The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity

by Kurt Vonnegut

  Folk medicine, astrology, the I Ching, other things Western rationality held in contempt, were more training exercises than things we absolutely believed in. We trusted gut impulses more and more, our plans less and less, and found ourselves having gut feelings about more and more things, and getting more and more done and feeling better and better about what we did.

  There were some spooky parts to it. Stubbed toes, strange clouds, how many snakes we saw in a day, all fit together and had meanings which we would be able to figure out some day if we paid the right kind of attention. Nothing was meaningless or disconnected. It would be easy to dismiss this as just some kink in a mind about to blow sky high, or mass hysteria, or hippie foolishness, but I still think we were on to something very real.

  Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life. Then I couldn’t get enough. There’s something happening there but I don’t know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?

  TOWN TRIPS. Powell River was a two-supermarket mill town. Its raison d’être was the world’s largest pulp and paper mill, which used twice as much water a day as New York City and could be smelled as far away as thirty miles if the wind was right. The whole time we were at the farm, the smell only got up to us twice, but it was hard to forget it was there. Some neighbor for Eden. Blowing it up was one of our playful fantasies.

  Sometimes we went two or three weeks without anyone going to town, and we would have loved to dispense with town trips altogether, but we were a long way from selfsufficiency. Fresh vegetables and building supplies were the usual reasons for going. While we were at it we did the laundry, picked up mail, exchanged books at the library, and paid social calls.

  We never went down en masse. Town trips were seen as a royal drag, so two was the usual crew. Besides, with more than two people Blue Marcel couldn’t do the trip in less than three hours.

  There were no set teams. We went in all possible combinations. Who went was usually decided on the basis of who hadn’t done town duty in a while and/or who had expertise on whatever tool or building material we needed and/or who had some medical or other personal business to see to.

  Except for one solo desperation run of mine for tobacco, it was always an overnight affair. Considering Blue Marcel’s speed, there was no other way to play it. We had a variety of places we were welcome to stay, including a commune on Prior Road about ten miles out of town; Joe and Mary’s place in town; two abandoned loggers’ cabins a few miles by dirt road from town that had been taken over and fixed up by three refugees from New York, and a few locals like John who were always willing to put us up. If we weren’t in the mood for any of these, there was an old twenty-four-foot, double-end lapstrake boat with an unlocked cabin tied up at the marina. No one ever seemed to use it, so we slept there from time to time.

  There was a short-order greasy spoon, the Thunderbird Restaurant, which we usually patronized on town trips. We called it the Works in honor of the house specialty, which was a hamburger with mushrooms, onions, peppers, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and a hot dog thrown in. At $1.75 it was the best deal in town. The Works also had one of the finest juke boxes I’ve ever run into, and it was conveniently located directly across from the laundromat.

  After three or four weeks of bucolic peace, suddenly seeing cars, electric lights, newspapers, your own face in a mirror was always a little jolting. Sometimes it was a kick to see all the shit we were getting away from, but more often the hassles and ugliness made us want to get back to the farm as quickly as possible and work our asses off so we’d be able to cut town trips to once a year or so.

  That town trips were more and more upsetting was a good sign. It meant that the farm really was changing us. We were more and more in tune with natural and divine harmonies and more and more sensitive to discordances we had once accepted as being part and parcel of life. Being out of it we now look back on our society and see that it was worse than our wildest condemnations.

  MERCIFULLY, the winter rains came a few weeks later than usual that year. We finished the roof in the nick of time. When the rains started, much to our delighted surprise that crazy goddamned thing didn’t leak a drop. We were still short a few walls on the third floor, but most of that work could be done out of the weather under our magic roof.

  You’re not supposed to just bop across international boundaries and set up housekeeping without telling someone. Some of us were on long-expired two-week visas, the rest of us had slipped by with no restrictions simply by flashing lots of cash and claiming we were on a shopping spree. Shortly after the roof was finished, we decided it might be wise to become legal immigrants.

  There wasn’t much to it. First Kathy and Jack and then Simon, Virginia, and I took a ferry from Powell River to Vancouver Island and drove to Nanaimo, which was the nearest immigration office. There were a few pages of forms to fill out: education, jobs held, occupational plans in Canada, financial stuff. We shuffled money around to make each of us look very wealthy. Although the immigration people seemed less than thrilled with hippie farmers, their “objective” point system didn’t give them much choice but to accept us. We all had maximum education points, fluency in French, which only meant you had to know as much French as the interviewer, which wasn’t much, financial points, points for being in our early twenties, and assorted other points.

  It was much like the draft process. We were constantly reminding each other to be sure we switched gears. It was a joke, but we had been so conditioned to be noncooperative and insulting to all forms of officialdom, these reminders weren’t out of place. We all sat through fatherly lectures from our various interviewers about the foolishness of what we were doing, and were granted landed-immigrant status conditional on our passing a standard physical exam. We were given forms to take to whatever doctor we chose any time within the next six months.

  THANKSGIVING. The Canadian Thanksgiving had been a few weeks earlier. Up north the harvesting time, which is what the whole thing is supposed to be about, comes earlier. So there we were, immigrants celebrating a holy day of the old country in their new home. We were celebrating the start of new things, new hopes, a new home, just like the Pilgrims.

  We invited everyone. Everyone we knew in Powell River, everyone from the other communes around, everyone we knew in Vancouver, friends in California, and anyone else we could think of. We had had visitors before, people from Powell River dropping in on us, old college friends, total strangers, and occasionally there had been enough people spirit and whatever for something like an occasion to take place. But this was the first time we had anything you could call planned.

  It was open house, inspection time.

  Luckily, most of the inspectors didn’t show up. If everyone we invited had come it probably would have been hell. The logistics of food and bedding would have been hassle enough, but the bigger problem would have been playing to that many different audiences all at once.

  We wanted everyone to dig what we were doing. I think even Nixon’s misgivings would have hurt some. Whenever we talked about the farm or showed visitors around, our presentation usually varied considerably, depending on who it was we were showing off for. Too many types of inspectors might have blown a fuse.

  The inspectors who actually did show up were important ones, the Berkeley crew made up of friends from Swarthmore and some other folk they had picked up along the way, heavy into radical politics, women’s lib, the revolution and all. It wasn’t like we would have given up and all gone down to trash buildings on Telegraph Avenue if they had not dug the farm, but it would have hurt a lot.

  We passed with flying colors. We weren’t copping out. We were on the same team. Brotherhood and sisterhood confirmed, alliances affirmed. Good feelings all around, we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner.

  A few grouse done up as much as possible like turkey, lots of things with apples, rounded out with a few cheat items from town. It would be different next time a
round.

  None of the Berkeley people liked Beowulf, which may have been what pushed things to the brink. In any event, the brink came a few days after they left.

  It was one of those scenes in which everybody knows what’s going down but nobody will say so. We were all sitting around the kitchen after dinner. Showdown. The issue was why people didn’t dig Beowulf and what should be done about it. There were hours of half-completed sentences and pregnant pauses. There was talk about how feeling should be in the open. The truth setting you free. Honesty being the best policy. Nothing being bad as long as it wasn’t buried. Things you think are hard to say being much easier if you just try. About three hours of this shit, everyone waiting, prodding, edging around, teetering, teetering. It was mostly Sarah doing the leading. She was in the middle. Beowulf was her man. We were her friends. That there was considerable friction between Beowulf and the rest of us was no secret.

  Beowulf’s name wasn’t the problem—lots of people were into strange name trips—but his attitude about it was indicative. It was twenty-four hours a day I’ve Got a Secret. He was smug about his diet, posture, breathing, and lots of other stuff too, but what he was smuggest about was that no one knew his real name. He guarded his birthday equally zealously and let on that these twin secrets gave him enormous advantage. Add the fact that the vibes were never quite right for Beowulf to do much work and that he never really talked with anyone except maybe Sarah and you’ve got friction.

  Why me? It seems so pointless, so unfair. It’s not like I’m much more bugged by Beowulf than anyone else. I didn’t get my way with the shape of the windows or the roof. If everyone else was so hot to have me not be chief of this tribe why do I have to play the heavy now? Simon, fucking free spirit, perfect hippie, the windows went mostly your way. Here’s a chance to earn it. Or Virginia. You’re the one who says you can’t live here if he does. Or any of you other jokers who keep coming up to me and saying how Beowulf is bugging you.

  More pregnant pauses, more pleading in Sarah’s voice, more looking at me, waiting for me to finish these dangling thoughts, waiting for Taurus to give some nice concrete example to all these abstractions.

  “Beowulf, you give me a pain in the ass.”

  I wish Sarah had been right. I wish I could report that after everyone leveled with everyone else, after everything was out in the open, all hostility vanished, everything was resolved and the whole room glowed with the good feelings of brotherhood.

  Actually, I don’t remember most of what was said that night. It was so much exactly what I expected I had a hard time paying attention. Beowulf wasn’t the only target. But all the criticisms leveled at others seemed like weak gestures to make things look a little more even.

  Beowulf had been saying he was about to leave anyway but he had been saying that for a while. Maybe that night made him decide to really go through with it, but all in all I don’t think that evening changed the tide of history one way or the other. Mostly I was just depressed that the whole thing hadn’t worked out as smoothly as we had expected when we left for my trial.

  Within a week he was gone and Sarah had left with him, which was too bad. Sarah hadn’t been much of a worker but was a good friend and a general up for everyone.

  LUKE. Sometimes I think maybe I liked Luke as much as I did to make up for how little I liked Beowulf. There were some superficial similarities, which made them easy to think of as a pair. They were the only non-Swarthmore people, they were both superfreaks. Freaks in different ways, to be sure, but neither could be accused of doing things halfway.

  If I and the others disliked Beowulf because he wasn’t from Swarthmore, why did we all love Luke? If Beowulf didn’t fit in because he was such a superfreak, why did Luke, who was second to none, fit in so perfectly? The real answer was that Luke was warm and open while Beowulf was a tight-ass.

  I doubt that there have been many who moved over the face of this earth as gracefully as Luke. I can’t imagine anyone or anything resenting his existence. He is probably as close to a saint as I’ll ever meet.

  Move over the face of this earth he did. He was brought up somewhere in New Jersey, spent a lot of time traveling around, settling for a while in various places in California, New Mexico, Oregon, and then British Columbia. Last word placed him somewhere in South America.

  Apparently he ran a hotel in Berkeley for a while, but beyond that I know of no work, regular or otherwise. I doubt if he ever had or ever will have much money. When I met him he had nothing but a few pieces of clothing that were the products of inspired dump picking and the like. I never heard him complain about having no money or brag about it either. He appeared to have some sort of faith that whatever he needed would gravitate toward him and it seemed to work out that way.

  I never saw anyone in any situation anything but happy to see Luke. I have a feeling he could walk in on Nixon fucking chickens and Nixon wouldn’t mind. Luke wouldn’t mind. The chickens wouldn’t mind.

  He just about destroyed my car one day. Town was upsetting him. He decided he had to get back to the farm, but our boat wasn’t there and no one was going up the lake that day. I don’t think he really thought that by some magic there was all of a sudden going to be a road to the farm, but he might have. More likely he figured that maybe one of those old logging roads might get him part way there and he’d walk the rest. He had a compass. Predictably, he didn’t get far. The car was hopelessly enmired, and there was a big operation to get it out of there. But the curious thing was that no one, not me whose car it was or any of the other people who had to salvage the situation, was the least bit angry with Luke.

  We were angry with the highway department for not putting a road where Luke wanted to drive. We were angry that there hadn’t been a boat at the lake for Luke to use. We were angry that one of us or someone hadn’t been with Luke to keep him from getting upset.

  How Luke had managed to survive this long was always a mystery to me. He’d do things like throwing a flimsy boat together with a few pieces of scrap wood, cut another piece of scrap wood into a paddle, and just vanish into the wilderness. A few days later he’d reappear, smiling, on foot, telling us about how his boat had sunk about ten miles up the lake and he just sort of moseyed his way back.

  There was a thing he said a lot that summed him up in many ways: “Nothing is poisonous.” The first time I heard him say that was in response to my look of disbelief as he picked up the deadliest-looking mushroom I ever saw and ate it. Later, when I was learning about mushrooms, he slipped often enough to let me know that he knew pretty much all there was to know about them. It’s typical of Luke that he was embarrassed by and tried to conceal this sort of expertise. He appeared to look at it as unnecessary garbage he had cluttered his mind with before he learned to trust. He wanted to believe he was picking mushrooms according to vibes, but he was always very careful about inspecting those we picked before letting them go into the pot.

  Luke was organic to the nth. He was the hippie’s hippie. He even had misgivings about agriculture. He claimed to have gone for months at a time eating nothing but wild food. It’s possible; he knew more about edible wild plants than anyone I’ve ever met. Of course he claimed it was just vibes leading him to his next meal. Meat, of course, was out of the question.

  Luke had a deep mistrust of even simple tools. The chain saw drove him up the wall. There was little love lost between him and most internal combustion engines, though for some reason he did have a certain attraction to Moldy Goldy and a few other things, like my car. There was nothing dogmatic or fashionable about his attitude. He just couldn’t stand to be around anything he didn’t love. That he loved my car was a great source of pride to me. In time I came to trust his instincts almost as much as he did.

  He was probably the least manipulative, least conniving person I ever met. He wasn’t perfect. He tripped over his own rhetoric from time to time. “The truth will set you free,” and then a little lie. But there was no way he could have lived up to
the things he said. He did it as well as it could be done.

  Some of the best times of my life were with Luke. Town trips with anyone else were a drag. Somehow he and I used to get everything that had to be done in about half the time it took anyone else. Obstacles seemed to vanish. Then we’d get a jug of wine and go visiting. We’d sing old rock-and-roll songs late into the night.

  If I were to pick out the high point of my life, I think it would be strolling down the beach in Powell River holding hands with Luke in the shadow of the stench-belching pulp mill, half-crocked on wine, the sun setting, and singing “You Are My Sunshine.”

  Hanging around with Luke, I felt the same flowing good feelings and lack of hesitancy that I felt with Zeke.

  Luke loved the old lapstrake double-ender and could rarely be persuaded to sleep anywhere else on town trips. The outboard I had brought from Barnstable made Blue Marcel dependable but she was still only thirteen feet long and couldn’t carry much. We asked around about the old boat and learned that it had been on the lake since 1917 and, more important, was for sale. At $175, a steal. Feather, weighing in at over two tons, became our heavy carrier bad-weather hope.

  Unfortunately, Feather got to make only two trips for us. The first brought us our two pregnant goats, the second brought Simon’s family up for Christmas. Then, since the engine was acting strangely, we decided to just let Feather sit till spring, when we could fix everything right.

  CHRISTMAS. Another holiday, another occasion. A new set of inspectors, Simon’s family. His sister, little brother, and parents all showed up to spend Christmas at the farm. Jet fare alone must have run over a thousand dollars.