by Peter Coyote
I rose to my ambassadorial appointment and assured Lennon that it was an isolated—furthermore, past-tense—incident. The guy had been rude, after all, to one of John’s guests, and we had been invited to Christmas dinner and had waited five-plus hours for some food without even being offered as much as a crustless cucumber sandwich. This seemed to mollify Lennon, but he retired soon afterward, consulting with Derek Taylor, who finally produced food and spirits.
London had other diversions. I particularly remember King’s Road and a below-street-level joint named the Baghdad. Sweet William and I arrived about midnight, and thirty Arab men were dancing arm in arm, with champagne glasses on their heads, celebrating the end of Ramadan. At around 2:00 A.M., the owner locked the doors and produced large silver water pipes stuffed with chunks of hashish and accompanied by sweet mint tea and honey-rich baklava. This was the “high” life on a grand scale, and I returned often. Mick Jagger and other popular rockers dropped in and out, and the atmosphere was thick with the buzz of a “happening” place.
One night I arrived to find a Slavic beauty named Ulla dancing on a table in the center of the room, decked out like a character from a Russian novel in knee-high boots, a fitted wool coat with fur trim, and a fox-fur hat. She had high cheekbones, fierce eyes, and luscious lips that when parted revealed glimpses of broken teeth, which contrasted with her styled tailoring and dusted her image with a fine overtone of savagery. Sweet William and I were both smitten with her and bullied our way to the edge of the table to watch her ardently. My desire must have burned particularly brightly this night because in the midst of her dance, she looked directly into my eyes, cocked her hip, rested a gloved hand on it, and said, “Vy nut?” Ulla and I ran off for several days, sequestering ourselves in her apartment. The only time we left each day was for Ulla’s required trip to the police station because the authorities had seized her passport for some reason that she never explained, and she was commanded to appear in person once a day to sign in.
Near the end of our tryst, Ulla and I took a train to the country to visit Derek Taylor, the publicist for the Beatles who had walked out of the Los Angeles meeting discussing a benefit for the Diggers the year before. Derek was perhaps the only person at Apple Records who was neither repulsed by nor afraid of our group. A small, lively man, very precise, with a hint of something feral quivering below his urbane and polished surface, he had a keen eye for bullshit and a lively and bottomless curiosity. He was as comfortable discussing fine arts as current affairs, and he went to some lengths to recompense us for the anxiety and timidity of his employers, extending innumerable small courtesies to our group and opening his elegant country home and grounds to Ulla and me.
Things began to pall after a month or so. Heroin was legal in Britain at that time, and Sweet William and I were using it a lot, tying up various bathrooms for long periods of time while people pounded on the doors to get in. We were falling away from the group purpose, whatever the hell it had become. I was still sick, understandably. Dr. Feelgood’s cure had apparently intensified my problem, and the little white English “jacks,” tiny pills of pure heroin, made their contribution as well.
It was time to go home. The only problem was that I had no home, having just dropped my stuff off at the Olema farmhouse shortly before our departure. Sam was pregnant and, no matter how callously I chose to ignore the fact, I must have unconsciously known that I would have to deal with that reality before too long. For the moment, narcotics anesthetized me to such concerns, and I joined my fellows on the plane for a triumphant return to California. We had been to see the Beatles.
16
slipping to the edge of the world
Bob Slade, a Kansas City friend I’d met when I was with Jessie Benton, found the Olema ranch sometime around 1968 through his friend Vicky Double-day. She had been living there with her two husbands, Mark and Cecil, making them both crazy by demanding that they be sexually faithful to her. Their household disintegrated at about the same time that I decided to leave the city.
Olema—“Coyote Valley” in the indigenous Miwok language—is a quiet intersection of two roads and swampy pastures bordering the fog-shrouded Coast Range of northern California at the inland end of Tomales Bay. The “town” of Olema is simply a post office and a store, and the nearest community of any size (perhaps eight or nine hundred people) was Point Reyes Station, a mile to the north.
The ranch itself consisted of three hundred acres located about three-quarters of a mile north of where Sir Francis Drake Road from San Rafael passes through the still-pristine San Geronimo Valley and Samuel P. Taylor State Park with its rushing creek and thickets of oak, bay, and madrone, and it snubs its nose against Highway 1 running north along the coast. From the Coast Highway a dirt road veers sharply uphill to the right and meanders for a mile and a half before spilling into the courtyard of a single-story, nineteenth-century ranch house. Once owned by the Gallagher family, whose heirs ran the Point Reyes post office, it then belonged to Doc Ottinger, a retired physician who leased the land to local cattle ranchers and the house, which had no electricity, to whoever would take it. Doc was locally famous for the spotted Asian deer he had introduced to this bioregion. I doubt that he anticipated that white people with feathers and amulets tied into their long hair, purified in sweat baths and using wild psilocybin mushrooms to sandpaper their nerve endings, would one day creep through the fog-moistened coyote brush and Ceanothus bushes stalking his deer for dinner with silenced rifles.
The ranch house was romantically picturesque—smothered in unkempt old roses, with small paned windows, and a lichen-covered shingled roof extending over the front porch. It was flanked on two sides by an abandoned garden and orchard whose silver-barked apple trees blossomed exuberantly each spring. The whole complex was surrounded by a weathered picket fence and nestled among a barn, a corral, and several silvery-gray outbuildings, bleached by the salty coastal wind.
The three hundred acres were half usable pasture and half steep hills, flanked on the east by a mountain referred to locally as Old Meatloaf. The back of the house faced a broad flat table of grass that splayed out toward the road, dipping once into a deep, stream-coursed gully thick with live oak and bay trees, continuing directly into the dark, timbered Coast Range. I called them the “Chinese hills” because the early morning fogs settling in the clefts between the ridges transformed them each day into living Chinese landscape paintings. “Fog is the breath of mountains”—the mushrooms told me that one day, and it seemed right. Still does.
From our elevation, we could see Tomales Bay, the little town of Point Reyes Station to the north, and most of the winding dirt road separating our romantic hideaway from the rest of the world’s realities.
Bob Slade was not a Digger, but a friend from an earlier time of my life. He and I moved in and spent days walking the rolling green hills and exploring the abandoned structures. It was a perfect score—the archetypical outlaw hideout—and we were primed to put it to good use, but the trip to London intervened. I barely had time to stake a claim to a room and to drop off my things and my new dog Josephine before I left for Europe.
When I returned from England, I was sick as my dog. Dr. Feelgood’s prescription had, if anything, exacerbated my hepatitis, and I was daisy-yellow and weak as wet paper. Olema was practically deserted, and Slade and his girlfriend, Eileen Law, were off gallivanting. Since I could barely navigate the distance to the bathroom unaided, I lay in my corner room, staring at the scraps of faded wallpaper peeling on the redwood walls and the gleaming sun-drenched life beyond the windows, and wondering how I had come to this pass.
Michael Tierra had brought me a coyote puppy from Black Bear as a gift, which I had named Eeja, a Shoshone word for coyote. He lay on the porch just outside my window, too wild to touch but civil enough to my attentions and food to remain just out of reach. Next to him was my white pup Josephine. I had found her at a commune at an old hot springs resort called Harbinger colonized by freaks and t
urned into a lunatic’s idea of the sensual life. Ron Thelin and I had visited the place in the autumn before my trip to England and thought it a pigsty. Naked and willing nymphs did pour hot water over us in the soaks, but the place was so filthy that anxiety about noxious microbes tainted sexual fantasies with dread.
There I saw what appeared to be a small, albino coyote with blue eyes. She was unmistakably feral and hyperalert but also obviously ill, with runny eyes and nose and a curious twitch in one eye that made her appear to be winking. I fell in love with her immediately and determined to take care of her. I found the owner, a young girl from Colorado, who told me that her father had dug up a litter of coyote pups and killed all but one, which he had mated with his Australian shepherd. This dog was a pup of that union. When I pointed out how sick the dog was, she said, “Yeah, bummer, isn’t it?” and offered no resistance to my taking her. I named her Josephine, in honor of the queen she would become, and except for the trip to England, we were never apart for even one week over the next ten years. She became a psychically tuned companion who would slip silently into restaurants and hide under my table. I could stop her at a distance with hand signals so she would not cross streets against traffic, allowing us to travel effortlessly in cities. Once when we were separated in Manhattan, I backtracked twenty-six blocks to find her waiting under my car. She was my most trusted companion (which no doubt comments on my human relationships). With her I felt that I could fall asleep in a public park with a hundred-dollar bill in my mouth and be perfectly safe.
She lay next to Eeja on the wooden porch, and the two of them were luminous in the sun. Their fur shone, their eyes sparkled, their teeth were glistening and white. Their beauty and fitness were indisputable. A thought crossed my mind—literally crossed it in moving red lights, like an electronic banner quoting stock prices—spelling out the words “Health is beauty.” Not a profound insight, perhaps, but I was sick enough (and vain enough) to pay attention.
I reviewed my life choices up to that point, reviewed my friends with sallow skin, nicotine-stained fingers, and bad teeth. For all our brilliant social invention and hipness, were we healthy? What did freedom and liberation mean without freedom from illness? I had lots of time to ponder because my speculations concerning limitless invention had finally collided head on with their first inalienable limit: the integrity of the body. Abuse of it had flattened me like foolscap.
One day, Rolling Thunder came to visit. He was a curious amalgam of contradictory qualities: a Shoshone medicine man, political activist, and opportunistic carnival huckster who had appeared in the Haight several years earlier, announcing that he’d had a vision of the Diggers as the reincarnation of white soldiers killed at Little Big Horn. He attracted a lot of attention in the counterculture community. A fellow named Doug Boyd wrote a book about him, and actor Tom Laughlin featured him prominently in his Indian-Zen-mystic-karate-Western Billy Jack films.
Rolling Thunder and I had become close when I spent some time at his house in Carlin, Nevada, fixing his cars and machinery as an admission ticket to his world. His best tobacco was always available to me, and in later years whenever he came to town, usually at the behest of the Grateful Dead, he’d stop by Olema and we’d smoke and talk before he left to doctor someone who needed fixing. R. T. may have been showy, but he also had the real goods and could definitely heal the sick.
So this day, when Rolling Thunder stepped into my room and then stepped out again quickly, saying, “There’s a rattlesnake in here!”—I paid attention.
Besides, there was a rattlesnake. Camping in the Nevada desert one day, I had killed and skinned one and tanned its hide for my hatband. I took to wearing the rattles on a thong around my neck as a talisman. If I had been less dense, I might have remembered a pointed incident the year before at the Bear Dance, a large pan-tribal gathering in Susanville, California. I liked the dances, the all-day gambling games, and the festive atmosphere. Moreover, I had Native friends who usually showed up at these events, and it was a good time to talk politics and trade gossip. I had walked around the grounds with Eeja tucked under my arm. The Natives loved him and wanted to touch him for luck, and I was an instant celebrity and honored with an invitation to sit with the gamblers. I developed a flirtation with a Native girl that was approaching critical mass until I bent over to put the puppy down for her and the snake’s rattles fell out of my shirtfront. She recoiled as if she’d been struck, raised her hand the way actors ward off vampires in bad movies, and said, “No!”
“No,” she repeated, backing beyond the reach of any protestation I could muster, and then she disappeared. From that point on, there was a decided chill in the air, and I realized that I had made a serious transgression. I stopped wearing the rattle, apologized to it, and even buried it ceremonially. I thought no more about it afterward, however, and continued to wear my hat with the snakeskin band.
It was the hat in my closet Rolling Thunder was sensing before I even told him about it. He seized my arms, reviewed the rows of puncture marks along my veins and said, “That’s where the snake bit you.” He may have been speaking metaphorically, but he had a way of making his point. He made me pray over the hat, “wash” it in tobacco smoke, and apologize to the spirit of the rattlesnake aloud. When that was done, I had to gather certain twigs and herbs and make a fire to burn the hat and the band. He gave me some teas to drink daily, including one called bitterroot, which was the foulest substance I have ever put into my mouth.
Ten weeks after those prayers and teas I was cured, and I resolved to keep my excesses within more tolerable bounds, as well as never to dismiss any living thing again by reducing it to a crutch for my vanity. I kept the second of those promises.
This resolution didn’t, of course, apply to women. There was something about that farmhouse with a single guy in it (even sick) that served as a magnet for women. To this day I do not understand the phenomenon, but at least twice a week some lovely girl wandered up the road with a bundle of food and curiosity, and stayed for lunch and an afternoon’s frolic. Most I never saw again (which might have led a less deluded man to assume the frolics were not that transcendent). But the fact that they came and went like breezes amazes me to this day. How did they find the place? What homing instinct did they follow up my red clay dirt road, and once there, what possessed them to minister to a sick guy with yellow skin and wild dogs for companions? Sometimes I assumed that they were by-products of Rolling Thunder’s cure, bizarre phantasms sent to fill me with healing energy and whip my body back into shape. I might have remained faithful to this theory if none of them had ever stayed. Among those who did stay was lithe and lovely Nichole Wills, a sunny girl with a captivating smile, an abundance of sexual energy, minimal demands, and a few very dark secrets. She assumes prominence in the narrative later, when our family stew was in full boil at Turkey Ridge Farm, and I’ll allow her to surface in her own time.
At first, Olema’s only other inhabitants were Slade and his girlfriend Eileen, a tall, slender, maternally calm girl with the kind of deep auburn hair and eyes you might not notice at first glance, but on the second you’d stay for a good long look. Slade would leave in search of adventure each day, and Eileen would clean and putter softly about the house while I remained bedridden. I did not know at the time that her ardor for cleaning was fueled by secret dips into a speed reservoir, but the upshot of her tippling was that the house, though rustic and simple, was always immaculate. Slade had it made. He would run out in his polished chestnut boots, crank over his snappy MGB, and tool off. No matter what time he rolled back in, no matter where his center of gravity had shifted, Eileen was there with food, an orderly house, and a warm body for him. If he didn’t show up for too damn long, why, then, occasionally she might be there for me too. It was a sweet deal, and I thought Slade a fool for not treasuring her.
It was easy to be sensitive to Eileen because I had no responsibility for her and she wanted nothing from me. Sam was another story. She had moved into Olema
for a while while I was in England, asserting her proprietary rights, I suppose, and looking for a nest for her expected child. She ran afoul of Eileen and her friend Diane, a quiet, capable blonde girl with a subtle smile and a vicious black German shepherd, and they “vibed” her away.
She bounced around various musical communes for a while, the Grateful Dead ranch in Novato, and then a place that some of the members of Crosby, Stills, and Nash maintained, becoming progressively distraught. During that time, she ran into Paula McCoy, who, thanks to Emmett, was just starting her terminal flirtation with heroin. Paula said to her, “If you get through this, you can get through anything,” but, Sam remembers, “she wouldn’t touch me [or help me] because she knew I needed too much.”
She made her way to the city as her term approached and settled for a while with Linda Gravenites, roommate and spiritual center-of-gravity for Janis Joplin, who was on tour in Europe. Janis sent word that Sam could have her baby in her bed, if she could have it before Janis returned. “That was more than most people gave me,” Sam recalls drily.
It’s hard for me to remember if I was simply heartless or oblivious or heartless and oblivious concerning Sam’s situation. I honestly can’t remember. I was sick and confused, Olema was peace and quiet, and despite numerous positive attributes, Sam and I together never generated peace and quiet.
My Digger friends soon transformed this little idyll at Olema. Scratch a Digger and you find thirty-five others. Slade had difficulty relating to some of the people who showed up from time to time, especially my close friend Chuck Gould, a lone-wolf uncle to a lot of our kids and the perfect running partner. Chuck’s style is East Coast Jewish tough and very smart. He is one of the funniest people I know, and also trustworthy and loyal to his core. (In later years, after he became a successful businessman, Chuck continued to generously support Digger kids with tuition money and allowances.) He would help me with the chores that were too mundane for Slade, who made no secret of his disdain for Chuck. “He doesn’t play jazz,” Slade would say; he usually left when Chuck arrived. “Not playing jazz” was shorthand for saying that Chuck (and people like him) consider issues and others as designed for purposes other than his own amusement.