old professional, he enjoyed his independent bachelor lifestyle.

 

When he asked Carol Berger Jr. out on a date in the summer of 1963, he was taken with her right away. Over wine and candlelight at an outdoor bar along the Mississippi River, she didn't hesitate to ask him questions about his disability, which was the first time any date had done so. He found her bluntness attractive. He told me he'd never met anyone as smart and interesting. We started talking, and we never stopped."

 

SNYDER: That was beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that. That's incredible. I was thinking about North Beach. My father used to be a professional comedian. He was friends with Lenny Bruce. I wonder if your father ever went to the Hungry I and saw my father perform. That would have been interesting.

 

DARDICK: Wouldn't that be cool? I love the idea that our fathers' lives would pass like that.

 

SNYDER: Yes. They're the same age, so that could have been possible. I have two final questions I want to ask you. One, you talk about going to Mexico and your mother's mental illness. Can you talk about that experience for you growing up?

 

DARDICK: Just so the listeners understand, my mother was undiagnosed with bipolar disorder most of her life, and it wasn't until she was in her mid-to-late 40s that she received the diagnosis. That meant, for me, the first 20-plus years of my life, there was no explanation for her—what we characterize as mood swings—that were quite dramatic. When my mother was up, she was fantastic. She was our best friend. We called her Mama Rocker. She couldn't be more exciting, engaging, outgoing, and fabulous. Everyone loved her.

 

The flip side of bipolar is this deep depression, and a deep depression that could sometimes leave her bedridden for days at a time. Traveling in a small VW van with someone going through those type of occasional swings could really be destabilizing and hard to understand how somebody who, one night, you're dancing ecstatically around a bonfire and having this wonderful evening of music, fun, and laughter, and then days later, "Don't talk to me. I'm just under the covers. Leave me alone."
As a kid, I would go to my father and go, like, "Why is this happening?" My father would say, "Oh, that's just your mom. Don't let it bother you," because he didn't have any language for it either, and also didn't have a diagnosis. In retrospect, I think the stigma against mental illness that still exists but was very intense then, played a part on two levels. One, coming from "a good family," you don't go to psychiatrists. That would be embarrassing for the family. People might have observed behavior, but no one said anything or put two and two together on her family's side.

 

Honestly, before she married my father, there were already signs. She dropped out of Wellesley in her 20s, which is when bipolar often manifests. There were plenty of signs, but nobody could see them because of either their prejudice, lack of awareness, or education around it. Then as we moved into the counterculture, in the counterculture, we were all crazy, and so the idea of labeling someone as crazy was also considered straight judgmental. These two competing straight mainstream societies, negative attitudes, plus the defensive attitudes, I think in some ways really delayed anyone helping that. I don't think my mother saw it either. She just said she's depressed.

 

SNYDER: I understand because I know my father was most likely bipolar as well. The idea of getting treatment meant you were insane during his lifetime, growing up in the '30s. I have bipolar too, as well. I can imagine it must have been very confusing and stressful growing up with a bipolar parent. Thank you so much for sharing that. I have one final question. How would you define freedom as your parents knew it, and how you defined it growing up, and how you define it now?

 

DARDICK: [chuckles] Oh, what a wonderful question. I think part of the freedom is that willingness to try something completely new, to take great risk, which I think is really embodied in my parents' decision in 1970 to drop out, that willingness to be open to whatever comes. That's certainly freedom on steroids and independence. I think the idea of living without fear and trying new things, which I think that embodied, all the way through moving to Nevada County, buying 50 acres of raw land, and, as my mother likes to say, with an organic gardening book in one hand and a shovel in the other, figuring out how to put it in gardens and orchards, and build wells, and build a home. Just that adventurous spirit of trying something new.

 

I think a lot of people hesitate, even when they're unhappy or stuck, to claim their true path and what would maybe make them happy if they tried it. I do think on a personal level, there's that. I think freedom politically. My parents, as I shared, came up through the civil rights movement. I think that really shaped them for their disability rights activism. The same thing: this idea that disabled people should somehow have a life less than able-bodied people is unacceptable, and so living a life of freedom as people with disabilities.

 

My mother did not shy away from her diagnosis when she got it. Not only did she get the medical help and therapeutic help that she needed, she actually then got a degree and became a licensed marriage and family counselor, being open about her disability with her clients, and even going on the radio, KVMR and KNCO, and being very visible with her disability. I do think there's a spirit of freedom in that. Not being held back, embarrassed, defined, or confined in any way.

 

I think, for me, I've had a professional life that has allowed me to have many, many different roles, and I'm really proud of that. I'm proud of everything I've done: working for the county most recently, SYRCL before that, being self-employed, now becoming a coach and leadership consultant, working for the mayor, working for the University of California. I think that value of as much as I would love the pension of having 30 years in the same job, especially now, I also feel like I grew up in a culture that valued experimentation, freedom, trying new things. I definitely internalized that and have lived that as well.

 

SNYDER: Thank you so much. I feel as if we've only scratched the surface, and I would love to learn so much more. I know there's so much more to talk about, but maybe we can talk about it in a future episode. How does that sound?

 

DARDICK: I'd be delighted.

 

SNYDER: Fantastic. Once again, can you tell us the title of your book and where is the best place to order it from?

 

DARDICK: Wonderful. The book is called The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail. It is available wherever books are sold. We have wonderful independent bookstores here in Nevada County. I certainly encourage ordering through the bookstores. However, if that's not convenient, you can order it online, bookshop.org, of course, Amazon, Barnes & Noble. If you want to learn more about my book and see photos from our road trip, calebdardick.com.

 

SNYDER: Fantastic. Calebdardick.com. Go visit. It's a wonderful book, and I hope you all get it. It's really amazing. Thank you so much, Caleb. We really appreciate your time and being here. Once again, it's an honor and pleasure to have you on Disability Rap.

 

DARDICK: Thank you so much. It's been a real privilege.

 

WILLIAMS: That was Brian Snyder's interview with Caleb Dardick. His book, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail, is available from your local independent bookstore, online at bookshop.org, or wherever books are sold. Audiobook version coming soon. For our listeners in the St. Louis, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon, areas, you can meet Caleb at the two remaining book tour events, October 15th and 29th.

 

To find out more, check out calebdardick.com, C-A-L-E-B-D-A-R-D-I-C-K .com.

 

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WILLIAMS: That does it for the show. Disability Rap is produced and edited by a lively crew, including Carl Sigmond, Abby Richards, Galen Beebe, and me, Courtney Williams. Special thanks to Brian Snyder for hosting today's show. You can go to our website, disabilityrap.org, to listen to past shows, read transcripts, and subscribe to the Disability Rap podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcast by searching Disability Rap on any of the major podcast platforms. We're brought to you by KVMR in partnership with FREED. We're distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. I'm Courtney Williams for another edition of Disability Rap.

 

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