It is the early 1970’s and the youths of the baby-boomer generation are beginning to act upon Timothy Leary’s call to “Tune in; turn on, and drop out.” Many counter-culture youths gathered in the small college town of Bellingham. one hour from the Canadian border, had dropped out of college, including Sam.
When Aurora, 21, goes to rural Bellingham for college, she is distracted by Sam who snags her into a relationship she did not want, including his project to build a large sailing vessel with his buddies to sail away to the South Pacific, she finds herself unable to resist the boys’ control over her life in a drug-smoking commune of losers, until she comes to rely on her best friend and other women.
This project looks at a rural, USA setting of a hippie boat commune, relationships, idealism, health, sex, drugs, birth control and free sex, and various alternative, Feminist movements, anti-war activism and other themes of the mid-1970’s set in a small college town, Bellingham, WA, US in the Pacific Northwest corner of the US. It explores the social feeling and political issues of that period of time in the US by examining the life of a group of hippies who came together to build a boat with the idealistic notion of sailing around the world to escape.