Mother American Night

by John Perry Barlow

  Nonetheless, I did my best to keep my relationship with Judy alive during my freshman year at Wesleyan. There were several weekends when I drove from Middletown to Colorado Springs to see her. It was about 1,900 miles each way and I would leave on Friday and come back on Sunday. My metallic purple 1965 Chevy Impala Super Sport had a 550-horsepower engine that I had souped up by putting two four-barrel carburetors in it. I had fucked with this car so significantly that I could run it for hours at insane speed.

  Gas cost only twenty-eight cents a gallon back then, but I was not getting even ten miles to the gallon at the speed I was driving. I almost had to stand under the hood while constantly pouring gas right into the carburetors to keep going. Back then, the speed limit was eighty-five miles an hour, but no one seemed all that concerned about enforcing it and so I would be going a hundred miles an hour easy.

  At about three o’clock one Kansas morning while I was going roughly 130 miles an hour and had been for a long time, I was not quite nowhere but I could certainly see it. Suddenly, the main bearings in the differential seized and the rear wheels were locked. With astonishing velocity, I veered off the highway into a cornfield. Entering a cornfield at 130 miles an hour is like slamming into deep water. Breathtaking.

  After the car finally came to a dead stop, I walked back up to the highway and stood by the side of the road until someone came along and picked me up. While I was standing there, I suddenly realized that driving all the way to Colorado Springs to spend the night with my girlfriend was even crazier than I was. I couldn’t do it anymore.

  Instead, I decided to focus my attention on the women’s colleges of New England, and I discovered that I could ride my motorcycle to places like Bennington and Sarah Lawrence, recite poetry of my own composition to anyone who might be interested, and do okay without a 1,900-mile booty call.

  Between April 1966 and December 1974, I was involved with many other women, but I never lost contact with Elaine. At one point, she was operating the cash register at the Yale Law School cafeteria, and I went to see her there. But just when I thought that we might start something up, she fell in with a promising student there who then became, at a startlingly young age, the president of the Union Pacific railroad. They were together for several years, and he took her with him to southern California.

  Elaine eventually broke up with him and returned to Colorado Springs, where she got into a relationship with a guy we had both known when I was at Fountain Valley. For a summer, they traveled around the Rockies in a VW bus with Elaine’s older sister, who had fallen in with him, too. Eventually, their road led to the Bar Cross.

  Although it was the middle of haying season, Elaine and I felt pretty cozy with each other. The feeling that I had after she left made me understand strongly that, whether we’d had a romantic history or not, she was now at the top of my list. It would still be a long-distance relationship, but I had gotten a pilot’s license and was leasing a plane, so I started flying down to Colorado Springs to see her nearly every weekend.

  This courting by airborne siege went on for a while until she finally said, “Barlow, what are you doing?” And I said, “I am attempting to win your heart.” And she said, “Keep working on it.” And I said, “At least, I’d like you to come up and share the Bar Cross Ranch with me for a while.”

  She said yes, and we lived there together along with my mother from December 1974 until July 1976, at which time Elaine had had a belly full of me and dashed back to Colorado Springs. I spent the balance of that summer engaged in a relationship with a girl who would have been the answer to all of my financial dilemmas. She was also beautiful, smart, and funny, and I might have ended up with her, but I realized that trouble would come between us, as it does to every married couple, and I didn’t want there to be a little voice in the back of my head saying “You did it for the money.”

  By Christmas of that year, neither Elaine nor I was very happy, and I resumed my lonely flights of courtship down to Colorado Springs. Over a period of about a month, I persuaded her to come back. This time, I wanted to nail it out of the chute, and so I proposed to her almost immediately, setting a date and beginning to create a matrix of details and expectations that might keep her from bolting again.

  We were to be wed on the Bar Cross on June 21, 1977, the day of the summer solstice. Let me tell you that, as difficult as being married can be, getting ready to be married can be even more difficult still, especially if you’re involving hundreds of people who know no master.

  Weir was going to be my best man, and we had agreed that, on the day of the wedding, we would go up on the hill at sunrise to lay out a line of rocks pointing away from a big medicine circle we had built. Then at sunset, when we expected the service to be over, everybody would pick up a rock and lay it out pointing to the setting sun.

  The night before, everyone was drinking. Earlier in the day, Weir and I had both gone straight to the Everclear, which is pure ethanol, 190 proof. You can run your race car on it. Everclear is not really meant for human consumption, but it is sold in liquor stores. We each had a pint of it in our hip pockets and we weren’t mixing it with anything.

  At some point during the night, Weir apparently abandoned me and went off to sleep in a bunkhouse. This was an act of disloyalty I could not abide. In those days, it had become my practice to punctuate points I wanted made very clearly by blanging off a round from my .357 Magnum into the floor. Since the bullet leaves the muzzle of that gun at twice the speed of sound, the exclamation point it makes is accompanied by two sonic booms.

  At about four-thirty in the morning, I went out to fetch the faithless Weir from his alcohol-induced coma. I entered the bunkhouse and, without any warning, I fired off my exclamatory round into the floor. But I had forgotten that this was the only inhabited building on the ranch that didn’t have a plank floor. In fact, it had once been a chicken coop and had a concrete floor, over which we had placed a rug.

  There was a remarkable silence as there often was following one of these shots across the bow. Suddenly, Weir said, “You shot me!” And I said, “Oh, I did not.” He said, “Turn on the light. Come see.” I turned on the lights and went over to him and sure as shit, it was clear that I had shot him. It was a minor wound but a piece of shrapnel had gone all the way through Bobby’s nose, and in fact the entire wall right above his bed was peppered with shrapnel.

  If Bobby had sat up when I had come through the door, I would have killed him for sure. Which would have given the day an entirely different flavor. But what it came down to instead was that Weir wound up serving as my best man with a Band-Aid over his nose.

  Right after this incident, I jumped on my motorcycle and left the ranch. In the tradition of the groom not seeing the bride before the wedding, Elaine was staying with a close friend of mine. I don’t think I mentioned the shooting when I came to see them that night, but after I had left the ranch, the guests talked about whether or not to follow me. The first question anyone asked was, “Is he still armed?”

  The next day, a wonderful man performed the ceremony, the Reverend Calvin Elliot, who had grown up next door to Katharine Hepburn in the tonier end of Hartford, Connecticut, back in the days when Hartford had a tony end. The reverend had come to Wyoming because he felt closer to God there. He was conservative but extremely refined and a real gentleman. In the sunset light, he looked like God almighty. There was a party after the wedding, and John and Caroline Kennedy were both there because John was still working for me at that point.

  Elaine and I had talked about a honeymoon but had not gotten up a serious plan. Although Weir had been muttering about me going with him to Los Angeles for a while to keep working on the album that came to be called Heaven Help the Fool, I didn’t realize that none of the songs had been written yet and we were already paying for studio time. Unfortunately for me, by shooting Weir on the night before the wedding, I had significantly lengthened his gui
lt lever.

  We’d already had one emergency songwriting session in Salt Lake City. I was drinking and doing cocaine with him and we went to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir while more or less stinking drunk. We were staying in the Hotel Utah, where my parents had gotten married, because Weir and I thought that if we got together in a hotel room, it would help us work. We got Keith Olsen, who had just produced the Dead’s Terrapin Station, to come out as well. As far as I could tell, his principal function seemed to be supplying us with blow.

  Weir went to Los Angeles right after the wedding, and then I followed him out there five days later. I left Elaine behind, which was not a terribly romantic thing to do, but nevertheless that was what happened. And so Elaine and I never did have a honeymoon. She took that period of time to move into the main house on the ranch, which she felt was fair to claim as hers.

  After the wedding, my mother had gone off on an extended tour of the South Pacific and was then in Papua New Guinea among the mud men. Which meant that, among other things, Elaine was able to remove the Christmas tree that had been in the living room for more than eleven years. It was a gigantic sagebrush, seven feet tall and nine feet wide, the likes of which you rarely see. My mother had put twenty-eight hundred little white Italian lights on it, which had been quite an ordeal for me to watch her do. Why did she do this? Because it was an objet d’art. That was what my mother said all of her artist friends called it. Elaine felt like she now had the right to take that damn tree down, and I was totally with her on that.

  In Los Angeles, I wrote the lyrics for six of the eight tracks on Heaven Help the Fool in a short time, pretty much the whole album. I’m still proud of that record because I think it turned out amazingly well. Weir was playing with some truly serious studio musicians, including David Paich, Mike Porcaro, Bill Champlin, David Foster, Nigel Olsson, Waddy Wachtel, and Tom Scott. Generally, they were right there in the room playing alongside Bobby. It was definitely a scene of major proportions, but if you’re not a musician, the studio can really be a dreadful place because nothing happens for the longest time.

  I returned to the ranch to find a whole new order in place. Which was okay by me. It had to happen sooner or later, and I was glad to see Elaine becoming the woman of the Bar Cross.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ADULT BEHAVIOR

  On October 2, 1977, I had the forehead-slapping realization that I was about to become an age above which nobody could be trusted. In fact, I’m still not sure that it makes good sense to trust people over thirty. While I had no aspirations to become a grown-up—and I think we all know what that is—I did want to be an adult who was regarded as responsible. I could no longer excuse my peccadilloes on the basis of youth. They had fallen into a less pleasant category, like bad manners.

  I went to bed on the eve of my thirtieth birthday only to realize all this, and so I got back up and spent the balance of the night composing a list of advisories to myself that I called “Principles of Adult Behavior.” Most of them were blandly inarguable, the sort of platitudes that Polonius had laid on Hamlet. Because I advocated avoiding the pursuit of happiness, this particular homily served to actively piss off the broadest range of folks you could imagine.

  Over the course of the ensuing years, I have done my best to keep the list posted wherever I am. And so I am going to include it here:

  1. Be patient. No matter what.

  2. Don’t bad-mouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.

  3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.

  4. Expand your sense of the possible.

  5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.

  6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.

  7. Tolerate ambiguity.

  8. Laugh at yourself frequently.

  9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.

  10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

  11. Give up blood sports.

  12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously.

  13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.)

  14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them.

  15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that.

  16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun.

  17. Praise at least as often as you disparage.

  18. Admit your errors freely and soon.

  19. Become less suspicious of joy.

  20. Understand humility.

  21. Remember that love forgives everything.

  22. Foster dignity.

  23. Live memorably.

  24. Love yourself.

  25. Endure.

  I don’t expect the perfect attainment of these principles. However, I post them as a standard for my conduct as an adult. Should any of my friends or colleagues catch me violating any one of them, bust me.

  John Perry Barlow, October 3, 1977

  I showed this list to Jerry Garcia a few weeks later and he said, “I hope your embarrassment insurance policy is paid up.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  ÉMINENCE GRISE

  On purely genetic grounds, I was always considered to be a Republican in Wyoming and had worked for several years as a precinct captain in Sublette County. In 1978, I was elected as the chairman of the Republican Party in Sublette County, and I went to the Republican state convention in June.

  Alan Simpson, an old family friend who was about to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Wyoming, said, “I’ve got a guy here I want you to meet and consider working for. I don’t think you’re going to like him because he’s too smart by half. But Dick Cheney does know how to deal with the federal government. He can play fuck ’em with anybody in Washington, D.C., and he cares just as much about protecting Wyoming as you do.”

  That was precisely what I wanted in a state where 78 percent of the land was controlled by the federal government, which meant that somebody other than the people who lived there were in charge and rarely making decisions that anybody there agreed with.

  I met with Cheney, and I wasn’t predisposed to like him on the strength of what Alan Simpson had said but I was prepared to swallow it and act like I did. He knew who I was, but I think he treated everyone like they were less than him, and in some respects, they were. Dick Cheney is one of the two smartest men I’ve ever met, the other being Bill Gates. He could take you on a devastatingly rapid tour of all the weak points in your arguments. That didn’t mean he was right, but it sure meant that he could show you where you were wrong.

  After having served as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff in the White House, Cheney had run Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. In great part, Dick’s motivation in running for Congress from Wyoming was his desire for legitimacy.

  As is almost always the case in Wyoming, that particular election was decided in the Republican primary. I began working for him as his western Wyoming campaign coordinator with some enthusiasm because he seemed like a crisp unit and I could see launching him on Washington and getting everything we wanted. Having already been the éminence grise for the better part of the Ford administration, Dick would have a hell of a lot more standing in Congress than any other freshman representative from Wyoming, and therefore be able to do more for us in Washington than anyone else ever had. To be honest, I didn’t do a great deal for him during that campaign, but that was partly because it was haying season on the ranch.

  After Dick got elected, he was a fierce advocate for Wyoming, and we worked together on a lot of issues, both at home and in D.C. At the time, I was president of the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the largest homegrown con
servation group in the state. We were not a preservation group; rather, we believed there were many uses of the federal ecosystem that could be accessed by humans without diminishing their biological integrity. But we did not wish to be trapped in the long-running battle between the urban professional class and the rural working class, which is far too often where environmental battles get disputed.

  I’d actually first gotten involved in all this when I returned to Wyoming in 1971. At the time, the El Paso Natural Gas Company and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission had come up with the bright idea of blowing up five separate 100-kiloton nuclear devices right below Pinedale so they could shatter the entire Pinedale Anticline formation and then begin doing wide-scale fracking there.

  I helped stop this with some cowboy theater. Floyd Bousman, a central-casting rancher as well as a man of great probity, and I went on the Today show together, and we basically just deep-sixed the entire plan. There was a whole community effort behind stopping it, and President Richard Nixon promised that if we came to Washington, we would be given the opportunity to meet with James Schlesinger, who was then the head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

  By the time we got to D.C., Nixon had just made Schlesinger the secretary of defense, and his replacement at the AEC, Dixy Lee Ray, refused to meet with us. The truth was that they were scared, and they had good reason to be because after that project got shut down, there was no more discussion about the nuclear stimulation of natural gas.

  After Dick Cheney took office, our biggest concern was the glut of new oil production in the Jonah Field down below Pinedale that was going to release a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. We were diametrically opposed to that because we were already getting about as much acid rain as we could take, or at least that was how it seemed to me.

  Dick wanted to know why that was, and I explained that there were three giant copper smelters along the Mexican border. In cooperation with the Natural Resources Defense Council, we had proven a direct correlation between production at those smelters and acid rainfall levels in the mountains. Although the smelters were quite far away, the stuff would get way up into the atmosphere, and then solar conditions would turn it all into sulfuric acid. Cheney was appalled to find out this was happening and got right on board with us. Within a short period of time, all three plants were shut down. Dick’s power in Washington was that he knew how to get shit done.