A Child’s-Eye Memoir of the Hippie Trail: Caleb Dardick in Conversation with Rachel Howard

Join author Caleb Dardick for a vivid reading and conversation celebrating his forthcoming memoir, The Adventures of Superfreak: My Childhood on the Hippie Trail (Running Wild Press, September 21, 2026). Caleb will be in conversation with Davis author Rachel Howard, author of The Risk of Us and The Lost Night, for an evening about memory, family, counterculture, disability, and the making of a memoir.

The Adventures of Superfreak offers a child’s-eye view of the counterculture—not as nostalgia, but as lived family reality, with all its longing, idealism, danger, and contradiction. In 1970, Caleb’s family set out from Amsterdam to India in a VW bus: three young children traveling with disabled parents—his father using a wheelchair, his mother living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder—on a 20,000-mile journey through Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Along the way: psychedelics, free love, tense border crossings, spiritual seekers, and a childhood shaped as much by wonder as by instability.

Told through the eyes of the child he was, the memoir explores attachment and abandonment, disability and independence, family resilience, spiritual seeking, and the costs of adult freedom. To make sense of the upheaval around him, Caleb becomes “Superfreak,” a self-invented superhero trying to understand love, danger, and belonging inside an extraordinary family journey.

This Davis event offers a rare behind-the-scenes conversation between an author and the developmental editor who helped shape the story. Rachel Howard worked closely with Caleb as he transformed memory, family history, and a 20,000-mile childhood journey into a literary memoir.

Caleb’s professional life has spanned public service, nonprofit leadership, environmental advocacy, disability-related community work, and local government. A graduate of UC Santa Cruz, he is also a storyteller and leadership coach. He lives in Nevada City, California, with his wife.

Rachel Howard is the author of the novel The Risk of Us and the memoir The Lost Night. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in publications including StoryQuarterly, ZYZZYVA, The New York Times Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, a MacDowell fellow, a 2024 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellow, and teaches nonfiction and novel writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. She lives in Davis.