The journey back to paradise took most of his adult life, but John Wythe White persevered. It was an obsession that wouldn't leave him alone.

As a young man in 1970, White found an Eden in a Kaua'i commune called Taylor Camp. It was a haven for counterculture refugees who had rejected mainstream society in favor of a hippie lifestyle near the end of the road at Ha'ena.

Taylor Camp's eclectic residents — travelers, backpackers, Vietnam War vets — lived rent-free in bamboo and wood treehouses beside the beach. They grew their own food, swam or surfed every day, debated politics, smoked pot and loved each other freely.

White lived there for four months and ever since has struggled with how best to explain the experience. Finally, the Hale'iwa writer turned to fiction and this month, 38 years after his sojourn at the camp, will publish a deeply reflective novel, "A High and Beautiful Wave," (Mutual Publishing).

"It was such a vivid experience that it just never left my mind," said White, now 63. "I think it was one of the best times of my life."

Coincidentally, the novel is not the only recent reflection on Taylor Camp. This summer a documentary film by John Wehrheim, who had photographed camp residents in the early 1970s, was shown at the Hawai'i Theatre in Honolulu and to sold-out screenings on the Big Island. Like the book, the film didn't hold back. For residents like White, the camp was a defining experience.

TEACHING TO TREEHOUSE

White was a 25-year-old high school English teacher in smoggy Southern California when a friend living at Taylor Camp urged him to move. White didn't know what to expect, but quit his job, emptied his bank account and bought a round-trip ticket to Kaua'i. He was welcomed by a community of roughly 40 people.

"I built myself a little treehouse on a plywood platform," he said. "It was on four tree stumps, a tiny A-frame. I had a little cooking area. I would walk up a little hill and there was this row of ironwood trees and then the ocean. It was a real beautiful place."

White's days were filled with surfing, working in the garden and playing his guitar.

"It was a nice little community," he said. "You would go over to someone else's treehouse for dinner. There were a lot of intelligent people. I found people who were very bright and entertaining."

The book was drawn from White's experience, including a key character named Fred the Zen. White based the enigmatic zen master on a resident named Dick Cohen, a man whose approach to life was unlike any the author had ever encountered. White hung around him a lot, and not just because he had the biggest treehouse and lived with three women.

"It was really educational to watch the way he lived," White said. "He was really spontaneous in the moment. He was just probably the most enlightened person I have ever known. He had no hangups."

TAYLOR CAMP

A lot of Kaua'i residents, especially in local government, were not amused by Taylor Camp. It was seen as an eyesore. There were thefts, complaints about sanitary conditions, drugs and public nudity, as well as a feeling that it was a threat to tourism that would persist for years after White left.

When officials evicted the last of the residents in 1977, they burned the treehouses.

White left Hawai'i when he left Taylor Camp, but returned to the Islands two years later. He created a life in Honolulu that included teaching, writing — journalism, novels, plays, advertising — and community theater.

No matter what else he did, however, the desire to write about Taylor Camp was always there. Although White wrote an article about the experience in the mid-1970s for an alternative weekly called Sunbums, he did not tackle the subject seriously until 15 years ago, when he turned it into a play. It was never staged, though, so White let it sit until he got the idea that he could turn the play into a novel.

The project took more time and patience than White expected. "It was like a shack I had to build a mansion around," he said. "It needed so much work."

He would work on and off, and at one point stopped altogether for two years. "The idea of going back to it was revolting," he said.

He finished it in 2006, then struggled for another two years to find a publisher.

A BYGONE PLACE

White's story follows a disillusioned English professor who spent time at the camp in 1970 and returns 30 years later with the hope that he can recapture the youthful sense of unlimited possibilities. In the end, he must come to terms with his own responsibilities.

The title comes from Hunter Thompson's book "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and refers to a generation convinced it would make a difference. The reality, though, is what haunted White for years.

"As time went by, that kind of got lost and that whole era got trivialized into hippies and flower children and free love," he said. "So I think that is one of the things that drove me to write the book — to sit down and just reconsider that era from a nontrivializing point of view."

White never regretted leaving Taylor Camp when he did. But after he moved back to Hawai'i in 1972, he visited the camp. Like the character in his novel, he sought to find something that he had lost.

"I kind of wanted it to be the same, but it wasn't," he said. "It was just a little different in ways I don't really remember."

After that, he never felt compelled to return to Kaua'i until he started fleshing out his novel.

"I went back there in 2001 to research for a week and I tried to find it, just like the character in the novel, and it is just not there," White said. "It's all jungle."