After almost six decades on the farm, Ken Kesey’s Furthur bus leaves Oregon

Furthur — the writer Ken Kesey’s bus, once a blaring DayGlo chariot, Acid Test home rolling on the road with Merry Pranksters in its belly, a counterculture roving hotspot painted in layers according to its passengers’ whims, an icon that went kaput after a 1969 drive to Woodstock and back to Pleasant Hill, then, a piece of metal on a farm, a dugout, a childhood castle, later pushed in a bog to help sell a prank, left behind moss and blackberry tangles, still there when Kesey died and was buried on the same plot of family land, then pulled out and sat in a barn for 20 years, where until recently it stood still, rusted, waiting — has left Oregon.

Until Monday, Aug. 17, the bus had been 20 minutes south of Eugene on the Kesey family farm for the past 57 years. There it sat, paint flaking and full of debris, for the last two decades in the “bus barn” next to dust, spiderwebs and ephemera from the Merry Pranksters, the group of friends, hippies and misfits Kesey took on the roadtrip. The barn is a short walk away from the graves of Ken Kesey and his son Jed. 

On the road (and driven by Beat Generation writer Neal Cassady, who served as the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”), it gained mythological status as the hippie movement exploded in the 1960s. Kesey and the Merry Pranksters’ trips across the country in the bus were famously documented in the writer Tom Wolfe’s signature work of New Journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The Beatles soon had a psychedelic bus of their own. So did the Muppets. 

But now, the Keseys say the time has come for the bus to leave the farm, head south and see the public again in San Francisco. It’s a moment of celebration as a beloved object will be on view to the public for the first time, and a sentimental time as the bus leaves its home in Oregon.

It’s also a financial decision. The nonprofit Furthur Down the Road Foundation — led by Stephanie Kesey, daughter-in-law to Ken — has pushed unsuccessfully to restore the bus in previous years. Zane Kesey, 65, is Ken Kesey’s son and Stephanie’s husband; he said the money needed to restore the bus as it should be is hard to raise through local grassroots support alone.

“The big boys are down there, and hopefully they’re going to get some of the larger donations,” he said. “It’s always needed that. There was no way we were going to raise enough to do a worthwhile restoration. We could raise enough to do a cheap one.”

Restoring a one-of-a-kind piece of hippie history left to rust under Pacific Northwest rain, moss and lichen is a costly endeavor. It’s one the Keseys are hoping supporters in San Francisco could step in to fund. And they hope a permanent home in the Bay Area will take the bus further. 

“We just want to keep as much of the magic of the original bus that we can,” Stephanie Kesey said. “The more of the magic that you keep, the more expensive the restoration.”

‘That’s the original hippie bus’

The bus was not designed for cross-country merriment fueled by LSD-laced orange juice.

It’s a 1939 International Harvester school bus Kesey purchased in 1964 from a man in Atherton, California, who had outfitted it as an RV for his family. Then, it was taken to Kesey’s ranch in La Honda, California, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, painted for its cross-country trip from California to the New York World’s Fair and christened “Furthur.” 

Stephanie Kesey, now 65, still remembers being 14 and seeing the bus on a drive through Pleasant Hill with her dad. “Look out in that field out there,” he told her. “That’s the original hippie bus.”

She grew up in a conservative family, worlds away from the psychedelic royalty living in the same town, and filed it away as a fun fact. She had no idea then that she would meet Zane at the University of Oregon, fall in love and later help push that bus into the swamp. 

After Ken Kesey died in 2001, she took it as her mission to restore the bus, wanting to honor her father-in-law’s legacy. The bus was pulled out of the swamp by Merry Pranksters’ friends and family, though some of the Pranksters wanted it to remain in the bog and let nature take over. Some still do, she said.

Stephanie Kesey founded Furthur Down the Road Foundation in 2008 to create a formal vehicle to push for the bus’s restoration. But shortly after, she became a caregiver for her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. After her mother died, Stephanie was diagnosed with the same form of cancer, slowing down her active work on the bus for a time. (She is now healthy.)

“It’s kind of just been a little bit of a bumpy road getting here,” she said. “But now everything is going full steam ahead.”

The Keseys know people want to see the bus. While Furthur has been off-limits to the public — the Kesey farm is a residential space for the family, which also drives cattle on the land that is dry ice-branded with a symbol of a key and the letter “Z,” — Stephanie fields dozens of emails from people who want to see the bus, pouring their hearts out about what it means to them.

If you’re thinking, “Wait, I’ve seen the bus at Oregon Country Fair,” that’s actually the second Furthur bus. While Ken Kesey liked to say, “There’s only one bus, just like there’s only one Starship Enterprise,” there are, in fact, two. He created a second Furthur, a painted and decked-out 1947 International Harvester, to coincide with the release of his 1990 book, “The Further Inquiry.” 

It’s OK to confuse the two; being fooled is common. Journalists were hoodwinked in the “Great Smithsonian Caper” that year, as they were led to believe the original bus had been fully restored and was being donated to the museum. That’s why the original was pushed into the swamp: to help sell the illusion that the first bus had been restored.

When asked to clarify, just in case, Zane and Stephanie Kesey said that the 2026 move to San Francisco is not a prank. 

The Haight Street Art Center, Stephanie Kesey said, “ticked all our boxes” for a partner to restore the bus, sharing an ethos of love, joy and spreading that in the world through art.  

Restoration needs 

While the bus is a weighty symbol of the psychedelic era, it’s also a rickety, rusted bus in significant disrepair. 

The Keseys have been “looking like crazy,” Zane Kesey said, for other 1939 International Harvester school buses that could yield compatible pieces, to no avail. Windows are broken, as is the plexiglass viewing dome above the driver’s seat. Stepping into the bus is hazardous: Zane Kesey recommends walking along the bus frame’s metal structural beams to not fall through. 

Signs of the old glory persist. With each layer of paint they cleaned off of the bus, there was another Day-Glo bright layer right underneath; he said they’ve only recently gotten down to the original school bus yellow. Inside, the paint is more vibrant than it is on the exterior, still on the ceiling and sides in swirling patterns. 

The bus was painted, repainted and re-repainted frequently during its Merry Prankster heyday. A future restoration wouldn’t be a detailed recreation of a particular moment in the bus’s appearance preserved for posterity, but rather a combination of how the bus looked through the years.

Restoration or not, it’s still the magic bus for devotees to Kesey, the Grateful Dead and the hippie era. 

One acolyte, Kelly Blake of Phoenix, Arizona, was granted access to see the bus before it heads down to San Francisco. Blake had read about the bus leaving Oregon in The New York Times and stopped in Pleasant Hill during his conveniently timed road trip from Arizona to Canada. He knocked on the Keseys’ door and asked to see the bus, joining a select group of neighbors and friends able to bid it farewell. 

Blake, 69, first got into the Grateful Dead in the 1960s as a young man who “got tired of the Beatles.” On the Kesey farm, he said, he got goosebumps looking at Furthur and, later, standing in front of Ken Kesey’s grave. 

“I’m surprised we found their house so easily,” he said. “Which I’m not wild about being able to do.”

Zane Kesey said that restoration or no, the bus has electric energy. He was on the trips with his father, a 3-year-old kid brought along on a culture-shifting bus ride, but said the bus had that aura even before it was painted in the Santa Cruz mountains. 

“I think that it was always the magic bus to me, long before I’d ever heard of any other magic bus,” he said. “How do you bottle up magic? How do you describe magic? It’s the ability to see the good, even if it’s not there yet, even if it’s not real.”

But it’s not lost on the Keseys that Furthur will be in a very different San Francisco, one transformed by the explosion of Silicon Valley and Big Tech, than the last time the bus was in Haight-Ashbury. Stephanie Kesey said the Furthur spirit is “terribly exciting and terribly needed” in the city. 

That mission, she said, trumps any personal connection the Keseys have to the bus, as storied as they are. 

“That really is more important than the sentimental feelings that I have at it leaving,” she said. “Because we’ll see it again.”

A drive south 

On Monday morning, a shipping company carefully loaded the bus onto a flatbed truck. Today, it is being driven off the farm and through the rolling, pleasant hills outside of Eugene, due south on I-5, into California. It should reach San Francisco a half-hour after midnight, in the early hours of Tuesday morning. 

It will be unloaded into Golden Gate Park to go on display as part of the Haight Street Art Center’s “Forever Grateful” celebration of the Grateful Dead next month. There, it will be surrounded by foliage and flowers, lit from within, underneath and from above and paired with a screening of original film footage from the 1960s Acid Tests.

After the “Forever Grateful” exhibition, which runs from Sept. 5 to Oct. 25, the bus will move to a Burning Man warehouse in the East Bay. 

From there, Stephanie Kesey said, the plan is to find a permanent museum home for the bus in the Bay Area and continue raising money for a future museum-quality restoration. 

Though the bus has left Oregon, parts of it are staying in Pleasant Hill. 

There are the paint chips that flaked off during clean-up, saved for a future art piece. There’s the original International Harvester logo plate, stolen from the bus in the 1980s during a Beta Theta Pi fraternity party on the farm (around five years ago, the guilty thief mailed it back with an apology). The second Furthur bus, in full color glory, will still make its annual trips to the Oregon Country Fair. 

But there’s one more keepsake, Stephanie Kesey said. During the work parties, friends and family spent hours cleaning out dump loads of debris “left over from the good old days,” and uncovered an artifact the family intends to keep. 

“Underneath it all,” she said, “we found a roach.”