The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  One of the things that made it all so wonderful was the acoustical properties of the valley. It held the sound just enough to give each note a lingering resonance without giving it any echo. That valley was made for music, especially the tenor sax, especially my tenor sax. Wherever I had played music before, I always had to contend with other sounds—cars going by, the hum of an electrical appliance. The only other sounds at the farm were an occasional wind and the melodic babbling of the stream running over the rocks. Although I may have gotten higher and more excited jamming with first-rate musicians, I’ve never felt so completely and deeply satisfied as when I was playing duets with the stream.

  The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lot of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty. It was a lot like playing with Zeke.

  I was finally just plain playing music, playing music just for the moment. I wasn’t practicing so that I could knock ’em dead at some later time. The music was finally an end in itself. Making the perfect music for the perfect moment for the perfect place.

  Music there was all music could be. It did all music could do. There was nothing second-rate about that music. And maybe most important, it was ours. We weren’t crammed into some stadium or concert hall. We weren’t dependent on any electronic gadgetry. Our music fit in perfectly with everything else there. We had brought up a battery tape deck, a really good one, but there was something jarring or alienating about it. We only played it once or twice. It didn’t seem to fit in.

  Serendipity. One time only. Fantastic beauty now, and then gone forever. There was something delightfully subversive about playing music that good that far, far away from New York City’s recording studios and the like. Who would have thought that here, twelve miles by boat from the end of Highway 101, twelve miles by boat from our nearest neighbor and then a mile and a half by foot on that old abandoned logging trail, was where it was happening?

  Simon had his trombone shipped from back East, Jack bought a flute, and Kathy unpacked her violin, which she played very well. Now and then we got some nice music going all together, but the sax and the trombone tended to drown the others out. The solo numbers seemed to work best.

  We had been weaned on horror stories of frictions between communes and local people. We figured things would be different in Canada and weren’t expecting real, heavy trouble, but neither did we expect the degree of warmth and help we got. There were some funny looks from folks who weren’t exactly in love with longhaired people, but it was so mild compared to what we had learned to live with in America that it was almost pleasant when it happened. What hippie hating there was up there was strictly amateur.

  Mr. McKenzie dropped in several times to check on how we were doing. He’d shake his head in mock disbelief and pain at the condition of the teeth on our chain saw and then sit down and while away the afternoon sharpening them right. A Mr. Palermo, who had lived up here helping his uncles in the old days and had a cabin at the foot of the trail, came by at least twice a month. He told us how they used the old irrigation system and what grew well where, and gave us all sorts of other invaluable information. There was a big-shot executive at the pulp mill who used to bring us huge plastic bags of seaweed, which we were particularly fond of for compost. Bea and Sam, who ran the marina at the foot of the lake, were constantly putting themselves out for us.

  Several times when we went down to the lake to swim or fish we found big boxes of dishes, tools, winches, rope, saws, all sorts of useful things. “Here’s some stuff I don’t need.” John Eastman. He had spent most of his life living and working in the woods of B.C., or, as they call it, the bush. He taught us how to use the chain saw, how to fell trees safely, how to split shakes and planks out of cedar, the best way to season firewood.

  If it hadn’t been for the help of the locals, things would have been much tougher.

  Part of their reason for helping, I think, was that the sort of life we aspired to wasn’t that far removed from their own. The frontier was recent history here. Many of them had spent their childhoods in the bush. We struck a chord.

  Being respected by them was important to us. That flattered them and they loved us for it. Not many people gave a shit about what they thought. We had use for lots of their experience and skill, too. Everyone loves to be a teacher, especially of some skill he thought no one would ever want again. We were willing pupils.

  UNFINISHED BUSINESS. The Pennsylvania dope bust had seemed absurd enough when it was happening. It was so predictable, so pointless. I could hardly keep from saying “Come on now, I mean really, isn’t this a bit much?” And now, four thousand miles away, next to a whole other ocean in a different country, it was hard to believe that Suchadolski and company were really on the same planet we were.

  I considered not going. The idea of marijuana and mescaline being illegal was absurd enough. The idea that Virginia and I were supposed to travel several thousand miles to see whether or not they would put me in jail for possession of less than an ounce of dope and a few pills was too ridiculous. I wasn’t worried about conviction—poor Suchadolski had made every procedural error in the book—but the idea of going all that way just to get let off on a technicality bothered me almost as much as the possibility of doing time. And what was the worst thing that could happen to me for not showing? I’d be in big trouble if I ever got picked up in Pennsylvania for anything, and I’d forfeit my bond. It was laughable.

  There was lots to do at the farm. Getting the roof done before the rains started was the most urgent. But trial time was coming up, and Virge and I took a ride on the Trans-Canadian Railway.

  Early September ’70, just before getting on the train heading East: “I feel better than I’ve ever felt about life.”

  I meant it. We could afford to be philosophical about the trial and any other unpleasantness that came up. We had our alternative, the farm, our hot-air balloon. We could stand a brief descent to where those funny little antlike things scurried around. If it got to be a drag, all we had to do to get our altitude back was cut away a sandbag or two. They couldn’t really hurt us. We were facing this last hassle out of politeness and not because they had any real power over us any more.

  Vincent had left for California a week earlier. From there he was heading back East to pick up some stuff. Our plan was for him to meet us on the Cape. We’d spend a few days at his place in Vermont before driving back to the farm with him.

  The train ride was a gas. Watching the deer and the antelope play, cruising effortlessly across the continent through some of the most beautiful wilderness anywhere. We brought our own food along—crunchy granola, super pumpernickel, cheese, nuts, fruit, salami, peanut butter—enough to share with other people. It took three and a half days to Toronto. Every day at sunset we’d go into the bar car and have a couple of beers.

  It would have been awful to go back having washed out. If we hadn’t found any land. But we had found land. Not just any land, really spectacular land. We returned with our heads high. The trial was just a silly interlude. Then I could get back to the good stuff, the real stuff. I had beaten a bigger, far more terrifying rap than the one I had to face in Greensburg, Pa.

  From Toronto we took a buff to Bussalo and tried to get hold of Steve and Sandy. The phone number and addresses they had given us didn’t work. We sent them a “Fuck, where the fucking shit fuck are you guys,” etc., etc., letter scrawled on a napkin giving them some addresses and numbers where they could get hold of us while we were East. Got on a pitt to Bussburgh and called a girl I had gone to elementary school with who had told my mother that she and her husband could put us up for the trial.

  Luxury accommodations. It was the first time we had slept
in what most people would call a bed in about three months. Nothing against couches and foam pads, mind you, but this was something else. A great big old maple bedstead, a mattress, a room all to ourselves. After four days of buses and trains, after three months of camping, it felt great.

  Amanda and Lou were first-rate hosts: good food, good drinks, movies. They expressed suitable indignation over the silly trial we had to go through.

  Lou was in graduate school, another thing I had avoided like the plague. They were making a pretty good adjustment to all the things I had refused or been unable to adjust to. Had I been a pathetic hippie whose dreams were getting stale, coming back East to be tried for dope, I would have hated them.

  The trial was a bore. I got off on a technicality but ended up having to use some political pull to get the judge to see it. Mine was the first case of its kind that hadn’t been pled guilty. People said it was an important case that would change things. I couldn’t get into it.

  Hitching to Swarthmore was a bore. Being stopped by the cops and searched again and again was a bore.

  At Swarthmore, talk talk talk talk talk. The shit is on the fan or very close. What to do about it? Was what we were doing good? Was it an answer? To how much? Working with the system? I had been through them all so many times. Boring. Spiced with a touch of astrology, the I Ching, or yoga, and diet. Was a bore. Was bored. It never went anywhere. Nothing ever changed. Maybe it was adding up. But how much adding up was needed? Boring, bored, bore. In the time I’ve been talking to you I could have cut a week’s worth of firewood, shingled a hundred square feet of roof, and shot three grouse.

  When the shakes started coming on the talk was torture. Dope helped some.

  Virginia went down to North Carolina to see her parents and I headed for New York City, where Pa was spending more and more time.

  Somewhere along the line I started falling apart. My elevation stopped working. My capacity for politeness and social grace deteriorated. “I have the farm to go back to. None of this shit matters. Repeat. None of this shit matters.”

  Earlier it had been “I have the farm to go back to so I can enjoy being back East, New York, etc.” Toward the end it was “If I get really awful I’ll just put myself on ice and ship myself back to Powell River, where life makes a certain amount of sense.”

  Time started meaning less and less. It just hung there. Where I was meant less and less. More and more meant less and less. Just getting back to the farm where things made sense became everything. Just getting back. Where there was work to do that meant something. Something to get my mind off my mind.

  Feeling something gripping the pit of my stomach. Hands shaking. Social blunders. Getting confused about names. Stuttering some. Confusion about how long to shake hands. Getting please, thank-you, you’re welcome, hello, and good-by fucked up.

  Then the crying started. First just little tears falling asleep. Then bigger tears. Then having to get away and cry alone.

  Always on the verge of tears, waiting for, dreading the question, “What’s wrong, Mark?” Not being able to answer except by crying. Nothing they could do. “Just get me back to the farm. I cry a lot less out there.” They hardly ever asked. When they did, my answer was usually a look or gesture that said “Why aren’t you crying too?” And their looks seemed to wonder back.

  Maybe because I had the farm I let myself go further than usual. The pressure of having to endure was gone, so I allowed myself to see the full horror. Knowing how many valleys there were like ours, why New York City? It didn’t have to be this way.

  Automobiles careening. Drunks careening, junkies, pollution, misery ad infinitum, all careening. Dinners at Sardi’s, famous people, lots of talk. I fled up to the Cape for a few days.

  Being alone in the big Barnstable house was strange too. A post card to Virginia: “I’ve decided to cash in a little public sanity for some inner peace of mind. At the going rate of exchange I’d be a fool not to.”

  A good nigger. Laughing and crying only with his own, just coasting through the rest. Putting in time, waiting to get back to the farm where life made sense, where there was no need to cash in public sanity for peace of mind.

  Finally Virginia showed up with Becky, an old housemate. Happy to see them. I was lonely as shit and going out of my mind. Then Vincent, the eternal wanderer, drove in. We could get moving. We put my Evinrude motor, a potbellied stove, and other stuff in the back of his station wagon and went up to his place in Vermont for a few days.

  Virge’s brother was in the area. Some other people. It was all jumbling together. They all tripped. I didn’t. They wanted to know why. I couldn’t say. I spent a lot of time crying in the woodshed. No one noticed.

  Finally, after what seemed like years, we were on our way. The tension in my head eased somewhat as we moved West, toward the farm, toward work worth doing. I stopped crying so much. Just the little tears falling asleep.

  How do them folk back there hack it? Certainly not in my repertoire of tricks. Maybe it’s a blessing. If I could have hacked it maybe I wouldn’t have taken off, I wouldn’t have found the farm. Lucky me. Unlucky them. Maybe if they weren’t so tough they would have found a reasonable way to live. Maybe if people weren’t so goddamned rugged they wouldn’t have so much to be so goddamned rugged about.

  It went pretty quick, driving straight through most of the way. Before we knew it, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, like a flash. Washington, the evergreen state my ass, most of it’s desert. Dead deer on every other car from Wyoming on. The Black Hills weren’t black but the Bad Lands were some of the prettiest, most awful bad land I ever saw.

  Three days after leaving Vermont, we crossed the U.S.-Canadian border just north of Seattle, drove straight to the Vancouver ferry terminal, and napped in the car waiting for the first ferry. The usual two ferry rides and a hundred miles of driving (five hours) later we were at the Powell Lake Marina. Luckily John Eastman was there and took us up the lake.

  Two pieces of bad news: Beowulf, who was getting on everyone’s nerves, hadn’t split as he had promised. Jack had slashed his leg with the machete. They’d brought him down to the water in a wheelbarrow and then found that neither Dick nor Moldy had any interest in being outboard motors. They had broken into a summer cabin on the lake and waited there a few days hoping a boat would come along.

  John took Jack to the hospital in his boat. It wasn’t serious, but it so easily could have been. Bringing my reliable outboard from Barnstable had been a good idea.

  The roof had progressed quite a bit. Vincent and I, the former foremen, surveyed critically and did a bit of chain-saw surgery. But all in all it looked like a good job.

  Nice to be back. The next day was more work: no more tears, no more tangles.

  THE GOOD OLD-FASHIONED ORGANIC WAY. A commune a little farther up the coast, rather than exploit animals or use any sort of machine, plowed their land by harnessing themselves to the plow four at a time. This was seriously discussed at our place somewhere in between my first two breakdowns. We eventually compromised on a roto tiller, the worst of both worlds.

  We hadn’t taken to the woods just for a change of scenery and a different way of life. The physical and psychical aspects of our adventure were inextricably intertwined, but the head changes were what we were really after. We expected to get closer to nature, to each other and our feelings, and we did, but even these changes were relatively superficial. They merely meant getting in touch with things that were already there. We wanted to go beyond that and develop entirely new ways of being and experiencing the world.

  We had only vague ideas about the shape of these changes or when they would happen, but we looked forward to them eagerly. Since they would result from being free of the cities, of capitalism, racism, industrialism, they had to be for the better.

  It was a lot like taking some new drug and waiting for the changes.

  “Is it happening yet?”

  “I think I’m walking more with my feet than my head.”r />
  Push-ups and football were out. Yoga and frisbee were in. Hamburgers were out, soybeans and brown rice were in.

  Fifty-pound sacks of dried milk from a wholesaler were better than quarts from the corner store but not as good as from our own goats. Buying Canadian was better than American. Red Chinese work clothes were better still. Bartering was better than cash but couldn’t touch dump picking. Anything that could somehow be construed as counterrevolutionary was out. I had my problems digging Charlie Manson and felt bad about it sometimes. Not that the people there were heavy into Charlie’s trip, it was just hard to have bad feelings about anything or anyone that Nixon and company didn’t like. If it had come down to choosing between Nixon and Charlie it’s hard to say which way the farm would have gone. It was a hypothetical situation, a not very likely one, but a fair amount of our lives was tied up with hypothetical situations—the revolution, ecological disaster, the last judgment, the breakdown of Western civilization, Armageddon.

  Apocalyptic expectations, revolution, economy, as important as they were still didn’t get to the root. The truth is we didn’t really know what we wanted. Ego death, mystic oneness with all things, seemed like it might be what we were after but it also seemed pretentious. We were after something a little less flashy but no easier to describe adequately. The best model I could come up with was wanting more of my life to be like playing with Zeke.

  I think most of us were fed to the teeth with the brand of rationality that had made up so much of our education. Western rationality had made a dreadful mess of a lovely planet, but it was more that this form of rationality had taken up the lion’s share of our minds without giving us much in return. Rational truths were true enough, but they were mostly trivial, boring, and not particularly useful. We wanted to free some of our rational brain space to make room for other ways of being. Having rationally decided to become less rational, we hoped to find new, meaningful, exciting, useful truths.