The Eden Express (10 page)

It went pretty quick, driving straight through most of the way. Before we knew it, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, like a flash. Washington, the evergreen state my ass, most of it’s desert. Dead deer on every other car from Wyoming on. The Black Hills weren’t
black but the Bad Lands were some of the prettiest, most awful bad land I ever saw.

Three days after leaving Vermont, we crossed the U.S.-Canadian border just north of Seattle, drove straight to the Vancouver ferry terminal, and napped in the car waiting for the first ferry. The usual two ferry rides and a hundred miles of driving (five hours) later we were at the Powell Lake Marina. Luckily John Eastman was there and took us up the lake.

Two pieces of bad news: Beowulf, who was getting on everyone’s nerves, hadn’t split as he had promised. Jack had slashed his leg with the machete. They’d brought him down to the water in a wheelbarrow and then found that neither Dick nor Moldy had any interest in being outboard motors. They had broken into a summer cabin on the lake and waited there a few days hoping a boat would come along.

John took Jack to the hospital in his boat. It wasn’t serious, but it so easily could have been. Bringing my reliable outboard from Barnstable had been a good idea.

The roof had progressed quite a bit. Vincent and I, the former foremen, surveyed critically and did a bit of chain-saw surgery. But all in all it looked like a good job.

Nice to be back. The next day was more work: no more tears, no more tangles.

 

THE GOOD OLD-FASHIONED ORGANIC WAY. A commune a little farther up the coast, rather than exploit animals or use any sort of machine, plowed their land by harnessing themselves to the plow four at a time. This was seriously discussed at our place somewhere in between my first two breakdowns. We eventually compromised on a roto tiller, the worst of both worlds.

We hadn’t taken to the woods just for a change of scenery and a different way of life. The physical and psychical aspects of our adventure
were inextricably intertwined, but the head changes were what we were really after. We expected to get closer to nature, to each other and our feelings, and we did, but even these changes were relatively superficial. They merely meant getting in touch with things that were already there. We wanted to go beyond that and develop entirely new ways of being and experiencing the world.

We had only vague ideas about the shape of these changes or when they would happen, but we looked forward to them eagerly. Since they would result from being free of the cities, of capitalism, racism, industrialism, they had to be for the better.

It was a lot like taking some new drug and waiting for the changes.

“Is it happening yet?”

“I think I’m walking more with my feet than my head.”

Push-ups and football were out. Yoga and frisbee were in. Hamburgers were out, soybeans and brown rice were in.

Fifty-pound sacks of dried milk from a wholesaler were better than quarts from the corner store but not as good as from our own goats. Buying Canadian was better than American. Red Chinese work clothes were better still. Bartering was better than cash but couldn’t touch dump picking. Anything that could somehow be construed as counterrevolutionary was out. I had my problems digging Charlie Manson and felt bad about it sometimes. Not that the people there were heavy into Charlie’s trip, it was just hard to have bad feelings about anything or anyone that Nixon and company didn’t like. If it had come down to choosing between Nixon and Charlie it’s hard to say which way the farm would have gone. It was a hypothetical situation, a not very likely one, but a fair amount of our lives was tied up with hypothetical situations—the revolution, ecological disaster, the last judgment, the breakdown of Western civilization, Armageddon.

Apocalyptic expectations, revolution, economy, as important as they were still didn’t get to the root. The truth is we didn’t really know
what we wanted. Ego death, mystic oneness with all things, seemed like it might be what we were after but it also seemed pretentious. We were after something a little less flashy but no easier to describe adequately. The best model I could come up with was wanting more of my life to be like playing with Zeke.

I think most of us were fed to the teeth with the brand of rationality that had made up so much of our education. Western rationality had made a dreadful mess of a lovely planet, but it was more that this form of rationality had taken up the lion’s share of our minds without giving us much in return. Rational truths were true enough, but they were mostly trivial, boring, and not particularly useful. We wanted to free some of our rational brain space to make room for other ways of being. Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths.

Folk medicine, astrology, the I Ching, other things Western rationality held in contempt, were more training exercises than things we absolutely believed in. We trusted gut impulses more and more, our plans less and less, and found ourselves having gut feelings about more and more things, and getting more and more done and feeling better and better about what we did.

There were some spooky parts to it. Stubbed toes, strange clouds, how many snakes we saw in a day, all fit together and had meanings which we would be able to figure out some day if we paid the right kind of attention. Nothing was meaningless or disconnected. It would be easy to dismiss this as just some kink in a mind about to blow sky high, or mass hysteria, or hippie foolishness, but I still think we were on to something very real.

Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life. Then I couldn’t get enough. There’s something happening there but I don’t know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?

TOWN TRIPS. Powell River was a two-supermarket mill town. Its raison d’être was the world’s largest pulp and paper mill, which used twice as much water a day as New York City and could be smelled as far away as thirty miles if the wind was right. The whole time we were at the farm, the smell only got up to us twice, but it was hard to forget it was there. Some neighbor for Eden. Blowing it up was one of our playful fantasies.

Sometimes we went two or three weeks without anyone going to town, and we would have loved to dispense with town trips altogether, but we were a long way from selfsufficiency. Fresh vegetables and building supplies were the usual reasons for going. While we were at it we did the laundry, picked up mail, exchanged books at the library, and paid social calls.

We never went down en masse. Town trips were seen as a royal drag, so two was the usual crew. Besides, with more than two people Blue Marcel couldn’t do the trip in less than three hours.

There were no set teams. We went in all possible combinations. Who went was usually decided on the basis of who hadn’t done town duty in a while and/or who had expertise on whatever tool or building material we needed and/or who had some medical or other personal business to see to.

Except for one solo desperation run of mine for tobacco, it was always an overnight affair. Considering Blue Marcel’s speed, there was no other way to play it. We had a variety of places we were welcome to stay, including a commune on Prior Road about ten miles out of town; Joe and Mary’s place in town; two abandoned loggers’ cabins a few miles by dirt road from town that had been taken over and fixed up by three refugees from New York, and a few locals like John who were always willing to put us up. If we weren’t in the mood for any of these, there was an old twenty-four-foot, double-end lapstrake boat
with an unlocked cabin tied up at the marina. No one ever seemed to use it, so we slept there from time to time.

There was a short-order greasy spoon, the Thunderbird Restaurant, which we usually patronized on town trips. We called it the Works in honor of the house specialty, which was a hamburger with mushrooms, onions, peppers, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and a hot dog thrown in. At $1.75 it was the best deal in town. The Works also had one of the finest juke boxes I’ve ever run into, and it was conveniently located directly across from the laundromat.

After three or four weeks of bucolic peace, suddenly seeing cars, electric lights, newspapers, your own face in a mirror was always a little jolting. Sometimes it was a kick to see all the shit we were getting away from, but more often the hassles and ugliness made us want to get back to the farm as quickly as possible and work our asses off so we’d be able to cut town trips to once a year or so.

That town trips were more and more upsetting was a good sign. It meant that the farm really was changing us. We were more and more in tune with natural and divine harmonies and more and more sensitive to discordances we had once accepted as being part and parcel of life. Being out of it we now look back on our society and see that it was worse than our wildest condemnations.

 

MERCIFULLY, the winter rains came a few weeks later than usual that year. We finished the roof in the nick of time. When the rains started, much to our delighted surprise that crazy goddamned thing didn’t leak a drop. We were still short a few walls on the third floor, but most of that work could be done out of the weather under our magic roof.

You’re not supposed to just bop across international boundaries and set up housekeeping without telling someone. Some of us were on long-expired two-week visas, the rest of us had slipped by with no restrictions simply by flashing lots of cash and claiming we were on a
shopping spree. Shortly after the roof was finished, we decided it might be wise to become legal immigrants.

There wasn’t much to it. First Kathy and Jack and then Simon, Virginia, and I took a ferry from Powell River to Vancouver Island and drove to Nanaimo, which was the nearest immigration office. There were a few pages of forms to fill out: education, jobs held, occupational plans in Canada, financial stuff. We shuffled money around to make each of us look very wealthy. Although the immigration people seemed less than thrilled with hippie farmers, their “objective” point system didn’t give them much choice but to accept us. We all had maximum education points, fluency in French, which only meant you had to know as much French as the interviewer, which wasn’t much, financial points, points for being in our early twenties, and assorted other points.

It was much like the draft process. We were constantly reminding each other to be sure we switched gears. It was a joke, but we had been so conditioned to be noncooperative and insulting to all forms of officialdom, these reminders weren’t out of place. We all sat through fatherly lectures from our various interviewers about the foolishness of what we were doing, and were granted landed-immigrant status conditional on our passing a standard physical exam. We were given forms to take to whatever doctor we chose any time within the next six months.

 

THANKSGIVING. The Canadian Thanksgiving had been a few weeks earlier. Up north the harvesting time, which is what the whole thing is supposed to be about, comes earlier. So there we were, immigrants celebrating a holy day of the old country in their new home. We were celebrating the start of new things, new hopes, a new home, just like the Pilgrims.

We invited everyone. Everyone we knew in Powell River, everyone from the other communes around, everyone we knew in Vancouver, friends in California, and anyone else we could think of. We had had
visitors before, people from Powell River dropping in on us, old college friends, total strangers, and occasionally there had been enough people spirit and whatever for something like an occasion to take place. But this was the first time we had anything you could call planned.

It was open house, inspection time.

Luckily, most of the inspectors didn’t show up. If everyone we invited had come it probably would have been hell. The logistics of food and bedding would have been hassle enough, but the bigger problem would have been playing to that many different audiences all at once.

We wanted everyone to dig what we were doing. I think even Nixon’s misgivings would have hurt some. Whenever we talked about the farm or showed visitors around, our presentation usually varied considerably, depending on who it was we were showing off for. Too many types of inspectors might have blown a fuse.

The inspectors who actually did show up were important ones, the Berkeley crew made up of friends from Swarthmore and some other folk they had picked up along the way, heavy into radical politics, women’s lib, the revolution and all. It wasn’t like we would have given up and all gone down to trash buildings on Telegraph Avenue if they had not dug the farm, but it would have hurt a lot.

We passed with flying colors. We weren’t copping out. We were on the same team. Brotherhood and sisterhood confirmed, alliances affirmed. Good feelings all around, we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner.

A few grouse done up as much as possible like turkey, lots of things with apples, rounded out with a few cheat items from town. It would be different next time around.