Delving the Diggers
By George Metevsky
Berkeley Barb, October 21, 1966, p. 3

In the afternoon, at a little before four, they come down Ashbury, cross Oak and gather around a Eucalyptus tree in the Panhandle.

They wear wide eyes, tattered clothes, and talismans around their necks. Some are in their teens, most in their twenties, and a few are closing in on forty.

They talk about anything, smile about everything and do what they want to do with the food that they bring to each other.

They are THE DIGGERS. And everyday at four o'clock they provide anybody with anything to eat.

The first time I noted them I thought it was a picnic. The second time I thought I was hallucinating. The third time I had to stop. And I sat down with them and ate food and discovered that I didn't but I did.

I talked to a young girl with bare feet and hair that fell over her shoulders and whose name began with an N.

"Who are the Diggers?"

She smiled: "I don't know. I'm not a Digger. Are you a Digger?"

"FUCK THE DIGGERS!!!, shouted a kid with a scar and everyone laughed and repeated it.

I asked him whose food it was. He said it was free.

"Yes, but who donated it? Who's laying it on?"

"It's free because it's yours," came a reply.

A yellow micro-bus pulled up onto the grass, the side doors flew open and somebody threw out a thousand apples. A hippy with a blanket for a robe started throwing them into the air yelling: "Food as Medium!" Another stuffed a tree trunk with lettuce. Another fed a bunch of scallions to a great Dane. One poured some stew into a hole in the ground and claimed he was feeding his archetype heritage. Most of them, however, sat around and ate and smiled and gave each other cigarettes.

There was quite an assortment of food. Most of it was good, some of it was hot, all of it was healthy: Shopping bags filled with day old bread, wooden crates of tossed green salad, a ten gallon milk container steaming hot with turkey stew, and apples all over the ground.

A patrol car pulled up to the curb. A sergeant got out and stood in the street and watched. Somebody invited him to dinner, but he shook his head no. And, after a while, he left.

Someone started mouthing a harp, someone else a recorder, then a flute and everybody's bowls became drums beating out a song against the 'Evil Auto' and the noise it makes and the accidents it involves and the war it supports and the air it pollutes and the monopolies it feeds.

The cars gushed up and down the streets of the Panhandle with a steady roar while their drivers stared out of windows wondering what was going on.

Some of them knew. They stopped and passed food to the DIGGERS. Sometimes a cake, sometimes fruit, sometimes a bushel of radishes. A farmer in Carmel dropped off a box of tomatoes via a friend who was on his way to Oregon who promised to bring something back with him.

He was thanked, but warned with a chuckle: "If you have to buy it, the DIGGERS don't want it!"

Everyone was relaxed. Words were used to sparkle eyes, break mouths into smiles, letters into tongued vibrations and meaning in-coherent.

The DIGGER PAPERS reflect this kind of atmosphere. They're mimeographed sheets with words jammed onto them and DIGGERS hand them out once or twice a week on Haight street around six o'clock. Nobody seems to know who writes them, but most agree that the DIGGERS are behind autonomy.

An orange PAPER is headed COOL CRANBERRY HORSE-HAIRED MOUTH CLUTTERED WITH APPLE CORES and begins "and so, I suffered an awful frenzy of collapsed assumptions." The footnote at the end reads: "Regarding inquiries concerned with the identity and whereabouts of the DIGGERS: We are happy to report that the DIGGERS are not that."

And so is the BARB.