THE FALL of 1967 was to be the last fall Kimberly Roth would spend in Troy. Autumn makes no mark on this new Detroit suburb. Trees have not had time enough to grow as have the elms of the inner city. And the air, sulphurous and choked as always, has brought blight to the few infant trees, imported and sculptured in thick rows between the yards of the condominiums to impart exclusiveness. They look siliconed, as do the laws which are sod carpets purchased ready-made and transplanted by unrolling.

The Rath place is distinguished only by boxes of geraniums set outside the second story bedroom windows, a gold bronzed door knocker the size of three fists of shaped like a gargoyle, and a wooden scroll with Welcome All Ye Who Enter etched in red, tacked upon the molding. Inside a chandelier, tear-shaped bits of glass strung together in the form of a globe, dangles in the hallway; the walls are bumpy, like just dried mud plaster, broken by an oil painting of a girl in a red equestrian's uniform astride an auburn thoroughbred in a forest. The living roomis furnished in imitation gold-leafed Louis XIV, with mustard velvet upholstery and matching floor length drapes. There are three six-year-old portraits of the Rath children above the fireplace and a bust of Andrew Carnegie on the mantle; the opposite wall is all mirror. National Geographic, Readers' Digest and Businessweek lie on a coffee table along with Mechanics Illustrated and a Bible. There are no ashtrays to be found.

In the fall of 1968, Kim, a well-possessed 18 year old, left home for Kalmazoo College--with its quiet main street and parochial ways--was not the place to hold her for long. She left not four months after she came.

Disillusionment and dropping out of college are by now so familiar, the experiences bear so much resemblance, that you could probably read this story like the rest. A friend recounts Kimberly describing hers: "Like they made me take this psychology course, the whole shebang, Introduction 1, rats in cages and schmuck cosmic questions. Like this exam I had to take. The first question was 'What is up?', can you believe it, what is up! What is up!" At this point Kimberly broke into a wildfire cackle that became a screech. She continued, "Well, I sat there for three hours and couldn't do it. So I turn this blank paper and they let me sit there for three more hours and I still can't do it. So they tell me to come back in a week and so I come back and sit in this empty classroom with the doors locked for six straight hours staring at that stupid question trying to figure out if maybe I'd gone crazy, zoned out. So they flunk me, but by that time I just couldn't see any point in any of it."

Thinking over this part of Kimberley's life Edward and Rose Rath merely shrug, tiredly. "I don't know what she wanted," Edward says, "she just wanted more. I didn't know why she left, but I wasn't going to object. Rose and I never went to college and we did all right; anyway, it was expensive. Kimberley was old enough to take care of herself. I told her to keep me posted on her whereabouts, and I told her I'd give her money when she needed it. She did call a few times, told me she'd found a job in an office in Ann Arbor. So we didn't worry."

But Kimberly Rath, as it turns out, was far from all right. Her story comes from Harley Coulter, a Dead freak, who runs a head shop in Ann Arbor. He went to the funeral stoned--"She would have like that," he said. He had known her well enough, he thought, in the times when no one else seems to have, to make some sense of her death. And he told a story, or rather, the ending of a story that is rooted in Detroit.

THE STORY is of a search, of course, of someone always heading somewhere else. "Kimberly always had to go overboard," Harley says. "She kept trying to get into the center of life and kept getting let down by it." The winter of 1968-69, Kimberly was in Ann Arbor, and it was there that she lost herself if she had not sometime before.

Certainly there was plenty happening in Ann Arbor that winter, planty to hang on to for identity, or for the feeling of identity. "Everybody," Harley says, "was running around like their heads had been cut off and the apocalypse was coming." The Arboretum, once the place where "you could kick a bush and it would kick back was loud with demonstrations; there was rioting when The Mothers of Invention opened a concert yelling "Up against the wall, motherfuckers"; Tom Hayden was running the Michigan Daily, Hare Krishna and Seventh Day Adventist freaks panhandled in the streets and fought with each other for converts, storefronts were going psychedelic and the graffiti bespoke anarchy.

But beneath the noisy surface of the city and outside the safe lives of the enrolled, was an Ann Arbor of precarious living--of streetpeople, young runaways and the dissolute, and of the more hardened and streetwise. It is here that Kimberly Rath had moved, not to an office job and a life with structure, but to this itinerant underground. And here, with time to kill, she began to hang out in Harley's head shop off South Main.

She had been in Ann Arbor five weeks when she met Harley. She told him, and she's still not sure she wasn't lying, that she had been picked by a man called "the Great" by those who dealt with him in Ann Arbor's drug scene, on her hitch in from Kalamazoo. The Great put her up "until she got settled," Harley says, in a left over row of dingy closed-out storefronts by the train tracks--in the center of the industrialized area off Route 23 just beyond Mr. Flood's Get Your Foreign Car Fixed garage and Super Gas at the bottom dip in Main Street. Behind the loft lies a fenced-in junkyard facing the Huron River and the rusted factory on the opposite bank. Harley figures that the Great turned Kimberly Rath on, but he can't be sure.

"KIM WOULD NEVER talk much about herself," Harley says. "Sure she talked plenty, she was funny as hell, but she'd shut up about everything personal. Maybe she was ashamed of something, of who she was, maybe. I knew she was rich right from the start. You see lost of them in here, rich kids. She was weird though, gutsy. First time I noticed her was when she takes all this real freak-show type stuff into the dressing room and spends about a half hour in there, and I'm getting ready to go in because for all I know she's shooting up or something. And then she walks out looking like this crazy turkey mama--feather boas on her arms and she's wrapped an Indian shawl around her for a skirt, and she's braided beads into her hair and painted her face in green and white diamonds. And then she just struts around for a while, singing to herself like she's trying to be Joplin. Well, I thought, she was pretty far out and we started talking. She came in every day after that, just horsed around and next thing I know she's moved right in, with me, I mean.

"It was nice, ya know. Sometimes she'd help out down in the shop or she'd clean my place. She was stoned a lot. After a while she was stoned all the time. I didn't notice it at first. I mean she seemed okay at first, that is. Probably because she always so gay, always dancing around and laughing, cracking up a storm, she seemed real happy, crazy happy. She never did anything straight, always dressed it up bigger than life.

"Like the drugs. After a while I was feeling something was wrong. I'd ask her about it and she'd tell me I was full of shit, she was fine, just let her be but don't leave her. So I let her stay, I cared, you know. But I just couldn't do anything. I'd tell her to lay off the drugs some and her face would get all hard and she'd yell at me to stop preaching at her. She just seemed hungry all the time, like she'd throw herself into every trip all the way. Manic. Then she'd come down like she'd been cheated. So she'd go back up again.

"I mean most people had their religious experience and dug it only as long as the trip lasted. But Kim made a religion out of it all, on you name it, hash, coke, heroin, speed, mesc, psylocybin, LSD, DMT. Once, on sunshine, she just danced in this slow circle around the room with this scary grin on her face, and then suddenly grabbed a pair of scissors and starts jabbing at her hair screaming about how the devil was inside her and she has to get him out.

"Another time she just up and hops on the back of this weird missionary-type freak's motorcycle and takes off for California. She's back in three weeks with a story about how he beat her up and raped her and left her for dead in a motel in the middle of Salt Lake City. After that she said she hated freaks--said they were mean bastards who'd steal you blind if you were stupid and kill you if you gave em' trouble."