Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011

Further, Ken Kesey's Bus

In 1964, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove from California to New York in a stripped-down, psychedelic school bus — an LSD-fueled adventure recounted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — the vehicle was already 25 years old. After its cross-country escapades, the bus, named Furthur (this misspelling was later corrected), sat in Kesey's farm in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Years later, he purchased a second Further and pushed the original one into the swamp. Kesey died in 2001, but the first Further lives on; the bus was exhumed in 2005.