A hundred meters north of the Massachusetts state line, I jog off the main dirt road onto a narrow road uphill into the forest. The map says this trail goes to Packers Corner, home of one of the first great hippie communes of the 1960s.

I want to see this 100 acres that a bunch of hippies bought in 1968, not because I want to revisit the days of my youth – which, I believe, are one of the few things it was more fun live through than it is to remember – but to escape, if only for an hour, from the sour viciousness of contemporary America.

I am one of that fortunate generation whose parents fought the banality of evil in Europe, and whose children are growing up amid the evil of banality in the United States.

Thirty-three years ago this month, Playboy magazine wrote an admiring article suggesting that the doughty hippies at the end of this trail might be the vanguard of a movement that could take over the state. Aside from two trail references for mountain bikers, that’s the only Internet article that mentions Packers Corner today.

I see why the hippies liked the place. Past a meadow and two dozen cows, the trail twists up along a stream into the forest. Every kind of waterfall you want is here: the long slide, the step and a pool and another step, the tumbling over boulders and the quiet stream descending into riffles over pebbles, the bifurcating brook under a mossy log. Sunlight filters through the mixed conifer canopy; buds are breaking out on the deciduous trees. It’s an enchanted forest.

In the second mile of my run, I spot an ancient cemetery off the side of the trail. I jump down the bank and slow to a walk, to show respect to these people who have been dead for 200 years. The little graveyard with thirty markers is surrounded by a wall of neatly piled stones.

One woman who lies here was born in 1722, a few years before her husband, who lies beside her. With them lies their son; he was a captain in the Revolutionary War.

The oldest tombstones are 1-inch thin black slate, some in the classic shape, some squared off at the top. In the early nineteenth century, there came a style of 3-inch thick white granite stones. These inscriptions are hard to read. Then the style changed back to slate, not as thin as the old style, not as thick as the granite. Slate takes a precise, incised line. I walk back to the trail quietly, out of respect for these people who will never know I was here.

So far as I can tell, there is no Packers Corner. There’s a house here and there along the trail, some colonial, some beautiful. At the top of a steep hill, surrounded by silence, an old mailbox outside an old house bears the legend, “Friends of Music.”

Down the far side of the hill, past another meadow and into the forest again, I’m stopped by the beauty of a stone wall. Not a wall – a relic. The forest has pulled down the wall and eaten it. Just this tumbling fragment remains; another century or so and even it will be gone. The carefully balanced slate stones were assembled with such care that they cast a spell of beauty even as they collapse.

I run deeper into the forest by the side of the tumbling stream. My untrustworthy map says this trail goes through to another one, but the map is wrong again. Down a final steep hill it ends in a bog. I can see where the trail once went uphill again, but not for me, not even on foot.

There is no sign of the old commune. Just the way the hippies would have wanted it. Their spiritual progeny, and probably some of their actual progeny, live on in town, in the food co-op, the yoga center, the wealth of musical and artistic talent who chose to live in this corner of Vermont.

I turn back to retrace my steps. Far uphill, in the yard of the last house on the trail, a man sits in a lawn chair, taking the sun on one of the first warm days of spring. He is talking on a cell phone. He waves. I wave back and run uphill into the forest. A woodpecker knocks at a tree.