The Eden Express (6 page)

After a couple of weeks Virginia started getting discouraged and talking about running out of money, etc. I tried to be bright and cheerful. The thought of what the hell we were going to do if we couldn’t find some land was just too painful to consider, so I didn’t.
We had moved out of Rosanne and Bert’s living room into a leaky cardboard shack behind their house. You could barely stand up in it. It was pretty dismal. We weren’t making love much. That was another thing I just put out of my mind.

Day followed day. Getting to know Vancouver, reading the newspapers, smoking a fair amount of dope, doing odds and ends and occasionally driving around the country saying, “Ooh, ah, isn’t that nice land.”

During one of our drives out around the city I noticed a sign saying “Ferries to Sunshine Coast.” What could be nicer? The Sunshine Coast became the new focus for my hopes. I bought some beautifully detailed maps of the area and fell in love again.

The Sunshine Coast isn’t really very sunny but I didn’t know that then. It has slightly less rainfall than Vancouver, which is where it gets off calling itself the Sunshine Coast while having a typically wet Pacific Northwest climate. But I wasn’t in a very cynical or analytic frame of mind. Sunshine Coast was paradise. It had to be.

Swifty and Bo, old Swarthmore friends, came north in a monster Pontiac Bonneville. They brought up some good California wine and some ancient Spanish brandy. I went out and got a beautiful leg of lamb. We had homemade garlic bread, French-cut beans, a huge salad, avocados with lemon and salt, and on and on. A feast. It was old times. We had done this sort of thing at college. Half the kick was starving for weeks on end to be able to afford it.

The next day we packed up the tarps, the ice chest, all the camping shit, and got on the car ferry for the Sunshine Coast, Swifty, Bo, Virginia, Zeke, and me. I was in high spirits, happy to be back on the road, back to camping out, building tarp houses. Away from worrying about Zeke being run over. Out of the city, out of stagnation. On the move and with old friends. The only thing I didn’t like was that pig of a car, which didn’t corner for shit on those mountain roads, but it was somehow appropriate to Swifty and even that made me smile.

The end of the road was where we were headed. Highway 101 starts somewhere down in Panama, comes up through Mexico and California, up to Vancouver, and then about a hundred miles north of Vancouver it stops. If you want to go any farther up the coast you have to go by boat. If I was going to find what I was looking for, the end of 101 seemed like where it would be.

There were two long ferry rides to get up to Powell River, eighty miles above Vancouver. The scenery was spectacularly beautiful. The Coast Range dropped right off into the water. This was virgin frontier, unspoiled except for ugly scars left by loggers here and there. Man was here but not many of ’em and he was certainly not master. Back East you could drive just about anywhere you wanted to go. Here there were vast areas that you couldn’t get to except by boat or float plane or on foot. The idea that man could ever tame these savage, proud mountains seemed remote. For the earth to reclaim itself here wouldn’t take much effort. A little shrug would do the trick.

 

I wish I could say we got the land by some soulful means, but the truth is we got it through a real estate agent. Now Virgil McKenzie is not your standard-issue real estate agent but we had no idea about that. His was simply the first sign we happened to see.

It might seem to some that a real estate office would be a logical place to start looking for land, but I had been looking for a year and had never talked to anyone in the business. It was somehow against the rules. I suppose what we wanted to happen was we’d be walking through the woods and come upon some old codger who would take an instant liking to the wonderful young people and sell us his land cheap. We did a lot of tromping through a lot of land without much luck.

After we had been at the camp ground for a few days, operating on all the soulful levels, it started to rain heavily, making a mockery of my tarp houses. As much to get out of the rain as anything else, with
deep misgivings Virginia and I went into the first real estate office we saw. It was Virgil McKenzie’s. Without much hope I described what sort of thing we were looking for, how much money we had to spend, etc., fully expecting him to come back with “Yeah, you and everybody else and their brother.”

We wanted a fairly large piece of land, something over fifty acres if possible, not too easily accessible, suitable for farming. With what I had and what Virginia had, and with the help of some of the other people who were interested in this sort of thing, we could get maybe $20,000 together.

It turned out he had something he thought might interest us. As he described it I felt my eyes get larger and larger. “There’s this piece of land…eighty acres…used to be a self-sufficient farm thirty years back…hasn’t been worked since then. Old boys used to bring in huge loads of vegetables and fruit…no neighbors. To get there you have to go about ten miles by boat and then back a mile or so on an old logging road. A year-round stream running through the property. Old fruit trees are still bearing.” And the asking price—$12,000. I caught myself just before the drool came over my lip. Would we be interested in having a look? It sounded too good to be true. We made a date to go up in his boat and have a look at it as soon as the weather cleared.

Why had it taken us so long to go into a real estate office? Having done it once it seemed easy to do it again, and so to be good shoppers we went into a few other real estate places to see what they might have. There was nothing remotely comparable to McKenzie’s deal. Completely undeveloped stuff that was accessible by dirt road, had been logged over, would have to be cleared, maybe had water, maybe could be farmed, was all about $500 an acre. Whenever I asked about anything cheaper they all shook their heads knowingly and talked about maybe some stuff way farther north by boat.

The next day there was a break in the weather. McKenzie and his son came to our camp site. McKenzie was the perfect boy scout leader. He hadn’t been at our camp more than three minutes before he started giving us advice on our fire, where to find dry wood, and what kinds of stuff were best for kindling. From most people it would have been offensive but somehow from him it was all right. He was an ex-logger who felt funny about making his living as a real estate agent. We found that out as soon as he had exhausted his kindling talk.

We put the boat in the water and zipped up the lake, with Mr. McKenzie’s folksy lore barely audible above the roar of his outboard.

We got to the farm after tromping a mile and a half on a soggy, misty, overgrown trail. The place was more beautiful than our wildest dreams. Lush blackberries ripening, apple trees with green fruit. Several acres of field still clear. A stream ran right by the old house. Mountains on all sides. If there was any hesitation in my mind I missed it.

“Of course there’s no value in the building,” McKenzie said professionally.

“Watch how you talk about my house.”

We walked around for a couple of hours uncovering more and more marvelous things. There were little trout in the stream, old harnesses and hardware in a collapsed shed, a wine cellar with old casks, lots of garter snakes and friendly toads. Zeke loved it.

I guess deep down inside I had never really believed it was going to happen; that we would really find something, let alone something so perfect, so beautiful, so cheap. I breathed huge sighs of relief. Home at last.

Virginia said something about shopping around some more. I laughed. I honestly thought she was kidding. She smiled and had to admit it was a hell of a beautiful place.

Swifty said something about its being pretty tough to go out for a hamburger or a movie. I laughed at that too.

Bo said that all the folks back in California would be glad to hear that they had a friendly place to visit up in B.C. I smiled and nodded.

I didn’t say much on the trip back to town. I just sat looking at the water rush by, feeling happier than I had felt in years and thinking that for the first time in years that happiness was called for.

The next morning I went to McKenzie’s office to put down a hundred dollars, which he said would be enough to hold the place while we got the rest of the money together.

Twelve thousand dollars. I had seven, Virge had three. We would need a fair amount of money for equipment and food. Simon was on the way up and he was reported to have a bundle that made ours look pretty silly. He had sounded enthusiastic over the phone but he might chicken out. I wasn’t very worried. The place was so gorgeous someone would want to come in on it with us.

 

GRACE. Here I was in British Columbia, with Zeke and Virginia and our meager worldlies in faithful Car Car, having just found our glorious land to build an alternative on. I had just said yes to lots of suggestions. I was taking cues. From God? World literature? Some weird consensus? I wasn’t sure. I was just staying open and saying yes as often as I could and this was where it had brought me. I felt that I was tuning in to something, something that loved me and would take care of me.

A lot of the principles I was operating on were lifted from my father’s stuff. It came from other places too. It wasn’t that I was trying to live my life by things my father had said in opposition to other things. It was just that his voice was a familiar one and seemed to be part of the larger voice that was worth tuning in to.

Somewhere along the line I had become a grace addict. When everything happens just right and it seems that someone or something is trying to tell you something, nothing is coincidence. You reach
into your pocket and pull out the exact change, no more no less, and it’s terribly important.

It’s important that it appear nonsensical. A radio playing next to a TV with the sound turned off. There shouldn’t be a connection but there is, and further there’s a point or message to it, and further it’s important and if you were operating on your priggish notions of logic you would have missed it. And you wonder what other goodies your priggish notions of what is and isn’t connected have robbed you of.

Gifts from God? Who else would operate that way?

Exactly when this sort of thing first started happening to me is difficult to say. By the time I got to college it was the biggest thing in my life, and it became bigger.

It felt so good.

After my first few tastes I was pretty much hooked. I’d have dry spells, months without any or only piddling amounts of grace, but I never forgot about it or stopped wanting it. The grace experiences seemed to be cumulative. They didn’t lift me up and then drop me down leaving me lower than they found me. They added to each other. The dry spells were just plateaus on an ever higher climb, but that didn’t stop me from looking forward to the next jump while I was digesting my last one.

There was usually a sensual rush of warmth and well-being. Sometimes that was all there was to it. Just feeling good.

I was doing things just right. I felt graceful and beautiful. Life was graceful and beautiful. We were moving very well together.

The message part of grace was something I was never quite at home with. I was perfectly comfortable when it seemed like just a simple greeting. “Hi, Mark.” “Hi, God.” And that would be that. It wasn’t a one-sided affair. I could start it. “Hi, God.” And usually he’d come back, “Hi, Mark.” Not always, but there were probably plenty of times He said “Hi” and I missed it.

It was when there seemed to be more to it that it bothered me. “Look, God, I don’t ask you for motorcycles, don’t ask me to go slaying infidels.” I was never sure of what was being asked or what lesson I was supposed to be learning. I doubt that God really wanted me to slay infidels but He might have, the same way He probably still has somewhere in the back of His mind the possibility that I’m angling for a motorcycle.

I was never at the point of saying for sure that this or that was definitely the work of God. I just wanted to keep the possibility open. If there was such a thing as grace, I didn’t want to cut myself off from it.

Somewhere back in my childhood someone told me about drowning sailors being kept afloat and eventually deposited on land by porpoises. More recently some marine biologists decided to check these accounts. What they found out is that porpoises simply like to play. The research concluded that porpoises probably take as many drowning sailors away from land as toward it. “I had no more strength left but I was floating toward a beach about twenty yards away. I figured I could just about make it when this fucking porpoise came along and…” There are some phenomena which you normally hear only one side of. Maybe when I found out the truth of porpoises and drowning sailors I should have started having second thoughts about grace, but by that time I was thoroughly hooked.

 

HIPPIEDOM. I wanted to be a good hippie. For me and lots of other people a good hippie was something very worth being, if not the only thing worth being.

In a way I’m glad no one seems much interested in being a good hippie any more. It wasn’t an easy thing to be. I hope the fact that no one wants to be a good hippie any more means the whole thing worked, that the world is slightly less the desperate, mindless, cruel nightmare of unawareness that gave birth to hippiedom.

Maybe everyone’s part hippie now so that really good full-time
hippies like what I tried to be aren’t needed any more. It’s what the good hippies wanted all along anyway. Maybe we could get doctors and lawyers to do the same.

A good hippie had no last name. It wasn’t entirely my fault I wasn’t a better hippie. “This is Simon, and Kathy, and Jack, and Virginia, and Mark Vonnegut.” Some of the best hippies I ever knew introduced me that way. If they hadn’t I probably would have found some way to work it in.

I had other shortcomings as a hippie. I didn’t have too much trouble getting over the idea of private property, but the big problem was that although I did all the things good hippies do, I always did them with a twist and was too conscious and/or proud of that twist to be the hippie I would have liked to be.