The Eden Express (11 page)

None of the Berkeley people liked Beowulf, which may have been what pushed things to the brink. In any event, the brink came a few days after they left.

It was one of those scenes in which everybody knows what’s going
down but nobody will say so. We were all sitting around the kitchen after dinner. Showdown. The issue was why people didn’t dig Beowulf and what should be done about it. There were hours of half-completed sentences and pregnant pauses. There was talk about how feeling should be in the open. The truth setting you free. Honesty being the best policy. Nothing being bad as long as it wasn’t buried. Things you think are hard to say being much easier if you just try. About three hours of this shit, everyone waiting, prodding, edging around, teetering, teetering. It was mostly Sarah doing the leading. She was in the middle. Beowulf was her man. We were her friends. That there was considerable friction between Beowulf and the rest of us was no secret.

Beowulf’s name wasn’t the problem—lots of people were into strange name trips—but his attitude about it was indicative. It was twenty-four hours a day I’ve Got a Secret. He was smug about his diet, posture, breathing, and lots of other stuff too, but what he was smuggest about was that no one knew his real name. He guarded his birthday equally zealously and let on that these twin secrets gave him enormous advantage. Add the fact that the vibes were never quite right for Beowulf to do much work and that he never really talked with anyone except maybe Sarah and you’ve got friction.

Why me? It seems so pointless, so unfair. It’s not like I’m much more bugged by Beowulf than anyone else. I didn’t get my way with the shape of the windows or the roof. If everyone else was so hot to have me not be chief of this tribe why do I have to play the heavy now? Simon, fucking free spirit, perfect hippie, the windows went mostly your way. Here’s a chance to earn it. Or Virginia. You’re the one who says you can’t live here if he does. Or any of you other jokers who keep coming up to me and saying how Beowulf is bugging you.

More pregnant pauses, more pleading in Sarah’s voice, more looking at me, waiting for me to finish these dangling thoughts,
waiting for Taurus to give some nice concrete example to all these abstractions.

“Beowulf, you give me a pain in the ass.”

I wish Sarah had been right. I wish I could report that after everyone leveled with everyone else, after everything was out in the open, all hostility vanished, everything was resolved and the whole room glowed with the good feelings of brotherhood.

Actually, I don’t remember most of what was said that night. It was so much exactly what I expected I had a hard time paying attention. Beowulf wasn’t the only target. But all the criticisms leveled at others seemed like weak gestures to make things look a little more even.

Beowulf had been saying he was about to leave anyway but he had been saying that for a while. Maybe that night made him decide to really go through with it, but all in all I don’t think that evening changed the tide of history one way or the other. Mostly I was just depressed that the whole thing hadn’t worked out as smoothly as we had expected when we left for my trial.

Within a week he was gone and Sarah had left with him, which was too bad. Sarah hadn’t been much of a worker but was a good friend and a general up for everyone.

 

LUKE. Sometimes I think maybe I liked Luke as much as I did to make up for how little I liked Beowulf. There were some superficial similarities, which made them easy to think of as a pair. They were the only non-Swarthmore people, they were both superfreaks. Freaks in different ways, to be sure, but neither could be accused of doing things halfway.

If I and the others disliked Beowulf because he wasn’t from Swarthmore, why did we all love Luke? If Beowulf didn’t fit in because he was such a superfreak, why did Luke, who was second to none, fit in so perfectly? The real answer was that Luke was warm and open while Beowulf was a tight-ass.

I doubt that there have been many who moved over the face of this earth as gracefully as Luke. I can’t imagine anyone or anything resenting his existence. He is probably as close to a saint as I’ll ever meet.

Move over the face of this earth he did. He was brought up somewhere in New Jersey, spent a lot of time traveling around, settling for a while in various places in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and then British Columbia. Last word placed him somewhere in South America.

Apparently he ran a hotel in Berkeley for a while, but beyond that I know of no work, regular or otherwise. I doubt if he ever had or ever will have much money. When I met him he had nothing but a few pieces of clothing that were the products of inspired dump picking and the like. I never heard him complain about having no money or brag about it either. He appeared to have some sort of faith that whatever he needed would gravitate toward him and it seemed to work out that way.

I never saw anyone in any situation anything but happy to see Luke. I have a feeling he could walk in on Nixon fucking chickens and Nixon wouldn’t mind. Luke wouldn’t mind. The chickens wouldn’t mind.

He just about destroyed my car one day. Town was upsetting him. He decided he had to get back to the farm, but our boat wasn’t there and no one was going up the lake that day. I don’t think he really thought that by some magic there was all of a sudden going to be a road to the farm, but he might have. More likely he figured that maybe one of those old logging roads might get him part way there and he’d walk the rest. He had a compass. Predictably, he didn’t get far. The car was hopelessly enmired, and there was a big operation to get it out of there. But the curious thing was that no one, not me whose car it was or any of the other people who had to salvage the situation, was the least bit angry with Luke.

We were angry with the highway department for not putting a road where Luke wanted to drive. We were angry that there hadn’t been a
boat at the lake for Luke to use. We were angry that one of us or someone hadn’t been with Luke to keep him from getting upset.

How Luke had managed to survive this long was always a mystery to me. He’d do things like throwing a flimsy boat together with a few pieces of scrap wood, cut another piece of scrap wood into a paddle, and just vanish into the wilderness. A few days later he’d reappear, smiling, on foot, telling us about how his boat had sunk about ten miles up the lake and he just sort of moseyed his way back.

There was a thing he said a lot that summed him up in many ways: “Nothing is poisonous.” The first time I heard him say that was in response to my look of disbelief as he picked up the deadliest-looking mushroom I ever saw and ate it. Later, when I was learning about mushrooms, he slipped often enough to let me know that he knew pretty much all there was to know about them. It’s typical of Luke that he was embarrassed by and tried to conceal this sort of expertise. He appeared to look at it as unnecessary garbage he had cluttered his mind with before he learned to trust. He wanted to believe he was picking mushrooms according to vibes, but he was always very careful about inspecting those we picked before letting them go into the pot.

Luke was organic to the nth. He was the hippie’s hippie. He even had misgivings about agriculture. He claimed to have gone for months at a time eating nothing but wild food. It’s possible; he knew more about edible wild plants than anyone I’ve ever met. Of course he claimed it was just vibes leading him to his next meal. Meat, of course, was out of the question.

Luke had a deep mistrust of even simple tools. The chain saw drove him up the wall. There was little love lost between him and most internal combustion engines, though for some reason he did have a certain attraction to Moldy Goldy and a few other things, like my car. There was nothing dogmatic or fashionable about his attitude. He just
couldn’t stand to be around anything he didn’t love. That he loved my car was a great source of pride to me. In time I came to trust his instincts almost as much as he did.

He was probably the least manipulative, least conniving person I ever met. He wasn’t perfect. He tripped over his own rhetoric from time to time. “The truth will set you free,” and then a little lie. But there was no way he could have lived up to the things he said. He did it as well as it could be done.

Some of the best times of my life were with Luke. Town trips with anyone else were a drag. Somehow he and I used to get everything that had to be done in about half the time it took anyone else. Obstacles seemed to vanish. Then we’d get a jug of wine and go visiting. We’d sing old rock-and-roll songs late into the night.

If I were to pick out the high point of my life, I think it would be strolling down the beach in Powell River holding hands with Luke in the shadow of the stench-belching pulp mill, half-crocked on wine, the sun setting, and singing “You Are My Sunshine.”

Hanging around with Luke, I felt the same flowing good feelings and lack of hesitancy that I felt with Zeke.

Luke loved the old lapstrake double-ender and could rarely be persuaded to sleep anywhere else on town trips. The outboard I had brought from Barnstable made Blue Marcel dependable but she was still only thirteen feet long and couldn’t carry much. We asked around about the old boat and learned that it had been on the lake since 1917 and, more important, was for sale. At $175, a steal. Feather, weighing in at over two tons, became our heavy carrier bad-weather hope.

Unfortunately, Feather got to make only two trips for us. The first brought us our two pregnant goats, the second brought Simon’s family up for Christmas. Then, since the engine was acting strangely, we decided to just let Feather sit till spring, when we could fix everything right.

CHRISTMAS. Another holiday, another occasion. A new set of inspectors, Simon’s family. His sister, little brother, and parents all showed up to spend Christmas at the farm. Jet fare alone must have run over a thousand dollars.

Simon went down to Vancouver to meet them: neutral ground, so to speak. They spent a few days there, did some skiing, and then came up. The parents didn’t spend much time at the farm. After about a day and a half they retreated to the Marine Inn back in town. It was probably the outhouse that did it as much as anything else. We all thought they were pretty good sports to come at all.

There were little awkward moments, like when someone passed a joint to Simon’s little brother, but all in all it went very well. We enjoyed having them there and I think they enjoyed being there. They weren’t tickled pink that Simon had chosen this way of life but they weren’t foaming at the mouth about it either.

There were lots of the usual conversations you have with parents about this sort of thing. Throwing away a good college education. Don’t you get bored? Money? What about working in the system? Would you fill in an absentee ballot if I sent you one? Dope.

Same conversations but with a difference. The difference was it was taking place on our turf and not theirs. We were the ones who could afford to be indulgent and polite about their screwy ideas. Somehow, watching their reactions to this new situation gave the farm a solidity and reality that the previous inspection by peers had only hinted at.

 

On the way to the farm with his family Simon had picked up a Christmas package from Barnstable addressed to Virge and me. Red and green DO NOT OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS stickers were on all sides. We went along with it and just let it sit there till December 25, in spite of our talk about moving Christmas back to the winter solstice, where it belonged.

When we opened the box, it was all I could do to keep from crying. The two little bottles of champagne had broken en route. The champagne had all evaporated but the joint letter from everyone was stained and the pages of the books were warped. Nothing but the wine was really destroyed, my Christmas stocking and my mother’s rum cake were OK, but the accident seemed fraught with tragic symbolism. It triggered off thoughts of Christmas a year ago.

 

Each of us in the family knew that it was “the last Christmas.” The last Christmas we would all spend together. The last Christmas that would be anything like the Christmases of the past.

Something was dying. It was more than Christmas. The magic that had filled the Barnstable house was dying. Our childhood was dying.

What was killing it? Father’s getting to be famous? The changing times? The fact that we weren’t children any more? Nothing goes on forever, but we didn’t let it die gracefully, we just had to try to squeeze one more Christmas out of it, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening, trying to make like it wasn’t the last Christmas, trying to be twelve again. It seemed like we were compelled to play a cruel joke on ourselves and insult what had been so precious and real with a farce.

I honestly tried to coast through it and maybe in another mood at another time I wouldn’t have taken it so seriously. I could have played the game like everyone else and just let it go. But this wasn’t that time and mine wasn’t that mood. I was too upset, too desperate, too scared and unsure of what lay ahead.