Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  'Honk shoes,' she exclaimed mysteriously, 'nobody is in charge of Frog. Frog is in charge of the world.'

  She said it as though she meant it, but I got no further with my questions because we had climbed out of the river gorge and crossed a small clearing, and we were at the Camp Site. Some rattan matting had been set up as screens round a room-sized space in the shelter of a group of oaks. Inside were an old stuffed sofa and some easy chairs, a low table, orange boxes set up as shelves for food and things, and old carpets on the ground. An outdoor room.

  'No, it never rains in the summer, well hardly.'

  Annie was there and embraced me fondly. Bob too, and some other people. Everybody looked very pleased. Frog, as I had guessed, was a small boy. He stood on the edge of the circle and looked me over very thoroughly for a while. He was only four, but very tough and self-contained, a force to be reckoned with.

  They said I should sleep there at the Camp Site. Josie and Christine were sleeping there too, and maybe others. Carol said we should go up to the cabin in the morning and she would make pancakes for breakfast. She said she lived in a wooden cabin up the hill on the other side of the county road, and I could find it by listening for the sound of the piano.

  'A piano,' I cried. 'You must be joking.'

  She smiled. I think it was the piano that made me begin to take it all seriously. A piano is a distinctly permanent thing.

  Six hundred and seventy acres is a lot of land, especially when it is all up and down, laced with streams and studded with hillocks and humps of crumbling stone. I ambled around it for some time in the morning, looking for the cabin. A certain kind of countryside has always attracted me. I like streams of clear water running at a gentle pace over smooth rocks and pebbles freckled and veined with the browns and greens and yellows of mysterious minerals. I like grassy banks tied to the roots of ancient trees, and rough-hewn hillsides scattered with live and fallen timber, boulders and mosses, leaves and lichens, where creatures I have never seen can go about their business undiscovered. I love land that rises and dips, forever revealing and concealing secret places, intricate land with shelter and food for all kinds of life, big and small.

  The power of this attraction was heightened enormously by my long journey. In Africa, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, so many places, I saw countryside which drew me almost with the force of destiny. It became too painful to be forever passing it by. I felt I had to stop somewhere and make some lasting connection with this earth, to become involved with it in some way. The power of the desire was overwhelming. I walked through the ranch, smelling the earth and leaves, startling deer, being startled myself by the sudden screech of peacocks roosting in a large oak, and thought 'This could be the place. This has to be the place.'

  I heard the piano, and found the cabin on a gently sloping shelf of land. A stream ran along one side, lost under a thriving colony of blackberry bushes, and tall trees provided shade on the other side.

  It was a modest cabin, square and set on piles, made of planking with a tar paper roof. The piano was in the front room which overlooked the valley through a large sheet of acrylic set into the wall. Also in the front room was a big, black, cast iron, wood-burning Franklin stove. At the back was a bed and a kitchen range. Behind the cabin was a clear space with an outhouse, a hose rigged up for a shower, and a chopping block. The water came in a tube from upstream.

  The heat was beginning to build up for the day. All the doors were open and warm air moved through, carrying all the scents of the woodland. Carol was alone and we talked much as we had the day before. Nobody else came. I had to admit that suited me, and Carol did not seem at all surprised. I played a few pieces, clumsily through lack of practice, while she made breakfast. The aroma of coffee wafted through the cabin, followed by the smell of frying in hot butter.

  'The butter is from Germany,' she said. 'Germany is one of our cows.'

  'Frog again,' I said.

  'You know it,' she said. 'Really.'

  We ate our way through mounds of little soft pancakes soaked in almost pure maple syrup. The simplicity of the cabin, and the golden silence all around us, was affecting me profoundly. Halfway through the pancakes, I said:

  T still don't really know what you are all doing here?'

  She looked up with a flash of anger in her eyes. Then she snorted.

  T guess there are some people here who'd like to know too.'

  She tried to tell me something about the ranch, how it had come about out of the turmoil of Student Revolt, Flower Power, Civil Rights, the Women's Movement, the Vietnam War, all those waves of energy rushing across the face of America promising a storm of change and liberation.

  'Some of us got together and found this land, after it had been ripped off by the loggers. It was amazingly inexpensive. Some of the guys who were at school together, they wanted to start a school here. One day we will. It's still my dream.'

  'What happened?'

  T guess when we got here we found we had too much to learn ourselves.'

  I listened hard trying to understand, but every answer begged another question, and I didn't really want to ask questions. There were some people here, living on some land. Why or how seemed less important than the fact that they were doing it. In any case the only way to find out would be to do it with them.

  Apparently there was this one annual crunch, the mortgage payment. Every year they struggled to make money, selling produce, hauling hay for a neighbour, maybe getting in money from jobs in the city, but they were not desperate. There was money among them, already inherited or in a parent's bank account. No question, one way or another the payment would be met. The Annual Mortgage Meeting was a symbolic crunch, when they looked at each other and estimated how much energy they had in the bank, and what kind of energy it was.

  The Annual was coming up soon. I gathered that this year the energy was running low. There were fewer people living on the ranch than ever in its four-year history, only half of the twenty or more who had built their own small houses on various parts of the land.

  'We put all our energy into our relationships, and the results are totally amazing. Really. You'd never find a more beautiful set of people anywhere. But, I don't know, we were on this big high, but it seems to be fading, which is fine but . . . it's really hard on the kids.'

  'Look, you know what surprised me most when I got here?' I said, bravely. 'The mess. I mean, all the stuff littered round the big house. I don't understand how you put up with that ugliness. Doesn't anyone want to clear it up?'

  T know,' she said sadly. 'It seems to be really hard for people to find that kind of energy right now.'

  There was no doubting Carol's energy. She worked furiously in the garden. I spent most of that day and the next with her, at the cabin or in the garden. She told me things about herself which surprised and sometimes disturbed me. The disturbing things were about love, different kinds of love for people and things. It was alarmingly honest, but exhilarating too. Sometime during those two days, her grey-blue eyes got too big for me and swallowed me up. I forgot that I was only intending to be there for a few days, that I was already booked on a ship for Australia, and that I was only halfway round the world. The next day I rode the bike up the trail to the cabin and moved in.

  I don't think I ever fell in love with Carol in the way I had fallen before. Love simply wrapped itself round me. She was made of it, and the ranch, I discovered, was full of it. It was what they had really come there for, and it was what I wanted more than anything else; to be alive and in love on land like that. A week or so later I rode into San Francisco and postponed my sailing from August to November.

  I claimed that long summer, immersed in love and sunshine, as my reward for two years of physical and emotional battering. Although I had stopped for a few weeks at a time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Rio and Santiago, though I had even fallen in love once before, a part of me had always been unattached, waiting to move on. The journey had never stoppe
d, and all the while I was soaking up information and sensation at an alarming rate.

  I came to the ranch brimful of feelings and insights which had had no release on the way. Like a cargo of perishable goods, they were threatening to rot in me. So I spilled my heart out on that land and among those people who had made it their business to share feelings and dreams.

  There was work to do, a chance to leave something that would survive my passing. We built an extension to the cabin that widened it by a few feet towards the blackberry bushes, and gave a sense of new space that was quite palatial. We called it the East Wing, and moved the bed into it to receive the morning sun.

  The blackberry bushes concealed a busy community of birds, frogs, rodents and various species of snake. The largest inhabitant was the civet cat, a kind of spotted skunk. For a while the entire wall of the cabin was down, and we lived as though in an extension of the blackberry bush, open to the stars and the moon and the cool night world. Then the civet cat took to visiting me.

  I was woken by the startling sound of someone running across the bare wooden floor in small hob-nailed boots. It did not stop. In short rushes the sound traversed the cabin from end to end. There were snuffling noises. Sounds of pleasure and excitement. Boxes toppled over. A broomstick clattered to the floor. Whoever it was, was brazen beyond belief. To tell the truth I was delighted that some small wild animal should want to live its life so close to mine but, even so, there was a distinct lack of respect. A lesson would have to be taught.

  'Hon’ said Carol, 'just be careful. If you scare it, it'll stink the place out.'

  I watched from the bed. The moon was bright. Something like a big white shaving brush emerged from behind the chest and went bobbing jauntily across the room. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat went the hob nails. I could just make out the lustrous black fur of the body, polka-dotted with white, but it was the flouncing white tail that enticed the eye, and threatened the nose with doom.

  I prowled round the cabin, naked in the moonlight, but the civet knew I was powerless. It was utterly insolent, did exactly as it liked and left in its own good time.

  The second night I was bolder. Prodding it with the long handle of a mop, I tried to guide it to the door. Failure. The civet actually seemed to enjoy the game and stayed even longer. The noise it made was phenomenal.

  'They have these pads of toughened skin,' Carol told me. 'They signal by thumping the ground.' Under the civet's hammer blows the planks of the cabin resounded like a xylophone. Adorable as it was, we were losing sleep.

  The third night I struck lucky. By chance I held the mop the right way round, and brandished the mop head in a way that I imagined would be very frightening to civets. The civet rushed up to the mop head and positively fawned on it, clearly in love at first sight with what it took to be the ultimately handsome civet. I drew it cunningly across the floor and out through the open kitchen door. Then I closed the door.

  With the whole side of the cabin missing, that was a very thin gesture of defiance, but the civet did not return. Hideously deceived, it joined the ranks of heart-broken lovers and crept away into the bushes to pine.

  Carol and I loved very deeply. It seemed inconceivable that it could come to an end and I lived my life there as though it was for ever. The range felt like home and the people on it became my family.

  I learned to know the land, walking round it and working on it. There were many more encounters with animals, including a thrilling meeting with a rattlesnake carried off with great dignity on both sides. The summer held out right through to the end of October, cooling slowly as the days drew in, but staying bright and clear. More and more ranchers were making trips to the city and some were staying there longer than they expected. It was evident that some new impulse would have to be

  found to bring everyone back, and as the numbers diminished the prospect of a winter on the ranch became less tenable for those who remained.

  Eventually Frog's mother also decided to move to San Francisco. Shortly before she left, Frog stood on the wooden steps of the communal house and declared that he was no longer Frog. His name, henceforth would be T.A. Frog was born with the ranch, and he seemed to have grasped with extraordinary clarity that it was the end of an era.

  During the last month I began to dig a drainage ditch across a hillside to intercept spring water that was flooding the foundations of the big house. As I dug, it became a stream, a microcosmic river with cascades, bridges and grassy banks which I imagined might one day blossom with spring flowers. It revealed scores of forgotten memories of streams I had camped by, paddled in or simply gazed into as a child. It led me (more than I led it) in a meandering curve around the house, so that the clearing away of old junk and abandoned machinery became part of something new and exciting.

  I took the experience of the stream as a parable on life, believing that as long as I did what I did wholeheartedly, it could only go well, and if there was to be pain, then that also must lead to better things. There would have to be pain. The journey had to be finished. I could not take the ranch with me, but I could at least leave something, a part of myself, behind.

  The sailing date was 15 November.

  I had seen the P&O liner Oriana, all forty-two thousand tons of her, the day before when I came over the Bay Bridge from Berkeley. She had a fairy-tale brilliance floating there in the dark winter evening, and just looking made me feel thousands of miles away and sad.

  They loaded the bike in the morning. Carol and I were staying at a friend's house on Maple Street, and in the afternoon T.A.'s mother brought her Volkswagen beetle over to take us all to the ship. She was enormously pregnant and very happy about it, and I was allowed to put my hand on her big tummy and listen for the baby inside. It was a heartbreaking thing to do in the circumstances. The father of this still unborn wonder was also there with still another rancher, and the five of us, with all my luggage, completely filled the VW's egg-shaped interior.

  We drove along Clay to Gough, left and right to Van Ness, left and right again past Stockton to Pier 35.1 fastened on to all the details hungrily. We went through an archway past a pot-bellied guard to the luggage reception, and I joined a queue of passengers while the others made their way to my cabin. When I arrived among them, other ranchers and friends had arrived. Bob and Annie were there with the biggest rolls of paper streamers I had ever seen, and Larry, another close friend, had brought two bottles of champagne.

  There was a tremendous air of excitement about us all. The ship was so grand, and made such a powerful statement about romantic travel, that nobody could be immune to it. We celebrated as though all of us were going along, and it really began to feel like that. I grabbed one of the streamers and dodged crazily round and between people until I had tied us all into a great knot, and the emotional temperature rose far beyond anything I had ever known before in a group. We kissed each other, all of us, men or women regardless. I felt a distinct rush of love for every person there, and knew that it was reciprocated, and I was able to say a few things that were true.

  It was a most moving experience created entirely by those marvellous people out of their real warmth and affection for me, and it bound me to them for ever.

  Australia and Malaysia

  I stepped off the ship at Sydney wondering what it would be like to arrive there with no name, no past, nothing but a handful of cash and a new life to start from scratch. Until they opened up the moon, Australia was still the farthest I could get from the place I called home.

  It was a continent I knew only as a caricature. Perhaps because it was so far away, the only images that seemed to travel the distance were absurdly overblown. Australians were the Ancient Gauls of the Twentieth Century, a good-hearted people so untouched by the niceties of civilization that with one sweep of their good intentions they could do more damage than an elephant in Harrods.

  Australian women, I knew, were big and brazen, and went about the streets dressed and made up for the stage in the belief that the right
way to catch a man was to incite him to rape. The wounds sustained during this savage form of courtship were soothed by swimming two hundred lengths before breakfast.

  Australian men were big and bronzed, and wore shorts and singlets from which their muscled limbs extended like four strings of sausages. At the end of one of the upper strings was attached either a tennis racket or a small bottle of beer called a 'Stubbie'. They ambled about in hot sunshine being disgustingly frank about their natural functions and waiting to be incited to rape. If one of these King Kong figures appeared over the skyline, the thing to do was run for your life.

  I came ashore determined to forget all the jokes and cartoons and ridiculous stereotypes and to learn about Australia from scratch.

  It was not easy. During the first days in Sydney, getting ready to ride up the east coast, I looked around me with the freshest eye I could manage in the dusty December heat. I saw men ambling in singlets and shorts. Their muscles looked remarkably like sausages. I saw women who had apparently slipped off stage during the interval of a matinee performance of Cabaret. They looked as though anything less than rape might be mistaken for indifference. I noticed that many men wore tailored shorts with cute little slits up the seams like cheongsams to show a little extra flash of thigh, and the obscene thought crossed my mind that maybe they were hoping to be raped as well.

  I saw some men, still in their youth, with the grossest beer bellies it was possible to imagine, cultivated at great expense, and I was overcome by the noise people made and the difficulty they had in showing each other affection.

  Then, one day, I set out to photograph the things I had noticed. Not one revolting beer belly came my way; not one girl was dressed in such tasteless extravagance as to be worth recording. To my annoyance I saw men and women appearing to be softly and openly appreciative of each other. The truth bore in on me that I had been seeing only extremes in the crowd: the most flamboyant, the most threatening, the most crass, just as an Australian in London would see only Poms in pin-striped suits and bowler hats.