The Eden Express

by Mark Vonnegut

  My boss wanted me to stay on as his permanent trouble-shooter. The parking and garbage collection situations needed attention, too. But he was very understanding about the whole thing and told me if I ever needed a job to just come see him. We had spent many a lunch talking about my dream of finding some land and a life style that made sense. He hoped it worked out and said it was probably what he would do if he were my age.

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN WEST BRANCH. Virginia was coming out of her trance and thinking about turning around. It occurred to me that she might be just testing me, making sure my politics, dedication, and whatnot were in good shape. How had I suddenly become the spark plug of this operation? I had thought about getting land before, but tying it up with communes, politics, and liberation, though I took to it like a duck to water, was something I had picked up from her and her friends.

  One of the things that attracted me to Virginia was that she had such a strong show of her own. I had looked forward to a nice vacation from being the macho leader, but somehow things had got twisted around and I was leader but not with ideals that were really my own. From here on whatever happened would be my fault. Even if we turned around, by the time we hit Boston she would be fuming with resentment at the chauvinist pig dragging her around. She could rightly say she hadn’t suggested it. I had, in that weird charade, a milder version of that which had produced the British Columbia decision a few months earlier.

  One way or another we decided to keep heading toward Vancouver. We turned north. We had heard tales of people being hassled by Canadian immigration on the West Coast. There’d be a lot less hassle going up through North Dakota. Maybe the Canadian cops wouldn’t stop and search us every hundred miles or so. Besides, Trans-Canadian Highway had a nice ring to it, and the Canadian Rockies were rumored to put their American counterparts to shame.

  Minnesota, land of 100000000000000000 lakes. But more than the lakes I loved the blue roofs. No one back East had blue roofs. If we had flown to Vancouver we would have missed the blue roofs. It seemed like just the right color for roofs. It seemed like such a nice thing to do for the world, have a blue roof. I wonder if living under a blue roof is different from living under a black or brown one.

  Maybe all these people watch the same shitty TV shows, eat the same shit food, use the same laundry soaps, underarm deodorant, and razor blades, but they’ve got blue roofs.

  This was what dancing lessons from God were all about, blue roofs.

  Through North Dakota and across the border to the Trans-Canadian Highway.

  Some people from Swarthmore were doing summer theater in Helena, Montana. We had thought about stopping off there on our way out. It was nothing definite. Now it turned into a fight.

  I don’t know why I was so dead set against it or even if I was. We had made it into Canada without any problems. Going back through U.S. customs would be a bitch. Helena was several hundred miles out of our way. I wanted to get into the Canadian Rockies.

  But all that, according to Virginia, was beside the point. She was probably right. According to her, somewhere back in the Dakotas or maybe even in Iowa or Minnesota or maybe from the very start I had decided to diddle her out of visiting her friends.

  “I should have gotten out in North Dakota and hitched to Helena.”

  The fact was I liked having Virginia alone. It wasn’t so much having a good time. It was more wanting something to happen and thinking it was more likely to happen if we were alone.

  ZEKE. Beautiful, noble Zeke never complained about driving in a hot car day after day, ten hours at a stretch and sometimes more. He was a good traveling dog as well as a good everything else dog. He was nine months old then, seventy pounds of grace and dignity and still growing. The only problem was that he still liked to sit in my lap when I drove. He was getting a shade big for that.

  Virginia and I never gave each other gifts. Christmases and birthdays went by pretty much like any other day. Zeke was the exception. Just after I had quit my job as chief of police, just before the Christmas of ’69, Virginia dropped a want ad in my lap. “Lab-Gordon setter cross puppies for sale…”

  “If you want to do it, it’s your Christmas present,” she said.

  I wanted to do it very much. I had been thinking and talking a lot about how much I wanted a dog, and Lab-Gordon setter was my dream combination.

  We called the people up and the next day went to check out the litter. The owners lived on a small farm sitting incongruously in the middle of a tacky development with tiny lots. They must have been the last holdouts against the developers. A funky old farmhouse and barn, a corral, horses, and fields smack in the middle of cheesy plastic.

  There were four pups left, three males and a female. I wanted a male. I didn’t want the hassle of puppies and was hungry for male company. The biggest, healthiest-looking male was a complete extrovert, almost offensively so. Frat-rat blowhard, not much substance. His white markings were pure white. The smallest male obviously idolized him, and was obviously low on independence and imagination. Then there was Zeke, almost as big as his big brother. He traveled farther away from the group, seemed to be a generally more serious sort of dog. Whenever he did join the group he was the leader. His sister seemed to love him more than she loved his brothers.

  I played with the litter for an hour or so, until it became more and more obvious that Zeke and I were meant to be.

  “I can’t say much about what lies ahead, pup, but as long as I eat, you eat. That’s a human’s word of honor for what it’s worth.”

  Beautiful, noble Zeke. Looking out for Zeke’s interests, making sure he got all the right shots, ate regularly, got enough exercise, learned about cars, was properly trained and brought up, gave my life an immediate purpose and meaning I was much in need of. But above and beyond all that, Zeke and I had glorious gleeful times together. We’d spend days just walking and exploring, howl along with fire sirens together, have endless mock growling, wrestling, yelling, biting battles. I never hit Zeke. The most I ever had to do by way of punishment was narrow my eyes slightly and say his name. He’d roll over contritely, begging forgiveness.

  I suppose clinical psychologists could go on endlessly about why I became so attached to Zeke—increasing inability to form meaningful relationships with people, etc.—and they’re probably right. I was desperate for something good in my life, but Zeke answered my desperation in a way I doubt that just any dog could have. I could relate endless tales about how smart he was, how graceful he was, how strong, noble, beautiful, and loving he was, and how everyone who ever met him, even dyed-in-the-wool dog haters, loved him too, but it’s probably best to just say he was a true prince and leave it at that.

  As for the clinical view, Zeke did mean a lot more to me than most of the people in this book. The utter trust, simplicity, and spontaneity of being with Zeke made most human relationships seem hollow, clumsy, and hardly worth it.

  THE PRAIRIES. I was amazed. I had never seen anything like it. I was ripe for amazement.

  More blue roofs and land that looked like no place I had ever been.

  Big sky, seeing forever, no hills, no trees. Incredibly clean air. So dry. Little puddles of water every hundred miles or so, but mostly dry brownness forever. Lots of people were born, lived, and died here. New England would be big news to them. Gas station attendants were proud about never having been off the prairies, but I never talked long enough to any of the people there to really get a grip on it.

  I didn’t know it was prairie at first. I thought we had stumbled into a unique little area. I loved it. Something to write home about. Five hours of driving later I was a little less amazed. Apparently this wasn’t very rare.

  There was no place to camp, no streams or trees, nothing to attach the tarps to, no shade. Nowhere to hide. Our original idea of driving three hours a day and camping and fishing our way across Canada became hysterically funny.

  When it’s all so much the same there’s nothing that’s any different from anywhere else.
Why stop one place rather than another? So on and on and on. It was a treadmill. I had driven ten hours to get exactly where I started.

  We drove straight through, just stopping for gas and food.

  The tension between Virge and me over whether or not to stop in Helena, plus the surreal effect of no water or green or change and being able to see forever, going forever, bore down on me. I hated the prairies. I became obsessed with getting to the Canadian Rockies.

  When we finally saw them we were still a day’s drive away, but at least then we were moving toward something we could see.

  The first camp site we stopped at in the Rockies was loaded with freaks. Most of them had taken off from Amerika and all the things we had taken off from. Most of them were headed for Vancouver. Most of them were looking for land. There was a roof over some half-walls with smoky fireplaces in the center of the camp site, where we congregated and talked about what we had come from and what we thought we were headed toward. It was all very pleasant. Lots of talk about Vancouver being a cosmic magnet drawing us all there. Lots of expectations that something pretty funky was going to go down there if only because of the incredible influx. I began to worry about having so much competition looking for land.

  We camped at a couple more places in the Rockies. Fished, hiked around and moved on, did more of the same through the rest of B.C., making only about 150 miles a day.

  “It’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive.” We could have made it to Vancouver easily. It was a little after three. We had at least five hours of daylight left and Vancouver was only forty more miles west on a six-lane highway. But we turned off and went to Cultus Lake Provincial Park. “Easy striking distance,” we said. It was one of the loveliest places we had stayed, with incredible mosses and huge mother trees. “That’s got to be the biggest—no, that one over there. Look at the size of this one.”

  The next morning we dismantled our tarp house, packed up, and headed for Vancouver. We got into town about eleven.

  VANCOUVER, JULY 1970. All we had was the address of Sally, a girl I had known slightly and Virge had been fairly close with at Swarthmore: 77 West Seventh Street.

  It was a nice little two-story house in a light-industry neighborhood. The front door was open so we called hello. Rosanne, whom we didn’t know, was working out in a garden in the back yard with her little girl, Holly. Sally had gone up north with her boy friend but we were welcomed in. A little later Rosanne’s husband, Bert, showed up. Of course we could stay there. Lots of people had been staying there off and on. Rosanne and Bert were ex-Americans from Portland.

  The laws about homesteading and leasing crown land weren’t heartening. There wasn’t very much available and you had to be a citizen, which took a minimum of five years. The worst news was that most of B.C. was mountainous, with gravelly soil, not suitable for farming, and that lumber companies owned just about all of it. There was virtually nothing available on Vancouver Island. There were a few encouraging stories about people who had found nice places, but mostly it was depressing tales of squatting and being thrown out by logging companies.

  We talked a lot with people who had been looking for the same sort of thing we wanted and we checked the want ads faithfully. Prices and the sort of thing that was available didn’t seem to be radically different from the way they had been in New England. If anything, the prices were higher. Large tracts of completely undeveloped, nondescript wooded land that might be farmable when cleared, and then again might not, ran about $500 an acre. We looked for old farms around the city that maybe we could rent until we got more money together, but here again the pickings were slim. We even snuck an occasional look at the apartments available and the help-wanted section. Apartments were pretty expensive and the job situation was dismal.

  After a couple of weeks Virginia started getting discouraged and talking about running out of money, etc. I tried to be bright and cheerful. The thought of what the hell we were going to do if we couldn’t find some land was just too painful to consider, so I didn’t. We had moved out of Rosanne and Bert’s living room into a leaky cardboard shack behind their house. You could barely stand up in it. It was pretty dismal. We weren’t making love much. That was another thing I just put out of my mind.

  Day followed day. Getting to know Vancouver, reading the newspapers, smoking a fair amount of dope, doing odds and ends and occasionally driving around the country saying, “Ooh, ah, isn’t that nice land.”

  During one of our drives out around the city I noticed a sign saying “Ferries to Sunshine Coast.” What could be nicer? The Sunshine Coast became the new focus for my hopes. I bought some beautifully detailed maps of the area and fell in love again.

  The Sunshine Coast isn’t really very sunny but I didn’t know that then. It has slightly less rainfall than Vancouver, which is where it gets off calling itself the Sunshine Coast while having a typically wet Pacific Northwest climate. But I wasn’t in a very cynical or analytic frame of mind. Sunshine Coast was paradise. It had to be.

  Swifty and Bo, old Swarthmore friends, came north in a monster Pontiac Bonneville. They brought up some good California wine and some ancient Spanish brandy. I went out and got a beautiful leg of lamb. We had homemade garlic bread, French-cut beans, a huge salad, avocados with lemon and salt, and on and on. A feast. It was old times. We had done this sort of thing at college. Half the kick was starving for weeks on end to be able to afford it.

  The next day we packed up the tarps, the ice chest, all the camping shit, and got on the car ferry for the Sunshine Coast, Swifty, Bo, Virginia, Zeke, and me. I was in high spirits, happy to be back on the road, back to camping out, building tarp houses. Away from worrying about Zeke being run over. Out of the city, out of stagnation. On the move and with old friends. The only thing I didn’t like was that pig of a car, which didn’t corner for shit on those mountain roads, but it was somehow appropriate to Swifty and even that made me smile.

  The end of the road was where we were headed. Highway 101 starts somewhere down in Panama, comes up through Mexico and California, up to Vancouver, and then about a hundred miles north of Vancouver it stops. If you want to go any farther up the coast you have to go by boat. If I was going to find what I was looking for, the end of 101 seemed like where it would be.

  There were two long ferry rides to get up to Powell River, eighty miles above Vancouver. The scenery was spectacularly beautiful. The Coast Range dropped right off into the water. This was virgin frontier, unspoiled except for ugly scars left by loggers here and there. Man was here but not many of ’em and he was certainly not master. Back East you could drive just about anywhere you wanted to go. Here there were vast areas that you couldn’t get to except by boat or float plane or on foot. The idea that man could ever tame these savage, proud mountains seemed remote. For the earth to reclaim itself here wouldn’t take much effort. A little shrug would do the trick.

  I wish I could say we got the land by some soulful means, but the truth is we got it through a real estate agent. Now Virgil McKenzie is not your standard-issue real estate agent but we had no idea about that. His was simply the first sign we happened to see.

  It might seem to some that a real estate office would be a logical place to start looking for land, but I had been looking for a year and had never talked to anyone in the business. It was somehow against the rules. I suppose what we wanted to happen was we’d be walking through the woods and come upon some old codger who would take an instant liking to the wonderful young people and sell us his land cheap. We did a lot of tromping through a lot of land without much luck.

  After we had been at the camp ground for a few days, operating on all the soulful levels, it started to rain heavily, making a mockery of my tarp houses. As much to get out of the rain as anything else, with deep misgivings Virginia and I went into the first real estate office we saw. It was Virgil McKenzie’s. Without much hope I described what sort of thing we were looking for, how much money we had to spend, etc., fully expecting him t
o come back with “Yeah, you and everybody else and their brother.”

  We wanted a fairly large piece of land, something over fifty acres if possible, not too easily accessible, suitable for farming. With what I had and what Virginia had, and with the help of some of the other people who were interested in this sort of thing, we could get maybe $20,000 together.

  It turned out he had something he thought might interest us. As he described it I felt my eyes get larger and larger. “There’s this piece of land…eighty acres…used to be a self-sufficient farm thirty years back…hasn’t been worked since then. Old boys used to bring in huge loads of vegetables and fruit…no neighbors. To get there you have to go about ten miles by boat and then back a mile or so on an old logging road. A year-round stream running through the property. Old fruit trees are still bearing.” And the asking price—$12,000. I caught myself just before the drool came over my lip. Would we be interested in having a look? It sounded too good to be true. We made a date to go up in his boat and have a look at it as soon as the weather cleared.

  Why had it taken us so long to go into a real estate office? Having done it once it seemed easy to do it again, and so to be good shoppers we went into a few other real estate places to see what they might have. There was nothing remotely comparable to McKenzie’s deal. Completely undeveloped stuff that was accessible by dirt road, had been logged over, would have to be cleared, maybe had water, maybe could be farmed, was all about $500 an acre. Whenever I asked about anything cheaper they all shook their heads knowingly and talked about maybe some stuff way farther north by boat.

  The next day there was a break in the weather. McKenzie and his son came to our camp site. McKenzie was the perfect boy scout leader. He hadn’t been at our camp more than three minutes before he started giving us advice on our fire, where to find dry wood, and what kinds of stuff were best for kindling. From most people it would have been offensive but somehow from him it was all right. He was an ex-logger who felt funny about making his living as a real estate agent. We found that out as soon as he had exhausted his kindling talk.