Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Pit stops provided interesting theater. The raven heads were an inexplicable and creepy bundle hanging from the window, and every square inch of the car’s interior was covered with drying animal parts. When Jim and I emerged, unshaven, longhaired, wearing crusty boots, belt knives, and earrings, attendants backed away from the pumps and civilians gathered their children back into their cars.

  We drove and talked our way across country, punctuating emotional moments by firing Jim’s Ruger .357 magnum dog-leg six-shooter out the window. We reached Pennsylvania from Santa Fe in sixty hours of hard driving—good time, though hardly a personal record, considering that after the final Mime Troupe performance in New York, Charlie Degelman and I (on a modest amount of methedrine) drove back to California in fifty-four hours, which included a four-hour layover to visit a girlfriend in Des Moines.

  Not long after this return to Turkey Ridge, my mother delivered a stunning announcement. She was being sued by creditors for fraud, a serious charge that could not be avoided by bankruptcy. The creditors were pressing her for an immediate sale of the farm for whatever it could bring as the only alternative to being taken to court.

  Elly Clancy, the disaffected manager’s wife, had, we were told, informed one of the creditors in a phone call that my mother had signed the farm over to me and that I was planning to take the money and run to South America. The farm had been signed over to me years before by my father, then signed back to him when he needed to mortgage it. My mother had put it back into my name, hoping to save it at best or at least delay the inevitable. But she would not have picked a nickel off the sidewalk that wasn’t hers, much less defraud people to whom she was in debt. Elly’s story was a fiction with just enough truth to give it credibility.

  I was dumbfounded. I had adored Elly like a grandmother since I was an infant. Among my first experiences of childhood autonomy was the half-mile walk to her tiny storybook cabin for a piece of pie and milk. She was an effervescent, cheerful woman, “a cunnerman” as she referred to herself, meaning of Pennsylvania-Dutch mountain stock. She kept chickens, dogs, raccoons, and birds around her charming little home and painted oils of the region’s natural beauty in a gifted naïf style. Before Morris died, he had given Jim and Elly their cabin and seventy acres of land surrounding it as a reward for their constant and loyal labor. They had their house and home, and if this suit was successful, I would have nothing. I could not believe Elly would begrudge me my share.

  In retrospect, it is not difficult to understand, and I must accept some blame for what transpired. After Morris’s death, Jim had worn the uniform of the Forest Service. To him, we represented the forces of anarchy, and to us he had sided with law and repressive order. He had only to drive by Turkey Ridge to see the accumulating clutter of old vehicles, the large kitchen garden plowed into the once-pristine lawn, and the general deterioration of the house and grounds he had dedicated a third of his life to maintaining. No matter how hard we labored, no matter how many good deeds we offered the community, we were indisputably different from the local people and in many ways a threat to their values.

  Part of the problem was duration. We had not lived there long enough. In other communities, like Black Bear, where Free Family people organized a tree-planting cooperative, worked for the Forest Service, and took roles teaching in the local schools, familiarity led to integration and acceptance, direct results of long-term residence. At Turkey Ridge we’d had time to extend feelers but no time to sink roots.

  We were shocked and hurt one night when a local childhood friend, Raymond Van Wuys, told us that Walt often recounted satirical stories about us to amuse his friends at the local bar. Raymond knew we assumed that our labors for the Poliski family had won us a measure of friendship and respect; now he cautioned us against making unfounded assumptions about the depth of those feelings.

  People in that area were hardworking, thrifty, resourceful, generally clean and sober. They eschewed welfare rigorously and harbored little if any antigovernment sentiments. The day another childhood friend, Bruce Kessler, lost his license as a tractor-trailer driver, I asked him if he was going on welfare. He looked at me as if I were deranged—and had a new job the next day. As members of a counterculture, we defined ourselves by our opposition to the majority. The local people were the majority culture. We could not have it both ways at once.

  We had behaved with both arrogance and naïveté, assuming that we were leading the way to a future of our own design. We had assumed the task of creating a culture from whole cloth, certain that our example would shine brilliantly enough and that more traditional people would join us. I can’t blame Elly or Walt for rejecting our example. There were aspects of our life that did not compel me: the chaos, the impossibility of refined group expression, the moral self-righteousness, and the personal failings and indulgences that undermined some of our best efforts. I viewed such problems as part of the process, but to outsiders, our problems represented what we were, and they found us offensive.

  The pending sale made relocating a necessity, and I wanted to return to California to be near Ariel. Nichole and I discovered a beautifully constructed but rundown handmade house trailer in a neighbor’s ancient barn. It had been lovingly fashioned of wood in the late thirties and was eighteen feet long, with smooth curves to the roof over a somewhat boxy body, like a modern Airstream. However functional and prosaic it appeared from the outside, the inside was carefully crafted, varnished wood like a sailboat. The tires were flat and the roof was shredded, but the structure was sound, so we bought it for a hundred dollars and hauled it back to Turkey Ridge.

  We insulated the delicate rafters with mattress pads, and cut and stitched a new roof of canvas, which we stretched and tacked down tight as a drum head, sealing it with aluminum-asbestos paint of a high silver sheen. We painted the body a deep forest green and the window and door trim barn red. I located a varnished plank door that I cut to size and trimmed with found brass Victorian hardware. The primitive two-burner gas stove, sink, and counter were still in good order, and I added propane lights and a small cylindrical woodstove. I constructed a double bed across the back for Nichole and me and fold-down bunks for Jeremiah and Ariel, whom I planned to pick up in California.

  Since the Meat and Bone Wagon could no longer survive a cross-country trip, I traded a friend my worn Mannlicher deer rifle and the farm’s antiquated Land Rover for a clean 1964 Dodge Town Wagon, a beautiful panel truck with side windows and two rear doors. It was the newest vehicle I had ever owned, originally ordered by the Florida State Survey Department and set up for them with one-ton suspension, oversized brakes, and seventeen-and-a-half-inch wheels. Its 225 slant-six engine was a paragon of reliability that could propel it at seventy miles an hour all day long.

  One of our squatter friends from Shawnee, a Chicano from Compton, California, whose name I’ve misplaced, painted the truck electric blue and stenciled crescent moons with the morning star in silver on each door. For some reason I christened this blue truck “Sadie Green.” I still have it today. It has accumulated more than 380,000 miles and in the interim has been converted to four-wheel drive (a task of monumental proportions), and painted forest green to match its name. Presently powered by a 318 V-8 engine, it has been rebuilt from end to end and, as my alter ego in some wise, reaffirms to me that, despite scars and wear, old machinery (like my body) can still be of value and service.

  Nichole and I and the others left for our various destinations, and Tommy Lavigne was left to sit the house (although “plunder” would have been a more appropriate verb to describe his residency). The spring after we had returned to California, my mother received an alarmed call from my cousin Arthur who lived nearby in a home he constructed single-handedly, informing her that he’d noticed an announcement in the paper of a yard sale at Turkey Ridge. With true junkie resourcefulness, Tommy auctioned off the contents of the house and outbuildings to raise personal spending money. When he was finally pried out, it was discovered that he had al
so sidestepped the inconvenience of carrying his garbage to the dump by throwing it down the cellar stairs to molder there all winter. That was the Free Family legacy at Turkey Ridge Farm: a festering garbage pile in the center of my father’s heaven-on-earth. Not a pretty thing to remember, or admit.

  Nichole, Jeremiah, Josephine, and I began our cross-country trek with seventy dollars in cash. On our first day, the highway god delivered a pheasant to us, which I skinned. We stopped at a shop in Port Jervis, New York, bought a gross of ear wires, some bails to hold the feathers, and corkboard on which to mount finished earrings. I drew a catchy little logo of a snake eating its own tail and trademarked our intended product “Eternal Circle Earrings.” A paragraph under the title described the origin of the feathers (poetically, to be sure, avoiding the word roadkill) and assured customers that by “recycling” these feathers as jewelry, they would be participating in an eternal circle (not to mention supporting my family). It was a thin premise on which to base an economy, but it worked out well enough, so that by the time we reached the West Coast three and a half months later, we had a bankroll of slightly over four hundred dollars.

  It was a nice trip. It was winter and freezing cold, but we stopped at lumberyards along the way and got “short ends” of milled lumber for free. They burned fast and hot and made the trailer toasty. We were already skilled at raiding supermarket dumps for slightly overripe produce, and we had enough friends or contacts along the route to keep us showered and in clean laundry.

  In areas without friends, we’d park by the road, and while the winter winds of Illinois or Nebraska rocked the trailer on its suspension, we stayed warm and dry inside. Jeremiah and Josephine slept, and Nichole and I arranged feathers into pleasing designs and sang in harmony for hours. I remember it as a long, easy crossing. I never wore a watch in those days, and today, pressured by a relentless schedule and myriad obligations, I look back at life on the road as a relatively carefree period. It couldn’t have been as rosy as I remember, though, because shortly after we reached San Francisco, Nichole and I decided to live apart.

  We spent our first night back in San Francisco at Peter and Judy (Gold-haft) Berg’s Victorian house that Judy’s father had bought for them. When Peter awoke the following morning, he stumbled into the bathroom where Nichole and I were washing and muttered something disparaging about “life on the commune.” There was no mistaking the chill of that crack. Nichole and I looked at each other knowingly and moved out that day. Solidarity has its limits, and Berg had never been enthusiastic about communal life.

  I moved into a two-room basement apartment on Holly Park Circle, a small hilltop in the outer reaches of the Mission. I parked my trailer in the street and used it as an additional room. I had no idea how I was going to survive in the city, but Danny Rifkin solved the problem for me by offering me his unemployment benefits. He had made it a practice to learn to live on half of his current earnings. In that way he was guaranteed a future week off for each week he had worked. He was about to take a year off from his duties with the Grateful Dead, didn’t need his benefits, and knew that I did.

  With an income assured and something left over for Sam and Ariel, I could afford to rebuild the engine on Sadie Green. To do that I needed a car. There was a wheelless VW bug abandoned in front of my apartment that the neighborhood children had used as scratch paper. I appropriated it. To me it had some charm, but it must have been pretty rank. About two years later, Phil Esparza, a friend from El Teatro Campesino (Luis Valdez’s brilliant theater company in San Juan Bautista), regarded it one day and asked me in all seriousness, “Man, aren’t you ashamed to be seen driving that thing?” To tell the truth, I never thought about it. It was free.

  I registered the car in the name of Amanda B. Reckonwith, figuring that I had little money to spare for parking tickets. I had never voted for the presence of parking meters anywhere I had ever lived and considered their presence an insult to my inalienable right to lounge around. When the police stopped me from time to time and informed me that “Miss Reckonwith” had “lots of warrants,” I told them dutifully that Amanda was out of the country but that I would tell her to take care of them the minute she got back. The system is not calibrated to work with people who do not want to own property; this made things much simpler for me.

  When the VW stopped dead with an expensive-sounding grinding noise and “thunk” on Market Street during rush hour one day years later, I felt I had received my $150 investment from it and abandoned it where it stopped. The vehicle had numerous outstanding warrants, and I thought it was time for the car to turn itself in and take its punishment.

  Holly Park was an unlucky neighborhood for me. My apartment was plundered shortly after I moved in and then my guitar was stolen out of my VW while I ran in to use my bathroom one afternoon. It was a large, blond maple Guild F-50 given to me by a writer friend, with my initials “RPC” inlaid at the fourteenth fret and a little Barcus-Berry electric pickup under the bridge. It would resonate against my chest as I played, and I imagined that if you could play a cathedral, it would feel something like that. I mourn its loss to this day, reflexively scan pawnshops and newspaper ads for it, and it’s a measure of my love for it that even as I now write nearly thirty years later, I fantasize some reader revealing its whereabouts.

  A few years before, in Woodstock, I had convinced a friend of Martin Carey’s to give Nichole an extra guitar he owned. We played together often, and she needed something to do with her hands. It was another Guild, a D-50, smaller than mine, but with a lovely voice. Now that mine was gone, I asked to borrow hers. She almost never used it, and music was a daily preoccupation for me. Nichole told me that she had loaned it to someone and couldn’t get it back at the moment. Several nights later I woke from a dream inflamed by the certainty that Nichole had pawned it for drug money. I was indignant. “She would not even have a guitar had it not been for my efforts,” I told myself, en route to her house at 3:00 A.M. By the time I reached her apartment I had worked myself into a self-righteous fury. I broke down the door and demanded the pawn ticket. She denied any knowledge of it at first, telling me I was crazy to believe a dream, but then she recanted and turned the pawn ticket over to me. I left, and still have that guitar. I was pleased as punch with myself and never considered that I had been prepared to hurt someone for a material object.

  The random disorders in my physical life mirrored my emotional life. Nichole and I were living apart but seeing each other occasionally, getting high together, sleeping together, codependent as sociopathic Siamese twins. I took my truck and trailer to visit Freeman House in La Conner, Washington. At the time of my flight from Nichole, Freeman had just written a beautiful piece called “Totem Salmon,” published in Peter Berg’s new magazine, Planet Drum. Among other things, this prescient piece calculated the calories required to catch one calorie of fish with current industrial methods, demonstrating that the modus operandi of the fishing industry was insupportable for the long term.

  Planet Drum was a forum for bioregionalism, a cutting edge of deep-ecological thought. A bioregion is a distinct plant-animal-climate community (including humans) marked by the presence or absence of certain species. A bioregion’s inhabitants have more in common with one another than they do simply as citizens of a state or county, which are abstract lines often including several bioregions. Los Angelenos and northern Californians inhabit the same state but radically different bioregions. Many cultural differences between the two areas can be traced to that distinction. Bioregions are the way the earth actually organizes itself.

  Our evolving thought held that if humans wanted to avoid destroying our life-support systems—water, soil, air, and plant and animal species—both urban and rural people would have to learn to live according to the dictates and processes of their bioregion. If it takes seventy-five years to grow a usable tree, you have to incorporate that fact in any planning. If that tree is necessary to prevent topsoil slipping into the streams and killing the salmon s
pawn or silting up downstream estuaries, employment may have to be adjusted to that objective reality. If the annual rainfall can support X number of people, that too must be factored in to planning commissions and real-estate permits. Human industries and lifestyles that murder their biological supports are patently untenable, and no amount of “reasonable compromise” will change that fact. Learning how and what to change and creating cultures that embodied such changes as conventional wisdom were the tasks at hand. Planet Drum was created to be the mouthpiece and the messenger.

  The ostensible purpose of my visit to Freeman was to sound out his thinking on this subject. The secondary purpose was to get away from the city, drugs, and Nichole. One of my self-conscious functions in the family was as a messenger and catalyst. I have an ability to translate and transmit ideas clearly, and since conversations at many Free Family houses and kindred groups were concerned with the same subjects, it was often my task as a traveler to be the cross-pollinator of ideas and institutions, one of the time-honored contributions of nomads. Information was a currency in which I was wealthy.

  I consoled myself for my difficulties with Nichole by keeping company with an Indian woman from the reservation in nearby Yakima. I met her playing pool in La Conner, and although she was pretty drunk, she was deadly at the table. She was exciting and unpredictable, not above winging a pool ball at an idiot who offended her. She looked about thirty-five, and confessed to having a “clutter” of children back in Yakima. Had she drunk less and her teeth not been cracked and chipped, she would have been stunning, but none of the ravages she inflicted on herself could obliterate the residual wisdom of her culture.