TOUR

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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

[xoxoxoBruce]

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.

[russotto]

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

[wolf]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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.

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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.

[lumberjim]

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:

[lumberjim]

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:

[lumberjim]

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

[lumberjim]

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.