by Peter Coyote
. . . The Black Bear Book begins to look like the Torah, growing daily as people expend enormous amounts of energy adding information to it. Elsa’s drawings are wonderful. Each time one is completed and passed around the room, you can mark its route through the crowd by the smile illuminating the face of the person holding it.
. . . Stay up most of the night with Geba. Met her last year and didn’t get time to know her. Large woman who would have driven Rubens berserk—big breasts, hips, high-cheekboned face, flat honest eyes. Quiet. True. Her soft questions search for my heart. She is deft, lifts the corner of word-curtains and peers underneath. I am nervous, like a deer. I tell her many secret feelings, shadows, doubts about myself, this family, and its future that are hidden behind my public face. Liberated women will save us all.
Sunday, Third Week
Departure is a bungle. Smilin’ Mike and his son Timmy want to leave with us. My truck is loaded down so heavily the springs are bowed. Mike is no help; he can see that but does not defer and, passive-aggressive, rests the weight of decision on me. Sensing the tension, Phyllis offers to hitchhike, and it is so obvious that he should be hitchhiking and not her that it angers me. I offer to take his son to Trinidad if that will help. He muddles around. Something about him doesn’t feel right. He smiles too much.
In Orleans we spot [Karok Indian] Willis Bennett and his friend Darvin—short, stocky, 1950s pompadour, massive build. Darvin is drunk, but a high intelligence flashes through the smoke screen of the whiskey. They insist we stay and go eel fishing with them. Willis says it might be a year before we see each other again. I check with the girls and they say okay. . . .
Later, drinking and making music. All the kids playing volleyball. Willis likes my buckskin vest with the leather handprint of my daughter sewn on it. He wants to trade for a fringed, shiny black, three-quarter-length vest his daughter made, a Vegas cowboy number. I try to squirm out gracefully, but he is insistent. “What, it’s not good enough for you?” he demands sullenly. When I refuse, he sulks off and drinks alone. Willis passes out, and his young nephew Moose, chasing a ball, runs into the corner of my truck and splits his head open. I drive him and his mother to the Hoopa hospital over forty miles of dirt road. Nice people there. Doctor teaches me how to stitch, and Moose, ten or eleven at most, never flinches or complains once. I’m struck by the thoughtfulness of the staff. Different than the city.
Monday
Stop at Trinidad house. Everyone happy. Been pulling in sixty to one hundred pounds of fish a day, small smokehouses up all over the yard. Neighbor relations still difficult. One-eyed Orville comes around, malicious, insinuating, dropping veiled allusions about our being burned out. San Quentin Dave watches him blankly. I watch Dave. Orville has no idea that Dave was sentenced for murder.
Ivory [Freeman’s wife at the time] is weaving a blanket from the men’s hair. Freeman talks about a solstice ceremony at Trinidad Head to reinvoke the spirit of Surai, the old Yurok fishing village that used to be there.
Tuesday
Stop at Salmon Creek. Libré has sent a letter reneging on the invitation, telling us that they are helpless and lame, working on their own problems. Everyone at the Trinidad house enthused about the caravan. More and more people planning to go. I send Peter Rabbit and Libré a fifteen-cent get-well card.
Before leaving, David Simpson takes me aside. I’ve confessed my ambiguities about the trip to him and that the idea of continuing some of the craziest aspects of our life on the road leaves me cold. I feel like being alone. He tells me, “A man is no better than his time. To try and be better means being worse.”
David pleases me by saying that after Olema, I now travel as I would have liked others to have moved through my place. He laughs commiseratingly at the burden I’ve taken on, and I leave feeling much better.
Driving south, we pick up an old hitchhiker named Elmer, a white gospel singer from Oneida, Tennessee, sixty-nine years old but “sexually, just like a young boy,” he says often, darting his tongue about like a monkey and eyeing Phyllis. He’s got emphysema and black lung from coal mining. Tells us all about it while he eats Wonder bread and drinks Dr. Pepper. He sings gospel songs in a strong nasal voice.
We drop him off and pick up a stringy Okie named Walt, coming from Oregon where he got rolled and robbed. All he’s got are his coat and a bottle of wine. His hobby is jokes, he says, and he tells jokes without a repeat for seven hours. Good jokes. I laugh till I cry. He sings like Hank Williams, yodels, and plays harmonica. He used to be a warm-up comic for the Grand Ol’ Opry but “couldn’t take the pills” and left.
Back in the city, Berg is at Treat Street. He has warmed to the idea of the caravan and tells me, “Everyone is going to Colorado.” I’m pleased to know that he considers the trip worth his time, since his attention can close down as rapidly as a blown fuse if he is not interested in what’s going on.
Our departure date keeps being postponed. The summer solstice is celebrated on Mount Tamalpais [in Marin County]. Sam appears with my pixie-daughter Ariel, delivered [to me] by a proud Jim Koller, who regards Sam as a Valkyrie and seems to feel that our destiny, hers and mine, is to be shared. [Sam had an extraordinary story. Her friend Cass had left Koller and was weird to her when she visited. Unhinged by grief at their estrangement, Sam sheared off her hair with a scissors and went to the Huerfano Valley in Colorado with some names I’d given her. She arrived just as the peyoteros returned with peyote from a trip to Texas. She had set up a small lean-to covered by a large canvas Drum Hadley gave her. Carelessly, with no ceremony or prayers, she ate an extremely large peyote button and fell asleep.
She woke in the pitch dark, terrified. Her black Great Dane, Crow, was growling and trembling, ears flattened. A number of dogs walked stiff-legged around her camp, growling and spitting in the dark. She got her feathers and a bag of cornmeal and made a circle of the cornmeal around the lean-to, lit a fire, and prayed all night long. Something turned around for her.
She made a beautiful camp and lived rather idyllically for a month or so with Ariel, teaching her to build fires, use needle and thread and scissors, and cook. According to her, “for the first time, I began to feel myself as whole.” Ariel began to grow restive at their solitude. Sam realized that Fosmo wouldn’t show up with the promised horses and said to herself, “I’ve had enough.” The next day Jim Koller appeared magically and announced that he was going to California, inviting her to go. “Can you wait an hour?” she said, which was how long it took her to break camp. They drove straight back to the Red House, where the caravan was preparing to leave for Colorado.]
Sam looks beautiful, long blonde hair cropped short and her eyes clear. Ariel has lost her infant look and is taller, very quiet, and demure. I am excited to see her after a long time and lift her up to plant a kiss on her downy butt. She startles me by smiling shyly and saying, “Don’t do that, Poppa.” I set her down, thrilled at being called “Poppa.” Sam is not certain what her plans are, and I wait, giving her space to decide whether or not to travel with us.
A long procession treks up Mount Tamalpais carrying drums, trombones, and wine, winding through a rustling, hissing expanse of waving, knee-high grass, cresting the hill where the ocean extends before us, glittering and vast beneath a dense awning of clouds. We blow horns, shout encouragement at the departing Sun, expressing neither neoprimitivism nor anthropomorphism but improvised ceremony. The gaily dressed children moving as randomly as milkweed spores blow horns and whistles and sing continuously, accompanying the sun on its long trek toward winter.
The Red House population is reaching critical mass as family members from different communal bases crowd the grounds preparing their vehicles. A sign in a woman’s hand appears on the front door asking people to consider why they are here and what they are doing to help. Numbers have swelled to nearly forty people, and the neighbors are incensed. “Why’s” are swarming like hornets:
“Why should I have to wait to pass on a public street?”
“Why are there children playing in the road?”
“Why isn’t that septic tank fixed yet? It’s disgusting.”
“Why don’t you go to fucking China?”
“Whatever happened to our sweet suburban community?”
Cops visit daily, tagging vehicles for parking on the street. The night after the sign appears on the door a group meeting goes unaccountably well. People bare doubts, grudges, and misgivings, but the group mind keeps it light and tight so that no one becomes a victim. Each person is called on to declare why they want to caravan and what they think they can do for the group. Crazy Kevin [who had locked himself in his room at Olema, shitting in newspapers and throwing them out the window, emerging only at night to pace through the main house after everyone was asleep, carrying an axe and screaming about “Dr. Death.” He was “cured” by Rolling Thunder during one of his visits and was now only odd.] declares that he is pursuing the wisdom of madness. No one disagrees there. Each conversation continues until everyone’s reservations have been aired, clarified, and dispersed. People feel fine.
The next day, I am up early, soliciting contributions of welfare money, gasoline credit cards, and food stamps as final provisions for the trip. I am overready to leave. J. P. Pickens gets into a fistfight with a friend’s ex-landlord who, for some reason, had called the police on J. P.’s buddy. The guy is threading his car between our vehicles trying to pass when J. P. begins screaming at him, calling him a “scum-sucking pig” and shouting, “You stink like a dead dog.” As the man’s vehicle is forced to a crawl to pass between several of ours, J. P. spits in his face. This is too much, and the guy leaps out to fight, even with thirty of J. P.’s friends standing by. J. P.’s behavior is so bizarre, and the reasons for it unknown to the rest of us, so we stand back to see what will happen.
J. P. is ready. His dilemma is that the methedrine residues in his system misfire some critical synapse, because he misses with his first swing, and the guy flattens J. P. with one good punch. J. P. rises from the ground, one eye split and bleeding copiously. He offers a zany giggle and says, “Showed him!” Work resumes after some discussion.
Finally, on a Friday morning, all was ready, and according to my journals, with the “sun in Cancer and the moon in Gemini,” the first wave prepared to leave.
Word from Libré had come yet again, emphasizing that we were not welcome. They were totally panicked. They said that we were not “together,” were too ready to teach and not ready enough to learn from them. There was some truth in this assertion, but much of their information was probably related to my failed ambassadorial visit the year before. The group decided that Paul Shippee and I should go ahead as envoys, since two people hardly constitute an invasion. (Paul was an old friend from Actors’ Workshop days once married to Sandy Archer of the Mime Troupe. He had moved into our community in step with me.) We would try to dissipate Libré’s paranoia. By the time we left, however, the modest scouting party (also charged with reporting details about routes and campsites) had swollen to include Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft, their children Aaron and Ocean Rush, and their truck, the Albigensian Ambulance Service. Traveling with them was a slender, boyish woman named Suki, conscripted to operate the video camera that Peter had scammed from a producer who had provided it to purchase a safe way to interact with the Diggers. Paul Shippee and Mai-Ting, a Chinese woman doctor we nicknamed the Dragon Lady (both for her no-nonsense approach and her exotic beauty), would ride in Paul’s green Chevy panel truck. Sam, Ariel, and I would travel in the Meat and Bone Wagon.
After a fine birthday breakfast for Judy and Ocean Berg, we piled into the trucks but were halted yet again for a serenade by the Valley Liberation Band, which wanted to dignify our send-off. The band was the raunchiest group of rotten-royal losers imaginable and did nothing to allay my queasy feelings about the impression we might make on strangers. J. P., one eye swollen shut and bandaged, played banjo; Digger, in a filthy L.A. Bikers’ Club T-shirt, played tin can; Marsha Thelin’s temporary lover Willem, clad in shredded coveralls, played guitar; Smilin’ Mike played something as a drum; Vinnie, naked to the waist except for copious amounts of body hair, played trombone; and a crazy woman who appeared from Mexico with a parrot on her head did a loose double-boogie in the middle of the street. We drove all of about seven miles into San Rafael, where we retrieved good radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, and squash from a garbage bin behind the Safeway supermarket.
Our first “official” stop was to be Gary Snyder’s place near Nevada City, and the first night we camped on the Yuba River under stars like small tufts of popcorn in the blackness of the sky.
We arrived at Gary’s place carrying bay and Yerba Buena leaves we’d stopped to pick as gifts. Gary was walking around in a loincloth, cutting madrone yokes to hang pots over his outdoor fire pit. He didn’t stop working when we arrived, and his greeting consisted of “You again.” I hadn’t seen him in several years.
Later in the day, he thawed a bit and took us to a clean and shaded pine grove near his place, announcing, “Let this be a family camp.” We explained our visions of the trade route and caravan, how we hoped to stitch together various regional economies into a larger network. We expressed hope that he and his friends would participate.
The next morning, Gary woke me and Berg early and brought us to his house for coffee and talk. He told us that the people in their area were committing themselves to articulating a sense of place and understanding its species diversity. They planned to be there for the long haul, to serve as its guardians. They had reservations about travelers. Furthermore, he added, they didn’t need much.
We had anticipated this response and looked forward to a meeting where we could express ourselves directly to the community and hopefully put their reservations to rest. When we returned to our campsite, Crazy Kevin had tendered us a gift of a latrine, using a hatchet to carve perfectly true rectangular walls in the granitic soil, an act of monumental dedication.
We reclaimed a muddy spring at the site by removing clay, water, quartz, and old pine needles and constructing a spring box from heavy cedar boards, fashioned with carefully dovetailed corners. The box was placed on four inches of white gravel hauled from the nearby Malakoff Diggings. We packed the outside of the box with more gravel and stood back to watch the water rise and the silt settle. We were rewarded with a deep, clear pool to leave for those who followed us. We felt good about our work and hoped it would say more about our intentions than words.
That night, members of the San Juan Ridge community visited our camp: Gary and his family; Zack Reisner; Joel the potter; Doc Dachtler, local schoolteacher, craftsman, and singer; and his pregnant wife Shelly. They wound their way through the trees, halloing as they came.
Our camp was beautiful: lanterns were strung through the trees and around the grounds. A meeting place had been marked out with blankets. Greetings were exchanged warmly, but there was an undercurrent of reserve. The community members addressed us formally, expressing fear that welcoming us would place their still-fragile community in the path of a hippie migration. They explained that they were making a serious effort to live tribally maintaining separate households village-style but meeting often for group work and policy discussion. They were pursuing systematic, organized research to combat gold mining, irresponsible logging, and exploitative real-estate practices. They were relearning “life in place,” as people had lived on San Juan Ridge for thousands of years, and worried that nomads would not be sensitive to local practices and spirits. I liked them for their gentleness and concern, admired their unity and discipline.
We traded songs, and the night was good, but a gulf remained between the two tribes. I was not sure whether it was a difference of intentions or of personal development. They were more settled that we and, in many ways, more accomplished. A thought occurred to me that made me lonesome: “They are the Earth and we are the Wind.”
The next day, Doc and I traded songs. He asked to learn my “Rainbow
Woman Song” and taught me a “Corn Song” I’d admired. Bearing his song as a gift, we said good-bye and pushed on—over the Sierras, down the eastern slope, into the picturesque town of Sierraville, homing into the magnetic spiritual pulse of Pyramid Lake.
The next day, we entered the lake’s force field through the north end. It shimmered before us, a perfect turquoise oasis in the rusty, dusty earth. In the town of Sutcliff, Berg remembered some people we had helped during the Indian invasion of Alcatraz. He proposed asking them for recognition as pilgrims, to clarify our posture toward the lake. In the general store at Nixon, a man steered us to a campsite on native land in Dead-Ox Canyon.
In Nixon we met Dora García, secretary of the local tribal council, who seemed disposed toward us and invited us home. Berg and Suki fascinated Dora’s family by showing videotapes of their children over their TV. Dora expressed curiosity about the utility of this (then relatively new) instrument for preserving tribal customs. She agreed to put our petition to the tribal council the following night and then to visit our camp to inform us of the response.
It was technically illegal to camp on Indian land, but we were buried out of sight in the chaparral of a sandy canyon flanking the Truckee River—and we didn’t care. Pyramid Lake is one of the continent’s magical and holy spots, and we considered our being there totally correct.
We fashioned trotlines (long lines from which dangle multiple baited hooks) and ran them across the river. I spent most of the day making fish gigs out of an old iron rod I found in the desert, heating it with my torches, beating it flat, and filing barbs and a blade on it. Shippee fashioned an exquisite Zen spear, while mine looked as if it had been made in a kindergarten for mentally challenged students. We spent the day spearing the fat, bony carp introduced by Europeans, splitting them open and drying them on the rocks to make jerky for the road. They glittered on the rocks like the wings of gigantic iridescent moths.