TOUR
 

The posts that follow are the recanting of my experience with following the Grateful Dead, and the Rainbow Family gatherings I attended when I was in my early twenties. They are long posts. As I write this, it is still largely unwritten, but I think there is enough for right now. There will be more to come. Feel free to comment or ask questions or make fun of me, but at some point, i will be reorganizing the posts to maintain the story as a continuous stream of posts.

Sometime in early summer, 1991, Shelby suggested that we go on tour following the Grateful Dead. We were at Marsh Creek State Park pool at the time, and at first, I didn’t think she was serious. The matter, however, did not drop. Plans were laid, extra jobs worked, money saved. Gina bought a blue 1972 VW microbus with the money she saved. I made a bench/cupboard to fit along the wall opposite the sliding door. Someone made yellow curtains, and we installed curtain rods to hang them from. Stylin’.

My Mom was worried for me, and my Dad was upset. There was a whole scene at my house as my dad ( who was there to pick up my younger brother Todd for a visit) tried to talk me out of it at the last minute. At the end, he accepted that we would all be fine, and there was much rejoicing. We had been to multiple shows in summers past, and knew what we were in for. Heather and Jeremiah had some friends from California coming along, and Gina, Shelby, Terry, and I went in the VW. Heather and Jeremiah would follow in the lil’ blue Chevette, and Tony and Rachel in Tony’s beige Toyota pick up truck with cap.

I didn’t know Tony or Rachel at all, as they had only gotten into town a few days before we left to go to the first show. They were real life hippies. So was Jeremiah, for that matter. Heather was about the hippiest of the rest of us. Middle class white kids. Tony, Rachel, and Jeremiah had “different” upbringings, and their mannerisms were noticeably different. Jeremiah had lived on various communes, Tony had grown up on the beach in Ca, and Rachel was only 15 and pregnant. Noticeably pregnant.

We decided on sleeping arrangements in the bus, divided up storage space, and filled the cupboard with rice and beans. Then Gina bought the Trunk. Aquamarine with brass corners, cheap masonite trunk. Why a trunk? Because her clothes had to be neat and unwrinkled. As we left to travel the country for an undefined period of time. She was an Ironing nut. Naturally, the only place the trunk would fit was on the floor, right where you open the sliding door to get in and out. So, for the next few months we would step over the trunk. Fine. Gina got her way most of the time. I was pretty oblivious to this for some reason, but it made Shelby see red, and as I would find out, she could only stand so much of that kind of thing.

Shelby and I bought new backpacks from I.Goldberg, and a nice new 4 man tent for the two of us. We had a propane stove, pots and pans, can openers, Frisbees, hackey-sacks, cards, beads in beadboxes, some leather, some crystals, and all kinds of shit in that bus.

The best part about the bus was that it was manual transmission, and Gina could barely drive it. She had to look the part, though, so whenever we were arriving to a destination, or departing, she insisted on driving. And almost every time, there were long awkward periods when Gina would wrestle with the shifter, buck and stall the van, curse, and eventually gain control of the beast. She held up traffic in Pittsburgh on an off ramp though 3 or 4 cycles of the green light. Shelby had to physically remove her from the drivers seat and get the van going. Gina pouted for a while. She was cute. Most of the time she was fun to be around, and very sweet, but certain things had to be just so

the day before we departed:

JIM TERRY GINA SHELBY

We left in late afternoon on day in early September headed for Richfield, OH. I don’t think I got in to the concert that day. Some one did, though because I can remember waiting outside while the concert was happening and playing hackeysack under the lights. At one point, Jeremiah ( who was extremely recognizable even in silhouette because of his Muppet like dread locks) came wandering over looking lost and afraid. He had taken too much acid, and was seeing dinosaurs. Unreal.

On to New York. MSG. We got there the morning of the first of nine shows, found a parking spot under a bridge, and set out to find tickets. It was cold and windy for early September. We hung out in Greenwich Village for a while; I watched a guy hurdling multiple trash cans on his roller blades. In a drug store, a lady spit on another customer who attempted to butt in line. “I’m on line here!”

Show time approached, and we had just one ticket. If you’ve ever been to a Grateful Dead concert, you may have noticed people holding their finger up in the air yelling “I need a Miracle!”. This means “ I want you to give me your extra ticket for free”. It is seen to be a considerable karma rich investment of good will to participate in this practice and “miracling” some random Dead Head can do wonders for your sense of self esteem. We were planning to be there for all nine shows, so we weren’t panicking about getting in that first night. Nonetheless, we all managed to get free tickets from the crowd coming in that had extras. “miracles” The show was just ok. I didn’t like the venue very much. So we decided that the city was not for us, and since we had all seen them, we would drive up to Woodstock and camp instead of staying and trying to get into the other 8 shows.

We found a really nice little campground with a lake and showers, and restrooms. We camped for 4 days during which, Terry sang compulsively. He sung poorly but enthusiastically. He also had a penchant for hollering out of car windows at strangers. You learn about people when you live in a microbus with them. Woodstock was a tourist trap.

Every shop front window in Woodstock has tie-dye clothing and stickers in them, but when you go inside, they are all selling New York designer clothing. The shop keeper did not seem surprised to see a couple hippies wander in, look around, and walk out shaking their heads. We met a few interesting people almost immediately. Apparently there are a number of leftover hippies that have gravitated to the area, and stayed. We met a freaked out old black hippie named Lincoln, who introduced us to a house full of freaks just off of the main strip. There was a 40-ish yr old fat guy wearing a wifebeater t-shirt that would sing “MY God’s better than YOUR god!” repeatedly at intervals during our visit. There was a girl, who’s name escapes me, that had jet black hair in some bizarre fashion that I also disremember, as I was too focused on the many hoop earrings that adorned the various parts of her face. Three or four in her lips, a couple in her eyebrows, nose, obviously, ears, etc…. I think she said she had 29 in her face. This was 1991, remember. First time I’d seen something like that outside of National Geographic. She wore a Lilac dress with big black combat boots. It was an unreal and dreamlike afternoon. The house had that strange filtered lighting of late afternoon, when the sun comes in at an angle that lights up all of the dust in the air, and it seems to sparkle. It is an image that has stayed with me here twelve years later. The week we stayed in that campground was thoroughly enjoyable, and we had a good time gathering firewood, washing our pots, making tea, and playing hackey sack. I think we all dosed one night , and walked down to the lake and got all freaked out, but memories of times when I was tripping are elusive. Time passed quickly, and soon the Boston dates approached.

We had van trouble on the way, and Gina’s dad knew a mechanic in a town on the north side of bean town. So we went to see him, and he was able to help out with I don’t remember what kind of repair. We spent a night in the van out in front of the garage. It was cold. Before the show, we stopped at a local grocery store, and loaded up on bagels, cream cheese, veggies, and plastic baggies. We made bagel sandwiches with cream cheese, apples red onion, and whatever else looked good. It cost us about $25 for the supplies to make 48 sandwiches, and we sold most of them for $2 a piece. Sometimes we gave them away, and we ate a little bit of the profits, too, but it generally paid for parking and gas to the next destination, with enough left to reload for the next show.

Bitchin Veggie Bagels. I wrote that on the front of the cardboard flat I sold them out of, and the name caught on. I had repeat customers. “ Hey, there’s the Bitchin Veggie Bagel Guy!” We hung out on the sidewalks out in front of the Boston Gardens. There was an over pass that had parking under it, and there were rows and rows of tailgaters, vendors, and locals partying. A festival. The main strip where the big vendors set up their camps was always called “Shakedown Street” You could see yards of tie die clothes, Guatemalan clothes, crystals, beads, drums, various kinds of food like Falafel, and soy bean burgers, and all manner of hippie regalia. I preferred to walk around with my little box. We stayed around Boston for five nights and I didn’t even get in once. Whatever. That wasn’t the whole point. It would have been nice, but we had a good time just hanging about. One of the show dates was on a weekend night, and at one point the cops rode their motorcycles up the sidewalks to clear them off. Someone got slammed into a plate glass window and cracked it. The cops were being unnecessarily physical, and they came very close to running over people with that stunt. As soon as they left, the sidewalks filled right back up anyway. Stupid bastards.

At night, we had to leave the underpass parking spot, so we decided to park and sleep in a nearby subway station parking lot one night. It was raining it’s ass off, so we draped a tarp over the raised hatch doors of the van and Tony’s pick up truck. There were some friends from home along for the weekend shows, and all eight of us in the two vehicles. One of our friends from home, Dan, who was Gina’s on again off again boyfriend, had come up and met us after he went to the show. Heather had scored a nugget of Kindbud from a head named Darcy, and we were smoking it in Dan’s ceramic dry bong. I had not had any pot for a couple of weeks due to budgetary constraints, and the first hit I took almost made my lungs collapse. I was in the back of the van and, as I said it was raining really hard. Out the window of the van, I see two police cars coming down the street toward the lot we’re in. One of them turns in to the first entrance, and the second loops around to the opposite side. Uh oh. I reacted. I jumped out of the van (visualizing the scene from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and hoping the rain would obscure the cloud of pot smoke that must have come out with me) and trotted over to the cop’s car with a big smile and a friendly look.
“Hi! Is it alright if we park here overnight?” I said
The cop looked me over ( I was dressed like a circus performer, I’m sure) chuckled, and said, “ I don’t have any problem with it, but your on the transit Cop’s turf, and it’s their call. We were called about the odor of marijuana emanating from the area. You know anything about that?”
“Well, yeah, there was a white Subaru parked right over there when we got here a few minutes ago, and it was smellin’ pretty skunky” I said.
The cop didn’t want to get out of his car, I could tell. “ How was the show?” he asked.
“Oh, we didn’t get in. Our tickets are for tomorrow night, but we had hoped to get in tonight too.”
The cop mumbled something in his CB and the other car started to roll away. “Ok, you kids be careful, and have fun tomorrow”

Whew. What an adrenaline rush that was. From that point forward, during this tour, I was encumbered with the title of “PR Man” and the responsibilities that came with it. I learned to be the one to approach authority and seek approval for something that it was within that particular authority figure’s power to grant, and guide the conversation away from whatever I was trying to slip by them. I felt like if we were upfront and nice, and polite, the Cop was more at ease and less suspicious. There were several close calls like that narrowly averted search of our vehicle, and subsequent arrest on drug charges. Man, when I think about how close we came how many times, I can’t believe it.

After the shows had finished in Boston, we stopped in to visit our friend Dan’s relatives who lived nearby in Connecticut. We all showered, and slept fully stretched out for the first time in too long. In a house. Strange how good a thick carpeted floor feels to sleep on after sleeping bent up in a van for a few weeks. We had a REAL breakfast, and then we headed for Woodstock again. The Dead’s next show wasn’t until the end of October, and as it was September 27th, we had some time to kill. So, we headed back to camp in that campground. We spent another week camping there, but it started raining and didn’t stop. By the third day, we decided to take up an offer of hospitality that someone had garnered and connected with a couple that lived in Kingston, which was only about a half hour south of Woodstock. I don’t remember the people’s names whose house we stayed in that night, but I do remember that they had a pit bull. A nice one named Delilah. Very affectionate, but very strong. The next morning, in talking to our hosts, we found out that it was really, really easy to get food stamps in this town. I was resistant to the idea, having been raised to earn my own, but Heather, Jeremiah, and Rachel had all done it before, and it was a great way to get some food in your belly. So I went along with them. We wore dirty clothes, and I’m sure we stunk to high Heaven. There were a couple of brief interviews, and within about an hour and a half, we walked out of that office with something like $300 in food stamps, with more available if we were still in New York in two weeks. To the Grocery store!! I felt very guilty when I was paying for that food with food stamps that I didn’t deserve. But I was hungry. Time to begin the second phase of our trip.

Enter Rainbow Family. The Rainbow Family is like a roving commune. Rainbow people go from gathering to gathering for most of the warm months of the year. A gathering is like a mass campout. There are often many smaller gatherings happening simultaneously throughout the Summer in different parts of the country, and there are “National Gatherings” which are more planned and advertised and draw as many as 10,000 people. The layout of the gathering depends largely on the location. There are typically several “Kitchens” that are maintained by volunteers throughout the gathering. They are large central campfires set up for cooking, and sitting around socializing. Some with ovens for baking, some with huge stew pots, some with a nice grill. The evening meal is eaten in a huge “circle” in the main gathering area (usually a field) and people stand up and talk to the gathering about whatever is on their mind. Oft times, there are prayers made to the earth and sun led by what we came to recognize as “Super Hippies”. These were the self appointed and very impressive people that spent the bulk of their time at the gathering organizing and leading, and being very important. They had been in Rainbow Family for a long time, some even being born into it (Rainbow Family has roots in colonial American time) . They were, in fact, very important participants at these gatherings, as hippies tend to need direction in order to accomplish things like gathering firewood, supplying the group with potable water, digging shitters, etc. There were several other types of people at these gatherings which I unconsciously categorized in my mind as one type of hippie or another. There were the Bums, who were real life bums that had caught wind of the Rainbow Family, and realized that they would be fed and usually transported if they could make friends and help out a bit with chores. “Happy” was the first of those we met. Then there were the “Wing Nuts”. They were crazy. Really. And they all seemed attracted to me for some reason. They’d be magnetized to wherever I was and invariably begin to tell me some of the most bizarre and disturbing things I had heard at that stage in my life. And there were “tweakers” that had an agenda to promote. They’d preach to you or the group you were with if you walked too close to them. There were also a lot of really, really cool people that made the gathering a life changing event. The first gathering we attended was in Shawnee Forest, in Shawnee, Illinois.

Heather, Shelby and Gina had been to a Rainbow gathering the previous year in Sept Isles, Quebec (and one shortly following that in Woodstock, NY.). It was a National Gathering and there were thousands of people there. Shawnee was to be a smaller gathering. By the time it was in stride, there were only 100-150 people at this one. Imagine a field party without the kegs and the band. For two weeks. We arrived after dark, and there was a very confusing scene as other people were also arriving and spilling out of their cars and milling about. Selecting a campsite was quite interesting. Somehow, though we managed to set up in an ideal spot that was private, and yet just a short walk from where the main kitchen ended up being. The first thing I remember about the next morning was people’s voices through the trees calling, “Welcome Home!” to each other. And when we all got our selves together, and made our way to the kitchen, we got the same greeting. Introductions all around, “Would you like some tea?” We had breakfast with them, and then got busy stocking our camp with dead timber for our own campfire. These two weeks stand out in my memory.

I think it was the first day we got there that we met Marco. Marco was a cross between a bum and a tweaker. He was naked when we met him. Completely naked. Striding about the rocks like he was in his bathroom. He was from the Bronx, and had the accent to boot. He’d been in jail, and found rainbow shortly after his release and had latched on to it, and followed it wherever it took him. Ok. A nudist. I think he had a girlfriend that was also naked most of the time.

The campsite was in the woods on the edge of a big flat field where we would gather. Behind the tents and campsites, there were great slabs of stone forming a ridge about 20 feet tall that ran laterally for miles in the woods. Above these shelves were more shelves of stone that led to the top of the hill and ran along in both directions out of sight. There was a path along the top of the highest ridge, and sparse trees grew along the edges of it making it into a corridor of filtered sunlight by day, and a ribbon of shimmering moonlight on the stone path by night.

We spent entire days on those rocks crafting this and that. In that time, I learned how to Peyote stitch and made various casings for some of the crystals I had brought with me. We had also brought a bit of deerskin suede that we made pouches and medicine bags out of. It was our intent to sell this stuff at the Oakland shows at the end of October. I also began working on a belt, as I was losing weight rapidly. When we left, I was 225 lbs, and by the time we returned home in late November, I was around 170. Food, water, and wood were ever present priorities in our daily life.

Most days, we began by gathering firewood and water to last us the day. We took turns driving into Shawnee to fill several 5 gallon jugs with water at a gas station to bring back to camp, since there was no potable supply on hand. It was around this time that we met Troll. Troll was a Dead Head and had come to this gathering alone. Well, he had recently acquired a golden Labrador puppy named Daisy. He drove a yellow Gremlin wagon with wood paneling. He was one of those guys that you like right away, and he fit in with our group immediately. We invited him to camp with us, and he did. Troll went with us when it was our turn to go get water for the kitchen, and while we were at it, he and Daisy managed to “Spange” $30 in a half hour in the neighboring McD’s parking lot. “Spange” is a contraction for Spare Change. He used the “I need to buy some puppy chow” line very effectively. I remember being somewhat aghast at this, as I’d never known anyone that begged before. I was also impressed that he’d made $60/hour doing it. I had quit a job that paid me $8.50 and hour to go on tour. This was also my first exposure to WalMart. I was perplexed by the existence of this monolithic store in the midst of this highly rural area. There didn’t seem to be anything else in the town apart from the gas station and fast food restaurants. Seemed like a great store to me at the time.

We would bring the big jugs back to the main Kitchen, and drop our own smaller jugs off at our campsite, and then try to help with making dinner. Usually some type of bean chili over rice, with a salad or potatoes if they were available. One day I woke up feeling a cold coming on. My throat was aggravated by the Bugler tobacco we had been smoking because it’s much cheaper to roll your own smokes. I was urged by Heather to eat an entire raw clove of garlic. I tried it. It was awful. That night in the kitchen, I witnessed two separate cooks give the rice and beans “en extra healthy dose” of cayenne pepper. By the time the second one heard me shouting at him, it was too late. That was some bumpin’ food. Never did get that cold, though.

Daisy:

Troll:

One Saturday night, as we were all just falling asleep in our tents, we heard a car pull up and some (had to be) locals shouting and hollering. Then we heard gunshots. And then the locals sped off back down the gravel road. Everyone was OK. I guess the farm boys had heard we were in town and decided to give us a little scare. It worked. Another day, the Sheriff pulled down the road slowly looking closely at all of us as he drove by. I was away from our camp sight, but when I saw them slow down and stop near it, I hustled the girls down to meet them and prevent them from getting in to our gear. One officer had gotten out of the car and started walking toward our camp, and the car pulled forward to meet us. I arced off the path through the woods to intercept the cop that had headed for our camp. He was wandering around it looking into the tents, and peering around the woods. “Hey, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Runaway” he said. “ We are looking for a 15 year old girl who has run away. Her parents think she may have come out here.” Sounded like a lie to me. Just something in the way he said it. I think he was going to search our stuff, but when he saw me coming, he decided not to. Not that we had much other that a little paraphernalia to find, but I didn’t want the hassle. I stayed with that cop until he began walking back toward the car. When we got to the car, the girls had been talking to the cop in the car and were getting along nicely. The cops continued down the road to the main kitchen, where they told the same story, and heard the same “we haven’t heard anyone say they ran away, but there are probably a few 15 year old girls here, and who can tell if one is a runaway?” the cops didn’t bother searching very hard for her, which lent itself to my theory that they had just hoped to catch us at something untoward, or they just wanted to make their presence felt. We complained about the locals firing their guns , but they shrugged and said it could have been any one. Boys will be Boys.

The remainder of the time blurs for me except for two things. One night, one of the local residents came to visit. He was a hermit type and a little bit peculiar, but nice enough. I can’t remember his name or even what he looked like specifically. But, after hanging out with us playing guitar and singing one night, he invited us to his house the next. So, about 7 or 8 of us trekked along the top ridge of those rocks in the woods for about 2 miles until we came to a cozy little house that overlooked a long stretch of valley. We shared a joint with him as soon as we got there, and hung around his place as the evening faded to night. He made spaghetti for everyone, and I ate heaps of it. A general hungriness had settled over me since we’d been at the gathering, and this was a hot and delicious meal. I noticed that although the joint we smoked should have worn off by now, especially after filling up on spaghetti, I was feeling pretty high again. So I said so. Our host then informed us that he had put over a half ounce of pot leaves from his plants into the sauce while it cooked. Nice. That walk back to camp in the dark with no flashlights across the top of that huge rock shelf was intense. The moonlight was just enough to see by and I can remember looking up at some thin wispy and small clouds that were illuminated by the moon. Beautiful.

The other thing I remember was less enjoyable. There was a dog there named Reilly. He stayed at the main kitchen. I don’t remember who’s dog he was, but they had tied him to a tree to keep him out of the food, and a copperhead had gotten tangled in his rope and bit him on the neck. Venomous snake, naturally. The people freaked out and rushed him to town, where they were lucky to find a veterinarian capable of helping the dog, and advising the owners on how to care for him. Reilly was a bit subdued for the rest of the gathering, but by the time we left, he was doing fine again.

On the day we left the gathering, saying our goodbyes and loading up the van, Gina shows up with these 3 girls in tow, and says she offered them a ride with us in the van. After we planned and plotted for months the previous summer about how we would do things, she just went and invited them without checking with any of us. It was her van. And Terry had wrangled a ride on a big school bus and was off on his very own adventure now. They promised that they would sleep outside at night and wouldn’t interfere with anything we did, and they would help with gas money, and food etc… At this point, we were one of the last cars there, and if we left them, these girls would be totally screwed. Apparently their ride had left them. So they loaded up into the van with us. The “leader” of these girls was named Carter, and I think the other two had made theirs up. Carter was a very pretty girl but the more we got to know her, the more obvious it became that she was totally nuts. She also had a disturbing infection on the skin surrounding her ear. We got rid of them as soon as we were able. I think in Oklahoma somewhere.

Our next stop was Prescott Arizona. Gina nearly killed us all 3 or 4 times on the ride along route 40 west. We all got so mad at one point that we forbade her from driving anymore. She protested, of course. It was her van, after all. But the deal had been that I would save cash, and she would buy the van. She also would get to keep the van when we went home. I had saved up $1200 and was treating it very communally. Gina, however, was becoming bossier by the minute, and kept falling back on the argument that it was her van, and her vote counted more than other votes. It was an uncomfortable ride to Prescott. We were going there to kill the last week before the Oakland shows on Halloween and to visit Gina’s more recent boyfriend, Paul, who attended a Flight School in Prescott. Paul was a cool guy. He looked a lot like Getty Lee from Rush, but shorter. He was very gracious about opening his apartment to all 8 of us, and we had a nice time there, apart from a few Heather and Shelby vs. Gina spats. The Chevette had a squealing belt, and while we were there we decided that it need an adjustment. So Jeremiah and I tightened the tension on the Alternator belt, and patted each other on the back for handling the problem so quickly and efficiently.

Prescott was a neat little town. You’ve seen it. I was playing hackey sack in the town square with a few local college students (Prescott University was the reason the town existed, I think) and I commented that the clock and the town hall looked somehow familiar. “Did you see ‘Back to the Future’,” someone asked. I looked around slowly. There’s the movie theatre. And there’s the diner. This is the clock they ran the big wire to. No shit.

We still had a few days to kill. The plan now was that Heather and Jeremiah were going to Tucson Arizona to meet up with some people they had met at “wolf something commune” and go on a trip to Guatemala. So they would be parting company with us when we left Prescott. Tony and Rachel were going up to Tahoe to visit some friends and meet the people that would be adopting Rachel’s baby. We were planning on going slowly up to Oakland by way of some Major landmarks we wanted to visit like Yosemite, and Sequoia Nat’l Forest. This, however, like so many things, changed.

Shelby and Heather had reached a boiling point with Gina, and had concocted a viable “plan B”. It was pretty harsh. We would leave Gina at this point while she had Paul’s support, and go with Heather and Jeremiah in the Chevette to Tucson, where we would assume possession of their car after they left for Guatemala. Tony and Rachel had already left. Breaking this news to Gina was one of the hardest things I can remember doing. I felt like a heel. I have understated some of the strife and tension that we lived with because of her vanity and instability, and our leaving her was mainly her fault, but I did feel like I was shirking a responsibility to make sure she was safe. I was forced to choose between her and Shelby, though, as Shelby had borne all she could and was going with Heather, with or with out me. There really was no choice. So we left here there. Crying.

We made it about 10 miles to the next town when the car broke down. Instant Karma. Apparently, when a belt is squealing, you should find out why instead of just tightening it up. I had put too much tension on the belt, and while it had stopped squealing, it eventually pulled some vital part of the back of one of the pulley wheels out. Fortunately, there was a service station within a few hundred yards, and the tarmac was smooth and level. So we pushed. After a bit, my heart was racing, and I started to see spots. I stopped pushing, and realized I was out of breath. But I had barely exerted myself, and I was in great shape. Then we realized that the elevation of Prescott Valley was 5000+ feet. The air was thin.

We introduced ourselves to the lady at the gas station, and I made friends with her. She liked me. They let us sleep near our car that night as we had to wait until the next morning before that mechanic got there. It turned out that we needed a new thingamajig for the doohickey. They didn’t have one, but there was an auto parts store in Prescott, 10 miles away. Ironic. So, I hitch hiked back to Prescott. Got a ride from an old dude in a VW bug. I bought the part I needed, and hitch hiked back to the Valley. We gave the part to the mechanic, who said he’d get to it sometime that day. We decided to take a walk over to the old volcano that was just down at the end of town.

It looked like it might be a half of a mile away at most. It took us about and hour and a half to get to the base of it. Turns out is was 3 1/2 miles away.

There was a tree standing out from the lava rocks about 100 yards up the slope, and we decided that we would go sit in it’s shade and smoke a little of the precious remaining pot that we had. Pot + Altitude = speedy high. I wanted to walk up to the top of the mountain. Nobody else did. So, I went alone. I had to keep stopping every 20 steps or so to catch my breath and slow my heart rate. It took me almost an hour. I could see my friends the whole time. They were sitting on a downed log next to the tree. It was silent. I mean SILENT. Deafeningly silent. At one point, a hawk took off from the ground about 10 feet in front of me, and I nearly leaped out of my skin. The view was spectacular. A bit of a hazy day, and the town our car was in looked like a cull de sac, it was so small. I peeked over the other side of the mountain, and there was a lush green “V”-shaped valley with tiny little sheep grazing it. Sheltered from direct sun, and there was a stream bubbling out of the side of the broken mountain. The walk back down was far easier, if a bit more dangerous. I rejoined Shelby, Jeremiah, and Heather at the tree, and they were all very sick of waiting for me. They had apparently been yelling for me to come back, but I was too far away to hear. They got over it. We walked back toward town to see if the car was done yet, and on the way encountered what we were convinced was a tarantula. It sure looked like one, but I thought that they were tropical. This one was sitting in a little crack between some loose lava rock. When I put a stick near it, it tensed up, and looked like it might pounce. We left it alone. When we got back, the car was done, and the bill was very reasonable, as the people at this Texaco had taken a liking to us. We got loaded up again, and headed toward Tucson. Tucson was strange. There was and old section of town that was quite beautiful with cobblestone streets, and ornate architecture, but as you follow the main road South, it takes a bend to the left, and you’re on a stretch of about 5 miles worth of cheap motels advertising XXX cable and Winnebago manufacturers and dealerships. Seedy.

We found the Commune we were after at night. This seemed to be a pattern. That was a really weird scene. We were total strangers, and the house looked like something from Texas Chainsaw Massacre. We didn’t know any of the guys that were there, as the owner, who had invited Heather, was away for the night. He’d be there in the morning, but we were welcome to sleep there. So, we slept there. And the next morning, we met the head Hippie, and his crew. I was glad we weren’t going with them. We left that evening in the Chevette after many thanks, and farewells for Heather and Jeremiah. On to Oakland.

We drove “the 10” west out of Tucson toward southern California. My Father’s friend Steve lived in Mission Viejo (between LA & San Diego), and we were going to stop and visit them. What a straight and flat road US10 is. We drove and drove along it, rolling our own cigarettes from Bugler tobacco, listening to Jeremiah’s Bob Marley collection on the tape player. We drove straight through that day stopping only for gas at some very interesting rest stops along the way. “last Gas for 80 miles” All of the Indian blankets you could shake a stick at, fireworks, pottery, discount cigarettes, and all that other rest stop stuff. We arrived in Mission Viejo at dusk, and called my dad collect to get Steve’s number. Steve wasn’t home when we called the first time. He had opened an invitation to us when he heard that we would be traveling the country, and we hoped to get a shower and a free meal, so we kept trying him. Finally, we reached him but he was on his way out to dinner with his wife, Marian. SO we had to wait until 11 when they got home.

He gave us directions which included instructions for getting through the security gate to his community. Oh boy. I remembered Steve from when I was little and my parents would go over his place, or they’d come to ours. We’d all go roller skating or sledding, or to amusement parks. They were fun. This yuppie environ did not match my image of him. It matched Marian , though. So, we pull up to the curb in front of his house, take all of the crap we have strapped to the roof of the ugly little blue chevette with the rusted fender flares, and Bob Marley stickers all over it, and throw it inside for the night. Steve answered the door with a smile and started to advance for a bear hug, but then his nose advised him otherwise, and he grabbed my hand instead.

It had been about 2 weeks since we’d showered. You get acclimated to your own smell after a while, but other people seem to pick right up on the aroma. So, we slept in our sleeping bags on top of their nice white beds, and showered immediately upon waking up.

Marian took and washed the clothes we were wearing, with much wincing and grimacing. She was a good sport, if a bit dizzy. We hung around Steve’s house that day absorbing the cleanliness, and the TV. When I went out to get some clothes to do laundry, I noticed a little pink slip on the windshield. “ NOTICE”….”24 hour warning to remove eyesore” I looked around the beautifully landscaped, hilly neighborhood and saw nothing but highline vehicles in all of the driveways. We left that night after dinner.

The Oakland shows were in 2 days, and we had to drive all the way up the coast to the Bay, as the shows were in the Coliseum. So we took the 5 the whole way up. I drove straight through the night, stopping at Denny’s for coffee, and bathroom breaks. At dawn, we were coming out of the mountains at Gorman, Ca, and started to see these huge, bright yellow Umbrellas dotting the landscape along the roadside and down in the valleys, up on hills. Hundreds of them. I woke Shelby up to see them, and we both mused upon what it could all be about. It wasn’t until we got home that we learned what they were about.

more on that

I was driving north through California in September of 1976. Beauitiful open, rolling countryside, nice weather, good buzz and good tunes.
I crested a hill and there ahead, running across the valley, was Christo's Running Fence , broken only at the road, where a state cop car was parked with it's lights flashing. Talk about instant paranoia. Sheesh.

Didn't Erik Honecker come up with something like that many years before?

Christo was the guy who gift wrapped the Reichstag, wasn't he?

My college friends and I were quite pissed, as we had come up with the essentials of that idea in the early '80s.

Actually, our plan involved slipcovering Anderson Hall at West Chester State College ... for which we didn't have enough money, so the plan morphed to painting the building pink ... but we still couldn't afford to rent the helicopters and fire-supression buckets that we were going to fill with paint. Our notion was to come in out of the sun, like the choppers in Apocalypse Now, dump the paint, and beat a hasty retreat, with none the wiser as to our identities.

It's tough being in college on student loans and grants and not being able to do these kinds of things. Actually, it's probably good that we didn't have enough money to do shit like this.

Putting up the "Running Fence" for two weeks was $3 million. Wrapping the Reichstag took 24 years from proposal to fruition. Talk about "artists" frustration.:)

I’m pretty sure I remember that someone got killed or injured by one of those umbrellas.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.

Money was getting pretty tight, so we had to spend what we had left on supplies to make more Bitchin veggie bagels. We had them down to a science at this point. We ate a fair amount of our profit that day. Hunger, again, was a daily presence. I remember giving half of my bagel to Shelby because she was looking so thin. She accepted it eagerly, as I recall.

Apparently there is a State mental facility right next to the Oakland Coliseum. We met most of it’s tenants that night. I think the facility let some of the less violently tweaked out in hopes that they’d tag along with the rest of the crazies that were following the band, and wind up in another city as someone else’s problem. That was a freaked out town. An armpit, too. We slept in the car in the parking lot of a hotel one night, and an apartment complex another. Oakland began an unfortunate trend towards our leaving shit on top of our car and driving around with it like that. We lost most of a bag of groceries, my good Dallas Cowboys travel mug (this is an essential item for a dead head. You eat and drink out of it), and who knows what else that way. The problem was that during the day, we would pack every cubic inch of that car with all of our belongings. Everything had a specific place, that we had worked out to make things easily accessible while driving. At night, we had to take it all out, put it on the roof, cover it with the tarp, and strap it down. So we became used to seeing things on top of the car. So, we had a harder time noticing disregarded roof top items.

It was in Oakland, that, as I tried for a “miracle”, a guy leaned out of his VW microbus, and stuffed a big green bud into my hands. I became one with the world. I was unable to come up with a ticket that day, and we heard some sad news, to boot. Bill Graham, the Grateful Dead’s promoter of a million years had died. Bill always prowled the lot on Halloween ( tomorrow) and gave out free tickets to those in good costumes. I wound up getting one of these that night, even though I had no costume. The guy that gave it to me seemed depressed. Must have been his assistant. It had “CHEERS, BILL” stamped on the back. I ended up “miracling” it to a girl, because we only got the one ticket and I wasn’t going to leave Shelb out in the lot alone, nor would she me.

The parking lot at the coliseum was like a festival. A festival with crowds made up of familiar faces. There was the Patch Guy: He was a loner as far as anyone could tell. He was at every show I’ve ever been to, and I always manage to find him in the crowd. It was like Where’s Waldo. He wore jeans, jean jacket, and hat all covered completely with patches of overwhelming complexity. The image in my mind is just splashes of color on black backgrounds. Mainly circular patches about the size of a coaster. He is a very dark skinned African American, maybe 40 yrs old, but he could have been older. I never once spoke to him, as he was always walking by half dancing and mumbling a little. I usually found Goat Boy, too. He was short, and muscular, with super fat dreads, a sharp little goatee, and a face that put one in mind of a goat. He was cool. Distinctive.

We hadn’t seen a lot of our friends for a month, and when we ran into Tony and Rachel, we felt a little less alone. Then we saw Gina. Oh….yeah. ….Gina.
She was alone sitting in the open doorway of her van. Terry had resurfaced, and was with her, but not just then. We attempted small talk, but it was so awkward, that we didn’t hang around long. Later that day, someone gave us a puppy. We planned to give him to Gina. Fonzie. I have no idea what kind of a dog….maybe Akita. He was fluffy, and pointy eared. And he just looked like the Fonz. We didn’t see Gina until the next day, and she reluctantly accepted the dog. We learned later that he had peed on or chewed one of her dresses and was given away to some college girls that loved him when they met him.

We met another dog that day. Pocky. God Damn. Pocky was the best dog ever created. He was HUGE. He was pure white to the yellow side, and wolf shaped. I’m 6’2” and Pocky’s shoulders were up to my belt line. Pocky was traveling with a young couple and two other normally large dogs. I think a large Terrier, and a Labrador. I don’t recall if the owner told us what his lineage was, but it had to be some derivative of a large wolf. He was as calm as the deep blue ocean, good spirited, and just the right amount of playful for a dog that size. His owners wanted to stroll about shakedown street and go visiting, and we offered to pooch sit Pocky. We were selling crystal necklaces and doing hair wraps as well as selling our bagels and sodas. I can still see in my minds eye, the image of Pocky lying across the top of our blanket in the shade of the car. It was the back of a chevette, and Pocky’s span from nose to hindquarters was every bit as long as that car was wide. Friendly and inviting, and absolutely confident. Pocky drew people out of the crowd who had noticed him. They probably bought stuff, too, but I don’t really recall specifically. He picked up one of our larger crystals once, and began to wander off with it, but when I raised my voice to him, he ducked his head briefly and returned the item. Smart, too.

Our time in Oakland went by pretty quickly. There were a couple of incidents that stick out, but mostly it was like the last few days of Summer Vacation….fleeting. One night, we were sitting around our blanket behind our car with some friends that were not able to get into the show either. A guy came by and sat at the edge of our blanket, mumbling to himself, and gesticulating. I figured he was drunk, and confused. He would slip in and out of focus, it seemed. He would talk semi coherently for a bit, and then revert to mumbling and half drooling. Just as we got used to him, and Shelby began to lay on her side, resting her head on a backpack, the guy flips out, and grabs her hair. Like it was a pile of snakes, and started screaming really loud and panicking. We all grabbed him and pulled his hands away, and shoved him out of our area. So he began to kick the car next to us and scream some more. We had to chase him down the lane in the parking lot a ways until he recognized his group of friends. Among them was Happy, the bum, and Riley, the dog that had been bit by the snake. Poor Riley.

These were the last planned shows of the tour season. There was talk of a thank you concert for Bill Graham in a few days in San Fran, but there was also talk of a Rainbow gathering in New Mexico. We didn’t want to stay in Oakland any longer than we needed to, and since we didn’t know anyone local, we decide to head to NM. Tony and Rachael again took their leave. Rachael was getting close, and they planned to winter in Tahoe. We didn’t see Gina or Terry again, but we did happen upon Troll, who was also going to the New Mexico Gathering. We traveled separately, agreeing to meet at the gathering.

The gathering was to be held at the Red Rock Canyon on the Gila River, about an hour northwest of Silver City, NM. We went back the way we had come to the bay area, down the 5. Again, we took the 10 through the desert, but this time it was at night. We pulled into Joshua Tree National Monument in the middle of the night, expecting a rest area with bathrooms to use and snack machines, but it was just a little pull off on a small dirt road that had a plaque on a post. I saw all of the stars that night. All of them. Never have I seen even half that many, anywhere else. It’s so goddamn dark out in that desert, and there was no moon, and it was crystal clear. Wow. They were so close.

The next day we left the interstate, and made our way along a mountain road through the western portion of Gila National Forest. Let me just tell you, that as an East Coast native, the Western half of this country is so much more picturesque than the East, that it’s a damn shame. Every corner we went around revealed prettier rock formations, and cliff faces. We stopped for lunch at a scenic overlook that displayed a “ticklish” rock. It was a huge boulder supported by a narrow pillar of stone. A natural phenomenon, and oh so delicate looking. We boiled a couple of potatoes and ate them like apples. It was hungry out. We were also down to about $90 or so. And 2500 miles from home.

We got to the gathering site late in the afternoon. There was one other set of campers there. They were driving a pickup truck with a camper top on it that looked extremely homemade, and not very safe. The driver was a 45 year old white guy with 1970’s wavy thick black hair complete with long sideburns. He had an accent like a New York Jew, and wore dark blue dress socks with his sandals. He also wore a cowboy hat, had 5 O’clock shadow, and smoked continuously. He was an artist. He carved soapstone. The back of his truck was loaded up with it. He had harvested it somewhere he shouldn’t have, and made aware that he would be in deep shit if he was found to be transporting it. I was skeptical, but whatever. His work was very nice, as I recall. We slept in the car that night, and in the morning, Troll and Jen, his new rider appeared. Jen was a runaway from Chicago who had been on tour all summer. She was 18 or 19, but she came from a wealthy and over-involved family.
Here's Jen:

Jen was really nice, and together, and funny. She and Troll were like soul mates. And they’d just met. It was neat to see that happen.

So, we waited around the parking lot for a little longer, just to see who else would turn up, but even after we had given up and set up camp down the canyon, only 4 or 5 more groups showed up. That was fine by me, though. We explored the canyon, finding, to our delight that there were Hot Springs in a couple of places. One pool in particular, was perfect bath temperature, 3 feet deep along the cliff that bordered one side, with a white sand bottom. Like it was made specifically for people to enjoy. We went skinny dipping with 6 or seven other people as soon as we found it. There was a girl who would climb the face of the cliff, and fall back into the water. Nekked. A little further down stream, we found a crystal clear cold spring bubbling up out of a pile of rocks that had a decided “man made” appearance about them. We would later find the creator of the little fountain living under a military parachute around a bend in the canyon. His name was Matthew. He had lived there for 9 months, and seemed at peace. He was tall, blonde haired, with a beard that hadn’t seen a trim for the entire 9 months. Clad only in shorts, and sandals, he had a surfers tan, and a lumberjack’s musculature. Clean living, friend. Clean living. He smoked a couple of bowls with us, and intimated that he had some plants growing up the canyon. His crop had been discovered by helicopters last year, but he had adjusted his strategy this time. We never got to tour his pot patch. We camped just down stream, and across the river from Matthew on a bank by a cliff wall. The Canyon, at this point was about 75 feet deep, and 100 feet across the bottom. The walls came straight down to the ground in this area, and the river was well shaded except in the middle of the day. Here’s our camp site:

The river ran along the wall of the cliff at this point. Here's me on the opposite wall from our camp:

This was our home for 3 weeks. The simplest, happiest 3 weeks of my life. No job. No money. No bills. No pressure, no worries, no time. It felt so easy and natural.

I’m sure most of you have been camping before. Some just for a weekend here and there, some for a week, maybe, but if you have happened to do any long term camping in one spot, you may be able to relate. Ad to that the knowledge that we had no time limit on how long we stayed other than the season, and in New Mexico, the warm season is long. This was not a vacation. I spent a lot of time pondering that. It brought me down to a very basic level. Survive. Take away the expectations of society. The pressure and expected behavior of young people growing up. To go to college, find a career, a mate, have kids, grow old. This was just 4 of us living in 2 tents in a canyon. Our days consisted of excursions to Silver City for food, gathering and breaking of fire wood, trekking to the spring and lugging the big bottles of sloshing water back down the canyon. We took a couple of extended hikes down the canyon. It just kept getting prettier as the walls got closer together, and the river bent. We were just as alone as we could be, miles from the closest road and yet, with the noise from the river, the big horned sheep, and all of the other life crammed into this contained space, it felt like we were in a market, or shopping mall. The times that I camped in the mountains of Pa, and hiked up the mountain in Prescott, I felt very distant from everything, although I was actually much closer to civilization. This was wholly different.

.

..

...

There were places where the water that ran along the face of the rock wall had eroded the wall away, and created overhangs with sand bars at the base. You could wade or swim across the river, and park it on the sandbar or mini beach and soak in the sun, tuck back into the shade, whatever.

There was a fairly large one of these near our campsite, and for a little while, Troll and Jen moved their tent to it in order to have a little “privacy”. You had to wade across thigh deep moving water to get to their little beach, which was no big deal, as we were constantly in and out of the river all day long anyway. At night, however, after sitting around the fire for too long getting toasty warm, it was not quite so pleasant. In that part of the country, it gets very hot during the day, but then can drop to 45 or 50 degrees at night around that time of year. The first night, shortly after having said goodnight to Troll and Jen, and slipping into our tent for a little R&R, we were shocked by shrieking coming from down stream.

We both charged out of the tent and ran down to see what was afoot. Both of them were shivering by the side of the river using the last faded drops of light from their flashlight to try to see across to their camp. They had attempted to cross, but something had touched their toes in the water, and they were now too afraid to cross. We basically ridiculed them into crossing, and Jen shrieked the whole time. I have a new appreciation for just how loud humans can be. Things are louder at night to begin with, what with all of that silence around, and having a sheer stone face nearby can redouble the sound, but goddamn. It was loud.

It was a night that I remember fondly, and I miss both of those guys, and have no way of contacting them, and will most likely never meet them again. That sucks. I hope they stayed together. Jen was slightly resistant to Troll, because he was little and dirty, but he was so ebullient, and likeable, that she had a really hard time keeping him at bay, and finally had given in to his advances. It seemed to me that she still had the perspective of a rich kid, but was cognizant of it. Her “training” was telling her that he was beneath her, and she was beautiful enough to do better, but the real girl in her loved Troll because he was so funny and cute. One morning when Troll had left his pants outside, and was naked inside the tent, unwilling to brave the chilly morning air, Troll was shouting to Jen to get his pants. She was refusing. “GET MY PANTS!”.... "no.” You could hear him smiling inside the tent. “GET MY PANTS, BITCH!” “oh, now you’ll never get them!” and on and on. This is a phrase still repeated at my house. “GET MY PANTS, BITCH!” I yell, when I want Shelby to get me something, and she doesn’t want to be bothered.

Oooh! Ooohh! I know this one without looking!

It was a Christo thing, wasn't it? He loves to do big bright colored things with fabric in unlikely places. He used the same saffron colored fabric to wrap the walkways of our coolest urban park.

Maybe they sensed a kindred spirit. And so, having missed that interaction, you found the Cellar... and Radar.:p

Seriously, it's a great story. Sometimes I think that Gods plan for the universe was that people should have a place to make memories like that.

We would go to sleep a few hours after dark, and I was always up with the sunrise, for some reason. Id get the fire rekindled, or relit, put water on for tea, or cowboy coffee if we had been lucky enough to score some on the latest food run. We usually had rice or fruit for breakfast. Food procurement was always an interesting event. Some of you will be put off by what is to follow, but it was an integral part of my experience, so I can’t really omit it, but I have saved it until the latter parts of this tale in order to keep it away from the focus of the story. It was important, but not all that important.

We “dumpster dove”. Yeah, I know. Gross, right? Well…..there are some that would disagree. I, personally was mildly appalled at the prospect when first I heard it discussed. Back in Shawnee, I think it was. Heather mentioned having done it before, and when I questioned the wisdom of the practice, she clarified, and rationalized for me. Heather saw it as a noble thing to do, rescuing the food from waste. We waste so much food in America. You see, dumpster diving is not a literal statement. There is no diving involved. You do not dive into the dumpster. Nor do you wade through gops of garbage and refuse as my initial mental images showed me. It is best done strategically. You get to know the practices of a grocery store or dunkin’ donuts or pizza hut, and hit the dumpster immediately after they dispose of their stale food. Pizza Hut in Silver city had a lunch buffet from 11a to 1p. We got there 3 times a week at 1:15pm. The boxes of pizza were piled neatly on top of the dumpster for us after the first or second time they saw us reach in and take them out. Nothing wrong with them at all, completely free, and yummy as yummy could be to 4 starving hippies living in a canyon.

I found a pile of busted up shopping carts behind a grocery store one day, and immediately saw the potential. A McGyver moment. We took a few of the panels of steel grids with us. The dumpsters behind the grocery stores were always picked over by indigenous po’ folk, so there was not much food to be found there. We did, however, get wind of a food bank, and took advantage of some very good and well meaning Christians’ repast. They gave us 5 or 6 frozen blocks of soup, some bread, and maybe a can or two of odd veggies from the most recent food drive. There was lots of God Blessing, and they only subjected us to about 15 or 20 minutes of “Jesus loves you, and will see you back onto the path”….They were nice, so we didn’t mind too much. Troll felt guilty about saying “God Bless You” in reply to their blessings on us.

Back in the canyon, we lugged the steel grates, the soup, and the boxes of pizza down to the camp. We wanted to offer some to Matthew, but he was not around. We gathered up the stones in our fire pit, and arranged them into a box with only 3 sides. After the first course of stones, we added the larger of the grates. Then more stones, mortared with mud from the river bottom. With the walls about knee high, we added another grate, carried the walls up again, and toped it with the third grate. This was covered by river rocks, mortared, and voila, we had ourselves an oven. Sorta. Not like we were going to be doing any baking, but it sure did warm that pizza up nicely. WE realized that the oven was great for cooking, but didn’t serve well to sit around and stay warm in the crisp cool nights, so we ended up encircling the back side of the oven with another, larger fire ring.

Now, if you go to the super market you see veggies that are close to the end, packaged up and marked way, way down. They didn't used to do that.
When I was in HS, my Dad arranged with a Shriner buddy that owned a market, for me to load the pickup three times a week, with stuff they were throwing out, to feed my pigs.
The veggies were still good, maybe a little wilted or a couple of bad spots that could easily be cut off.
The thing that always got me was the pastry, all boxed up and clean but a day or two past the expiration date. There was coffee rings, pound cakes, strudel and the like, from Drakes, Entenmanns and Sara Lee. Once in a while Mom would come out and grab a coffee cake off the truck when I got home. ;)

That is so fucking cool. I actually got to see the umbrellas as I lived in CA at that time. They were huge, and it was amazing. Every time I drove over the grapevine pass (Gorman) after that, I always remembered the umbrellas and how the lined the otherwise boring mountain side. Very cool that you got to see them.

BTW. This is an awesome story LJ, I am enjoying it immensely.

yeah, at that time, bruce, we had our share of stale pumpkin pies, donuts, and pastry. We also would find dozens of loaves of white bread, flats of tomatoes, lettuce still in bags......seems like more and more grocery stores have begun using enclosed dumpsters now, though....not that i've looked.

if jinx would get off her ass and share some of HER observations, as I ve asked, pleaded, demanded, and now applied public pressure for her to do, you'd all get a more complete picture of what went on. Her memory is far superior to mine. c'mon, shelb!

You're doing fine. I don't want to muck up your story with my nitpicky details and such. It's interesting just to see your perception of events and what had the most impact on you etc...

chicken

I got a lot of thinking done in the time we had in the canyon. One day we took one of our long hikes down the canyon, and I, having dosed upon waking that day, was amped and fidgety and crawly. If you’ve ever done it, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t, it would take a page to describe. If you don’t know what it means to dose, (not doze) then I’m not telling you. As I said, the canyon became more and more beautiful as we hiked downstream. There were several places where we had to cross hip deep water, so we carried little. The picture above with the bright yellow tree in the sunbeam was taken a good ways down the canyon. I think we made it around the next two corners, and decided that we needed to head back if we were to make it back to camp in the daylight. We had noted that it gets dark quickly in a canyon. But walking down that river, exploring unreal landscapes, while psychedelically enhanced, made for some very vivid memories and treasured mental images.

I guess I actually should explain a bit about the feeling you get when you drop acid. At least the feeling I get…..got. ( I can’t handle it anymore….too much reality in my life). Physically, you feel as though you had taken speed, or drank twice as much as too much coffee. You become extremely well balanced, like you do when you FIRST start to feel a drunk coming on. Kind of settled down into your muscles, instead of standing up on a pile of bones. Groovier. Your skin begins to crawl a little bit, and images become more 2 dimensional. ( I never ever saw pink elephants on parade or any cartoon like hallucinations. Occasionally, a shadow would waver a bit, or a closed door would seem to swell, but I was always very conscious that the effect was taking place between my eyeballs and my brain, and not in real life. Dexterity increases, energy abounds, and you tend to lean forward a lot. That’s because you have such a short attention span up until the time that you “peak”, which is usually 3-5 hours into a trip. Then things settle down, and unless you make the mistake of smoking pot, you “get good” at it. Life is great, you love everyone around you, and instantly understand exactly what they’re saying. You connect. You belong. You are all part of the earth, and all part of each other. You are also unimaginably funny. It is not unusual to have cramps behind your ears from all of the Cheshire cat smiling you do. That and the strychnine. You simply have a much better time, carry more confidence, and have unstoppable energy. The physical effects usually lasted me into the next day, as well, while the mental effects fade within 12 hours, but on the third day, everything sucks. You don’t feel physically sick, just disgusted with everything that looked so cool a coupe of days ago. It takes a lot out of you, and your vitamin levels drop, leaving you listless and you just want to sleep all day.

So, anyway, that day as we hiked down stream, a feeling began growing in me. It made me even more restless than I would have normally been. And the feeling was getting stronger. I recall making the mistake of focusing on this anxiousness that was coming upon me, noting how it grew, but not really getting what it meant. When I did realize what it meant, there was little time left. I had to poop. I mean REALLY had to poop. And all at once, it seemed. Now.

Ok, so the worst thing that I can imagine is being spotted on the bowl. Maybe I’m weird, but that’s the truth. If I was ever to forget to lock the bathroom door in a public bathroom, and some stranger were to walk in on me, I am sure that my heart would stop, my brain would stroke out, and I’d bleed from my ears until I died. Don’t ask me how I know this, I just do, OK? So. I had to poop. But I didn’t bring anything with me but a water bottle, and a camera. This was a river canyon. Dry grass was scarce. There was also exactly ZERO privacy. The whole time we were on the road, if I had to poop outside, I would do it either in the early morning before everyone woke up, or at night after dark, and far enough away, that I could keep an ear on everyone. I’m a little better about it now, what with having kids and all, but not much. Ok, wait, it gets worse. Remember I told you I was TRIPPING? Yeah, that adds about 10 million degrees to the poop-shyness effect.

Bodily functions are strangely frightening when you take acid. If you’ve ever tried to have sex while tripping, it was because it sounded really cool while you were straight, and you planned to do it. It’s not something that would occur to you to do. Sex on Acid! How cool! Nope. Not cool. You just want to get up and walk away. Maybe apologize to the other person. Eating can be a little tricky even, but pooping is definitely the worst. This was not the first time I had to go while tripping, but there was always a closeable bathroom about those other times.

I didn’t even want the other 3 to know what I was doing. I held it for a few more turns of the creek, until I spotted a toppled tree. Privacy! I made Shelby, and Troll and Jen go on ahead, so I could be alone. I had to tell them why, too. They giggled at me, and said I was being weird, but complied. The weight that was lifted from me when I came back out from behind that fallen tree must have been immense, because I flew around that canyon with lighting bolts flying out of my ass for the rest of the day. We climbed rocks, swam in the river, and talked about living there forever like Matthew did. It was gonna be great!

Do poop molecules sparkle, like dust in the sunshine?;)

and twinkle in the gentle moonlight

Damn LJ , you would have NEVER made it at Parris Island !!!! Just a row or crappers , no stall at ALL !! The ONLY way you could have ANY privecy was to get the fire watch ( all nite guard ) to wake you up an hour or 2 after lights out ( unless the DI felt like being an ass !!!)

Oy, LJ.
Post the end of the friggin story already. You ended your last part of the story with, We climbed rocks, swam in the river, and talked about living there forever like Matthew did. It was gonna be great!. So how about we hear the rest of it.

Don't make me nag you.

sorry......i forget the rest........

...just kidding

We spent some days gathering firewood, refilling the water jugs, and getting food, and some days just crafting or throwing the Frisbee or playing hackeysack. On one of those days that I had gone hard at it all day long, I recall being physically spent, and as I rested my rubbery muscles on a blanket near the river, there was a moment when I noticed my contentment. It was in twilight that it came to me, cool in the shade of the canyon walls. I can sometimes catch a whiff of that feeling as I picture the moment, but the memory of a feeling is a fleeting thing. I felt at that time like I could sustain myself and Shelby there indefinitely, and that I would be quite happy doing so. And at that particular moment especially, as we had enough food for 3 or 4 days, full water jugs, a large pile of firewood, and excellent weather. I owed no one anything, there was nothing to spend money on even if we had some, and I was alive. It occurred to me at that time that I was an animal, and I had satisfied my basic animal needs. And more importantly, it seemed that this was all that anyone had the right to expect of me. I was free from any social pressure to do the grown up things that young adults must learn to do. I was happy. Not a thing to complain about. It is a moment that I have filed away in a different part of my brain with a couple of other moments when I saw myself from above, and the big picture was visible to me. I was able to put myself into perspective, and I was pleased with who I was, where I was, and what I was doing.

All good things must come to an end, as they say, and although we were making no plans to leave, we had promised Heather that we would call her mother and let her know that she had gone to Guatemala. Heather’s mom was crazy. No really. She was the first person I ever heard refer to her medication as her “meds.” She was a hippie, though, and I don’t recall being concerned that Sue would react poorly to her daughter leaving the country with Jeremiah and a bus full of hippies. We also let her know that we had Heather’s car and would be bringing it back to her when we got around to coming home. This, for some reason, set her off like a powder keg. She demanded that we return her car immediately as it was in her name, and we were not insured to drive it. She went way too far way too soon with the shit she was saying, too. We blew her off a little bit and told her we would be staying there a little while longer, but would be coming home when it got cold out. We’d call her later.

So then, there was an end in sight. And it just felt like we were waiting to leave. It kind of blew the whole, “I’m not late because I’m not going anywhere” motto I had begun to think to myself. The next time we called Sue, she said she had called the police and given them orders to shoot to kill. I told you she was crazy, didn’t I? Still. It was her car, and if we got nicked for doing something else, and this car came back stolen(just in case she actually HAD called the police), I didn’t think I would be able to talk our way past it. So we decided to make our way home by chevette. Troll and Jen didn’t want to stay alone, either, so they were going to go live in Chicago and find jobs. I hope they got good ones. I had a half tank of gas, and $50 in my wallet. I was in a Canyon in New Mexico, and we were on our way to Downingtown, Pennsylvania to return Sue’s car. I gave away all of my paraphernalia because, if we did get stopped, and the car WAS reported stolen, I didn’t want to have anything on me that could be found in a search. I only recently replaced one particular item that I was very fond of. Anyway, obviously, I made it home, or I wouldn’t be here writing this, but next time, I’ll tell you how to get home from 2500 miles out on $50 and a half tank of gas in America.

Troll
 

Everybody had a made-up name; Happy, Floppy, Poppy, Dancing Bear, Foot Bear, Possum, Sunshine, Sunbeam, Sunscreen.... we all thought it was funny (especially when their name would suddenly change one day; "I'm no longer Moonshine, my name is now Quazar". Ya... ok bub) and didn't give their 'real' names much thought. Except for Troll.
Jim and I, having a lot of time alone to think and talk, debated about what his real name might be. By the time he showed up at the canyon we had decided that his name was Eddie. He just looked like an Eddie.
Turns out we were wrong, it was Ryan. He liked Eddie better though.

Didn't even know this existed 'til you mentioned it in Dirt Poor.

What a cool thread! Wish you had more pictures. And there was drugs but very little rock n roll or sex.

I have more photos, but I just moved in august, and have yet to dig them out.

sex was tricky, but we had enough. I'm just too much of a gentleman to go into a lot of detail.

as far as rock n roll goes, if you consider the Grateful Dead rock and roll.....there was plenty.

Get digging! I scan in on average 100 a weekend.

Jen was gorgeous, Jinx was hottie potottie, you..well you just look like a younger dorky ass version of yourself.

When you find yourself that far from home, and with that little amount of money, and pride that would not let you ask for help from home, you should have a plan in mind before you set off home. We had discussed it at length with Troll, who had some experience with traveling on the cheap. We figured that it would take us about 5 days to make the trip home, as we would have to go mainly town to town where the interstate went through empty parts of the country. The plan was to hop from city to city spare changing and dumpster diving, and if all else failed, asking the authorities for help. Most cities or towns with more than 15,000 people in them will have some type of traveler assistance program. This sounded a little bold to me at first, and I did feel like a tool the first time I had to do it, but it got easier. It was easier and more pleasant than spangeing, that’s for sure. I would go to the police station, introduce myself, and let them know that I needed to get home. Most of them used vouchers that were good at the local gas station. Occasionally, they would refer us to a church or tell us that there was no program, but normally, they were glad to help us leave town. Ehem.

We headed north out of Silver City toward Socorro, NM. Things went well in Socorro. This was my first attempt at asking for help from the police, and it was as simple as filling out a form, handing over my ID for a moment, and redeeming a $10 voucher across the street. We started out of town late at night, planning to drive to the next rest stop and sleep. As we went up a slight grade, on newly paved highway, the Chevette’s lights blinked and dimmed. The car cut off halfway up the hill, and the shoulder was none too wide, and bordered by a guardrail. I couldn’t do anything in the dark, and while I felt like the car probably wouldn’t be rear ended while we slept, I did take a relatively fatalistic approach to my repast. The car had that soothing rocking motion of trucks blowing by at speed and the wind they created in their wake. In the morning, I looked under the hood, found nothing awry, and scratching my head, tried the ignition. The car fired right up. I got us down the road a ways to where I had mor room to work, turned the car off, and back on. No problem. Huh. Shortly after this, as the day’s light became more complete, we looked out into the landscape south of the road and saw this along the roadside:

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/images/OwensValley_small.jpg
http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/images/vla_twilight_small.jpg

http://www.vla.nrao.edu/images/tightcenter.small.jpg
there were lots of these radar dishes. This was the national radio astronomy observatory, and like the umbrellas, we had no clue about them until we got home and remembered to look it up.

We went right past Albuquerque and by night found ourselves in Tucumcari. There the car actually did die. It wasn’t recharging the battery, so when I put the headlights on as it got dark, the battery weakened and died. With no money, and a bad battery ( it was an old one, so we figured it had stopped holding a charge) it seemed as though we might get to know Tucumcari pretty well. The town is in an empty section of the New Mexico desert, demarked by a single mountain protruding from the otherwise flat tableau.
http://takeatrip.com/us/new_mexico/n.../tucumcari.jpg




THE LEGEND
The Legend of Tucumcari Mountain has been handed down from mouth to mouth by Indian tribes.
"Wautonomah, Chief Apache, knew that he would soon die and was troubled over the matter of who his successor would be. His two finest braves were Tonopah and Tocom, enemies and deadly rivals for the hand of Kari, the daughter of Wautonomah. But Kari loved Tocom and hated Tonopah.
So, Wautonomah called Tonopah and Tocom to his side and said: "Soon, I must die and one of you must succeed me as Chief. Tonight you must take your long knives and meet in combat to settle the matter between you, and he who survives shall be Chief and have for his squaw, Kari, my daughter."
So the two rivals met and hurled themselves upon one another in deadly combat; but unknown to either, Kari had concealed herself nearby, and as the knife of Tonopah found the heart of Tocom, she rushed from her hiding place and plunged her knife into the heart of Tonopah. Then, taking Tocom's knife, she stabbed herself in grief.
When Wautonomah was led to the scene, he was heartbroken. Seizing Kari's knife, he plunged it into his heart, crying in agony, "Tocom-Kari." The old Chief's dying utterance lives on today with a slight change to "Tucumcari," and the scene of the tragedy is now famous legendary Tucumcari Mountain."

There's not much happening in Tucumcari. I cannot imagine living there. It existed soley because of the interstate. The car ran for a few minutes, but then would die, and each time it was weaker to start. We called Sue again at that point to tell her that it would be a while until we could save up the money to get a new battery put in. Oh no no. She had to have the car pronto, so she had us locate the local western union agency and she wired us $75 to get the battery replaced. It took all day of waiting in a dusty little storefront for the money to come over. I stared at that white linoleum floor with the black runner floor mat. The rust rings, and the pitted aluminum glass door with the bell at the top. I cannot remember what the store's main function was, strangely enough, but I can picture that black vinyl chair with the chrome arms and broken jagged arm rests.

We got a battery at Kmart for under $50. After I installed it in the parking lot, I noticed how hungry I was and that I was staring at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Oh , yeah. The $25 we had was bonus money. I felt I was due for a bonus. We spent $20 on a family sized meal, and ate half of it in the car as we left town. We were like two ecstatic kids tearing up their easter baskets. Such glee. Baked beans! Mac n cheese! potato wedges! CHICKEN! I hadn't had meat for 2 months at that point.

Which has an interesting effect on the gastrointestinal process. About 5 hours after our first go round with the chicken, Shelby and I engaged in a silent yet friendly fart war. Kentucky Fried Farts. Oh man. I still say we both lost that war. The next morning I could literally feel the grease oozing out of my pores. We promised each other that we would not make that mistake again.

That is the most depressing explanation for a place name I have ever heard.

The only other notable event was the time that we stopped into the salvation army to see about getting a bed and a shower. Someone had told us that they were clean ad free. We found the one on the map at 2 AM. There was a scary looking woman dressed like a nurse at the desk. We told her what we were up to, and she started laying down the rules. We would sleep in separate rooms. We had to be up and out by 6:30 am, you had 1 towel and 1 washcloth, etc…. Sounded OK to me, but as soon as Nurse Ratchet left to go and get blankets for us, Shelby grabbed my arm and pulled me outside. “No way!” She started towards the car.

“What the?” I was confused, and felt bad about bailing like that, but Shelby had been thoroughly skeeved by this lady, and was afraid to sleep alone. So we split. And as we left, I heard my favorite mug slide across the roof and crash to the ground. We didn’t stop to retrieve it, as we were in the middle of a get away. Oh, well.

We stopped in Knoxville TN, and stayed with Shelby’s Grandparents for a few days, and then we drove home in one straight shot. I got a flat tire about 1 hour from home. Hysterical. Coming home was strange. I’d never been gone so long, and there had been recent changes to a few local roads and landscapes. We got home in the very early morning. Straight to sleep on the orange carpet in my very own bedroom. The bed was unmade, and I wasn’t taking the time to make it. We were awakened a few hours later by my sister who couldn’t wait any longer. “Good to be back; yes I have lots of stories to tell; yes, I did lose some weight; yes Sue IS nuts…she called here too?” We cleaned our stuff out of the chevette and returned it that day. Sue acted like she was glad to see us and had been primarily concerned for our safety the whole time. Yeah. That’s why the cops had orders to “shoot to kill” . Looney.

So that’s it. I got my night job at Denny’s back, didn’t get the furniture refinisher job back, I worked graveyard for a year and a half, got into management, got burnt out. Left to sell cars, got into management again, got a computer that had internet access, and stumbled upon a site called cellar.org. You know the rest.

Jim

Good story and well told, Jim.
Tucumcari has (had) a chinese resturant called the Golden Dragon. Their food was better than the best places in Frisco's China Town. Go figure.:)

thanks, bruce.

the best mexican food i ever had was in Kansas...that town where all the cowboys are buried.......