When the writer Ken Kesey graduated from high school in 1953, he was voted “most likely to succeed.” And he did succeed. The New York Times described him as the “pied piper of the psychedelic era.” Kesey authored the classic novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and was instrumental in bringing nomadic beatniks to San Francisco. Kesey’s vehicle of choice was a hand-painted 1939 school bus that carried him and his Merry Pranksters across the country, intent on spreading an LSD-fueled gospel of free expression. The back of the bus read “Caution: Weird Load,” and the misspelled word “Furthur” adorned the windshield. “It was groovy,” Kesey said of the experience in a 1989 interview. “We suddenly realized that there’s a lot more to this world than we previously thought.” In 1968, the journalist Tom Wolfe documented these “trips” in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which immortalized the movement. Since 1969, the Furthur bus has been hidden in storage, a bygone symbol of the Hippie movement. For the first time in decades, the bus travels back to San Francisco as the centerpiece of an exhibition honoring the history of the Grateful Dead, where it joins other memorabilia such as Jerry Garcia’s BMW. “When people ask what my best work is, it’s the bus,” Kesey said in 2000. “Those books made it possible for the bus to become.” —Maggie Turner