Bamboo Blowing Buddhist Rings Up Berkeley

BERKELEY – Downtown Berkeley is often downright noisy, with buses honking, trains rumbling underground, traffic lights beeping, and the homeless yelling. It’s so loud that any kind of subtle or inspiring sound can be overwhelmed unless you listen closely. If you do, you’ll often be able to hear impromptu melodies from a bamboo flute. Soft as it is, the music continues steadfastly, persistently, and soothingly.

The 28-year-old player has been standing at the entrance of the Downtown Berkeley Bart station for three hours. As Ethan Ford, he is no more than a street musician making a living selling music and self-made bamboo instruments from saxophones to violins; but as “Bam-Booda”, as he calls himself, another offspring of a hippies’ family, he is telling his eccentric stories and unusual philosophies through the music. “It’s just my way to express the truth,” he said.

Ford said he was born on an Easter Sunday, pulled into life by his father, who bundled him in a brightly colored school bus near Summertown, Tennessee, where the hippies called “The Farm”---one of the famous and long-running communes with more than 1,500 people living together at its peak. “It was incredible: we lined on the double deckers in the bus…All of us: ten children and four parents,” said his father Alan Ford, a MIT graduate and a retired software engineer from New Hampshire.

It was actually four parents—or two couples—bonded in one marriage, as one of the experimental programs on sex liberation around “The Farm”. It lasted for four years before they separated back to couples and then the Ford family moved to New Hampshire with five children, including little Ethan.

Years later, the commune is probably no more than a piece of memory to many of the old-day hippies. Yet to Ethan Ford, who tends to wear a long beard and sloppy clothes, the influence of “The Farm” or more specifically, the “Four Marriage”, could never fade away.

Not until he was16 years old did Ford discover who his biological father was—David Buren, the other man in the marriage. It was certainly a bombshell to both of the families who lived close by when Ford looked more and more like Buren as he turned into a man. “It took us two years to prove because none of us believed or has ever thought of that he was crossed over,” said Buren, an electronic engineer from New Hampshire, who was a high school friend of Alan Ford.

“I guess the most important thing I learned from it was that the real family is not made up of blood but of love,” said Ford, rubbing his hands on a chilly night. His eyes were sparkling when vividly describing how much he admired his foster father for his integrity.

But still, he is too unconventional not to be isolated especially after leaving home. “I will trade it off to just to be normal,” said Ford, a high school dropout who just moved here from Hawaii for a more tolerant environment. “It is difficult for me to meet people and get connected, I am lonely.”
He was therefore arduously exploring his own way for identity – he took drugs, of all kinds, he said, to stay aware; he wandered, all around the country, to find companions; he even tried a trio-romance, just as his fathers, only to end up with another break-up and an unexpected daughter who is now three and a half years old…

“Then I found Buddha,” said Ford. To him, Buddhism is not only a faith, but also a source of good luck to stay away from starvation and homelessness. He recalled that he always sold his instruments for good prices right before the rent was due. “Everything will come to me eventually for my need,” Ford, a vegetarian, murmured with his eyes closed, “and this is the faith I reply on and spread out through bamboo music.”

Here he was, Bam-Booddha---standing behind a purplish sitting Buddha miniature with hands holding his favorite four pipes cord flute. Rather than playing, he was releasing, meditating and messaging… “I see myself a fully-awakened Buddhist, the same I want others to be,” said Ford.

Some echoed to his efforts. “It is obviously more pleasant to listen to than what I heard last week at a farmer’s market,” said LA Wood, the city council candidate of District 4, who was lobbying next to Ford. “Oh, the other musician was terrible!”

Others felt the melodies too lyrical to capture their attention in the busy world. However, resembling the bamboo, which was the first plant to grow from the toxic soils in Hiroshima after 1945, Ford said he was persistent in pursuing his dream, “I would rather die if I were not realizing my dream.”

Ford vividly pictured a day he was longing for: “I will make a bamboo orchestra...The suits of all the musicians will be made entirely out of the bamboo…We sing, dance and wrap with each other. All, all of us---who share the same ideals—Buddhism, environmentalism, communism or pacifism.”
$18—the young man counted carefully from dollar to dollar in gloved hands, sniffling—that was all he made for the day. “No big luck,” he smiled, with a shrug of his shoulders, and then walked out into the dark with his and only his friend Roshi, a Siberian Hosky dog. He said, finally, it was time to eat…