Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  Water, at volume, plus gravity is greater than Rolling Turtles divided by poor planning. The mud level rose steadily overnight, and near dawn I awoke embedded in a clammy quagmire. At about the same time, the steady leaks in the roof matured into a catastrophic failure of the waterlogged felt ceiling. A pent-up cascade of water plunged into the center of the yurt, and groggy grunts of protest went up from all sides. I shook my head in disappointment. I’d had a hunch the dry warmth wouldn’t last. I collected my tarp and plastic bag of food and sloshed through the bedraggled band of still-stoned flood victims. “Thanks, guys, and good luck,” I called over my shoulder. I couldn’t tell what stunned them more: the flood or my suddenly accentless voice.

  I slogged down the trail looking for new shelter. Up ahead, the sound of Vedic drums and hand cymbals beckoned me forward. As I crested a little ridge, a beautiful scene filled my eyes. The Krishna Kamp spread out before me—dry, orderly, full of dancing people and, most importantly, steaming pots of food. I felt like some lucky sinner who’d had the good fortune to bump into Noah’s ark just before it launched.

  The finger cymbals chanted, and so did the people:

  Haray Krishna, Haray Krishna;

  Krishna, Krishna, Haray, Haray;

  Haray Rama, Haray Rama;

  Rama, Rama, Haray Haray.

  Over and over.

  The cymbals and the people never stopped. Ever.

  But it didn’t matter. Their camp was perfect. I walked the perimeter and stooped appreciatively to pat the French drains they’d installed all around. The gravel-filled ditches conveyed the runoff away from the kitchen. Genius. Above, they’d anchored to trees a series of interlocking plastic tarps that directed the rainwater into a catchment tank that could be used for washing. Beneath this structure was a huge canvas tent that housed the kitchen itself—a seamless production line manned by saffron-robed Krishnas—and a series of wooden benches. The focal point of the camp was a massive bonfire around which paraded the swaying musicians, the dancers, and the singers who continuously praised Krishna in the simple repetitive formula that indelibly seared itself into my brain after the first few thousand times I heard it.

  “Well, I’ve finally found the adults,” I thought to myself. “And they’re a bunch of weird chanting people in yellow robes with funky shaved heads.” The chanting didn’t matter. Nor did the robes or the oddly shaved heads. The hot food and dry ground were all that mattered. I took my serving of hot, pasty, sweet basmati rice and sat cross-legged under one of the serving tables, staring out at the leaping orange flames of the central fire. I had arrived. I was safely aboard the ark now and, whatever happened, I was going to be one of the survivors.

  Two days later, the rain finally let up. But it didn’t matter. Rainbow was over, and the Krishnas began dismantling their spectacular camp, chanting all the while. I ran into my mother on one of the trails back to the parking lot.

  “Wasn’t Rainbow amazing, Joshey?”

  “It was something.”

  “I know!”

  We hitched a ride into the town of Council, Idaho, where I found my way into the public library and finally used one of the real porcelain toilets I’d been dreaming about all week. Afterward, my mother and I stood outside, looking to hitch another ride. Across the street, Michael Rodriguez was leaping around, playing frisbee with some other guys.

  “Josh, you’ll never believe what Michael’s day job is. He’s a stockbroker.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s not really a man.”

  “You’re right about that,” my mother said.

  I nodded. No, Michael wasn’t really a man. But I could think of somebody who was.

  EIGHT

  Wanderings in the Wilderness

  The Rainbow Gathering had set my mother on fire with visions of idyllic intentional communities that might be out there waiting for us. She sensed that the elusive combination of rural agriculture and urban intellectualism might be down the next off-ramp, somewhere in the hills beyond the Burger King and the laundromat.

  Hitchhiking with Claudia through the backwoods of the American West, I began to develop something of a hitchhiker’s guide to the road in my head. No matter how hard I smiled, most folks driving by wouldn’t stop to pick us up. I hated them, those smug rich people who could afford to own cars but pretended not to notice us. The ones who did stop for us came in two flavors: slow and fast. The slow stoppers were open to the idea of picking up a hitchhiker, but not just anyone. They passed by slowly, swiveling their heads to run their eyes over us. When they pulled onto the shoulder ahead, we had to smile, grab our gear, and run to catch their idling good graces before they changed their minds. We ran up the road, knowing they’d only stopped to pick us up after they’d calculated that they were bigger and stronger than we were. I couldn’t blame them, but I couldn’t entirely trust them either. The fast stoppers, on the other hand, would hit the brakes immediately when they saw hitchhikers ahead, pulling over before they could tell who we were. We could have been angels or we could have been ax murderers for all they knew. We walked back to them, grinning in their headlights. It was easy to love them for trusting us, but I’d always shake my head a little. You had to be a crazy person to blindly stop for total strangers—a real angel, or an ax murderer.

  The big rig that gave us a ride outside of Klamath Falls was a fast stopper. The truck driver with the leather vest didn’t care who we were. He just wanted someone to talk to. “Where d’ya call home?” he asked me.

  I had to think about that one. We’d lived in that half-built cabin on Mount Lassen for a year and a half. An eternity in my memory. But that was a freak occurrence, the longest we’d ever stayed in one place. We had to keep on moving.

  “I guess this out here is home,” I said, waving my hand at the darkening road ahead.

  “I hear that, muchacho,” the truck driver said. “I hear that.”

  Claudia had decided that one place in particular promised to be the perfect community for us: a survivalist settlement along Pokey Creek in the mountains of Northern Idaho. She had met two of its founders, Greg and Mary, at Rainbow and had been impressed by the way Mary used spiritual terms to describe gutting a dead deer. With their homemade buckskin clothing and adamant refusal to participate in American society, they proved to my mother that they were “for real.” These people considered themselves white Indians, living off the land as the Great Spirit intended. They used every part of the kill, and smoked, dried, canned, and pickled all summer to survive through the brutal winter. It was almost too good to be true. But by the time we’d purchased long underwear and packed our bags, it was October, and the snows had already barricaded the place shut for the winter.

  We sat out the intervening months in a rundown little shack in the woods of Shasta County, California. The nearest store was in Shingletown, a tiny cluster of dilapidated buildings. Shingletown was the kind of place you went to restock your propane, chewing tobacco, and ammunition. Unemployed loggers and drunken hunters gathered at the restaurants. Klansmen frequented the general store. On more than one occasion, we were cornered by a talkative young man with a hunting dog named K, as in KKK. He told us little K had been trained to “smell out Jews and Niggers.” My mother went cold and rigid every time we bumped into him, until one day she overheard him talk about drowning unwanted kittens in the river. Then she lunged at him, gesticulating wildly and calling him a murderer. “What?” he sputtered meekly. “I don’t want no kitties, you want ’em?” My mother did want them and quickly became known as the crazy lady who loved cats. Over the winter, we harbored sixteen feline fugitives, and the air of our home hung heavy with cat hair, dander, and piss. As the temperature dropped in the evenings, the cats sought the warmth of my body heat and burrowed into the bed all around me. I slumbered warmly but uncomfortably in my lumpy, purring feline blanket. When Uncle Tony visited for my seventh birthday, he stayed awake all night, pulling cats off of my face, afraid that they were going to smother m
e to death.

  We didn’t have a car so we hitchhiked into town regularly to buy supplies until some of the rides began to feel like attempted kidnappings. One guy wouldn’t let us out of his truck until a sheriff’s deputy fortuitously drove by. Another told me he was going to pump my mother full of quaaludes so he could sling her over his shoulder for some “R&R.”

  When Claudia and I finally received word that the snows were melting in Idaho, we took to the road again, leaving fourteen of the cats behind to fend for themselves in the woods.

  The settlement at Pokey Creek was a dusty, eerie collection of subsistence homesteads carved into a thick evergreen forest in the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho. During the brief summer months everyone lived outside in teepees, laboring in a panic to prepare for the long winter when they would retreat back into their subterranean silos. The residents were lanky and pale, adults and children alike, collectively struggling with seasonal affective disorder and feverishly bracing for winter or the apocalypse, whichever came first. My mother had proudly agreed to be the schoolteacher for the community and, in exchange, we would receive meat and root crops to help us survive the winter. After a few weeks of inspecting potential building/excavation sites and getting to know the community elders, Claudia was ready to get to work on building a subterranean silo of our own. But not me. All those nights sleeping on the loose dirt under the drying racks of deer innards and the never-ending battles against mosquitoes, black flies, ticks, and fleas were too much for me. And although I could barely communicate with some of the jittery barefoot kids my age who spoke in a pidgin English of their own creation, their fear of the impending winter needed little translation. “Snow-snow back quick.”

  I was planning to stage a coup d’état.

  After our final “interview” with the elders around the communal fire, they prepared to formally accept us into the community. But I sabotaged our whole venture by instigating a fistfight with one of Greg and Mary’s feral boys in the middle of the ceremony. Mary’s leathery face howled down at me: “At Pokey Creek we do not strike other human beings!” It was my first act of premeditated violence, but I forgave myself by invoking a broad definition of self-defense. In my mind, the alternatives were: a little fisticuffs or a lifetime spent underground gagging on half-cooked moose meat.

  Hitchhiking away in disgrace, my mother told me how ashamed of me she was for wrecking everything. But she was quickly distracted by the artful contours of a mountain, and I sensed she was nearly as relieved as I was. We spent the next few months exploring less severe communities throughout Oregon and Washington State. We hitchhiked when we could and rode the Green Tortoise bus the rest of the time. Our fellow passengers on the Tortoise were typically radical international students, American rainbow warriors, and a few very distressed Midwestern tourists who had mistakenly assumed that the Tortoise was going to be a cut-rate version of Greyhound when they bought their tickets. The main differences between the Green Tortoise and Greyhound were tapestried beds in place of seats and luggage racks, and, instead of a men’s bathroom, an oversized garden hose, called a “piss-tube,” disappeared into the dashboard and reappeared somewhere beneath the bus. For women, the bus simply pulled over, and they squatted by the side of the road while everyone watched.

  I loved the Tortoise. I made the rounds of the pretty European college girls, impressing them with my knowledge of Reagan’s demonic foreign policy, and they rewarded me with hugs, massages, and sometimes candy. Federico, the dissident Argentine poet, carried me on his back into the deep waters at the nameless lake where we stopped for lunch. At the hot springs, I had the honor of rubbing down the naked zaftig form of Sølvig, the blonde Danish backpacker. Astrid, the Swedish dancer, invited me to be her teddy bear when she went to bed. I spent the night in an upper bunk nuzzling against her chest, drunk on her redolence of lavender and fresh rain.

  In this manner we crisscrossed the Pacific Northwest until Claudia heard about Skagit County, Washington. There, the brave people were opposing the construction of two nuclear power plants and were even floating a ballot initiative to enact a nuclear weapons–free zone. These were our kind of people. In the county seat of Mount Vernon, we discovered the food co-op where the tie-dyed and patchouli-scented came for their organic produce. The Spirits guided Claudia’s eyes to the billboard, where she saw a listing for a little cabin on Guemes Island out in the San Juans.

  Our one-room cabin on Guemes was smothered by a tight canopy of evergreens that relegated the sun to more of a concept than a reality. Stinging nettles blanketed the web of little trails that ran through the forest, and every trip to the outhouse required a machete. My face, arms, and legs soon became a patchwork of white itchy bumps, and I took to peeing in a jar next to my bed.

  Trying to stop Uncle Tony from boarding his train back to San Francisco at the end of a 1983 visit to Washington.

  The cabin didn’t come with running water or electricity, so we lugged bottled water over by ferry from Anacortes and read at night by the light of candles and kerosene. My mother still read to me, but I was increasingly decoding the magic of the written word for myself, carrying myself off into fantastical times and places where boys could be kings for a day and come home to use warm running water at night.

  Claudia found employment on the island as a house cleaner, scrubbing toilets at a rustic waterside resort run by an old guy we called “Fat Butt Charlie.” I helped out by making beds and stealing toilet paper. After work, we took saunas with Tara and Tolly, the lesbian couple down the trail, or wandered the roads collecting dead branches for the woodstove.

  In the evenings, Claudia made masks from clay and plaster bandages with the hopes of selling enough of them to buy her own kiln. We invested in a table at an Anacortes street fair, wedged between the kids selling caramel corn and the lemonade stand. A lot of people wandered by, but no one wanted to spend fifty bucks on a twenty-six-pound clay mask of Eleanor Roosevelt or a bust of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the saintly Salvadoran clergyman gunned down by US-backed death squads. Nor did they want shaman-grade sun and moon masks, appropriate for the Longdance at the Autumnal Equinox or for the fertility dance on Beltane.

  After a few months, Claudia decided Guemes Island just wasn’t the community for us. Too many rich people from Seattle were buying everything up. We needed less pretentious, more down-to-earth folks. This led us back to the mainland. More specifically, this led us to the muddy corner of a hayfield east of Sedro-Woolley, Washington, the home of the Loggerodeo, where chain-saw carvers and log lassoers regularly competed.

  The hayfield was owned by a long-haired, pot-smoking contractor named Frank. He and his wife wanted my mother to home-school their two little blond children, Sequoia and Samish. In return they agreed to let us live rent-free at the corner of the field in a dilapidated trailer and decommissioned ice cream truck.

  Maybe every child is born with an innate desire to live in an ice cream truck. I was. I’d never even seen an ice cream truck before, but I already knew all about it. It was a big white refrigerated van that roamed exotic and faraway suburban neighborhoods playing metallic clown music. When the clean, well-groomed children came tumbling out of their fancy, running-water-equipped houses and streamed across their manicured lawns, a side window opened up, offering ice cream by the scoop, soft serve from a lever, ice cream sandwiches. And popsicles. Not the crappy kind we made in San Francisco by freezing apple juice on a plastic spoon. No, the genuine artificial article, glowing in unnatural colors and brimming with ingredients like FD&C Yellow No. 5 and enough preservatives to embalm a mammoth. Here, at long last, was going to be the kind of Utopia I could get behind.

  “You know the ice cream truck doesn’t drive anymore, right, Joshey?” I did, but I figured they’d probably left behind a few dozen popsicles. Maybe we could get the thing running again.

  My nice dreams melted when I saw the big box of rust sinking into the mud. The cab area was thick with spiders and their webs, and the blackberry vine
s were snaking their way through the holes in the windshield. The back of the truck was free of debris but fettered with the sharp odors of rust and mildew and a little, taunting hint of curdled cream. The green trailer with the vaguely whitish racing stripe next to the truck wasn’t much better. But these immobile vehicles became home. We stored our things in the ice cream truck—my books in the top freezer, art supplies below—and slept in the trailer.

  In front of the trailer where Claudia and I lived, east of Sedro-Woolley, Washington. The ice cream truck is on the other side.

  For a couple of hours a day, my mother schooled Sequoia, Samish, and me in English, political science, and sculpture. We also learned some history and feminist theory. Math and science, not so much. During our lessons I’d daydream about hot water and flushing toilets. After we’d finished our William Carlos Williams, we’d race along the edge of the hayfield to watch The A-Team on the little black-and-white television that Frank and his wife left out for the kids while they were at work.

  What was now three kids diagramming sentences in a moldy trailer, my mother saw as a powerful seed with the potential to germinate and grow into a national system of alternative education. But the seed’s promise would not be realized. Frank’s wife had started working the night shift, so now she could stay home and teach Sequoia and Samish herself. This meant no more “free rent” for us. Our Welfare check would have to stretch a little further if we were going to pay Frank for the right to continue living in our decrepit vehicles in the mud.

  Claudia felt like the Spirits were giving her a sign: Now was the time to really make it with her artwork. She sliced up her twenty-five-pound blocks of moist red clay from the art supply store in Seattle with new urgency. She woofed as she flattened it with her fists on the old water-warped door that served as a table. A half dozen clay plates with shallow-relief carved images of women in the woods soon took form. They were joined by several large pinch-pot bowls. With a little sweet-talking, we were able to fire her work after-hours in the studio kiln at the local community college. Now we were ready for market.