PLEASANT HILL, Ore. – Four decades ago, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters rolled across the country as psychedelic shock troops in a brightly painted bus called Furthur.

Recently, some remaining Pranksters – plus kids, companions, young acolytes and dogs – met at Kesey’s farm to help his son Zane make Furthur roll again.

The Pranksters were lysergicized proselytizers making the transition from the beat generation to hippies, a rainbow-hued crew seeking to wake America from two decades of cultural slumber. They were harbingers of a tectonic, though temporary, shift in American culture.

Furthur is one of the enduring symbols of that time. But it was road-weary and 50 years old when Kesey towed it to bottomland at his farm near Eugene. He built a replica from a newer bus as the original languished in the swamp. Kesey, who died four years ago following liver surgery, stoutly resisted all suggestions to move the bus.

On a late October day, Zane Kesey and his crew towed the bus a couple of hundred yards from the swamp to a flat spot near the barn.

It was a journey that many of the Pranksters never thought they’d see. “It’s sweet to see it back out of the swamp,” said Mike Hagen, a former Prankster. “Who would’ve believed it?”

“I don’t know what Kesey would think about it, but we can’t worry about that now. I’ve been trying to e-mail him, but the server must be down,” joked Ken Babbs, who knew Kesey for 43 years.

“It’s been a miraculous day, because we had no idea what would happen,” she said. “We didn’t know if the brakes were seized and the wheels would even roll. We didn’t know if it would break in half when we got a chain on it. But the vibe was right.”

What happens next is the question.

“Our goal is to restore the bus and tell its story,” said David Houston, who owns Barney’s Beanery, a Los Angeles restaurant. “This is a priceless piece of American history.”

Lit by full sun for the first time in years, Furthur looked the part. Moss drooped from its flanks, ferns grew from its fenders and mice had colonized the interior, which was stripped except for the driver’s seat where Neal Cassady often sat.

It may be rusted, but it was the locus of many lives.

“This feels like a perfect time for a new subculture,” said Stephen Greene, Houston’s partner in the possible restoration of Furthur. “It feels like something was pulling it out of the swamp. Since Jerry Garcia died, another of the doorways to a different culture closed.”

But which Furthur do you restore? Its livery changed overnight, and then again in a month or a year.

“Oh, I remember when it was that color, I think I painted that,” said “Mountain Girl,” a Prankster and the mother of Kesey’s daughter, Sunshine. “I remember every one of these flakes.”

She pored over multicolored paint chips that flaked off the bus when it was pulled out from between trees that tightly flanked it.

Mountain Girl (her driver’s license shows a different name, but her friends call her MG) looked up as people pushed the bus around a corner to ready it for the tow up the hill.

Zane Kesey allowed two days to extricate Furthur, but it was out of the swamp shortly after noon on the first day. Which is not to say the operation went off with military precision.

The scene in the swamp (a mercifully dry swamp, thanks to a lack of rain) was marinated in the same cheerful anarchy that Kesey and the Pranksters brought to those long ago Acid Tests.

“No control freaks,” Sunshine Kesey said. “Keep it loose. Dad encouraged randomness.”

Dogs and kids romped, mostly ignoring the trampled blackberry vines. Characters milled about – young neo-hippies, one of whom unslung a mandolin to sing “All You Need Is Drugs”; a documentary film crew; silver-bearded Prankster Izzy Whetstine in Technicolor tie-dye: Zane Kesey in purple tie-dye of his own; and Phil Dietz, who calls himself the last Prankster and who tapped a hand drum as people strained on the ropes and chains.

The pullers put their backs into it, and Furthur inched backward as David Tipton walked alongside and shouted steering commands to Prankster George Walker in the driver’s seat.

But Kesey’s daughter was OK with the plan, whatever it may be.

“My dad would’ve been thrilled that there’s a new surge of energy behind the bus,” Sunshine Kesey said. “It’s not necessary to leave it as a story of the past, because he wanted other people to take the craziness on the road.

“To him it wasn’t just the bus, it was the action of people coming together to make something happen. His philosophy was live in the moment and call the dance.”