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 Tony Sauer, former Director of the California Department of Rehabilitation, longtime disability leader, and close family friend.

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.

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