SHE NEVER GOT OFF THE BUS

PLEASANT HILL, Oregon - "Come on and see The Bus," ordered Mountain Girl over her shoulder as she rushed hell-for-leather down the back steps of Ken Kesey's red barn home. With steely determination, she continued her way across a wide expanse of unmown grass with Kesey's black spaniel Happy yapping at her heels. A buxom, big-boned woman wearing green velvet pull-on pants, a shapeless black wool sweater and a voluminously floppy, long black coat, Mountain Girl is a force of nature - difficult to ignore when she's under sail. The Bus had been abandoned in a muddy, mossy swale behind the Kesey compound for three years. Thirty years ago, in the dawning of psychedelia, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, that tatterdemalion pre-hippie/post-Beat caravansary of performers, musicians, poets, magicians, gypsies, tramps and fools crammed into their gaily-painted 1939 International-Harvester, and drove their way into the American consciousness on the rollicking prose of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And now, The Bus was retired. Left to moulder in the weeds. And Mountain Girl wasn't sure how she felt about it.

Happy the dog, her head splotched with a huge drop of blue paint, flushed a covey of peacocks which rose above the trees and the parked bus, scattering rainbow feathers and squawking bloody murder. The wind blew the cottony clouds around in a brisk Oregon morning and Mountain Girl, oh-so-daintily for her bulk, padded across a slippery board laid to traverse a narrow creek.

And there it was. The Bus, with "Furthur" written like a title across the top. The hood was open. The engine had been cannibalized for parts for Furthur II, the "new bus" that Kesey was taking on what fellow Prankster Kenneth Babbs was calling the Grand Furthur Tour to the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. The riotous paint job was murky and peeling, as if the bus had leprosy.

Mountain Girl walked around it, peering in the windows. She tried to get in the door but a tree had grown up and blocked her passage. She uttered a huge sigh. "I always get emotional about the old bus. It was such a special thing," she says. "I felt bad when it was taken down into the woods and abandoned. It hadn't been running for a very long time. There were daisies growing up through the floor boards. Ken (Kesey) could have made yard art out of it. Instead, he decided to hide it. It's sad to see it crumble away. It's a piece of my childhood. We had so much fun on that bus. Getting on it was a liberating feeling."

"The bus is the real talisman," said Kesey a few weeks later. "It's the thing that runs through all of this history. It's not a thing anybody owns or controls. No matter how peeved you get with people, the bus always makes your heart jump. Everybody was attached to it."

The first time Mountain Girl climbed onto the mythic bus, she was 18. Today, Carolyn Adams Walker Garcia is 51 years old. Her legend leaps off the pages of books, in the annals of the Grateful Dead in her role as Jerry Garcia's consort and then wife for nearly 30 years and in the transcripts of a high profile trial last winter which pitted her against Garcia's widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, in a Marin County courtroom.

But who is this woman who attracted Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, two of the most powerful influences on the popular culture in the past three decades?

"She's a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy," says Jon McIntire, the Dead's manager from 1968 to 1990. "She had the ability to meld her energy with the energy of others to do more than what one person could do by themselves. ... She had intelligence, joie de vivre and a directness that is really remarkable. And her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful."

"She is an authentic personality," says Dennis McNally, former public relations manager for the Grateful Dead and now publicist for Grateful Dead Productions. "She is the real deal."

Even as a teenager dedicated to "experimentation," as Carolyn now puts it, she was a fairly daunting personality.

"I suppose I would have been pretty good pickings for a cult," she laughs. "I was definitely a seeker ... I would question every single thing. That was sort of my style, to ask the really tough questions right away."

Even back in those pre-women's liberation days, Carolyn Adams was an in-your-face challenge for any male.

"She's imposing all right," says David Gans, the proto-Deadhead historian who hosts "Dead to the World" on KPFA-FM radio. "You have to be a pretty big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and their milieu. Those two are the biggest people in every way - big souls, big hearts, big egos, big personalities. They were monumental. It takes a monumental person to be with them."

Today, vestiges of the slender, heart-stoppingly beautiful girl-woman who caught Kesey's eye in 1964 remain - the fierce intelligence, the take-control bossy stick, the intellectual acuity, the ability to cut through a morass of pretense to the heart of the matter, the boisterousness, the guilelessness, the curiosity, the laughter.

It is to Pleasant Hill that Carolyn Garcia retreated many years ago, during her nearly three decade liaison and marriage to Jerry Garcia - the totemic Captain Trips, guitar-genius/linchpin of the Grateful Dead - when the druggy Deadhead scene got too weird and dangerous. She opted out of the Grateful Dead scene for the sake of her three little girls, Sunshine Kesey, her daughter with Ken Kesey, and Annabelle and Theresa Garcia, her children with Jerry Garcia. And it is in Pleasant Hill, in the bucolic greenness of the Willamette Valley, that she now lives on 16 acres with her new love, Bill Burwell, 49, a huge, shambling, robust ex-logger with a split between his teeth, ruddy cheeks and a long, salt-and-pepper gray pony tail. Their agrarian entourage includes a quartet of donkeys, a dozen sheep, two dogs (Chiquita, an ancient, deaf Border Collie mix and Penny, an apricot standard poodle) and two cats. She has a garden, a greenhouse with a new outdoor shower, a painting/writing studio guest house, a hot tub, an aging BMW convertible and a split-log conservatory Burwell built where she grows redwood trees.

For an arduous month in December 1996 and part of January 1997, Carolyn Garcia was living on the Bolinas Lagoon at Stinson Beach with her old friend Caroline "Goldie" Rush and commuting to the Marin County Court House in San Rafael. She was the plaintiff in a court case seeking the balance of the $5 million settlement arrived at in a contract that she and Garcia had drafted as their divorce agreement in 1993. But Jerry had up and died. He left a third of his estate to his wife of three months, Deborah Koons Garcia, but had a herd of creditors in his wake (including Mountain Girl) and the value of his estate in dispute. Before Garcia died of a heart attack in a dry-out facility in Forest Knolls on Aug. 9, 1995, he'd already paid Mountain Girl their agreed-upon $20,883 per month for a period of 18 months. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks.

Mountain Girl sued to get the money owned her. The court case turned into a high-profile free-for-all, with Koons Garcia's side claiming that Jerry had stopped loving Carolyn years before, that their marriage on New Year's Eve, 1981, was a sham and had been for tax purposes only and that in circumventing the legal system, their agreement was basically not worth the paper it was written on.

"Yes," admits Carolyn Garcia. "We were trying to do an end run on the legal system and get the ball around to the other side of the court without having to engage a whole lot of people in the process. It was something we did amongst ourselves. It was the honorable thing to do and it should be honored. Which is why I went and took it to court. Because Jerry and I honorably tried to do a deal that covered everything, that made me happy."

Garcia knew that as Jerry's wife and mother of two of his children, she was entitled to half of his estate under California law. Both felt the $5 million figure was fair, she said. In exchange for the cash, she gave up claim to the fruits of his talent, his real estate holdings and any future earnings. "I knew he could pay it and that he would get total control of his own business and that I wouldn't ever have to know anything about anything. One thing that he did not want was any disclosure. He did not want to share that information or even have to dig into all that information."

The trial was "an unexpected development," she says, as she sits in her rural kitchen. "We thought we had everything settled and that I was going to go up to Oregon and raise dahlias ... have some goldfish or something that would keep me happy. And then this sort of unusual set of circumstances occurred whereby Jerry ..." Her conversation tails off into an uncomfortable silence. She realigns her shoulders and runs her large hands through a luxuriant mop of silver and black hair. "You know, we lost him out of our family. He's dead. He's not going to come back. It's so sad."

After a trial noted for the animosity between the two warring sides and full disclosure of the Garcias' private life and Jerry Garcia's assets - the very things he wished to avoid - the judge decided in Carolyn Garcia's favor. On April 3, Marin County Superior Court Judge Michael Dufficy handed down a 10-page decision stating that the one-paragraph agreement drafted by Garcia and Mountain Girl is a valid contract and legally binds the estate. Meanwhile, Koons Garcia's attorney, Paul Camera, has indicated that he will advise his client to appeal. Carolyn Garcia's monthly payments, at this point, are still suspended.

Deborah Koons Garcia declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a written statement, she said "we did not want this case to go to trial, but we have a duty to protect the Estate," adding that the "alleged agreement was for an amount which exceeded Jerry's net worth at the time, which was clearly unfair."

The battle between Mountain Girl and the woman some people secretly call "Dark Deborah" or the "Black Widow" has a long and difficult history going back more than 20 years. In 1975, when Theresa Garcia was not even a year old, Jerry disappeared. Mountain Girl's girlfriends had an idea where he was - living with Deborah Koons, a filmmaker he'd met at a concert in New York in 1973 with whom he'd stayed in contact. But they were reluctant to tell Mountain Girl, lest they hurt her. (There is an apocryphal tale of Mountain Girl throwing Deborah Koons through a sliding glass door at Bob Weir's recording studio, which both women hotly deny both to the press and in private. A few of her friends acknowledge the incident as rumor but refuse to verify it as fact).

What really happened, Garcia says, is that she marched into a film studio in San Rafael and handed Deborah Koons a one-way ticket back to New York which, Koons Garcia told the press, "Jerry and I cashed it in."

The Mountain Girl-Jerry Garcia relationship was fraught with enough drama and see-sawing emotion to resemble a hippie soap opera. Joy and excitement; uncertainty and pain. It began in 1966 and extended nearly 28 years until the couple divorced in 1993. At Jerry's funeral, Annabelle, his older daughter with Mountain Girl, said,

"He was a great musician and a shitty father." Says Rock Scully, the Dead's road manager for many years, "Jerry Garcia was married to his guitar and the muse and his human relationships suffered for it. None of the various women and children in his life could dispute that. It's the price the individual pays for the overall benefit of the planet. We're lucky to have geniuses around giving us art." But, says Gordon "Dass" Adams, Carolyn Garcia's oldest brother, "Jerry was a lousy husband."

Somehow, however, Garcia and Mountain Girl established a life, albeit one that was quite unconventional by Leave It To Beaver standards. They produced two daughters. The family moved from house to house (Annabelle Garcia says that she went to no less than 13 schools, "just like an Army brat" ). Occasionally, Mountain Girl would ferry the kids away to Oregon and once, during one long separation, took them all the way back East to be near her parents. It was a complicated situation but there's one thing that anyone close to the couple agrees upon: It was a very big love.

By the time Jerry Garcia met Carolyn Adams she was the iconic Mountain Girl - the outrageous, free-spirited teenaged Merry Prankster who captivated Tom Wolfe's imagination in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. As Wolfe first described her, she was: "A tall girl, big and beautiful with dark brown hair falling down to her shoulders except that the lower two-thirds of her falling hair looks like a paint brush dipped in cadmium yellow from where she dyed it blond in Mexico."

The first time any of Kesey's literary mob ever saw Carolyn Adams, late of Hyde Park, N.Y., she was seated in a Palo Alto cafe, reading a book when Prankster and Beat icon Neal Cassady and a handsome young blond guy with a Beatle haircut named Bradley picked her up and invited her for a ride.

She was living near Stanford, hired by then-department head Carl Djerassi to work the night shift at the mass spectrometer in the university's organic chemistry lab. Many of the compounds she was analyzing came from the psych department, where novelist Kesey was a volunteer guinea pig, tripping his brains out on the still-legal precursors to lysergic acid diethylamide, aka LSD. She was fired for dipping into the experimental psychedelic chemicals she was analyzing.

"I had a little "spill,' " she laughs, "and got really high. I kind of nodded out. It was definitely a mild psychedelic experience with a lot of long, complex dreams, mostly about ancient ruined cities - Mayan - and jaguars. When I came to, my boss was shaking me by the shoulder. The machine was down. I had f - - - - d up the sample and taken the thing out of commission for a day."

Cassady's car actually belonged to Kesey, who was living with his Prankster band up at La Honda in the Santa Cruz Mountains. "Cassady was on a speed run, looking for bennies," Garcia remembers. "He seemed to be a dangerous kind of guy, sort of angular, like a trucker. But I went because I thought Bradley was cute and here is this older guy with him who was kinda weird. Then all of a sudden, the older guy's pulling these clippings out of his wallet and he's a Kerouac character. Well, I loved Kerouac."

They wound up at Kesey's spread at 5 in the morning. For Carolyn Adams, encountering Kesey and the Pranksters was like coming home, as if she'd been looking for people like them all of her life.

Kesey describes that first meeting with a literary allusion: "Vonnegut's phrase a "karass' comes to mind. We often thought of ourselves as a karass. We weren't exactly a coven, we weren't a cult ... but we did seem to be involved with each other before we even met each other." In Carolyn Adams, the Pranksters instantly recognized one of their own.

"I was on the hunt for compatible people," says Garcia now. "It's one of those things you do in your early adulthood. When I met Kesey and the Pranksters, I had that understanding immediately - that these guys were going to be my friends for a very long time. There was no uncertainty about that."

Cassady had told Kesey that he met this girl who was a little wild, "like she was kind of a mountain girl," says Kesey. The name stuck.

Retired Prankster Lee Quanstrom, a Santa Cruz-based journalist, has vivid memories of Mountain Girl. "The first time I saw her, she was riding a 175 Honda motorcycle, driving east on La Honda Road. She was turning a corner so fast, she was leaning down, close to parallel with the pavement on this windy, twisty mountain road, her long, black hair flying out behind her, lookin' good. A beautiful woman. ... She was very bright, very fast. Had a quick mind - quick on the pickup with puns, jokes and comments. Attractive in every possible way. I think everybody had a crush on her."

At the time, Kesey, the Pranksters and The Bus had just come back from their cross-country hegira; Wolfe had written the pieces for New York magazine that eventually became his bestselling book; Kesey was orchestrating the Acid Test concert/psychedelic experiences and the house band was the budding Grateful Dead (formerly the Warlocks) featuring a half Irish, half Spanish banjo/guitar whiz named Jerry Garcia.

The intellectual climate at Kesey's was free of academic constraints," remembers Carolyn Garcia. "He was very connected in the world of literature and we were constantly being visited by graduate students or writers or people doing interviews. It kept him very up. He had a very bright, engaging repartee going all the time, which I just loved."

She and Kesey were "mutually attracted." But at the same time, he had a family and was "very married, with the cutest three little kids you ever saw in your whole life. And there were dogs and Pranksters, the bus and a whole huge scene all around them. And Faye, his wife, was struggling with the whole thing. ... I don't know if she was threatened by me. I'd really kind of like to stay out of that discussion because we're good friends and she's a very private person."

But at La Honda and in other communities around the country, a new movement was taking place. The seeds of hippiedom - question authority, love the one you're with, share and share alike - were fueled by marijuana and psychedelics and accompanied by the twang of guitars and banjos. "I think there was a realistic amount of sexual activity up there," Garcia says, "but it was certainly not out of bounds or weird or anything like that. I mean, there were no "scenes.' "

Kesey was, she says, "attractive and very engaging. He loved to engage all sorts of people in all sorts of conversation and brief relationships. My relationship with him had to do more with intellectual companionship rather than a physical relationship, which was really brief. It was a minor note, although I suppose it wasn't minor for me at the time because I was young and attractive. What was happening is that we were working on stuff together and collaborating on things and I was supporting him in a lot of the writing and the fiddling around and the taping and the filming ... you know. I was just on board to do whatever."

Or, as Kesey told Tom Wolfe: "Either you are on the bus or off the bus." Either you were with Kesey or not with Kesey.

Mountain Girl was definitely on the bus.

For MG, which is how her intimates shorten her name, the Pranksters were her college, the University of Fun. That she was 18, unmarried and pregnant with Kesey's child didn't really register until the birth was upon her. Says Kesey: "There was never a question that she would not have the baby, gosh, no. That would have been a sin. I'm not a great anti-abortionist, but it never came up."

Carolyn Adams is very proud of her family history. Her maternal grandfather was a missionary in Allahabad, India, where her mother grew up. One of her father's progenitors was Dr. Samuel Adams, a physician in General Burgoyne's army during the Revolutionary War. Her parents, Ruth and Alfred, prized knowledge over material possessions and she grew up the tomboy little sister of two older brothers whose excellence in academics and athletics challenged and frustrated her.

"Girls didn't have as much personal freedom as boys did," she remembers. "I was jealous of the freedom the boys seemed to have and I was always angling for another little slice of freedom. Independence. That was my big goal as a child. Complete independence."

Her mother, a botanist and a school teacher, "abhorred gender classification," says Garcia. "The intellectual challenges of being a part of my family were certainly evenly shared by everybody, regardless of sex. But at the same time, there was a slightly Victorian tinge to the whole thing."

Carolyn was born on May 6, 1946. Her entomologist father was 40. "My father was not a person who was ambitious in a materialistic way," says Carolyn's brother, Gordon Adams, 57, who runs a computer help line for architects and designers in Seattle. "He wanted to do his work and be off in his head. There was a gentleness and a simplicity about him. Jerry, I think, fits the Alfred picture as a kind of verbally interesting person, rather than the swashbuckler Kesey was. Carolyn is such a big, energetic person and you could see, even at 17, the frustration with the mildness in her family situation (along) with the kind of isolation she had and lack of involvement in rough and tumble life."

"School," writes Garcia in the beginnings of what may become her memoirs, "was an inner battleground. Daydreaming took me out the windows and into fresh, limitless landscapes and away from that tension of never quite fitting in, of the feeling of being odd and too smart."

She was, she recalls, "a beatnik." It was like opting to be an alien. She eschewed the fashion pursuits of the time. She refused to rat her hair or wear makeup. She affected black turtlenecked sweaters and carried books of poetry. Eventually, rejection by her peers got easier to handle.

From her parents, young Carolyn inherited an adoration of nature. She spent every minute she could out of doors, exploring the local terrain and, she writes, "imagining myself running long distance over the old Mohawk trail or hunting deer or making the clothes and foods of the Indians." Both of her parents encouraged her interest in the natural world. Their house was a living lab, a repository of bugs and plants.

While life at home was an intellectual paradise, school was quite another matter. A natural athlete, Carolyn tried out for girls basketball but ran into trouble with her gym teacher who, she says, "was not my admirer. She never taught me any rules and benched me forever." Carolyn "went to war with her" and eventually, the gym teacher saw to it that she was expelled only six weeks before graduation. She received her diploma by mail. Over the summer, she took a waitressing job and put college on hold. When her youngest brother, Don, offered her a ride to California, she took it. It was the summer of 1963. She had $600 in her pocket and she was 17 years old.

Ken Kesey was in a lot of trouble in 1965 with the authorities in San Mateo for a marijuana bust. He faked a suicide and split for Mexico, basically leaving a pregnant 18-year-old - Mountain Girl - behind him. Eventually, the rest of the Pranksters loaded themselves onto Furthur and trekked down to Manzanillo, where they lived in a small rancho with a red and white checkerboard roof. Carolyn's daughter Sunshine was born in a Manzanillo hospital where the water was turned off 12 hours a day. To ensure that the baby, named Solano in Spanish (which, laughs Garcia, means "sun porch" ) would have legal U.S. citizenship, Mountain Girl married a pretty blond Prankster named George Walker.

Eventually, Kesey and his rag-tag band returned to the States, Mountain Girl and the baby in tow, to produce the final of the Acid Tests, the combination concert-performance-mass LSD trip (often courtesy of Owsley Stanley, who provided the psychedelics and was the money behind the house band, the Grateful Dead).

In 1966, Kesey was still officially a fugitive. For the Acid Test at San Francisco State, the Pranksters set up in the gym while Kesey sat in the broadcast booth of the college radio station and taunted the authorities.

Rock Scully's girlfriend of the time, Valerie Ann Steinbrecher, who still is called "Tangerine," remembers watching Carolyn Adams and an unbearded Jerry Garcia literally fall in love on the spot: "The first time I saw Mountain Girl was at this gig at S.F. State. She had short hair she'd dyed blonde. Sunshine was about two or three months old and she was in this little basket. I watched MG and Jerry connect. As far as I know, it went boom! He played to her all night. You could feel it."

It was not difficult to get Mountain Girl away from Kesey, says McIntire. "I didn't witness it," he says carefully, "but I heard from (one of her best friends) that Garcia pursued her with a focus that could not be broken."

"I'm not sure he "got her away' from Kesey," says Sue Swanson, who calls herself "the Grateful Dead's first official fan" and who runs the Dead's merchandising office in Novato. "She was fascinated with Jerry and the Dead's trip. And perhaps the Prankster thing had gotten a little stale for her at that point."

But from then on, Mountain Girl and Captain Trips were a pair.

Soon after they coupled up, Mountain Girl moved with the baby into 710 Ashbury, the Dead's commune in the Haight, coincidentally on the day that Tangerine moved out. "She didn't move into another woman's house," says Tangerine. "She was Jerry's girlfriend. They spent all the time in Jerry's room being in love. They were a team."

"I never met a woman with quite as much machismo as this girl had," marvels Scully. "She spoke her mind and was quite tolerant except for anything that approached ignorance. If you were stupid, she'd tell you so. If you were behaving badly, she'd tell you that, too. She wasn't a judgmental kind of person, she was just brutally frank. She was judge and jury in those days."

But, laughs Scully, "Nobody ever saw her and Jerry because they never came out of their room. And they had the smallest room in the house at that point. They just fell in love. Jerry had that fortune ... or misfortune, that when he falls, he falls hard." For the two of them, says Scully, "it was a great big love."

For Carolyn Adams, it was her second brush with genius. And her first with a chauvinistic rock 'n' roll culture that relegated the band's "old ladies" to caretaker status.

At 710, Mountain Girl imposed order like a drill sergeant. Meals got planned; bathrooms were cleaned. Finances were cleared up. But basically, she was assigned to the traditional women's stuff of keeping a home, albeit a very large and unruly one.

"Well," she says, "I wasn't a musician. I did try to run their sound board for a while, but I wasn't good at it. Once you've had a little kid, it's very difficult to focus on being a P.A. mixer. My attention would get distracted and I would miss a cue and Pigpen (McKernan, the Dead's late organist) would be up there pointing to his microphone and be really mad at me. So I faded out of that position."

But she "wasn't happy about the (female stuff). Not at all. It was sort of the unfortunate consequences of my actions, my procreative act. It was this concentration on the domestic side which certainly was not intentional on my part. But God, if somebody didn't cook, do you know what they would eat? I mean, yuck! Chips and Twinkies. Ratburgers."

By the time she walked into the Dead's kitchen, Mountain Girl had attained iconic status, although it was not her way to pay any attention to it. Tom Wolfe's New York magazine pieces may have put her on the map, but she says,

"I really didn't have an attachment to a personal image. I was not seeking the spotlight. I was very much in love with Jerry's music and supported it, but our personal relationship was sort of outside that. ... We were very, very happy with each other. Initially."

"Jerry and MG were absolutely a blessing to hang out around," says McIntire. "When you're in a car driving across the plains of Kansas from one gig to the next and you're lucky enough to be in the same car with Jerry and MG, the details they would notice about everything, the joy they would take in life, would sweep you along. It was a tremendously exhilarating, positive experience about relating to everything around you. Both of them could be among the most open people I've ever run across."

It was more than just hormones and the passion of new love that kept Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia together.

"Later MG told me that when she met Jerry," remembers McIntire, "she recognized in him that his music was the stuff of greatness. And she wanted to help that greatness."

"Jerry loved his work," says Garcia in retrospect.

"His whole thing was to drive to San Francisco, play a gig, go home, go to sleep, get up, have breakfast, drive to San Francisco, play a gig. ... that was it for him. That was the world. That was his happiest space. He was a pro. He loved to work. It would have been like a ballplayer missing a game. How could you do that? And that level of his dedication really fired everybody."

And so Mountain Girl became a handmaiden to genius, a term she calls "horrible, but true." Her function? "I was maintaining our home. Jerry didn't really do a lot of maintenance. He certainly had me buffaloed on the dishwashing thing. "It'll ruin my calluses if I do the dishes,' he told me. And I was like: What a bunch of baloney. But I went for it. I think I went for a lot of stuff."

At the same time, she says, "it was joyous."

The joy started to end around 1974, when the Grateful Dead decided to take a break.

"Things changed," she says. "Jerry decided to spend more time away from the house and in his studio. They would go and do these long, drawn-out scenes at the studio that would go on for weeks, where nobody slept and they'd stay up. It was completely nuts. I could go in there, but I didn't like it. It was a toxic environment. I would go home and make some orange juice and he'd show back up again, sleep for a couple of days and recharge. That's what a home is for."

All along Garcia understood that she had elected to keep the home fires burning and give her genius husband plenty of "space."

"If you're involved with somebody with a talent like Jerry's, the richness of his gift to everybody was so powerful, you have to give them a lot of latitude to express that gift," she says in retrospect. "The price is very high and the price is personal relationships and time away from the family."

Mountain Girl gave Garcia enough latitude for him to play music, get involved with other women, and eventually, fall into the trap of what she calls "the white drugs" - cocaine and heroin. She was caught napping each time.

"You might say I was in denial," she says. "I never did any therapy about it, but I've read all the books."

"The co-dependence book was real big in our house," laughs Annabelle Garcia, who inherited her father's fey sense of humor.

"Jerry and I had our arguments, but it never led to anything good. Neither of us knew the language of sorting out your personal relationships," Carolyn says. "We didn't have the education that modern America has now to help us talk about our roles. And frankly, I'm glad we didn't, because I think if we'd fought it out too much, we would have lost each other. As it was, he always knew he could come home and there would always be a place for him, no matter how weird it got out there. I am quite certain that it was a comfort to him as well as to me. I just ran my life that way and it mostly worked out."

But, she emphasizes, the gestalt of the Dead, that the whole was so much greater than the parts, kept her a believer. "It wasn't (about) any one person," she says.

"There was something that needed to be done and when you got all these people together, it was suddenly possible to do it. What needed to be done was to drive back the black and white and the separations between people and make a place where people could come together and have some joy and harmony without doctrine."

The joy and harmony in the Garcia family was challenged further in 1975, shortly after the birth of the Garcias' second daughter, Theresa, nicknamed "Trixie" by Kit Candaleria, one of the Dead's roadies. Like any other rock and roller, Jerry Garcia was under tremendous pressure to fool around. "There were always girls coming out of the woodwork," says Mountain Girl. "Of course, I was totally in denial about this."

Jerry never said a word, said Mountain Girl. "He just disappeared. I had no idea what he was doing. I know he had asked for space, as he put it earlier in the year, and I said, "Sure, whatever you need.' And that was the end of the conversation. And then one day, he just kind of up and left. I was flabbergasted. I didn't know what to do. I decided not to do much. I had a new baby. Annabelle was in pre-school and Sunshine was in school. I was locked in. There wasn't a whole lot I could do to go chasing around worrying to see what had happened to Jerry. I made a few phone calls and everybody said the same thing: "I don't know. Gee ... I don't know.' "

"I never spoke with her about any of it until after the fact," said Sue Swanson. "After he had left and moved in with Deborah. I had heard rumors and didn't want to say anything because I knew that it would hurt her very deeply."

Garcia had indeed gone to live with a slender, intense and dark New York City film student named Deborah Koons whom he had met at a show in 1973 and who had hitched a ride back to New York City on the Dead's bus. She moved to Europe with a boyfriend for a year but wrote to Garcia. When she returned, they got together.

Meanwhile, Mountain Girl took her three girls to Oregon.

"I had a personal myth about independence that was getting shattered," she says. "I stayed up in Oregon much longer than I thought I should. We were there for 18 months.

"The moment we came back, Jerry was at my door to visit and within a month he was asking to move back in," says Mountain Girl. "We were delighted. God, I was so thrilled. That played itself out for a while. He came and went for the next year." By then, things at their Stinson Beach aerie, Sans Souci, on a ridge high above the beach, had gotten pretty weird.

It was before the age of security gates, and all sorts of bizarre hangers-on started planting themselves in the Garcia parking area. One of their cats was killed. Annabelle remembers encountering a junkie shooting up on their doorstep. And then there was a former Philadelphia assistant district attorney who drove West, determined to "move in with Jerry."

He had dumped all of his belongings in the Garcia driveway, including a box with a cat in it. The police advised Mountain Girl that there was not much she could do about him because he had established some sort of homestead on her property.

"He was crazy and he'd been to too many Dead shows," she says. "His glasses were broken and he had a couple of (bruises) where people might have punched him. He was one of these people where the first time you see him, he's kind of personable, and then the next time, he's starting to disintegrate."

Before the lawyer finally disappeared, Mountain Girl shooed him off her front porch with a small child's broom, smacking him over the head. He stole her white Alfa Romeo and drove it into a ditch; he papered the town of Stinson Beach with bad checks and told people that she would pay his bills and he let the air out of the tires of her VW van.

It was episodes like these, coupled with Jerry's inconstancy with other women, that precipitated her escape to Oregon, the place where Kesey, Faye, their children, Ken Babbs and a bunch of her Prankster family had settled. The Oregon connection centered her and gave her the strength to go on. Often, it was very difficult. Meanwhile, Jerry would wander in and out of her life. They traveled as a couple, for instance, when the Dead went off to Egypt to play at the Pyramids in 1978. When they returned, Jerry's heroin use was getting so extreme even Mountain Girl was noticing it.

"I was devastated," she says. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to ask for help. All there was was Synanon, and I wasn't going to call them!" Again, it was time to extricate herself and rescue her children. She took them East. "I ran home to mother for the first time in my life," she says.

By the time she returned, her confidence was at an all-time high.She had had an opportunity to develop her own talents, including a gift for writing, in a brief sojourn at an eastern college. As the '80s approached, the whole Dead zeitgeist was getting way out of control. Caravans of Deadheads turned Jerry and Mountain Girl into godheads. But Carolyn Garcia says, "nobody seemed to notice me for a second." She also says that she started putting on weight "out of self-defense. I just didn't want to compete anymore."

"Don't kid yourself," says Jon McIntire. "The weight thing wasn't that simple. Jerry was very jealous."

"Jerry was extremely jealous," says Goldie Rush, who met the Garcias, as she puts it, "in a child care situation," and has continued to be a business manager and accountant for a number of people associated with the Dead's extended family. "It's an old story. You know. In that the guy gets this beautiful woman and wants to keep her all to himself and he doesn't care if she changes, and one day looks around and wonders why she changed."

"I didn't want to compete for attention," admits Mountain Girl. "There was a star they could look at who had to hide out. I think that two people hiding out in the same family would have been even more difficult. ... I wanted to sidestep that rock star wife thing as much as possible. I think I did a pretty good job. But I was a little envious of the glamour queens, you know. They didn't have kids and it looked like they were having some fun. But I was anti-cocaine," she says pausing. And these were Cocaine Katies? "There were a lot of them around," she says.

For a long time, Mountain Girl clung to her anonymity. "I began to realize the dangers of celebrity that had to do with the Grateful Dead attracting a lot of people to themselves who were unconventional. When you feel people reaching out to you with those psychic rubber bands, they want to grab you and hold you and get you. And boy, do I run from that stuff. Any sign of a trap and I'm moving."

"MG put up with a lot of shit for a lot of years," says Goldie Rush. "She never defined it as shit. She just gave Jerry a lot of slack. He never did respond well to pressure of any kind. I know they had a big love with one another. Part of that was the elasticity of the relationship and how it could adapt to stuff. I fear she did most of the adapting."

All Carolyn Garcia ever wanted was a family with her children and Jerry Garcia. It was not to be. Not even when she and Jerry, after two children and 15 years together, got married on New Year's Eve 1981, between sets at the Dead's traditional New Year's show. She had finally gotten a divorce from George Walker who, she said, "was living on a sailboat in Samoa." Jerry and Carolyn were married by a Jewish friend who was also a Tibetan monk in a ceremony missed by most of the band members. Jerry promised that they would get a house together. It never happened.

Once again, Carolyn took her children away to Oregon, to a newly purchased patch of verdant acreage in the Willamette Valley. Until, in 1986, a phone call came telling her that Jerry was in Marin General Hospital in a diabetic coma and that he was not expected to live.

"She came and stayed with me," says Goldie Rush, who was living in Greenbrae at the time, right behind the hospital. Mountain Girl would ride Rush's bike over a rutted short cut to the hospital and sit by Jerry's bed, willing him to live. When it appeared that he would survive, she and the girls moved in with him in San Rafael and for six months, she had the family life she had always wanted.

"Everybody loved it that those guys were back together again," says Rush. "They were a couple. Jerry was never with another woman who matched him as elegantly as she did, with her kind of energy and intelligence."

"Jerry had told me what he wanted me to do," says Jon McIntire. "He came out of a near death (experience) with this true resurrection feeling. The resurgence of life. The cleanliness of life ... which people around him discouraged pretty quickly. But part of it was MG and the family and wanting to embrace that. He was clean out of necessity. He had been in a coma. You can't do drugs when you're in a coma."

Six months later, Garcia had some dental work and got involved with pain relievers. It was a short hop back to addiction.

In 1993, Jerry Garcia asked Mountain Girl for a divorce. They had not lived together for years, although once in a while they got together with the children during a holiday or when the Dead were in town playing a concert. They wrote their one-paragraph separation agreement and went separate ways. Garcia to Deborah Koons and Mountain Girl back to Oregon and the big, rugged logger she had met, Bill Burwell.

Her friends approve.

"Now she's with this guy who is a perfect match," says Tangerine. "They're great together. We call them the "bears.' "

"Bill is a wonderful man," says Sunshine Kesey, who, with her halo of white-blond curls resembles her father, Ken Kesey. "Bill serves her. He is her "handmaiden.' They're like a couple of grumpy bears who just woke up in the spring. Bill is finally the right person for my mom. Jerry was a right person, too, but unfortunately, he was stuck and trapped in a circumstance he didn't want to be in. Mom escaped. It was really hard and frightening for her. But she's come out ahead of the game. She got a lot more happiness than anyone else in Grateful Dead Land."

Mountain Girl and Jerry Garcia were the stuff of hippie fairy tales, who dressed alike and thought alike and spoke as one person. The fairy tale soured. The legend crumbled. Jerry is dead. The fight over his intellectual and real property continues. Mountain Girl's bitterness, if she ever had any (and she denies that she ever did), probably dried up long ago. She has no regrets. None.

"Mountain Girl taught me this years ago," says Rock Scully. "That hating is a quick step away from death - that going through your life being resentful and hateful and nasty about others is going to destroy your life. We are on this planet to live, not to die."

"Jerry and I had a fortunate relationship. It was difficult, but it was worth it," says Carolyn Garcia.

"There are things that can happen to people. With the best of intentions and the best of relationships, things can go terribly wrong. In my case, with a powerful talent like Jerry and this tremendous culture-changing thing he'd found to do, it was a tough place to try to carry on a relationship. We did the best we could. I don't feel bad about it at all. I think I did the best I could with a tough situation. It was all so incredible.

"The band got to be very big and very much the nexus and focus of hundreds and thousands of people. The personal relationships within the band and their own personal relationships shattered under tremendous pressure. But there was a part of Jerry's and my relationship that was unshatterable by any means that's persisted until today. And that was a faith in the rightness of our relationship. It was not a mistake. It was never a mistake."

Examiner staff writer Cynthia Robins' last feature for the Magazine was on philanthropist/activist Jim Hormel.<