The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Hippies love to name things. Everyone likes to name boats. Watching our boat in the truck in front of us, we tried to come up with a name. “Blue Marcel” was perfect. The old gold-painted outboard motor that was thrown into the deal became “Moldy Goldy.”

  Moldy Goldy, who had shown some reluctance to be an engine back at Marcel’s place, lost all ambition in that direction once she was placed in the lake on the back of Blue Marcel.

  So now we had a boat but still no way to get up to the farm. Everyone tried to coax Moldy into pushing the boat. New spark plug. New gaskets for the carburetor. But all to no avail.

  While we were trying to get Moldy interested in her old line of work we asked around about other outboards. Dick was a pilot for the charter pontoon plane outfit that flew out of the marina, mostly taking loggers to camp and back. He had an old racing Merc 25. No neutral, no reverse, just point it and go; racing prop and the whole bit. Sold. It was the perfect addition to our shoestring transportation corps. The racing Merc became simply “Dick.” That was perfect too. I was naming up a storm.

  Dick was an interesting engine. The throttle was open. We were running along fine at what we thought was top speed. But Dick, after sitting around for a while, was just warming up. We started going faster and faster. About halfway up the lake we had to run at half-throttle for fear Dick would tear the boat apart going too fast. Dick was fast. Dick wasn’t all that dependable but that comes later.

  It was getting dark as we docked. After considerable crashing around in the brush we managed to find the trail. The trail wasn’t very well cleared, but one way or another we managed to make it up to the farm. Just enough fading light for a quick look around the place, then a full moon and aurora borealis. It seemed like a good omen even though the two phenomena were in competition. Two kinds of light. Simon seemed dumbfounded by the farm’s beauty.

  We spent several days up there, exploring and setting up a rudimentary kitchen. A beachhead.

  Back down to Vancouver to figure out how one turned stocks into cash, get a chain saw, other tools and supplies, and the rest of our stuff.

  Ted went back to California on his way back to New York and law school and all that. Virginia, Simon, Zeke, and I headed back up to Powell River with the two loaded cars.

  Simon toyed around some with the idea of getting Ted to stay. How could he go back there to all that shit? I remember being slightly jealous and/or admiring. How could anyone take New York or law school, let alone the two of them together? Why wasn’t Ted incredibly depressed by the prospect? I mean, what hope was there in that? What joy? What adventure?

  One thing I noticed about Simon was that he was a very different sort of man from me. Not better or worse but different. He was the sort of guy the football team used to make fun of or just ignore. His fogginess, his athletic ineptitude, was something I liked. I saw so much of my own athletic carriage, my coordination and quickness, as a fraud. It was an image I had sought and aspired to in a very conscious way for very superficial reasons.

  Being shrewd and quick seemed like bad things, part of the typical American syndrome that had landed the world in such shitty shape. I hoped that being around such a noncompetitive man as Simon might help me drop some of that shit in myself. He was well over six feet and quite strong. He just didn’t seem it.

  When we drove in next to our old site at the Powell River camp ground, the people next to us were pulling up stakes and throwing everything into the trunk of their huge, beat-to-shit De Soto sedan. It was dark and we could barely see each other but somehow a conversation got started. Joe, Mary, and their child Sarah had been traveling all over B.C. for about a year looking for land. Money was running out and Joe had just taken a job in the local pulp and paper mill. They were giving up the dream for a while and moving into a little rented house in town. Somehow it was decided very quickly that we were friends. They told us we were welcome to stay with them any time on our town trips, which we were to do many times, and we told them that they were welcome up the lake.

  There was some more work to be done on the boat. The way the bottom flexed with good old Dick pushing her along was pretty wild. I put another rib in Blue Marcel and gave it another coat of resin. While I was at it, I put another seat in, for comfort and a little more strength. Then there was always our eternal project, trying to get Moldy interested in being an outboard engine. It seemed like a good way to learn something about engines, which was one of our weak points.

  While I was working on the engine and Virginia and Simon were off getting groceries, Vincent showed up. No one had any idea that he was coming or even knew where we were.

  I was glad to see him. He was supposed to know something about engines, but I was so happy about the way things were turning out that I would have joyously welcomed anyone. The more the merrier.

  I should know Vincent a lot better than I do. We were classmates for four years at Swarthmore, shared a house with four other guys senior year, lived together with assorted people in two separate places in Boston, and then again in B.C. He’s average height, blond, blue-eyed, very pretty to look at, and might have been a decent athlete if he had realized he had a body. All I can really call to mind when I think of Vincent is someone walking around in a fog, bumping into things a lot and saying “I’m sorry.” I didn’t dislike Vincent, but I couldn’t help wondering from time to time why he kept turning up. It was almost like he was following me around.

  Fifty pounds of dried milk, thirty pounds of honey, fifty pounds of brown rice, twenty-five pounds of corn meal, pots and pans, the chain saw, some gasoline and an instruction booklet, lots of different kinds of flour, assorted vegetables, fishing stuff, axes, hatchets, machetes, a crowbar, hand saws, hammers. Millions of kitchen matches, sleeping bags, assorted clothes, buckets, plastic dishpans, a dish rack, twenty pounds of detergent, knives, forks, spoons, mugs, plates, bowls, a four-man tent, two tarps, fifty pounds of common nails, a book on carpentry, a few on gardening. Stalking the Wild Asparagus, The Whole Earth Catalogue, lots of novels and other books, some first-aid supplies and a book on that, a typewriter, my tenor saxophone, a beatup guitar, towels, mosquito netting, a wrist-rocket slingshot, twenty-five pounds of soybeans, fifteen pounds of lentils, two pounds of butter, four pounds of margarine and four of lard, ten pounds of assorted cheese, four gallons of soy oil, four of corn oil, four of peanut oil, everything Adelle Davis ever wrote, fifty pounds of dog food, several kerosene lanterns, five gallons of kerosene, thirty pounds of peanut butter, and miscellaneous. The boats were overloaded, with maybe half a foot of freeboard.

  The boats. We had Blue Marcel and John Eastman’s boat. John was a local we had met at the marina who was to be one of our protecting angels. Moldy had consented to run a little that day, so she pushed John’s boat up the lake in her own leisurely way while Dick spun circles around her all the way up.

  Had we forgotten anything? Well, if we had we could pick it up the next time we were in town. Who knew what the hell we’d need up there anyway? We had taken the big step. The others would become clear as we went along, just like all the other steps in this long, strange journey.

  One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, has worked just fine so far. No percentage in changing our mode of operation now. It seems an awful lot like someone or something is doing a first-rate job of taking care of us. This whole project is a little nutsy—I mean, if you had told me a few years back. But look at the breaks we’ve gotten. Something or someone must have something in mind for us. Why fuck it up with overplanning? I think maybe whatever or whoever doesn’t care much for planners, or maybe it’s just that it finds them hard to cheer up. Whatever-whoever seems to need a little slack to work with. Well, we’ll make damn sure it has plenty of that.

  In late August ’70 the farm became our home.

  OUR NEW HOME AND FAMILY. Jack and Kathy signed on shortly after we got there. They were often referred to as the little people. Kathy was five feet tall at most and Jack hit maybe five-thr
ee. They had both lived in the same house I did my last two years at Swarthmore, but I still can’t say I knew them very well. They were good friends of Simon’s. Both were borderline blondes with blue eyes, but Jack with his scraggly beard was considerably more scruffy looking.

  Kathy had a Wisconsin-farm-girl wholesomeness that years of heroin addiction wouldn’t have put much of a dent in. She had cheer-leader good looks and a soft Rubensesque femininity that contrasted sharply with Virginia’s tallness and spare lines. If you were to pick out someone at the farm to call normal, it would be Kathy.

  Jack was generally quiet, but it was a strong rather than a shy quietness. He was into Zen and mountain climbing but in a very nonflaky way. If there was anyone at the farm with feet firmly on the ground, it was Jack. He had a much more tangible reason for being there than the rest of us, too. He was our official draft dodger. Kathy and he had been together since their freshman year.

  Sarah and Beowulf were the next additions to our motley crew. More blue-eyed blondes. Sarah was a close friend of Virginia’s. She was beyond a doubt the driftiest person there, but drifty in a very lovable, loving way. She was very bright but just wasn’t paying much attention. Whenever I said anything to her I always had the impression that I had just woken her up.

  Beowulf was an unknown quantity Sarah had found in Oregon. He had a ramrod-stiff spine, a darting weasel face with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a wispy, almost-not-there beard. He made his own clothes and wasn’t much of a seamstress. That and his stiff, machinelike way of moving gave him the look of a hastily thrown together puppet.

  On our first town trip, we stayed with Joe and Mary and met Luke, whom they had found a few months earlier in the Kootenays, a mountain range about halfway between the Rockies and the coast. He came back up the lake with us and fit in like a charm. Physically and spiritually he was much more like me than any of the others, and I came to feel almost as close to him as to Zeke.

  Vincent passed through for two or three weeks every couple of months or so, and other friends and strangers would drop in and stay awhile, but the above plus Simon, Virginia, and me made up the basic cast.

  Shelter was the first order of business. There were two standing structures—a roof on eight-foot stilts with half-walls on three sides and open on the fourth that had sheltered a tractor in the old days, and the towering house that McKenzie had said had no value. We set up a kitchen in the smaller structure and set about redoing the house.

  McKenzie was right about the house and we would have done much better to tear it down and use the materials to build new ones. It was strangely built; set on a foundation of dug-in logs with hand-split eight-by-eight uprights every two feet, it rose about thirty feet into the air, covered over with hand-split boards of every imaginable dimension, which were covered in turn by hand-split shingles called shakes. It was twenty feet wide and forty long, and consisted of two stories, each divided into two twenty-by-twenty rooms with thirteen-foot ceilings, and an attic topped by a leaky roof. The strangest thing about that building was that there wasn’t a triangular brace anywhere. It swayed slightly in the wind.

  What we proceeded to do didn’t help matters much. We tore off the roof and added another story, topped with the most insane roof you could imagine. The first third of the house was covered by a slant roof that started at four feet and rose to twelve, facing east. The next third had the same setup facing west. The back of the house had twin peaked gables facing south. The damned thing looked like a pterodactyl learning to fly. The top floor, partitioned off with blankets into five little bedrooms, was sprinkled with a strange assortment of windows which we always kept an eye out for on the way home from town trips.

  We rebuilt the front porch, which had collapsed, and added a new one under the third-story gables. The work went slowly, partly because of our inexperience but more because we had to cut down trees and handsplit any lumber we needed. Three people working all day could split enough boards to cover what six dollars’ worth of plywood would have done tighter and stronger. The wood we split was a bitch to work with. Right angles, straight edges, and so on don’t just happen; each piece had to be whittled and fiddled with incessantly and still never fit quite right. Along with the major construction, there was cleaning windfalls from the trail, cutting and stacking firewood, and several other projects.

  An average day: up with the sun; fetch water from the stream; cook breakfast, usually ground whole-grain porridge with honey and dried milk; work five or six hours; lunch, usually peanut butter, dried fruit, and honey; work another six hours; then all run down to the lake, tear our clothes off and splash around awhile; back up to dinner, which was usually brown rice and some vegetable we had brought from town. After dinner we read, wrote letters, made music, or just talked. Kitchen chores were shared by all, though I remember telling Virge, after a snotty comment about the quality of my cleanup job, that I’d get better as soon as she showed a little interest in the chain saw. The traditional male-female division of labor would have made a lot of sense out there, but we stuck as closely as possible to these newfangled urban notions of equality.

  The cooking got a bit fancier when we brought in a big old wood stove (a full day’s operation) and set up an inside kitchen. Then, if someone was willing to grind flour for an hour or so, we could bake bread and make pies with the apples and blackberries we had coming out of our ears. Occasionally someone would catch a trout or two or shoot a grouse with a gun John Eastman gave us, but mostly it was very simple vegetarian fare.

  Nootka and Tanga, sisters from a Border collie-Samoyed cross, joined us in early September. Nootka was theoretically Virginia’s dog and Tanga Vincent’s, but both turned out to be generalized commune dogs. Samoyeds and Border collies don’t cross very well. Nootka turned out a lot better than Tanga and had a certain impish charm, but neither was much use around the farm and both were always underfoot, tearing things up and general-nuisancing. Tanga was an outright foul and obnoxious creature who should have been shot. Zeke’s nobility shone forth brighter than ever next to these canine misfits.

  It was a great life. I didn’t mind the physical discomforts—smoke in the eyes around the cooking fire, rain, cold, lots of hard work, the outhouse, general dirtiness, being so far from civilization, the mosquitoes, the impossibility of keeping anything clean or dry. I loved it all. The only thing that upset me was having other people upset by this or that hardship. I wanted everyone to love it as much as I did.

  I was in great health, better than I had been in for a long time, and in a good mood most of the time. I even cut down my smoking some.

  I think I was thinking less than I had in years. Maybe it was just that thinking wasn’t the only thing I was doing. I liked thinking less.

  Think think think. What a funny word. A funny sound, a funny meaning. Almost as funny as funny. I think I’ve probably spent more time and energy thinking than most people, but that’s a very hard thing to be able to say for sure. I don’t even know very well what thinking is, let alone have a way to tell who’s doing it and how much.

  Thinking something worth thinking. What would that look like? That’s the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. If you want to get something, thinking might help you get it. But I really didn’t do very much of that sort of thinking unless you want to stretch definitions. There wasn’t very much by way of things I wanted. I’d been spoiled rotten as far as that went. I didn’t even think that kind of thinking was thinking. The kind of thinking I did was mostly a luxury item and it wasn’t much fun.

  Some of my happiness, no doubt, was simple good old vanity. I had done what I had said I was going to do, and the pot was sweetened by having what we were doing be such a glamorous, romantic, noble venture. Through most of the early days I walked around with a giddy giggly cockiness bubbling inside, as if we were pulling off a particularly elegant jewel heist.

  For years I had looked at wherever I happened to be and realized “I can’t stay here.” It wasn�
��t a panicky “got to get out of here” feeling as much as just sadly realizing that for one reason or another it could never be home. There were lots of good reasons to be upset by the cities—noise, lights, bustle, misery—but my reaction had gone far beyond intellectual distaste and had been literally shaking me apart. My serious doubts about how much longer I could have held out added a great deal to my joy at having found a place I could stay, a home.

  I remember Victor, an early visitor, saying “I think I have more mosquito bites than not mosquito bites.” But the hardships were part of what we had all come there for, and there wasn’t much bitching about them. Besides, we found that there really wasn’t much that couldn’t be done, it was just a lot harder to do. We were getting rid of the insulation, partly out of curiosity about what life would be like without all the insulation we were used to, partly out of guilt at what that insulation had cost, partly in the expectation that the insulation was about to be wiped out anyway by one or another of the disasters we saw in the apocalyptic smorgasbord of the future. We thought it was good for us.

  What gave me more pleasure at the farm than anything else was playing my saxophone. After putting in a good day’s work clearing brush or chopping wood, I’d get out my old tenor horn, climb up on the roof, and play my heart out. Sometimes I’d be all tense and jittery and my hands or mouth would fuck up, but more often things fit together like magic and I’d sit up on our funky roof on our funky house, looking out on the mountains, feeling completely at peace and in harmony with the world and like I could play forever.