Life / My Generation
The Campus Revolution
Country Life
I stop over in Baltimore for a brief visit with my folks, then rendezvous with Steve in nearby Washington for the first leg of our itinerary. We immediately discover a critical error in our preparations: he's left his Strat-O-Matic cards home. A quick call to his parents and prompt posting by mail rectifies the problem in short order. The days quickly fall into a pattern: spending the morning and early afternoon crouched on the broiling metal roof in the stifling Washington heat, smearing thick sealer on cracks with a toothbrush; watching with anxious relief as thunderclouds mount in the distance and loom over to break the spell of the oppressive humidity; retiring to the living room with the cooling thundershowers pattering around us, to set up and play out our drafted leagues of “Mickey Mouse” baseball, including the newly-minted stars of the 1970 season.
We enjoy the company of Julie's parents and family: the jovial, portly lawyer, the effervescent wife, the draft-dodging son who stayed home in hiding while collecting blues classics, affable Julie, her pretty, young, tennis-playing sisters, and the pair of German Shepherds that never tired of fetch-the-ball. There was also an aged beagle that one day dragged an entire ham to the floor and devoured it . . . and another day soon after, in the same spot, died.
In two weeks' time the Meyers were off to vacation in the West and we were off to Maine - a tiny island in Penobscot Bay, where Steve's aunt inhabited an old captain's house, that she hoped to restore and operate as a hotel. Our jobs included a complete paint job, rebuilding some steps, and, as it turned out, flushing out a nest of bats in a sudden, screeching flurry from under the eaves.
The island is absolutely enchanting. Instead of the afternoon thunderstorms we've grown so fond of, we look forward each day to the banks of fog that roll in so fast that we are enveloped even as we watch, still perched on our ladders. On whole days off we hike to the beaches, through dense woods on deer trails; or we settle for backyard whiffle-ball, again the “boys of summer.”
For a two week stint we hire our labor out to a local stonemason working on a new foundation for a neighboring house: mixing cement, hauling rock. The mason is built like his walls: stocky, burly, muscled as if with large, round rocks in his biceps and thighs, forearms and calves. His very head has the craggy, hard appearance of a boulder. But he is a kind task-master and a master craftsman to watch, placing stone and packing mortar. Those mornings we learn to drink coffee, workingman-style: to drag the aching body from its seven-hour sleep, through a blessed breakfast and out the door to the early-morning, steaming cool.
Nights we drink Miller, watch or play baseball, or indulge in some old-time's-sake cruising. We are more mature now, more experienced. So the high-school-aged locals are easy prey, and we break ice and make conversation with practiced ease. But it's all for play; we have no serious intentions. Steve is already committed to Julie and I am just passing through. We buy them soft drinks, make token small talk and wish them good-night.
It is with a feeling of wistful nostalgia, already, that we board the ferry to leave that island; a nostalgia that we will reiterate in correspondence ever afterward. For it has truly been a last gasp of boyhood enjoyed, or perhaps a throwback to a boyhood already past. The romantic surroundings - misty, mystical, mythic - have indelibly impressed us as well with the timelessness of that world apart.
In short order we found ourselves in the glinting, pressing rush of traffic on the Pennsylvania turnpike, roasting once more in what struck us both clearly as "the harsh glare of reality." Steve's parents had driven their station wagon east to visit the aunt and pick us up, to take us back to Illinois for the final stretch of summer employment. And then, in another two weeks, it was over. A final immersion in basement player drafts and backyard whiffle-ball, slapping on buckets of yellow paint to pay our way through a final year of college . . . and we said goodbye.
I wasn't to complete this summer of innocence without a day of reckoning at home, however. The issue, which my mother had obviously held under her bonnet or vented into the agreeable ear of my father, revolved around drugs. I had only one more year to "make good" in school - a school that they'd saved to pay for, for years. They trotted out all the standard lines: "We shell out all that money, and what do we get? A bunch of communist professors whispering in your ear, and a bunch of drug dealers hooking you on drugs. How much money are you spending on that stuff? Do you realize you could wind up in jail? It's illegal! And look at you. Your hair is over your shoulders; you dress in rags. How are you ever going to get a real job looking like that? And studying poetry. You better start growing up pretty fast - you're going to be out in the real world in less than a year. Do you expect us to support you for the rest of your life, paying for your drugs? You better wake up. You want to paint houses for the rest of your life? Is that what we're spending our life's savings for?"
My feeble arguments in self-defense - attempting to paraphrase Shelley's “Defense of Poetry” - fell on deaf ears. It didn't impress them that grass cost "only" fifteen dollars an ounce, or that good acid came for two dollars a hit. When it all boiled down, their real concern was for my conventional frame of mind, which they'd so carefully nursed, and which they now saw on the brink of extinction due to the nefarious influence of, chiefly, LSD, and incidentally poetry. But their own conventional education gave value to the liberal arts; so, the politics of professors aside, the conflict came down to my continued use of acid: to be or not to be a hippie, that was the real question at hand.
Short of an ultimatum backed up by withholding of tuition, my mother's tearful exhortation was firm: I must promise to stop dropping acid, altogether. Grass, hash, even cocaine, I convinced her were harmless. After all, she'd tried pot first-hand. Her strategy worked. More as a personal favor than as a capitulation, I felt compelled to promise that I would take LSD no more.
Maybe my parents were right: maybe I was hooked on drugs. At least, my resistance was lower than my commitment to keeping my promise. Perhaps I felt that the promise itself was empty of any real meaning, beyond placating my mother's unfounded fears. I felt that it would make little difference, in the long term, if I chose to or chose not to drop one or a dozen more tiny tabs of the mind-altering drug. I was not going to be killed, or unrecognizably transformed by it - I'd already proven that to my own satisfaction. And whatever changes in my outward, cultural appearance or behavior, even beliefs or values, were traceable to insights opened by LSD, were equally the result of study and conversation, contemporaneous cultural revolution and evolution, meditation, and the unfolding of latent personal inclinations. So I justified a few more trips, for better or worse.
On one occasion at least, it seemed for the worse. I was newly installed in the house on the hill on a back road near Cornish, New Hampshire, a stone's throw and a covered bridge (“the world's longest”) from the Vermont border, and a twenty-minute commute from Hanover in Dwayne’s car. I felt somewhat the outsider, with Dwayne and his friend Wally a tight partnership from the year before. Three, I learned quickly here, is a difficult number. I was introduced to their circle of friends in Hanover, a party-loving bunch in their own house just off-campus. One weekend the whole gang got together for a group acid trip at the house in Cornish.
A lovely young woman named Janice was there. I'd seen her once at the Hanover house, and admired her charm and beauty. She had long, straight blond hair, fine features and glowing complexion, loose, casual clothing and an easy, gentle manner. She had plenty of male company, it seemed. She was Bill's lover, I guessed, perhaps even Dwayne's; it was unclear. but friends with everyone. The wine flask passed from hand to hand as we sprawled out on the grass before the splendid view. Laughter and talk flowed easily as within us all the acid rushes grew. With the mushrooming growth of my mind's awareness I became more and more self-conscious. It was late September and I still felt like an invited guest here, and not fully a part of this partying crowd, the familiar jostling and jibing of old cronies. In essence, I felt alone in the world. Free, and unfettered, in theory - but in the heart, alone. I felt increasingly, in the acid rush, a vision of total love - a love of anyone and everyone by anyone and everyone. The seven or nine or however many there were of us there in that mixed company of two women - Janice and Lila - and the rest men, had such potential, high together and loving . . . but not loving, not really. It was all on the surface, and there was no real person-to-person union. The urge to love was shut off, stifled by the veneer of togetherness. My loneliness in the face of this contradiction grew and grew until I was overcome with frustration and walked off to the barn to dwell on my sorrows alone.
Janice and Lila both, it so happened, were sensitive to my condition and appeared at the barn door, asking if I was okay.
"No," I blurted out, and my distress was now evident enough to them that they came to my side to comfort me.
I broke down and cried there, recieving their collective hugs for support. They swayed with me, held me, listened to my pain. I tried to explain as best I could. They seemed to understand, in their own fashion.
At least, some message of love got across. Because the following weekend, Janice and Lila appeared at our house again on a Saturday night. You could tell at a glance what they had in mind. Janice had her loose blouse unbuttoned to the waist, and Lila's tank-top was taut over a large pair of bursting breasts. Her belly was also quite prominent: she was four or five months pregnant. Janice came right out and told me, after a couple of joints, that Lila wanted to sleep with me. I looked at her sitting there, short skirt exposing her bare thighs, shy eyes lowered under round wire-rims, and respectfully declined. The old bugaboo, pregnancy, reared its head before me now as a fait-accompli, and I wanted even less to do with a bird in the hand than with the prospect of one in a fertile bush.
Besides, Lila was clearly a second choice, for me. She ended up bedding down with Wally, in one of the rooms downstairs; while Janice sported with Dwayne in his waterbed in the other downstairs room. I slept in the loft over the kitchen, alone as usual. My acid-heightened grief was gone now: I was reduced to the mundane sighs of the single. I tried not to listen to the rustlings and murmurings of the twinned bodies two floors below.
But into my world of resigned reverie an hour or so after bedtime, came soft, tiptoeing steps and a whisper at the foot of my loft-ladder. "Willie? are you awake?" It was Janice.
"Yes . . ."
"Can I come up?"
What a question. I leaned up on an elbow and looked down at her. She wore only a shirt, itself half-open in her style.
"Yeah, sure, come on up."
She climbed the ladder, and with each step I felt myself on a pathway to heaven. Did I guess what was in store? Probably not. My present excitement was too all-encompassing.
She sat beside me, placed a hand on my shoulder.
"I'm cold," she said. "Mind if I get in here with you?"
I opened the covers immediately. I wore a long nightshirt in those days. She stuck her bare legs in beside mine, and we lay there together in the semi-darkness.
"What a nice surprise this is for me," I told her.
"I thought you might think so."
"What about Dwayne? Doesn't he care?"
"No, we're just friends."
I figured she meant Dwayne and her. "Oh, that's good."
"Yeah. How are you doin'?"
I knew she was asking out of concern for my breakdown the previous week. "Not too bad, I guess. I did come down, after all. It's the same old reality to live with, but it doesn't seem so, so overpowering now. You know, the contradiction, between universal love and personal love . . . or lack of it."
She smiled and put her arm around my neck, then kissed me lightly on the lips.
"Yeah, it's a hard one."
"You don't seem to have much trouble with it. What about Bill now? Is it over with him?"
"It's not like that, for me. I don't believe in these exclusive, tight couple things. Maybe that's where your problem is."
I didn't know what to make of her statement. It gave me a feeling of uneasiness, even while it held out a solution to my philosophic dilemma. Maybe it worked for her. For me, well, maybe I wasn't experienced enough, hadn't experimented enough with relationships. I still had this grail of a permanent couple-bond before me. Before I could say anything more, Janice spoke again:
"Have you ever made love with anyone?"
I didn't know what to answer. But I had to stammer away with some stab at the truth. "Heh, I guess that depends on what you call making love. Rolling around in bed, having orgasms, yeah, for sure. But actually, a real, complete fuck, no, I guess I'd have to say I haven't."
I saw a sly smile spread across her face, so close to mine. "Would you like to?"
My heart had suddenly started pounding furiously - not for an imminent death, this time, but for the immanence of life itself.
"Well, uh, yeah! I mean, you mean, now, with you?"
She giggled and wrapped her arms around my head, and whispered in my ear, "Yes." And before I could ask, she added, "And by the way, I'm covered. I take the Pill."
It was truly delicious, that first complete sex, with that gypsy nymph Janice. We lay together afterward, talking, finally getting acquainted. She was twenty-four. That impressed me, and it explained her mature confidence in handling me in my inexperience. I was overcome with happiness there in her company, and confessed to her that she was my best, to use her terminology, "friend."
That proved to be an unfortunate compliment, for Dwayne overheard it from his bed below and began a feud with me that lasted for weeks. In fact it kept us apart, emotionally, from then on. He was doubly offended. Not only had I “lured his woman” right out of his bed; I had instantly installed her in his place in my rank of friendships. This is where the jealousy of boys meets the jealousy of men. To complicate matters still further, I discovered later that Dwayne was "bisexual" and thus had perhaps entertained still more illusions about my allegiance to him.
But then, he still had Wally as a loyal friend. I never got close to Wally, though he intrigued me with tales of fishing trips to the remote wilds of British Columbia.
My romance with Janice proceeded in sporadic fashion. Her comings and goings on and off campus were forever mysterious to me. I never discovered anything of her past or future: she was a free spirit of the present, and I had to accept her as such. When I found her in the company of Bill or others, I had to curb my rising jealousy. When she came up to me at noon at the snack bar on a Friday afternoon and said, "I've got a couple of hits of acid; do you wanna trip with me?" I accepted without hesitation. If we later that evening had to ask for Dwayne's car to drive out to the house for a more comfortable tryst, we managed that. If she appeared one glorious October afternoon when the leaves shone brilliantly against a solid blue sky and asked if I wanted to go for a walk with her, I had, of course, to go with her . . . through the pungent foliage of the woods, to a sun-dappled clearing where I draped my jacket on the ground and lay there on my back, with her on top of me, stripped down and gorgeously framed by tree-branch and sky . . . and when, before that fall term had even ended, she said she was moving on, to another "friend" with a house near Keene, I tried to understand, tried also to convince her to "stay with me," whatever that meant - but it didn't mean anything to her, and then with a parting kiss, she was out of my life forever. Yes, it was true, so painfully, simply true: Love is unfair.
All of this time, of course, I had courses to complete, the more surpassing lessons of humanity to learn. In an earth-history course I was lucky or resourceful enough to create for an assignment an epic poem called "The Book of Neutron" which would ostensibly flesh out the connection between the planet's origins and human mythology. Rather than engage in too much abstruse research and analysis I created a new "myth" using both patterns of traditional myths and known facts of astronomy and geology. It was a golden opportunity to use the resources at hand - namely, some good black hash - to help stimulate the creative juices. I had even better luck with the hash treatment on a final exam for a course on Dostoyevsky. Luckily it was all essay questions, and the morbid, penetrating state of mind of that dark-spirited author was easily approached with a large pipeful on the way into town.
A third course, American Prose, lent itself especially well, both in subject matter and form, to my particular talents and environment. At the core of the course were the transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau. I was also introduced to Whitman, Henry Miller, William Burroughs. The assignment for the entire course consisted of reading the works and keeping a journal in which to record responses to and connections between the readings. Cannabis was a natural aid to the intuitive process of appreciation and comparison, as well as to uninhibited expression in the journal form. More importantly, I was living in the very same New England woods that had so inspired the early American romantics to gush so over nature - indeed, to devote their lives and works to its continuing exploration at all levels. I too was becoming, along with my reading of them, increasingly sensitized to the holistic worth of the natural world, especially in contrast to the civilized version of reality.
"Holistic" is a trendy word that perhaps needs closer definition. I use it to convey a sense that "Nature" consisted not only in the attractive scenery of landscape, but also, as Thoreau discovered in his pioneering way, in a way of life, a living close to nature both outwardly and inwardly - in accordance with the seasons and the produce of the local soil, as well as with the dictates of one's innermost values and truths that arise naturally from a well-cultivated solitude.
I had to notice, by the way, that under the leaves throughout those woods lay tumbled-down rock foundations, ruins of abandoned farms. A whole generation had tried that countryside and found it wanting, and journeyed on . . . leaving it for dreamers like me to pass through in our turn.
Buried deeper still were the bones of the earlier inhabitants of that land. My fourth course that term filled in the details. It was called “History of the American West” - but whether Montana, Arizona, Florida or New England, the story was the same. In 1971, you could hardly help but throw in Vietnam. The clincher for me was the story of the smallpox-contaminated blankets that the US Government gave to the Cherokees for their forced relocation west. To help them on their way.
I took the extra course after calculating that I would thereby have enough credits to graduated a term early. A series of placement exams upon entrance in my freshman year had earned me course credits in English and Math that I could now cash in when it counted. My idea was to save me and my parents the expense of the final term, as well as the unnecessary time delaying the transition to what I kept thinking of as "real life." Not that I didn't have a good case of the senior blues. Like most of the class, every graduating year, I hadn't a clue what I should or could do upon exiting Ma D's all-too-comfy womb. Most opted for business school, med school, law school, New York banks. A bunch went on to further study, or teaching jobs. A handful settled for trades, travel, or . . . who knew what else? I didn’t.
By this time law school was out of the question for me. I hovered somewhere between teacher training and the God-knows-what option. When grades came in and I found I'd received a course citation (not to be confused with a traffic citation) for my American Prose journals, I was inspired to apply for a summer internship with The Washington Post, supported by Professor James Cox's recommendation. But that door never opened.
I enjoyed Christmas at home, proud of my newly-won prestige but still unfixed for the future. The holiday break after a jam-packed term was a welcome relief from worry. I had no real friends in Baltimore but partied with Randall and her crowd, spent balmy days out jogging and smoking by the sylvan Loch Raven reservoir, and sat up nights reading or watching the tube - notably, an entire Pink Floyd concert, otherwise the usual brainless mush.
On New Year's Eve an article on the front page of the Baltimore Sun caught my eye. It concerned military call-ups for the coming year. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had announced that he expected no new manpower needs for the first three months of the new year. The astute reporter was bold enough to point out an interesting connection with the Selective Service Act: If a man with a draft deferment (such as a college student) loses, or gives up, that deferment any time during a given year, he is only eligible to be drafted for the remainder of that calendar year, and the first three months of the following year. The reporter was quite direct about the connection - going so far as to advise that it was important to post such notice to one's draft board before midnight of December 31. This piece was written for me, I felt immediately - because in the newly instituted draft lottery, my assigned number was a dangerously low 42 out of 366. That was the luck of the draw for my birth date; when they began call-ups with the number 1, they kept going through the numbers until they filled the need for draft-eligible men. I still had a CO application ready to file, and a medical history of asthma as a backup way out. But neither was a sure thing as an escape route, so the new announcement was, I felt, a message delivered by my guardian angel.
I still had to consider, though, the possible consequences of tossing in my long-cherished student deferment. If Laird changed his mind, if the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese launched another offensive, I'd be a sitting duck. I didn't have long to decide. It was afternoon already. The post office would close soon and my choice was closing. I mulled it over and over, talked it over with Mom and Dad, and realized it was my best shot. The student deferment would end soon anyway, and then I'd be exposed for a whole year. Besides, why else had that article just appeared like that, if not as a gift of fate? I rode with it - wrote out the note to my draft board in Illinois, saying (however incredibly) that I wanted to give up my "2-S" deferment and become classified "1-A," and rushed down from my parents' apartment across the street to the mall and the closest post office.
It was closed. I'd missed it by half an hour. Did that mean I'd made a wrong choice after all, I wondered, and now had a reprieve, a chance to retreat? Or had I simply blown it? I had one last hope - the big blue mail-collection box outside the post office door. If postmarks were applied for time of deposit . . . or if there was an evening sorting . . . but no collection times appeared on the box. I popped the envelope in and hoped for the best.
I never heard from my draft board again.
Equipped with a brand-new pair of L. L. Bean snowshoes I'd gotten for Christmas, and with nagging uncertainty about my future, I headed back north one last time. The bus stopped in White River Junction, Vermont. From there a taxi ride completed the short journey to Hanover over the snow-swept granite ridges that lay between. Dwayne met me in town and we drove out to Cornish together, through the deep, dark, snow-laden forests.
"Y'have a good Christmas?" he'd asked with his old Southern charm. I was glad to see the grudge subdued, if not gone altogether.
"Yeah, not bad. How 'bout you?"
He regaled me with his tales of giant parties on his Alabama estate, wild drug binges, warm piney woods. No serious relationships, it seemed - but on the surface, he had the social graces down pat. He also knew whom to touch for a good supply of Lebanese blond hash, or Columbian weed, whatever. We toked up like old times and began the winter term stoned as usual.
Then even before settling in at home, Dwayne took a detour off into the blackness, a ten-mile stretch down a road like a tunnel to the dairy farm where we got our milk. The old farmer grinned as he came into the cold room by the barn to serve us.
"Oh, hey-ya, come back to try the wintertime good now, did ya? Heh-heh."
"Wal, it ain't Alabama, that's for damn sure," Dwayne drawled. He wore only a thin leather jacket, though it was twenty below. The two-hundred gallon, stainless-steel milk cooler purred before us in the center of the room.
"You don't have to pasteurize this milk?" I wondered aloud.
The farmer gave me a wink, and tapped his boots together lightly to knock the snow off.
"Depends on where it's goin.' Th'inspector come in her and ask me that, well, of course it gets pasteurized, to go out to that big operation cross the river'n Windsor. But you young guys, this one anyway" - and he made like to poke Dwayne in the belly with his elbow - "say it's healthier raw . . . an' I agree with you. Don't hurt the cows any." He opened the lid of the cooler, reached in a large dipper and filled us a gallon jar full of the rich, yellowy, cream-thick milk. Dwayne paid, we thanked him and went on our way.
"Real life," I thought to myself. "That's what it's all about. But is that what I want? Two hundred gallons of milk?" Time yet to stew over such matters. Precious little time.
One dusky Friday afternoon in heavy February snow, Dwayne and I went shopping in Windsor - across the Connecticut River, by way of the "world's longest covered bridge." On the way back, near home, we spun on a hill and stopped. Backed a little, tried again, backed some more, and so on. I got out to push. We gained a few feet, wheels spinning madly. Dwayne, I guessed, had never heard of snow tires. We inched forward. Finally the hill leveled out, and I opened the door to get back in. A four-wheel-drive jeep with a winch pulled up next to us; a tall man with graying hair and large black eyes looked out and said, "You okay? Need a hand?"
"No," I said, "We've got it now. Just spun a bit on the hill. Thanks anyway."
"You get stuck like that in deep snow around here, you might need a pull out. Just give me a shout if you do; I'm right down the road from you."
"Sure, we'll keep it in mind. Thanks a lot," said Dwayne, and the man drove off.
"Who was that?"
"That's our neighbor, J. D. Salinger."
He'd been so friendly - but the famous author was notorious as a recluse; so reclusive, even, that he'd been rumored to have given up writing. His tiny green "studio," a stove-equipped shack no bigger than an outhouse, stood hidden away in the woods across our property line. I never saw it occupied, or tracks going there, on my snowshoe treks through those woods.
Maybe, I theorized, he only used it during the days of his now-extinct marriage - more rumor. I did meet his wife, or ex-wife (named Salinger anyway), because she taught an extra-curricular, six-week course in a church basement in Hanover, called "Constructive Anarchism." Her aim was to debunk the familiar stereotype of anarchists as bomb-throwing terrorists, and to explore with the dozen or so of us in the class some more positive aspects of anarchist theory and practice. There was indeed a rich body of writings on the subject, and now in the culture at large could be seen an increasing number of lifestyle experiments that relied on informal modes of cooperation. These were benign, but nevertheless genuine outgrowths of "anarchist" spirit.
One of the members of the class looked right at home in an anarchist "cell." With a stiff brushy crop of wiry black hair, eyes like live coals behind round wire-rim glasses, a Mennonite's beard, lumberjack's shirt and farmer's overalls, not to mention the workingman's boots, Jim Borschert ranted at length about the evils of modern society and the particular evils of the American Government. And he had another way, he was happy to tell us. Claire Salinger, tall and graceful, priestess-like in her long, flowing, Indian-print dress, indulged him, as she was glad for whatever participation we offered from around our little circle of a dozen chairs. Jim had borrowed ten thousand dollars from his family in Minnesota and aimed to reverse history - in his own small way - by buying a twenty-acre chunk of New Hampshire real estate - undeveloped hillside bush - and turning it into a farm. With, that is, the cooperation, co-residence, and capital chipped in by a dedicated corps of fellow spirits, yet to be recruited.
I wondered if I could be one. Another temptation. Teacher, dairy farmer, writer, truck farmer. Was I already out on society's fringe forever, or could I still play it straight? Too far gone for business or law; that much was settled.
My last official course load filled out the requirements for the major, and plunged me further along some chosen paths. I took a second creative writing course, by which to indulge in some fiction experiments and discover whatever hidden potentials I might have in the field. The evidence, as I might have expected, was inconclusive: I earned a B. Good, but not great. Oh well, I thought, maybe the talent will develop, in time, with that heralded real-life experience coming soon, to a theatre near me.
A course in the modern English novel, from Professor Bien, was uninspiring, as was my performance. He had this unfortunate penchant for objective exams, which did nothing to tap my drug-induced intuitive insights, and everything to prove I'd been spending those long winter nights doing something other than close reading of the assigned works. Oh well, what's another C-plus?
And, finally, I chose a senior seminar more to my taste - the "Underground World Image." Yet another English course, this selection of novels gave memorable expression to society's rebels - the black, the outcast, the dissident, the aware - who all chose in one way or another to take their disaffection "underground." It might have been the contemporary version of transcendence, escape beneath instead of above or away from - a delving into the refuse of culture, to turn its values upside down. Because now that the West was "won," the East long ruined and left for the masses to wallow in, there was nowhere to go but underground.
But the question remained: was the symbol to be taken literally? To live by my values, did I have to take a basement apartment and work graveyard shift in some dump of a city slum? I nearly swung that way, when it came to the crunch. Teaching jobs right out of school were hard to find; but paying internships in the urban wilderness of Compton, California were paying well, and I could thereby become trained as a teacher . . .
Oh, the moonlit nights, the sun-sparkled days I climbed the hills and stalked the forests, wondering what I should do with my only life . . . often alone, gazing upward or praying to the earth like kindred soul Alyosha Karamazov . . . but no answer came. The moons came and went, and when Dwayne initiated a whole-group hike up Salinger's hill for a full-moon ritual of smoke, I would tramp along with the others, gazing at the shadowy trees, the glowing rocks, Lila stopping to drop her pants and pee . . . We were all of us (except Lila) in the same boat, after all, all faced with the same choice - not exactly life-and-death, but life-and-life - and-life, and-life, and-life . . .
Dwayne, Wally and I had some extra insight into that great world beyond, by virtue of our other closest neighbors. An old farmhouse had been rented by four ex-college students, recent graduates from Brown University, along with the Hendrix look-alike from the Brown Hall concert, Ollie.
He was the act; Rob the songwriter, Prudence his partner, Jeff the manager, and Kenny the equipment man. Moving to a deserted old farmstead in rural New Hampshire wasn't exactly going to market, but I guess they hoped to get by with the odd local concert and long-distance recording. By spring, Jeff was beating the countryside selling life insurance; Prudence had split and gone back to Providence; Rob and Kenny were becoming masters at chess and looking to sell off larger and larger lots of their excellent hash. As for Ollie, he was going a bit stir-crazy with so little opportunity to play. He told me when he spent time on the Spanish island of Majorca, he'd get up every morning and listen to Hendrix's "Voodoo Chile." There was more to this connection, I thought, than just the hairdo and repertoire. Another incarnation, or something - perhaps a clone? As a musician he was no Hendrix, but I became a staunch admirer all the same. Ollie was happy to play for us neighbors to please us, and to help feed his confidence. He was even open enough to play together with us amateurs, and at the odd moment, when I plunked along on Wally's banduria, it even sounded passably good. I already suspected that I was no musician, even though I'd invested fifteen bucks in Wally's cast-off guitar. Now I had to wonder, is there hope here to develop my talent, if I can already play with a pro? I wondered, but nursed no expectations. Ollie, on the other hand, was one in a position to worry about such things: he had the talent; now where was he going with it? For me, or Wally or Kenny playing along, it was simply fun.
I graduated in March - without ritual or ceremony, fanfare or celebration. Since I'd elected to finish a term earlier than the rest of my class, I was alone. Yet I remained in the same house with Wally and Dwayne, still I wondered what I would do now with my new (or was it the same old?) life.
To help me through the transition my old friend Dana drove up for a visit. He'd graduated the previous year and had been bumming around his parents' place in Connecticut, wondering what to do with his life, writing poetry, applying for the odd teaching job in private schools.
During our long walks on snowshoes, we'd speculate on the future, the vague and formless prospects before us. To counter our mutual despair we enjoyed the deep and clownish bond of our friendship. We took refuge in the image of ourselves as latter-day "dharma bums" in the mode of the earlier Beat Generation poets, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder - the jazz-novelist and Zen-poet, footloose spirits of nature and of freewheeling hip counter-culture.
There was a serious side to our search, a true spiritual dimension. We occasionally meditated together, and often talked of false religion and our striving for a closer contact with inner, cosmic reality. When the Friends Meeting hosted a Buddhist-Christian weekend retreat during spring break, Dana and I both signed up for it.
The workshop leader was skilled in all sorts of meditation techniques and applications. Audrey was an elderly but energetic woman from Massachusetts, a kindly soul who greeted everyone, however inexperienced, with equanimity. She placed my neophyte's legs in the proper half-lotus position . . . guided my hands through the air in the grace of the T'ai Chi pose . . . spoke about disciplining the wandering mind to focussed concentration. . . paired us up for trusting touch, and accurate listening . . . laid us out on mats and carpet to imagine our own seed-journeys . . . passed out paper and crayons for drawing and writing the visions we had experienced . . . and led us in chanting and singing, dance and nature walks.
She opened up for me a whole new realm of acceptance: of myself, the expanse within; of others, the goodness that shines through; of the outside world, the beauty that is. I was able to appreciate the splendor, the wonder of the sunshine and spring air as never before, outside of an acid trip. This new peace and understanding was a revelation to me: especially the awareness that the experience came drug-free. We partook of simple meals together, shared sleeping space on the floor, and ended with a group worship that confirmed in silent wholeness the new directions explored, and wove together the strands of our separate minds and hearts.
In proportion to the uplifting grace of the meditation retreat, Dana and I fell back to earth with a resounding thud. In that way the meditation-high was as disorienting from the usual daily mode of consciousness as any drug-high. We found ourselves up against the familiar human crunch. Dana's savings were running low (along with his father's patience). I certainly couldn't bank on that chimerical summer job with the Washington Post. I had no real desire to jump right into a teaching position at a New England prep school (nor did I have any confidence I could land such a position). I had an underlying feeling that I was due for a decent-sized chunk of non-academic experience for a change. . . somewhat along the lines of the past summer's jobs, that included a bit of carpentry and construction, well-paid trades . . . or perhaps something connected to Borschert's new land co-op, or commune, or spiritual community, or . . . what was it going to be, exactly?
Dana and I investigated. We talked to Jim, who'd already dropped out of school and begun work at a pallet-shop near Cornish, nailing boards together all day for $2.85 an hour. His ultimate ambition, he told us, hammering away in the frosty air, was to make a living with leatherwork. For now, he needed a more reliable source of cash to begin paying off his $10,000 loan.
What about new members? we asked. Wouldn't they be paying in shares? Well, Jim told us, eyes still on his work, that part of it was coming together slowly. There were a few people interested . . . Bayard Smith and his brother, Rusty; a couple named Jack and Annie that would be arriving next week to take a look at the land; some more folks in New York City who had read of the scheme in an alternative newspaper and written of their possible interest.
We told Jim that neither of us had any capital to sink in just yet, but that it sounded like an interesting venture and we'd like to be considered as prospective members. Jim knew me already; he halted his hammer blows and appraised Dana more carefully. Dana's bushy black curls, his block-heeled city shoes, wide bell-bottomed pants and thin, embroidered jean jacket, his sardonic grin and mad eyes showed him for what he was: an actor, a singer, a poet, a freak - not a dirt farmer, or pioneer.
"You know that land is just raw bush right now, don't ya?" said Jim, mostly to Dana.
"Uh, yeah," I answered. "But aren't you planning to clear some and build on it this summer?"
"Sure, if I can build up enough cash to last for a while from this piss-poor paying job." He glanced over his shoulder at the partners who owned the shop, preoccupied among the stacks of pallets in the open shed nearby. "Lorimer Bros. Freight" announced the unadorned sign hung on the fascia. "But don't you worry about the money at this point. That's my trip. It'll come together. For now we need good folks whose heads and hearts are in the right space to work together on this thing - in a community spirit, you know what I mean?"
"Sure, sure," I said.
Dana nodded vigorously.
Jim went back to his hammering when he saw one of the Lorimers looking at us from inside the shed. "Right now," he went on, "Bayard and Rusty are camped out there, felling a few trees. You could go up there and have a look if you want. You know how to get there?"
He gave us directions, and Dana and I chuttered up ten miles of back roads in his VW beetle. There was a blue streamer of flagging tape to mark the boundary of the land, as Jim had said. The slope rose steeply from the road, with nothing to see but thick, second-growth pine and mixed hardwoods. But above the trees rose a wispy plume of gray smoke.
We parked in a nearby pullout and looked at the snow-choked hillside, then at one another. I was uninspired, but thought I should be inspired by visions of Thoreau, the gypsies, Indians - who could all make good on their theoretical closeness to nature with practical skills I lacked. One had to start someplace, though. And Dana still seemed game. We spotted a thread of a trail snaking up through the bush, where the snow had been packed down by feet. We set off up the hill to seek our destiny.
Bayard was lying in his tent, reading a comic book. A smoky campfire smoldered away in a small clearing littered with dirty paper plates, utensils and cookware, rounds of firewood, cigarette butts. The stocky redhead poked his head out the flap of the tent and said, "Hi there; new recruits, are you?"
"Maybe. Or maybe just tourists," I hedged. "We'll have to see. Actually we are interested in having a look at the land. Jim sent us up."
"Name's Bayard, I guess Jim told you." He held out a bandaged right hand, then looked at it and grinned, and took it back to offer the left instead. "Yeah, I forgot about this. Had a little accident yesterday."
"What'd you do?" Dana asked him.
"Splitting firewood. Put that little ax," said Bayard, pointing to the chopping block near the hand-hewed picnic table, "right through this part of my hand..." and he fingered the meat between the thumb and forefinger on his good hand.
"Yaa - " said I - "that must've hurt like crazy. And bled, too."
"Yeah; it was a good thing my brother Rusty was here, to drive me to the hospital in Hanover. Took eighteen stitches, and I'm supposed to take it easy now for two weeks."
"That's no fun - or is it?" I wondered, looking in the tent at his pile of comic books.
"Well, I got to earn some money around here pretty soon," he said. "Rusty's in town buying some grub right now, with the last of my paycheck from last month. Had a job down in Manchester. Quit so I could come up and make a start on this place, get something built to live in for next winter."
At the prospect of work, I felt suddenly more positive about the whole business. "Did you say you had a job coming up, around here?"
"Oh, yeah, there is a little job I've contracted for, down the bottom of the hill. You pass that old burned-down house - nothin' but a pile of bricks left?"
I hadn't noticed. Dana had.
"Well, contractor over'n Lyme wants those bricks cleaned up, to use again, so I gotta go down next week and start chippin' away at 'em. You guys maybe interested in giving me a hand - heh, no pun intended," he added, looking at his bandage.
I looked at Dana. He raised his eyebrows, said, "Why not?" and we had ourselves a job.
That job lasted two and half days. The following week a good rainstorm melted much of the snow on the hillside, in time for Jack and Annie, a gentle, slender pair, to move up onto the mud with their flimsy little tent. This was the spiritual contingent of the community, it turned out. They had some savings and were not concerned with work, at present. They did spend long hours in the back of the natural foods store on the road halfway to Hanover, drinking coffee, burning incense, and reading Mother Earth News. Dana and I met them there on more than one occasion, as that had been our primary food source for the house in Cornish as well. Jack and Annie were practicing Buddhists, we discovered, and we delved into long discussion with them about various meditation techniques, eastern mystical philosophies, and land-based community. They were hoping, they said, to have a clear spiritual basis for community on Borschert's land, a common understanding and practice. When spelled out, their vision was quite specifically rooted in the Buddhist strain they followed, the Hinayana or "Southern" school.
Dana and I found them friendly enough. As we drove back to Cornish after each of these sessions, however, we had to examine soberly our actual intentions, our long-term motivations and respective inclinations. We were neither of us sure how we might fit into this shifting new proto-community. There was always the challenging thought that it was up to us, too, to help mold the vision, to set the tone and carry out the potentials - in one's own image, so to speak.
Still we wavered. "You know what's missing from this bunch?" said Dana one sunny spring day, after two weeks or so of murky indecision. "Theatre. Poetry. Clowns!"
It was true. The wooded land was a far cry from the day-glo painted, ribbon-festooned "Clown Palace" of our sophomore-year acid trips. This was reality boiled down to the basics. We looked one another in the eye and laughed crazily, then began to cavort down the road past Salinger's place like a couple of mad monkeys.
At the bottom of the hill, Salinger's driveway began. There was a large open field in the flatland below his house on the hill, and at the edge of the field Dana noticed a modest-sized cabin. "Hey, what's that Black Forest hut?" His large teeth gleamed in a smile.
"Dunno. Prob'ly a guest house or something."
"You know what? Maybe we don't have to throw our lot in with that bunch of pasty-faced pioneers. Maybe we could just freak out - ha! ha! ha! - in that gnomish gingerbread cabin there - J. D. willin' and the creek down yonder don't rise."
"What about rent?"
"Oh, same old problem. It'll work out somehow. Gypsies, remember? Now what were those trades again?"
I'd been reading a book about gypsies, researching, if you will, prospects for an unsettled livelihood. "Let's see, knife-grinding, horse-trading, fortune-telling...um, horse-stealing, bear-taming . . ."
"Yeah, yeah, right. I remember. Hmm. How about a roving theatre troop - Black Forest Clown Theatre. Little Fitchie meets the Gypsies - something like that. We don't need to be real gypsies. We can act it."
I was dubious. To the same extent that my imagination felt snubbed by the occupations Jim and Bayard had sunk to, and my sense of spiritual freedom was stunted by Jack and Annie's narrow creed, I now felt unqualified to join in fully with Dana's new-found revelry, with his abandon in the role of the artful self. But at least it was more entertaining, more fun than those other personae I'd considered trying on for size. "Well, maybe you're right," I said with a sobering tone. "No harm in asking the great man, I suppose."
We looked up at the house on the hill, a large, foreboding, rustic mansion, every bit as intimidating to us literary neophytes as if it were the House of Usher. But we truly had nothing to lose, so we methodically started up the driveway. I built my courage on the fact that I'd met J. D. on the road that once, and on my half-year's residence in the neighboring house.
We rapped on the large, solid front door with its hefty brass knocker. Footsteps shuffled inside, approached the door. Salinger pulled it open, then stood there momentarily in silence, taking us in. "Yes?" he finally intoned in a slow, deep voice. His eyes were black - huge, liquid pools.
"Um," I began, uncertainly. "Hi. You remember me? Willie Gray, your neighbor, from the house next door." I considered offering my hand to shake. Salinger was impassive. I went on. "This is my friend, Dana. He graduated last year, y'see, and, uh, I just graduated - from Dartmouth, you know . . ."
"Yes, yes - what is it you want?"
I glanced at Dana, beside me shifting his weight from foot to foot. He still hadn't opened his mouth so I figured it was still my ball to carry. I turned past him and gestured to the little cabin at the foot of the hill. "That - uh - cabin there - we were wondering . . . looking around for a place to rent, like for the summer at least. I'll be having to leave Scharf's place - "
"Oh, yes, Scharf. He's coming up for the summer, is he?"
Our house's owner was a New York cinematographer, and this was his getaway spot. Our rent paid his taxes for him, and kept the packrats and vandals away. "Well, I'm not sure, actually, but, um - we're supposed to be out by then, anyway."
"My cabin's not for rent."
"You, uh, it's, uh, a guest house or some - "
"I'm sorry, but I don't rent it."
"Okay. Okay. Well - "
Dana extended his hand. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Salinger."
Salinger shook it. "My pleasure."
I followed Dana's lead and shook, too. "Thanks anyway. See you." I smiled and turned away. Had I seen a faint twinkle in those deep, dark eyes?
With options thus limited, and travel funds nearly expired, Dana left to go back to Connecticut. We promised to keep in touch. The next time I heard from him, he'd had a nervous breakdown - "something snapped" under the pressures of, among other things, the truths revealed in the Buddhist retreat, uncertainty about a teaching career, and indecision on the question of a commitment to the Borschert community. The result he described to me as a "frightening psychotic trip" through his own, shattered, "Fellini-esque brain city." He expressed the hope that my plans to join the community would not be affected. While he looked forward to a transfer soon from the "modernized Bedlam" of the state hospital to a "posh private loony bin," he wished me luck with my own upcoming life-plans.
I felt distressed about Dana. And certainly the absence of his kindred-soul companionship would make my integration to the land community more difficult. But since his departure I had made a rough beginning in the long process of learning to stand on my own feet. First had come a roofing job with Bayard. His construction skills, combined with entrepreneurial ambition, represented a promising source of livelihood. He was eager to have my participation. I was satisfied, for the time being, though I wished for a bit more security. This was a sparsely populated, economically depressed area, and no one (except perhaps Salinger) enjoyed any guarantee of financial success. But beggars, as my mother always said, cannot be choosers. So I entered the partnership with thankfulness, but no illusions.
I left with still fewer illusions. Bayard had contracted to patch the roof of a woman who ran the nearby Howard Johnson's motel on the highway. The furnishings in her house bespoke moderate wealth and impeccable care. Particularly stunning was the white shag wall-to-wall carpeting in her living room.
Besides the roofing work, Bayard had agreed to clean out the fireplace flue. So we ended up keeping some of our tools outside on the flagstone patio, and some inside, laid carefully out on a small canvas tarp. The roofing job involved the application of thick, gooey tar under and around a series of rotting shingles. We both worked on the roof, clambering back and forth with an unwieldy tar bucket and brush, hammer and crowbar. The work went slowly and by lunch was still unfinished. I worried about the low bid on the contract - we stood to work an extra day but still for the agreed-on basic fee. From what I'd seen of Mrs. Ho-Jo first thing that morning before she went to work, she wouldn't budge on the costs. And the job had better be perfect. She was a large woman, who moved like a ship. Her broad chest had been draped in heavy necklaces over the satiny, flowered dress. She reeked of perfume. Her silver hair looked like a powdered wig, immaculately coifed. And she looked as if she'd not conceived of a smile for the last quarter century. I thought of her often that morning, and again as I munched my sandwich. Bayard and I were sitting cross-legged on the tarp in the living room, beside the chimney-brushes, innocently chewing. Then his mouth stopped in mid-bite, and he uttered a groan -
"Oh . . . no."
"What?" I said and looked at him. His mouth was still open and his eyes were glazed. I followed his line of sight to the floor, the white shag carpeted floor.
Black, tarry footsteps led right across the room. They were only fuzzy outlines of feet, true - but indelibly, undeniably there. Bayard looked at me. I looked at the soles of my shoes; he looked at his. We both had tar on the treads.
We spent the rest of the afternoon (after removing our guilty shoes) painstakingly rubbing at the sticky stains with rags soaked in linseed oil. Thankfully Bayard came up with the cure, a bottle of the stuff as well as the idea. It really worked, and by the time Mrs. Ho-Jo opened the door at quarter-to-five, we were gathering up the unused chimney brushes, the tarp, and our empty lunch bags. We'd disposed of the telltale rags already, minutes before stashing them in the back of Bayard's beat-up truck.
Bayard had had the presence of mind as well to peek up the chimney and decide that we'd be better off saying it was as good as done, than risk spilling twenty feet of soot down into the room. So Mrs. Ho-Jo grumpily looked around, fished in her purse for a checkbook and paid him on the spot. Driving away, with the battered old GMC leaving behind a cloud of blue smoke, Bayard looked as calm and unperturbed as if nothing had happened.
"Is the job finished, then?" I asked him. "She paid you already?"
He looked at me with a sly smile. "Yup."
"What about the roof, though? It wasn't finished."
"Aw, probably good enough, as is. Till next winter, anyways."
When more work with Bayard didn't materialize, I went shopping for jobs further afield. I heard from Kenny that the county highways crew was looking for a guy. My hopes shot up. that would be a really steady job, I thought - enough security for me to become established on Borschert's land, at any rate, until some more aesthetically-pleasing occupation could be developed.
I borrowed Dwayne's car and drove to the highways maintenance yard, five miles away. There was a big shed with attached office and lunchroom, two large dump trucks in the shed and assorted equipment, piles of gravel and sand in the yard. Three or four men were working lazily around the trucks - standard workingman types. In the south, they'd be classic rednecks. In the snowy north their necks weren't red, but their hair was just as short, their chewing tobacco just as strong. And they didn't like hippies; that much I knew in my gut. I braved their odd stares and walked through the shed to the office to talk to the foreman. Same type; he was the burliest. He wore a dull orange cap on his thick head; his cheek bulged with a chaw.
"Heard you might be looking for help, here." I stood up straight, hoping to look and sound straight.
"Yeah? Where'd you hear that?"
"Uh, a neighbor over in Cornish."
"You live over there?"
"Yes - " I almost called him "sir." "Just got out of school, and I'm looking for work. Are you hiring, these days?"
"School, eh? That Dartmouth?"
I nodded. I figured the jig was up.
"Well," he said strangely smiling to himself, "I'll give you an application, you fill it out and if we need you we'll give you a call. All right?"
I gladly took it, thought of filling it out on the spot, reconsidered and decided to take it home for more thought. I thanked him and left.
I did send in the application, and a week later I got a call offering me a job. The foreman, Dave Edwards, said I could start the following week, manning the sweeper unit (whatever that was) for $3.45 an hour. That was good money then, so I elatedly said I'd do it.
Then reality hit: how would I get to work? I couldn't use Dwayne's car every day - I'd need to buy one. But I didn't have money to speak of - only $150. to my name. I bought the county advertiser and found a listing for one car in my range, a VW Karman Ghia for $140. Great! I thought, I've always liked those. Good on gas, easy to maintain . . .
The owner was a fourteen-year-old boy. I was going on twenty-two, and this was my first car. It ran, but with its yellow color and oblong shape it looked much like a lemon.
"Oh, one thing about it," said the boy as I made ready to drive away. "I've been using non-detergent oil in it, so make sure you use the same."
"Sure, no problem." I waved and drove away.
The car was a hummer; the job, a bummer. The "sweeper unit" was a mechanized set of heavy-duty revolving brushes towed behind a truck. While three of the old boys rode in the cab, drinking coffee and swapping jokes, it fell to me to straddle the machine in the open air, directing the brushes down or up in the appropriate spots, as indicated by hand signals from the driver. The brushes whirled away and, in the down position, scoured the winter's sand off to the side of the road. The inevitable side effect of this arrangement, however, was that I would get quickly coated from head to toe with road-grime, that roiled about me in a cloud. By day's end I'd be black, a fitting image as the highway crew's new nigger.
The rest of the gang scorned my company at first. Either they thought I was too odd for them, or they figured I thought I was too good for them, or we just didn't have much in common. I sat nearby and listened to their stupid jibing, though, and in time threw in a few chuckles of my own. But I knew this was not a marriage made in heaven. They all knew it too. I lasted two weeks; then suddenly one of their old truck maintenance guys got out of hospital and wanted to come back to work, so I was let go. Without, as they say, so much as a fare-thee-well.
But it was just as well. It had been raining for a solid week and the work had become grueling misery for me. Then, the first week of June, my lemon died. The oil pressure light went on, which meant "Add oil immediately." I didn't want to risk a trip to the gas station in Windsor so I hunted through the shelves in a little storage shed beside Scharf's barn. There were three cans of Quaker State oil - good quality stuff. I told my conscience I'd replace them and then poured them all into the thirsty engine. Great, I thought, now that problem's solved - unless there's a leak somewhere. Hmm, better consult the manual. In my spiral-bound, do-it-yourself VW manual, I happened upon the following advice, in bold print:
DO NOT, IN ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, ADD DETERGENT-TYPE OIL TO YOUR ENGINE IF YOU'VE BEEN USING NON-DETERGENT OIL. THE DETERGENT ACTION WILL DISSOLVE WHATEVER CARBONACEOUS GUNK IS HOLDING THE PISTONS TOGETHER AND YOUR ENGINE WILL FALL APART!
Whoops - now I'd done it. I began to despair. But then I thought it didn't make that much sense. Oil is oil, not soap. I checked the old Quaker State cans again. They were marked on the top, "SAE 30W HD." Did "HD" mean "high detergent?" Nowhere on the can did it say. I decided the manual was exaggerating the problem; besides, there was probably still some of the older oil still in the engine, so it wasn't as if . . . anyway, I thought, to play it safe I'll drive to the gas station, pick up a supply of new oil, drain the engine and start fresh . . . with detergent or non-detergent, this time? Oh well, I'd consider the options on the way there.
No problem, down the hill and across the covered bridge into town. It was a fine, summery day - almost - with a few rays of sun creeping out from clouds to steam the rain-washed streets. I bought the non-detergent-type oil and motored back up the hill in good humor - until the engine coughed and stalled. I got out and looked under the hood, to see what I could see. Ah-ha - a loose spark plug wire.
Running on three cylinders . . . no wonder I was losing power. I confidently got back in and gunned it. Pooh - pooh - pooh . . . no go. I stopped again and checked the wires. All tight. Gunned the engine once more - no climbing power. I backed down to the flat below Salinger's hill and made a good run at it. Only with the car’s last gasp did I manage to clear the crest of the hill this time, and I pulled it into its final resting place behind the barn, afraid that its useful life was over.
It was. So was my time in this godforsaken, impoverished and drowning hill-country, I soon realized. It rained in that stretch for eleven days and eleven nights, and I was counting on forty. But I didn't plan to stick around for it. When John Wellington, a friend who'd quit mid-term from this, his junior year, said he was driving home to California and had space for me and my gear, I jumped at the chance.
Not without some consideration of the venture, I should say. I was down to my last fifteen bucks, for starters. When Wally agreed to take his old guitar back, I had thirty. John said he'd pay for gas; I could help out sharing the driving. I could go all the way to Long Beach with him, and see what happened from there. Construction was booming in California - I'd probably find work soon enough. It sounded good to me: free passage, perpetual sunny skies, and cities of gold lay ahead.
I would leave behind most of my books and records, clothes, course notes, and snowshoes, some three suitcases and seven boxes crammed into the Karman Ghia and abandoned until some later date, when I might return . . . who knows? perhaps to take another stab at the land-community. If not, I figured I could always contact Ollie's gang to ship things west for me. It was difficult parting with so many things, things that had been such integral parts of my life. I took solace in the Buddhist stories of burning one's books and the rest of one’s worldly chattel, of taking refuge in the purity of the spirit, of fresh experience unencumbered by the weight of convention, preconceptions, analysis and whatever other sort of mental fol-de-rol. I could leave the superfluous baggage behind and take to the open road, free as a bird.
