The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity Read online

  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.

  While we were looking for land around Powell River we met Steve and Sandy. Two minutes after we said hello I loved them.

  It seemed so right. I was getting off on the rightness of how I felt as much as on them. Why can’t people feel like this toward each other more often? Two minutes ago we were strangers, now we’re all warm and happy.

  Steve and Sandy had just taken off from all the things we had taken off from. Just about our age. Looking for all the things we were looking for. They had a Chevy van instead of our Volks and a Malamute husky instead of Zeke. Steve played guitar instead of sax.

  They were physically attractive more or less in the same way we were. Not dazzling, but no major improvements needed or wished for. They walked a lot like us, with the same loosenesses and tightnesses. Steve was athletic the way I was athletic, not a superjock but a respectable addition to any pickup game—football, softball, soccer—with no real preference. We probably would have split sets in tennis.

  They seemed to have a pretty good man-woman thing. People who believed all the stuff we believed and were trying to make the man-woman thing work too were a pretty rare commodity. “See, Virge, we’re not the only weirdos.”

  Sure, loving Steve and Sandy was narcissistic. A lot of positive feedback about what we were doing and thinking. Why not? Today Steve and Sandy, tomorrow Trooper Suchadolski. I knew that everyone was my brother and even felt it from time to time. Even with Steve and Sandy it wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago. How could I ever get to Trooper Suchadolski without a few warmups with guys like Steve and Sandy?

  A lot of the people into “alternative culture” had a hangover of bitterness about the things they had fled. They had been snubbed one way or another. They couldn’t play football, the cheerleaders wouldn’t go out with them, they couldn’t get decent jobs. They were looked on as ugly or failures. Mostly unfairly, mostly for petty reasons. The America they were fleeing didn’t seem to think they were worth much. So they were doing a very sensible thing, building a culture where their very real virtues and attributes had a chance, where they wouldn’t be just so much shit.

  The bitterness left its mark. There was the nagging doubt: If the America they were fleeing had opened up her arms to them a little more, would they be out in the woods believing in all the things they believed in?

  It went both ways. Those whom America had been nice to, who hadn’t been very shat upon, felt guilty about it. “What’s wrong with me that such a twisted no-goodnik thing liked me?”

  Steve and Sandy were golden. They could have made it. Physically attractive, top of their class. America would have gone out of her way to make them feel welcome. But here they were out in the boonies of B.C. in a battered Chevy looking for land to build an alternative of some sort.

  They were golden no more. Cops dying for a chance to bust them, customs officials hassling them, America praying that they would come to a bad end: “The blacks, the misshapen, the dummies, the graceless, I can understand. But you I loved. You were my hope. I would have given you anything. Told you my secrets, shared my wealth. But now you couldn’t drink my spit if you were thirsty.”

  Golden no more. What did it? Dope? The war? The long hair? Steve and Sandy had a few horror stories to tell around the fire but they were all recent. Timing is important. If it had been much earlier they would have had scars; much later and it wouldn’t have happened at all.

  Steve and Sandy were scouting the Powell River area for a home for their Buffalo tribe. That was part of why they were there. They were also there to get away from the tribe for a few days and think about things. Steve asked very gently about the possibility of the tribe’s coming to our place. We said we felt a little weird about saying yes to a whole tribe. It would most likely swallow us. If he and Sandy wanted to join us that would be great. But a whole tribe? If we had a tribe of comparable size maybe we could work something out. Good hippies though we were, it seemed a bit heavy. A whole tribe?

  Steve had reservations about the tribe himself, so he didn’t push it much. He said he and Sandy were about to split off anyway. Just thought he should ask. They invited us to come spend a few days with the tribe while we were waiting for Simon. Swifty and Bo headed back to California.

  The tribe was impressive. Twenty-some-odd people, five dogs, three recently acquired goats, three Chevy vans, two VW bugs, three huge tepees, $3600 cash (going fast), and miscellaneous in search of a home. For now a liberal Simon Fraser professor was letting them use some land he was holding as an investment right near the main road. So here was this bucolic frontier scene playing in stereo with a six-lane highway.

  The Buffalo tribe had been born that spring at a party where they all took MDA and predictably fell in love with each other. They liked loving each other so much that they all vowed to not let it stop when the drug wore off. So they formed a tribe, dropped out of school, pooled their belongings, and headed for British Columbia. It’s got to be the longest MDA trip on record.

  After a few very pleasant days looking at what might be a preview of what lay ahead for us, Simon was due so we split. The day after Virge and I left, four of the tribe got busted with a pound of dope. That pretty much killed it. The Buffalo tribe scattered to the winds. Another courageous hippie venture bites the dust.

  McKenzie called to tell us that the owner had accepted our “offer to purchase,” which was what the hundred bucks and those papers I had signed were all about. All we had to do was come up with $11,900 in the next forty days.

  Simon took longer than expected to show. He doesn’t move terribly quickly. I didn’t know that then. Steady like rock but not terribly quick. I didn’t really know anything about Simon then.

  SIMON. Swarthmore Class of ’69, just like me. I have a feeling he majored in either English or sociology. It doesn’t really matter. Except for engineering, there was really only one major at Swarthmore, which was Swarthmore. Even some of the engineers were really Swarthmore majors. All the Swarthmore people in this book were Swarthmore majors.

  Swarthmore’s small. Everyone is supposed to know everyone. I knew who Simon was. I knew his name and we had some friends in common. But if anyone had asked me about Simon before the Powell River venture I couldn’t have said much.

  I think our first conversation of any length was at Swarthmore, just before Virginia and I headed West. Simon was heading West too. He was fed up with teaching junior high school in Philly and said he was interested in the land thing. I talked a bit about why I thought B.C. was a good place to look. He said it sounded good, maybe he’d head up that way after California. He said he might be interested in buying in if I found anything. I told him I’d keep it in mind. I didn’t take him any more or any less seriously than any of the hundred or so other people with whom I had had virtually the same conversation.

  Two and a half months after that conversation, I had found land, spectacularly beautiful land, land tailormade for our needs. I had tried to get hold of some of the other people who had expressed interest, but Simon’s phone number in California was the first that worked. He was enthusiastic, and if I didn’t have any overwhelming positive feelings about him I didn’t have any negative ones either.

  I’m subject to occasional theological nightmares.

  The one that leaves me in a cold sweat every time is, I arrive at the pearly gates and the first thing I’m asked is where I went to college.

  Swarthmore people tend to form enclaves. They are often unable to live with, talk to, or sleep with someone who isn’t a Swarthmore person.

  All non-Swarthmore people in B.C. seemed to assume that all the Swarthmore people there had been very close buddies at Swarthmore. It wasn’t true. It was especially untrue in my case.

  I wasn’t thinking about my dread of spending my life in a Swarthmore enclave then. I wasn’t thinking about much except how happy I was that I had found land. Simon was a Swarthmore person but one more Swarthmore person does
not necessarily a Swarthmore enclave make.

  Simon finally arrived with Ted, another Swarthmorian. Simon seemed very eager, so we all headed up to Powell River immediately.

  I was feeling a little jerky and clumsy about things. What was agreed to between Simon and me? Was he committed to buying in or just shopping? Was I committed to letting him buy in if he wanted to? Shouldn’t we sit down and talk a few things over? What did he want the farm to be? How did we know we were compatible? There were substantial sums of money involved, not to mention all the spiritual and emotional stuff.

  Maybe it was just another situation in which I was being klutzy and dense. What bad could happen? But how did he know I wasn’t into some super-weird trip, that I wasn’t some sort of Charlie Manson? I couldn’t imagine any evil lurking in that Brillo-wreathed head with his usually smiling cherub face peeking through. It was a completely honest, unforced smile but I think it gave a lot of people the wrong idea. Simon could be mad as hell, but unless you noticed that he was trying very hard not to smile, it was hard to tell.

  Is this how it’s done? Somehow I thought it would be different! There we were making the heaviest decisions of our lives, and from the way we acted we might as well have been co-chairmen of the decoration committee for the junior prom.

  Problem number one: How do we get up there? We hung around the Powell Lake Marina half hoping someone would offer to take us up. But we were going to have a boat eventually anyway, so why not now? We went boat shopping.

  There was a notice on the laundromat bulletin board: “Two plywood boats—ready for fiberglassing—for sale.” Marcel was the guy who had built them, a nice guy about forty-five or so with sad eyes. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in Powell River. He was selling these boats he had made and heading back to New Brunswick.

  The bigger one, about thirteen feet, was just right. Marcel said he’d help us with the fiberglassing and take the boat down to the lake for us. The next day was sunny and dry, a good day for fiberglassing. He had some blue fiberglass coloring around, so we added that to the resin and fiberglassed the boat blue. There wasn’t a lot of blue coloring so the boat came out sort of an eerie blue, almost transparent in some places and opaque in others. We put her in Marcel’s truck and followed it to the lake.