by James Gunn
“I think there's more women in the house and in the fields,” a man said. He came from the direction of the house with a big box of fruit and vegetables put up in glass jars. “I thought I heard women ... children's voices, too.”
“Children?” the leader said happily. He turned to Gavin and Elaine. “We all love children.” He turned back to his followers. “By all means, let us search them out.”
But as a new group started toward the house, a rifle shot cracked, and dust sprouted from the road. Another shot followed immediately, and a bullet pinged against the side of a truck.
“On the other hand,” the leader said hastily, “we must not force ourselves upon the unwilling. Get started!” he said to his driver, and the jeep lurched forward. The leader sat down hard in the back seat. The caravan made a wide circle in the grass, returned to the road, and passed through the splintered gate while rifle bullets nervously searched the air.
In a few minutes they were back on the divided highway, heading south, a motley, ragged wagon train of dilapidated and antiquated vehicles filled with shouting, singing people and complaining animals.
“So, Professor,” Gavin thought, “Apollo may have driven off the centaurs, but not before they looted the temple.”
“Wouldn't it be simpler just to grow your own food?” he asked the leader, seated beside him.
The leader smiled. “You can call me Reich. Or Third. That's short for the Third Reich, as some of the old consciousness groups call me, or Reich the Third, as my friends call me. And we do grow our own food. We just grow it on other people's farms, and when we need it, we come and get it. That's simple enough, isn't it?”
Elaine had turned around in her seat. “For you, yes.”
“The unremitting labor necessary to proper agriculture in this climate is deadening to the spirit,” Reich said. “Most work available in our society is meaningless, degrading, and inconsistent with self-realization. It is work, unrelenting, driven, consuming, that comes between the professor and his students, the lawyer and his family, the bank employee and the beauty of nature.”
“Somebody has to do it” Elaine said.
“Let those do it who must,” Reich replied. “Let others get by without it if they can. Freedom from such work, making possible the development of an individual's true potential as a human being, is among the greatest and most vital forms of liberation.”
“So you go around liberating other people's produce,” Gavin said.
Reich beamed at him. “You understand,” he said.
“Why don't you simply pool your minimum annual incomes and buy what you need?” Gavin asked.
Reich's smile turned to a frown. “And collaborate with a government which has always told us we are an incredibly rich country when we are actually desperately poor—poor in most of the things that throughout the history of mankind have been cherished as riches? If you accept its charity, you consent to its tyranny.”
“They cut you off, didn't they?” Elaine said.
“They called us a conspiracy,” Reich said. “Just because we had a little unscheduled visitation on the town of Taos.”
The caravan rolled steadily down the highway, heading south. The even squares of the fields on either side were like a giant checkerboard man had laid down upon the earth to make it comprehensible. The fields were brown, now that winter was almost upon this high land, but they looked as if they would be green and fertile again; and here and there, automated electric machinery harvested corn or soybeans, or plowed the soil to leave a black square among the brown.
On their right, the mountains kept pace with them. To Gavin they seemed like jagged parapets of a great wall which barred humanity from a promised land.
The caravan stopped twice on the road to the commune called Cockaigne somewhere north of Taosonce to let Billie get into the truck with the cows and complete their milking, once to refuel the internal-combustion engines with gasoline brought along in colorful and oddly shaped pottery jars.
Toward evening they arrived at an arid place closer to the mountains and some ten miles from the big highway down narrow, winding roads through valleys and along the sides of foothills. Tired fenceposts and sagging barbed wire guarded the commune. Weeds grew in the fields among volunteer corn and milo and shatter cane; here and there, in a fit of enthusiasm, a little patch of land had been weeded and planted with carrots or potatoes or tomatoes or lettuce and then left to the bugs and the birds, the elements and the animals; but they stood out amid the general decay like reminders of what man could do to improve the productivity of the land if he could sustain his desire.
“If you talk to a farmer about ecology,” the Professor said once, “he is likely to reply, ‘You should have seen this place when nature was running it.'”
Depressions at the edge of fields and discarded siphons suggested that once the land had been nourished by an irrigation system, but that had been long ago. Now the weeds grew taller in silted and useless ditches. Here and there, the rusted remains of farm machinery poked out of the weeds like the bones of long-extinct dinosaurs.
“Some dull, industrious people farmed this land once,” Reich said, “but they got tired and gave up and left it to us.”
The whole place looked tired, Gavin thought, as if the land had given up on the people. The dust from the rutted dirt road they traveled now was dry and dead, and mixed with it was a growing smell of human wastes and decay.
The caravan neared a group of farm buildings and ramshackle hutches thrown together out of old wood and tin. Men, women, and a few children emerged into a littered patch of land trampled into uniform, weedless, packed dirt marred here and there by the soot and charred wood of old campfires. The people from the huts shouted and waved and pranced in celebration of the returning scavengers.
Gavin could tell from the set of Elaine's shoulders hat she didn't like this place. He shrugged. They didn't have to stay if they didn't like it, and they had gained two hundred miles on their journey south.
Reich was standing up in the jeep again. “We come,” he shouted, “bringing the earth's plenty to its chosen people.”
Earth's chosen people swarmed around the caravan, marveling at the bounty in the trucks, helping unload them of sacks and boxes, leading animals down ramps and into improvised enclosures, laughing at piles of dung the weary cattle left in the commons. Those who had nothing to carry or lead danced around as if they were improvising out of an irrepressible joy in living.
Gavin felt his opinion of the place begin to shift. After all, what did cleanliness and order matter?
Reich turned to Gavin and Elaine, smiling as if he had invented his followers. “Aren't they marvelous?” he said. “Aren't they wonderful?”
Gavin began to think that maybe they were marvelous and wonderful. He had always been able to feel other people's abandon, even though he was basically a spectator. He climbed out of the jeep and reached to help Elaine, but she already was on the ground. They looked up at Reich, his arms spread wide toward his people in a gesture of bounty and openness, like a man performing a miracle with fish and bread or a god prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. The sunset on the nearby Sangre de Cristos Mountains turned his face and hands the color of blood.
As the shadows of the peaks began to stretch into the camp, the carefree people prepared a feast Pigs were killed, squealing and bloody, and spitted over an open fire of old wood and manure, and when those ran low, one of the shacks was demolished for its lumber, as if the world ended today.
Vegetables were peeled and sliced and dumped into open pots with water and meat to simmer. Men and women worked side-by-side, sharing in everything, with an occasional half-naked child joining in the joyous activities as well; other children, too small to help, played around the shacks or in the dirt and casual vegetation of the fields. Sometimes, while they worked, a man and a woman's hands would meet in a special way, and they would stop whatever they were doing and walk together to one of the shacks or out into the
fields.
They were a strange group, Gavin thought—students grown middle-aged, with a few young people and a few more children. Reich was the oldest person in the group; he must have been sixty, approaching seventy. Like him, the others dressed in a variety of costumes expressing their attitudes or their moods of the moment, but all of them wore denim jeans, as if this were their badge of membership. To this they added individualizing touches: handmade belts and fancy blouses, ragged jackets, military coats, or opera cloaks; they liked jewelry—they wore rings and bracelets, and around their necks, men and women, decorations made of various kinds of metal and semiprecious stones or just pieces of colored rock strung together. Many of them wore headbands or strange, tattered hats.
As the shadows of the nearby peaks closed over the camp like the jaws of night, the sunny day grew colder, and the members of the group began to edge closer to the fire, both for warmth and to smell the delicious odors given off by bubbling pots and turning spits. Even the children stopped playing their games of pusher and narc, of cops and protesters, and came to huddle beside adults and stare into the flames and whimper occasionally at the hunger in their bellies and the anticipated feast.
Someone brought a guitar out of a shack and began to pick out a tune. A few people began to hum. Soon the gathering shadows were filled with song: sentimental songs of the open road or youthful companions or the discovery of truth, protest songs of alienation and terror and yearnings, hymns to drugs and free love, militant songs of coming revolution or of barricades in the streets...
Gavin recognized a few of them, thought others sounded familiar, and had never heard the rest. But everyone in camp except the newcomers knew the words and joined in the singing, sometimes clapping in time to the music. It was a communal experience that Gavin found moving in spite of himself, in spite of the elderly incongruity of many around the fire, and he found himself warming to the life of the commune as his body was warmed by the fire.
By the time the singing died away, the people turning the spits indicated that the feast was ready. Big knives appeared to carve long slices of roasted meat into waiting plates and impatient hands. Big ladles added vegetables to bowls and cups. Loaves of bread were torn apart. The eating began.
The cold mountain air and a whole day without food made Gavin ravenous, and he did not notice until he was almost full that the pork was burned on the outside and underdone on the inside, and that everything lacked salt and other seasoning. But it was good, better even than the elegant meal in Sally's Denver mansion on china with crystal and silver, and Gavin at last put down his plate, wiped his greasy fingers on his shirt, sighed, and was content.
He lay back on grass beyond the immediate family circle around the fires, with the night full upon the world, and looked over at Elaine, who had taken no pork but had eaten stew and bread, and at Billie a few feet away, her face smeared with pork fat and the heat of the fire. Her eyes looked stunned, as if she was overcome by the food and the heat and the colorful figures around the fire, and the changes wrought in her life within a few hours.
In spite of everything, Gavin thought, these were his people, even if they were old. He looked up at the stars, and they were clear and close and cold.
He smelled tobacco smoke and a more acrid smell, like dry leaves burning. He lay there, smelling them and enjoying the contentment of a full stomach and the companionship of brothers and sisters, and Elaine spoiled it. She leaned over him and whispered, “Let's get out of here.”
“What?” Gavin asked.
“I feel uneasy,” she said. “Call it intuition.”
“Oh, come on,” Gavin said. “Let's lay up here for a few days, rest up for the remainder of the trip.”
“Something's going to happen,” Elaine insisted.
“What could happen way out here?” Gavin said. “These just aren't your kind of people.”
Before he could say more, a rhythmic clapping had begun from the group sitting around the fires, and someone shouted, “The Ballad.” Others took it up: “The Ballad! The Ballad!”
Gavin sat up and saw a small boy run past with a joint in his hand.
Some of the others had pushed together a platform out of boxes and planks, and they were boosting Reich up onto it. He only half-resisted, and when he was up he stood in front of them, his hands on his hips, his long gray hair swinging. “You want the Ballad?”
“The Ballad! The Ballad!”
Reich struck a pose like an old-fashioned troubadour and lifted a clear tenor toward the sky.
“Let me sing you a song of Consciousness Three.”
“Consciousness Three,” sang the others, like antiphony.
“Of you and me,” Reich sang.
“Consciousness Three,” responded the others, and so it went through the rest of the ceremony. At least, that's what it seemed like to Gavin, like a ritual, like a confirmation of their beliefs, of themselves.
“On our legs we wear jeans
because they are cheap,
because they are earthy,
sensual, free.
“Expressing the shape of the leg,
shaped to the leg that wears them.
“They nudge the wearer with deep questions.
Their freedom reminds him he has choice.”
“But what about bell bottoms,” the crowd shouted.
“Bell bottoms are better,” Reich sang.
“Like jeans they express the body
-but they give the ankles a special freedom as
if to invite dancing in the street.
“A touch football game in bell bottoms
is like folk dancing or ballet.
“Bell bottoms are happy,
comic,
rollicking.
“No one can take himself seriously
in bell bottoms.
“For we are Consciousness Three.”
“Are we!” came the response.
“We are Consciousness Three.”
By the flickering light of the fire in the night, Gavin saw Billie being led into the darkness by a young man and a middle-aged man, and he felt a touch of regret.
“First there was Consciousness One.”
“It's done,” the others sang.
“First there was Consciousness One.
Immigrants
from class and village,
seeking new hope,
making a new beginning,
freed from the past,
building a new community,
innocent and free.
“The sovereign individual
turning the wheel of plenty.
“But then came self-interest,
competition,
suspicion,
to confirm its thought that
human nature is bad,
and struggle is man's condition.
“Consciousness One alienated man
from environment
and society,
from man's own needs and functions.
“Money called the tune;
loss of reality,
gross corporeality.
“Set in a sterile model of the past,
spooning ice cream while piped-in ragtime
tinkles unheard.
“That was Consciousness One.”
“It's done,” came the antiphony.
“That was Consciousness One.”
“What was that sound?” Elaine asked.
“I didn't hear anything,” Gavin said.
“Then there was Consciousness Two.”
“It's new.”
“Then there was Consciousness Two.
“From Consciousness One
disaster had come:
robber barons,
business piracy,
ruinous competition,
unreliable products,
false advertising,
grotesque inequality,
excessive individualism,
lack of coordination,
a gangs
ter world.
Besides the chaos of insecurity
and powerlessness,
“Man became the plaything of circumstances
and forces beyond control,
like the Great Depression,
and turned to Fascism.
“A new Consciousness arose
to organize and coordinate,
arrange things in a rational hierarchy,
and sacrifice for a common good.
“Consciousness Two appeared:
businessmen,
liberal intellectuals,
educated professionals,
technicians,
middle-class suburbanites,
labor-union leaders,
Gene McCarthy supporters,
blue-collar workers with newly purchased homes,
old-time leftists,
members of the American Communist party,
the Kennedys,
the New York Times editorial page,
liberalism, and the Democratic party.
“And they produced
a commitment of the individual to the public interest,
more social responsibility by private business,
more affirmative government action,
regulation,
planning.
more rational administration and management
and the welfare state.
“But possessing still a
profoundly pessimistic view of man as an
aggressive,
competitive,
power-seeking,
jungle beast.
“And the joy of life became a quest for
power,
success,
status,
acceptance,
popularity,
achievement,
rewards,
excellence,
cooperation,
and a rational, competent mind.
“The result: alienation, and no room for
awe,
wonder,
mystery,
accidents,
failure,
helplessness,
and magic.
“And to a young person
the corporate state beckoned,
with a skeleton grin,
'Step right in,
you'll love it—
it's just like living.'”
