California, the saying goes, is the land of fruits and nuts. We’re weirdos out here — devil-may-care oddballs, flower children, homos. That’s why I came west for school. I liked the idea of myself as a Californian. For that matter, it’s why people have always gone west, if you believe the mythology. Across the ocean, westward the wagons, over the mountains, to some new Eden.

There’s something tragic about the concept of a pioneer. What the pioneer makes can’t survive. Blazing a trail, by its very nature, invites others to pursue, to fill up the new space, and then suffocate its original, idiosyncratic character. Following pioneers in their wagons are workmen in their tractors, like characters in a Joni Mitchell song, paving paradise.

I’ve heard that Palo Alto wasn’t always like it is now. Before the Silicon Valley boom, this was something of a real college town. In fact, its predecessor, the town of Mayfield, had earned itself a reputation for rowdiness with its 13 saloons. The Free People’s Free Music Company used to play weekly live performances at Lytton Plaza, at the top of University Avenue. There was once an organization called Citizens Against Legislated Meanness, which advocated for Palo Alto’s homeless.

In other words, Palo Alto used to be a lot more like Santa Cruz. And while I love the Internet as much as anyone else, the effect of the new prosperity has been the transformation of this valley, the hills and forests that shadow its edges, and the towns that sprawl across it, into a suburban desert, a dot com Dust Bowl. The new Silicon Valley hasn’t been without its good sides, of course — the tech companies have brought an economic and technological boom and diversity undreamed of decades ago.

Head west, past 280 and the Dish, and halfway to the ocean, up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and you arrive at La Honda, where the ghost of Ken Kesey sits, watching Silicon Valley spread out below. This is where the myth of the West was adapted to modern life; with no geographical frontier left, Kesey and his friends made a new cultural West instead.

Kesey was a fellow in Stanford’s Stegner creative writing program, where he wrote “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” a novel about an insane asylum and, by metaphorical extension, about “The Combine” — institutions of authority that use invisible social methods to suppress individuality. A founding father of American Hippie-ism, Kesey and his friends, the Merry Pranksters, spent much of the ‘60s throwing huge parties at his place in La Honda. The house band was the Grateful Dead, who, in their earlier incarnation as The Warlocks, used to play high school dances at Paly.

They were an odd bunch. The Merry Pranksters drove back and forth across the country in a tie-dyed schoolbus, emblazoned with the cryptic destination of “Furthur.” Kesey himself, on the run from the law, faked his own suicide with a note that read, “Ocean, Ocean I’ll beat you in the end.” They were immature, but, aside from the massive drug abuse, these were deeply weird people in the most benign way, possessed of a once-in-a-century sense of fun that knew no boundaries and which, by some luck, made its way here, making Stanford what it is. The conveyor belt from La Honda down the hill to Stanford included people like David Harris, who lived in Columbae, was elected president of the ASSU on a pot-legalization platform, went to jail instead of Vietnam, and married Joan Baez.

I’m not here to indulge in ‘60s nostalgia, but to whatever degree Stanford is defined by its irreverence, I suspect we can trace it back to that house in La Honda. Hunter Thompson described the scene as “the world capital of madness. There were no rules, fear was unknown, and sleep was out of the question.” It sounds just like how Stanford must seem to a freshman.

There are particular, peculiar institutions that still represent Stanford’s frail spirit of madness and differentiate us from Northwestern or Duke or Harvard — the co-ops, the Chappie’s obscurantist jokes, absurd theme parties, the Band and its fixtures (the Tree, Band Run). Permitted by a weak disciplinary apparatus and nourished by the good weather, Stanford traditions have captured those qualities that are mythically best about the American West: individualism, nonconformity, freethinking. But it’s a shrinking oasis that we’ve got in this increasingly parched landscape — Paradise Lost along El Camino Real’s 50 miles of strip mall.

Joan Didion wrote that in California, the “mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

We’re out of space for parking lots and strip malls. Stanford’s free spirit is wispier now than it was even 10 years ago, and almost surely it will be a faint trace of its former self in 10 more. To resist the effort to corporatize and homogenize our home, and to cherish what is unusual about the place where we live, is what’s left to us. There’s a lot to hold on to, still: the informality of easy lives, the mountains covered in redwood forests older than the Himalayas, the Pacific beach where you can see elephant seals rutting and sparring, the Mission and the Gilroy Garlic Festival, foggy San Francisco and funky Santa Cruz. This place still has got more character than almost anywhere else in America. It’d be a shame for it to host a generic university.

Gabe hopes you’ve enjoyed this column. Go see the elephant seals at Ano Nuevo, and send him descriptions of their molting coats at gwinant@stanford.edu.