After driving his Cadillac into the icy waters beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Jerry mysteriously wakes up in a San Francisco rehab, before setting off to find his lost son, Ethan. Along the way he meets up with a young runaway named Lily and her anarchist boyfriend, Max. Before long Lily's mother, Talia-an erudite if finicky art professor-joins the group, all of them on the road searching for Ethan, and salvation. Set amid the vast spaces between San Francisco, the Salton Sea, Arizona's Four Corners, Lassen, and the lush banks of California's Russian River, Hippie Homeschooling is a road story that chronicles the end of a hippie dream, a novel that links the remnants of the psychedelic generation to today's twenty-first century hipsters, while it explores the perennial possibility of love.