Sometimes a Great Notion

by Ken Kesey

  So I say just in time because when the high first started to come on--to the tune of "Onward Christian Soldiers" played dance-time on a steel guitar as Brother Walker screamed for converts to stand and seek their salvation--I didn't relate it to being high the night before and, for a few maddening moments, teetered on the verge of trooping forth up that sawdust path to metaphysical glory.

  In the lot outside I scribbled a note to Joe and placed it beneath the wiper blade on the pick-up, asking that he forgive my early departure, saying I would have stayed but that "even from the back row I felt the power of Brother Walker's bite; such holiness must be taken at first in small doses." He sees the moon again, reflected in the pick-up window: You don't scare me. Not a bit of it. In fact, I'm in better shape than during your quarter or half . . . ("Here's as good a place to start as any." Hank stopped the pick-up and pointed to a yard already choked with twilight. "Just knock an' say 'Trick or treat' is all there is to it, bub . . . head out.") . . . because the chips are falling my way for the first time in my life . . .

  I struck out for town, which seemed to lie hundreds of miles to the north across a vacant lot. Banking slightly to the leeward, I turned on an impulse from Alagahea Street down the long broken backbone of Swede Row, trip-tapping along the old wooden-vertebrae sidewalk, running my knuckles along the bleached picket ribs of the Scandinavian yards. He keeps watch on it following ominously behind the maple trees. . . . (The child lifted his mask and stared at the house. "But we're at Swede Row, Hank! This is Swede Row!") He sees it slide behind clouds. . . . Christian Soldiers still marched Onward across the scattered wood shavings of my tented skull, but from the heathen Nordic yards skinny blond children with knees like doorknobs peered out at me from behind godless Viking masks. "Look the man. Hey, watcha scared of? Hey hey hey!" Hell with you and your macaroons and wolfbane. I'm in good shape; for the first time in my life the faint odor of distant victory blows my direction (Hank laughed. "A Swede ain't no different from any other nigger. Now get on; there's some other kids from your class goin'."); so how can you expect me to be coerced by a noon moon, and such a sallow one at that?

  I stepped up my dreamy pace, eager to put behind me the noise, the hubbub, the midway of bones and the whole Valhalla carnival, eager to get across town to the long, withdrawing roar of bracing salt sea, where Viv would be waiting with open arms and closed eyes. Lee's steps fall faster and faster until he is near to running and his breath coming fast. (The boy stood at the gate and looked into the murky, weed-lurking yard. At the very next house a Mickey Mouse and a masked cowboy no older than himself held forth sacks for the blackmailed booty. If they could do it, surely he could. He wasn't scared of the dark yard, not really, like he let Hank think, or of what he might find behind the door--just some old fat Swede fishwife. No, he wasn't really scared of Swede Row . . . but his hand wouldn't lift the gate's hand-carved latch.)

  The scene in town was as chaotic as the outskirts. A fever-cheeked real-estate man soaping his windows winked at me over a bar of Dial and hoped I was enjoying my stay, and a moth-eaten yellow rag of a tomcat tried to entice me into the alley to view his collection of dirty pictures. Boney Stokes stalked his shadow out of the barbershop and into the bar, where he bought it a drink. Grissom frowned at my approach--"Here come that Stamper kid to read my books for nothing"--and frowned when I walked on past--"So! My books is not good enough for his educated tastes!"--and a miniature rubber-faced werewolf leaned against the doorjamb, passing the time with a yo-yo while he waited for dark.

  The sun is cold though very bright and sharp; the chrome ornaments on the cars stand out in glistening relief; atop the telephone poles the insulators gleam with brilliant emerald luminance of their own . . . but Lee walks with his eyes strained wide as though through a dark night (Finally the boy managed to get through the gate and across the yard, only to stop once more at the door. Fear paralyzed his fingers again, but this time he knew that the thing he feared lay not in back of that door, but behind him! back across that yard! waiting in the pick-up! Without thinking another second, he jumped from the porch and ran. "Bub, hold it. Where--?" Around the corner of the house. "Bub! Bub! Wait; it's okay!" Into the tall weeds, where he hid until Hank was past. "Lee! Lee-land, where you at?" Then jumped up and ran again, and ran and ran and ran) and already feels an evening chill in the afternoon wind.

  Once more I accelerated my pace and when I glanced back over my shoulder I saw I had given the Christian Army the slip and ditched the Vikings and the real-estate man; the yellow tom still followed me, but his devil-may-care look of lascivious determination was beginning to tire. I turned from Main down Ocean Way, all but running, and was just complimenting myself on a clean getaway from all my demons when a machine swerved to halt on the roadbank, scratching gravel beside me like an amorous dragon.

  "Hey, dad, we give you a lift somewhere?"

  From a whiskerless face too young to buy beer glinted a pair of onyx eyes old before the Black Plague hit Europe.

  "We're makin' the A and W, hey, dad. We'll take you that far. Climb aboard."

  The molded white front door swung open to reveal a band sinister enough to make the masked Viking look like a merit-badge contender and the werewolf seem a whimpering old Dog Tray. A crew twice as frightening because they wore no masks or costumes. Terrors of teen-age fashion, dressed in their everyday Halloween best; a half dozen gum-chewing, toothpick-sucking, lipstick-nibbling oral compulsives, outfitted for an ordinary day with the gang. A carful of young America in living color, chemical monsters created by du Pont, with nylon flesh over neon veins pumping Dayglo blood to Orlon hearts. "What's buggin' you, dad? You look rank. I mean you look rank!"

  "Nothing. I'm just having a narrow escape is all."

  "Yeah? Yeah? An' what happened?"

  "I was on my way across town when I was captured by a band of aliens."

  "Yeah? Brass band? Ball-point pens? Bamboo who? Who?" A group giggle punctured by pistol cracks of gumfire unnerved me slightly, but I was nevertheless able to decipher their code.

  "Bam-bee thee," I answered. "See . . . ?"

  The giggling stopped, and the gum-cracking. "So . . . how's the life?" the driver inquired, after a cease-fire of silence.

  "Rife," I answered, a little less enthusiastically this time. My coded witticism met with silence a second time, and something in the tone of this silence told me that my companions did not take kindly to squares turning their own slang back on them. So I kept quiet to let my benefactors concentrate on the road and their gum (Ran and hid, and ran again from alley to alley and shadow to shadow until he was confronted by the headlighted sweep of asphalt highway). After a few moments of gum-clacking the driver laid his hand on my sleeve.

  "Well now. That church key, man."

  I handed him the opener. He took it without thanks and went to work on a seed between his teeth with its plated point. I began to get worried. The air was charged with a sadism too overt to be imagined; I had got into hot water this time and no fantasy. There is a certain kind of impending violence that one can never mistake, no matter how rampant the imagination. But just as I was about to throw open the door and leap from the speeding car a girl leaned up from the back seat to whisper something in the driver's ear and he glanced at me and blanched, his maniacal leer changing to a little boy's ingratiating grin. "Oh . . . uh . . . but look, mister . . . unless you want a glass of root beer, I mean right now at the A and W up ahead, where can we drop you? Electric chair? Frigidaire?"

  "There!" I pointed at a pair of fading ruts leading off the highway west into the push of green. "Right there!" (The child lay in the ditch until his panting slowed; then he dashed across to a private dirt road hedged high on both sides with dense undergrowth .) Again on impulse, plus the desire to flee my new-found friends: "Right there will be fine, thanks. . . ."

  "There? I declare. Nothing up that road but cedar keys and sand coons dunes. It's wild child out there." He slowed the car to a stop.

  "
It's wild in here," I noted, setting off a new sputter of giggling and opening the door to step out. "Well, I thank you . . ."

  "You, hey. They say you're Hank Stamper's brother? Huh? Hey, well anyway, here's where you wanted out."

  The driver waved with a casual lift of his hand, grinning in a way to let me know that for reasons unknown to me I was either very lucky or very unlucky to be Hank Stamper's brother.

  "Blue-tail fly," he called meaningfully.

  "Good-by."

  The whitewalls jumped, spinning gravel back at me as the car pulled back onto the pavement and I scuttled into the underbrush before another carful of good Samaritans came along.

  Free from the car's predatory atmosphere, Lee tries once more to calm himself: What's the hurry? I have at least another hour before I meet her . . . loads of time (The boy walked through the overhanging dark, able for the first time to question his sudden flight; he knew that it hadn't been the house that he ran from, nor did he really fear his brother--Hank would never hurt him, never let anything get him--so what had he run from? He walked on, knotting his little features to understand his actions . . .) So, seriously now, what is the hurry?

  If I expected to find respite in Mother Nature's lush green arms I was disappointed. After continuing for a few minutes, the wobbling road petered out completely and I left the last human scatter of paintless shacks and geranium plants in coffee tins and entered the dense jungle that is found all along the Oregon coast wherever the sand dunes, driven up from the sea, have become mixed with enough organic material to support life. The span of this jungle where I crossed was no more than thirty or forty yards, yet my passage took an equal number of minutes, and the weaving vine maple trees with their supple limbs and pale fall leaves purified by sun and rain seemed no more natural than had the teen-age laboratory concoctions that had driven me to the woods.

  So, seriously, what is the hurry? It's not that late. But then . . . why does my chin tremble? It's not that cold (Why'd I run? I ain't scared of them Swedes. I ain't scared of Hank neither. The only thing I was really scared about was that he might be watching when I jumped or yelled or something . . .)

  Though it was still early it was already beginning to grow a bit dark. Clouds had moved in to take the sun from me. I stumbled forward toward a quiltwork of dim light filtering through the leaves. Once I broke through a garden of rhododendron and huckleberry into an oily purple-black bog, glassy with decay where decomposition spread in a thick film over the shallow water. Lily pads floated here and there and from a particularly foreboding mass of peat and pollution a disconsolate bullfrog cried, "Suh-WOMP! Suh-WOMP!"--with all the desperation of someone shouting "Murder" or "Fire."

  I tried to skirt the bog, veering to the left, and at the edge, near the place where the frog had been voicing his plight, I found myself confronted by a community of strange, sweet-smelling tube-shaped plants. They grew in upthrusting clusters of six or eight, like little green families, with the oldest attaining a height of three feet and the youngest no bigger than a child's crooked finger. Regardless of size, and except for the broken-backed unfortunates, they were all identical in shape, starting narrow at the base and tapering larger toward the neck like a horn, except instead of the horn's blossoming bell, they turned at the last moment, bowing their necks, looking back to their base. Imagine an elongated comma, sleek, green, driven into the purple mud with its straightened tip; or picture half-notes for vegetable musicians, thicker at the neck than at the base, with the rounded oval head a swooping continuation of the neckline; and it is still unlikely that you have the picture of these plants. Let me say only that they were an artist's conception of chlorophyll beings from another planet, stylized figures half humorous, half sinister. Perfect Halloween fare.

  (So the only thing I was really scared of back at Swede Row was of Hank seeing me get scared. Now ain't that simply the most ridiculous thing? Sure . . . The boy laughed to find his fear so ridiculous, but kept walking away from the town just the same; he knew that what he had done had banished him forever from his home; he knew what old Henry and all of them thought of scaredy cats, even if the thing the scaredy cats were scared of was of being scaredy cats.)

  I plucked one of the plants from its family to examine it more carefully and found that under the comma's loop was a round hole resembling a mouth, and at the tapered bottom of the tube a clogging liquid containing the carcasses of two flies and a honey bee, and I realized that these odd swamp plants were Oregon's offering in the believe-it-or-not department of unusual life forms: the Darlingtonia. A creature trapped in that nothing's land between plants and animals, along with the walking vine and the paramecium, this sweet and sleek carnivore with roots enjoyed a well-rounded meal of sunshine and flies, minerals and meat. I stared at the stalk in my hand and it stared blindly back.

  "Hello," I said politely into the oval, honey-breathed mouth. "How's the life?"

  "Suh-WOMP!" prompted the bullfrog and I dropped the plant as though burned and fled westward again.

  When Lee reaches the top of the dunes he shivers at the sight: a few hundred yards away the ocean lies, peaceful and gray, with its lacy edge turned back upon the beach like a chenille bedspread ready for night (The moon led the boy across the dunes. A scant sliver of moon that barely lit the beckoning surf); but there is the sand . . .

  I finally emerged at the base of a steep bank of golden sand and clambered upward on all fours, filling pockets and shoes. The Oregon dunes are of the finest, cleanest, and most uniform sand found in America; constantly moving, forever sifted by summer winds and washed by winter rains, and extending in some areas for miles without tree or bush or flower, too orderly to be the work of haphazard nature and too immense to be the product of man, they present an unreal world to even the casual observer--to my already cockeyed eye, as I achieved the crest of the bank, the dunes presented a terrain forbidding in the extreme.

  He trudges toward that bed's embroidered spread, heedless of his feet in his trancelike walking (Halfway to the sea, completely alone on a bare, sweeping field of sand, the little boy vanished . . .) and feels disappointed when he reaches the dunes' edge: What had I imagined might happen, here in broad daylight out on a completely featureless field of sand? (vanished--into close and musty dark, vanished down into the black and moonless earth itself!)

  At the edge of the dunes where the beach began, a sun-silvered pile of logs separated the sea's territory from the territory of dry land, like an absurd wooden wall. I climbed across it, wondering what I would do to distract myself and pass the hour until it was time to meet Viv . . . When he reaches the beach he hopes that the terror provoked by the dunes will subside, but it hangs on and follows him down the beach like a piece of the clotted black clouds, crackling and hissing a few feet above his head. Pot hangover, he insists. Nothing else. Just get the old mind elsewhere. Come now, man, you can ignore a little old pot hangover . . . To while away the wait I sailed rocks at the droves of sandpipers that stood motionless at the edge of the water, beaks to the wind like little weathervanes each mounted on one thin spike. I dug after the little pink-shelled sandcrabs and tossed them to the careening gulls. I rolled over humps of beach kelp and watched the blizzard of insect life that resulted. I ran full tilt along the foamed edge of the waves for as far as my poor tar-infested lungs would carry me; I engaged in frantic screaming matches with the gulls; I rolled up my cuffs and tied my shoes to my belt and splashed in the surf until my ankles became swollen and numb . . . but every word he sings, every jump and gesture, seems to be an act making up a ritual for conjuring some fierce fiend out of the earth, a ritual he can't stop because every act calculated to stem its onrush to success turns out to be another part of some subconscious ceremony necessary to that success. As he comes closer and closer to the climax of this oceanside sacrament, it occurs to him that all his wild maneuvering might be re-enactments of childhood frolic: No wonder I'm getting the psychological jitters; why the deuce not? I'm sprinting hell-bent ba
ckwards. I'm taking a running jump at the womb. That's all it is. Along with pot hangover. That's all (Gradually, as the shock of the fall subsided, the little boy tried to move. He looked directly above him and found that he could perceive the passage of stars through a round hole far above his head, and as the wind shifted to blow from the rocky cliffs to the north at Wakonda Head, he found he could hear the angry pawbeats of an ocean frustrated at being cheated of a rightful prize by a hole in the ground) and all I need to do to overcome it is find something of this tune to associate with. He looks about the tuneless beach frantically . . . and just then my eye happened to fall on a first-rate distraction: a car stuck in the seaside sand a quarter-mile south of me, down the beach, almost to the big breakwater jetty where I was due to meet Viv. And there was something very familiar about the molding and primer job on the car, familiar indeed; a first-rate way to pass the time, if I am correct. (The boy lay at the bottom of a huge tube. A tube down into the earth. One of the chimneys of Hell! the boy thought, recalling old Henry's warning about devil's stovepipes out on the dunes where unwary wanderers might fall. Clear to Hell! the boy remembered and began to cry.)

  So I rolled down the pants legs and replaced the shoes and hurried down the beach. I was right, it was the carload of samaritans. My old friend the driver stood smoking calmly in complete disregard of the beseeching and baleful look of his sandlocked car, which stood trapped and helpless in the waves. He sighed at my approach. A cigarette package was rolled in the sleeve of his Dayglo pullover and his hands were thrust in the back pockets of his Levis. The skidding tracks along the beach told the story: they had driven to the Coast Guard station and down onto the beach, high on root beer and ripe for action. They had squirreled closer and closer to the ocean, taunting the tide, daring the waves, kicking sand in its gleaming teeth as though it were a ninety-eight-pound weakling. And had been caught. Planks and branches evidenced futile and frantic attemps to free the wheels. But no soap, the sand held fast. Now the tide was turned and it was the ocean's turn to tease closer and closer with excruciating patience. Footprints led up the beach, running for help, but unless that help arrived in the next few minutes it would be too late. Each snickering slap of water sank the right side of the car deeper into the sand. In five more minutes the foam would be chuckling against the differential.