Life: A Novel of the Baby Boom

Exile and Exploration

The Road to Canada

In the fall of 1973, the CIA engineers a coup in Chile that claims the life and topples the regime of Salvador Allende, the freely elected Marxist president. The oil-producing countries of the Mideast create a crisis in world oil markets with an unprecedented embargo on oil. None of this matters to me, in my state of personal turmoil.

Jill moves out. I feel badly for her, somehow responsible. I liked her - at least what I saw of her - but made little effort to befriend her, to make her feel part of our household scene. But she'll make out all right. It's probably for the best. I'm considering moving out myself. I just can't take too much more of the hassles with Jennifer, Glenda and Rondel. If I moved to San Francisco with Rondel, it would solve the problem quickly, I imagine.

Into this hornet's nest flies Marilyn, a friend of Glenda and Jennifer, visiting from Ohio for a while. In fact she's there when I return from Baltimore. Who's this chick, I wonder, sunbathing topless out there by the garden?

Since I'm right back into my six-to-three schedule at Air Cal, I don't have much time to get acquainted with Marilyn. She's another art student, I discover, and has the serene and finely-chiseled countenance of a Greek goddess, but with honey-brown hair. I begin to notice erections creeping up on me just looking at her across the supper table; I soak up the soothing, modulated tones of her sparse conversation. I only see her for two and a half days before she's due to take off back to Ohio, on a morning flight from Oakland.

I offer to take Marilyn to the airport when I go in for my morning shift. She'll have a three-hour wait. We both turn in early - me on my vast, queen-sized bed with the gold-colored sheets, she on her made-up bed on the living-room couch. Jennifer and Glenda retire to their respective rooms early as well, allowing us to sleep . . . in theory.

I couldn't help myself. There she was, all alone out there on her lumpy couch; I lay on my roomy mattress with arms outstretched on the bare sheets - it seemed a shame. The more I thought about it, the more I started vibrating with desire, for the simple (oh, so simple) companionship of that young woman out there, probably awake in a similar state. What could I lose, I thought, if I were to offer to share my bed with her for the rest of the night? It was an act of charity.

I got up and went to her.

"Marilyn," I whispered, leaning over her, clad in my underwear. "Are you awake?"

She stirred, opened her eyes, looked at me in the half-darkness. "Uh, yeah, I guess, sort of."

"Umm, I was wondering, uh, would you like to sleep in my bed tonight?"

She looked at me for a moment, then smiled a thin, subtle smile. "Sure, Okay." She wore a light, clinging top, underpants. I took her hand, held it a second, let it go and she followed me to my bed.

Immediately in bed I put an arm around her shoulders. She turned to me, put her hand on my waist. Then, slowly, inexorably, our passion mounted, our skimpy clothes came off, and we fucked like there was no tomorrow.

Indeed, for us, there wasn't. Except for the last, delicious, lingering crush of our bodies in bed after the alarm sounded . . . and the intimate, rather quiet ride together in dawn to the airport, where I bought her a pastry and coffee and sat with her after working my first two flights. At 9:05 she took off forever into the sky for Ohio.

So what, I figured, if that last loving embrace in bed had registered as a twenty-minute lateness on my time-card. It wasn't the first time that had happened. And this time, it was worth it.

---

We interviewed a couple of new prospective tenants for the house on Hillcroft Way, and finally settled on David Wine, a wise young Vonnegut scholar from Oregon’s Reed College. He had a wry sense of humor and a sharp mind, and it was good to add some male energy to balance the household vibes. He and Glenda hit it off especially well. I doubted that anything would come of that combination: she probably outweighed him by ten pounds. And it seemed good for her to have someone to tell her troubles to besides the unsympathetic Jennifer and the source of the troubles, myself. So now I could leave them sitting together on the couch, jawing and rolling joints, and get myself to bed at a decent hour for my four-thirty alarm.

It was those long drives across the Bay to see Rondel that did me in. Inevitably he'd need to make up for lost time by conversations long into the night - making plans for our "Christmas Celebration" play in Carpenteria, telling me all the gossip about his students and their relationships merry-go-rounds, quizzing me about "how things were going" at my house in Walnut Creek. He'd begun pressing me more and more to ditch that scene and move in with him. Rent-free, he said. In a month's time, it turned out, I found myself with little choice but to take him up on the offer.

In the meantime, there was more creative stuff to work on together, another project Rondel had cooked up for our collaboration. He arranged a studio performance for "The Pete Scott Show," on cable TV in Pacifica. We did a couple of rehearsals with Rondel's dance class and then took the class down to the charming little suburb south along the coast from San Francisco. There the host interviewed us briefly and, as I trotted out "Starshine" again (this time off camera), the dancers wove into planetary motion. I didn't know what the ratings were on Cable Channel 8 in Pacifica on Wednesday night, but it would have pleased me if a dozen arts-conscious souls on that craggy coast, that rain-driven evening in November, tuned in to our performance.

---

Interlude: October. It's baseball playoff time. I call up Kevin and secure a couple of tickets to game four in Oakland, guaranteed in the best-of-five series after a split in Baltimore. The resurgent Birds are back in form to challenge the new World Champion A's. I'll root for my old favorites, though I've found some enthusiasm for my adopted "home" team over the past two seasons, with the daily press proclaiming their prowess and with twenty or thirty thousand fans cheering them to victory live, when I attend the games at the Coliseum.

I run into some luck when a fellow baggage handler who could care less about baseball switches with me so I can make the playoff game on Wednesday afternoon. Thursday is my day off, so if there's a fifth game, I can catch it as well, if tickets are still available.

Kevin picks me up in Walnut Creek on his way in from Lafayette. We tune into the pre-game warm-up on the radio the rest of the way into Oakland. Today's starters will be 22-game winner Jim Palmer for the Birds, facing Oakland's Vida Blue. Palmer beat Blue with a five-hitter in the opening game in Baltimore, 6-0. Oakland came back with victories in games two and three and could clinch the pennant with a comeback by Blue today.

Kevin and I park. We join the crowds of pedestrians streaming to the park from all directions now, like ants called to their queen by some primordial signal. I have an intuition about this upcoming game - something about two names who will star in today's event. The names are Etchebarren and Jackson - but do I mean Reggie, the A's superstar, or Grant, the as-yet undefeated O's reliever? It will make a difference. I'm somehow confident the Birds will wing it, to even the series at two games apiece. I tell Kevin my premonition. He scoffs. I rub it in - "No, seriously, come on. This game's already decided, I tell ya. Now, do you want to come with me to tomorrow's game, or not?"

"Hey," Kevin whines, "There' not gonna be a game tomorrow, you bird-brained idiot. The A's are gonna stomp their ass today. Besides, no, I gotta finish painting my parents' garage tomorrow, if the weather stays clear. I was lucky to get away today."

"All right, but you wait and see. There will be a game five." I started wondering who else I might invite. Didn't Jill say she followed the A's? I had her new address and phone number, somewhere.

Wednesday, October 10, 1973:

Andy Etchebarren hit the biggest home run of his career and so did Bobby Grich as the Orioles bounced back from a 4-0 deficit and the prospect of certain elimination with five late inning runs to tie the ALCS at two games apiece.

Jim Palmer started against Vida Blue for the second time, but didn't get past the second inning when the A's put together four hits including three doubles to score three times and drive Palmer to the showers with only one out. Bob Reynolds came on to pitch effectively through the sixth inning although yielding a single run in the 6th that gave the A's a seemingly insurmountable lead.

Meanwhile, Blue was breezing through the first six innings allowing only two hits and no runs. Then in the 7th the tide began to turn with one out. Earl Williams walked, Don Baylor singled and Brooks Robinson followed with another single that plated the Birds' first run. Then Etchebarren stepped up and smacked a Blue offering over the left field fence providing an instant deadlock at 4-4. That blow finished Blue in favor of reliever Rollie Fingers who retired the side without further damage.

However, Grich hit one out off Fingers leading off the 8th to put the Birds on top to stay. It remained for Grant Jackson, who had entered the game in the bottom of the 7th, to get the A's out in the 8th and 9th, a chore he performed with great efficiency.

When it came to the finale on Thursday I had no such magic touch, at least for the events on the field. Game five pitted young, lanky Doyle Alexander against Catfish Hunter, the A's ace at 21-5 on the year, and winner of game two. I was confident of the Orioles' chances no longer, even after such an inspiring victory as that of the previous day. But being there was the important thing, watching history in the making. I thought it strange that the crowd the day before had numbered barely more than twenty thousand, after the near-sellouts of fifty thousand in Baltimore. But this laid-back West Coast attitude allowed me to get tickets on game day, with an even smaller gate showing for the rubber-match.

Jill was up for the date; in fact she seemed particularly pleased to come along. She even sported a green and gold A's cap, to go with a green T-shirt and aqua short-shorts. I was feeling somewhat cavalier myself and walked alongside her with a tentative arm around her tiny shoulders - but only as if to say, here, let's be friends (maybe even special friends), and not lose each other while we wade through this sea of people. She responded at first with surprise - a quick look that said "What?!" - and then placed a small hand in the small of my back. Now who, I dimly thought, was leading whom?

I dropped my arm and took her hand as we came to the opening in the concourse that led to our section, and wound our way out and down to our seats. We were way up in the upper deck behind first base. But it was all right.

We started right in on the cold beer being hawked from the aisles all around us. The game got underway: Hunter in control, the A's touching Alexander for three runs by the fourth inning. Palmer came on to pitch shutout relief, after his short work the previous day, but the damage was done and the A's came away champs. I drowned my disappointment in beer; frail Jill matched me cup for cup. We had our own thing going: as the Birds dove downhill, I compensated with derisive jokes, that Jill could tolerate in the magnanimous spirit of the victor.

We stayed till the bitter end and then staggered out with the rest of the crowd, holding each other more firmly now for support. It felt as if we were old buddies; or was it something else? In the clearer space of the parking lot, we paused to find out. We stopped as one and looked at one another, a flash of sober seriousness cutting through the beery haze. Jill's green eyes sparkled with a new intensity. I wrapped my arms around her so far, my hands almost found her little breasts in front again. We kissed with a mad, driven vehemence. I could feel her T-shirt riding up in back. I grasped her naked flesh. She pressed her body hard against mine - hard, yet yielding, soft.

Giggles from passersby floated into our consciousness . . . we didn't care. We had what we needed - were taking what life offered us, without compromise for the externals of the situation. It was right now that mattered, us, right there, in the moment, where love springs alive.

Jill drove me in her green VW to her new apartment in the Oakland heights. It was in a tastefully landscaped house, a first-floor bedroom with attached kitchenette. Later, she would ask me why we hadn't gotten together before; hadn't I cared for her then, when she lived in the same house? But first, we had to burn out that raging fire, naked and lustful in her bed. Jill cried when I bucked too hard - I eased up, too late. How different it was for me, with her tender and narrow frame, after Glenda's ample softness. When it was done, all too soon, I lay on top of her, then rolled off beside her. A tear tracked down her downy cheek.

After a long silence, we started to talk. I tried to answer her question.

"I don't know, there it was kind of like, we were brothers and sisters. You know."

"What about Glenda, then? You and Glenda?"

"Yeah, I see what you mean. Oh, I don't know. Maybe it would have been better if she and I had stayed like brother and sister, too."

"Are you still, together? You know what I mean - "

I had to take a deep breath. This was difficult terrain, even to cover in my own poor brain. "I guess I'd have to say we're trying to end it. I've told Rondel as much, told myself, even told her. But then when I go there and see her again, and feel the energy we share, then I'm lost again. I lose my sense of resolution and control. I think, for what? What am I trying to accomplish, by thinking it's all over?"

Jill has turned away, turned off from the truth of my confession. Her rosebud nipples have flattened out to small tan buttons. But I go on. "Openness rubs off," Glenda is fond of saying, and I follow her advice.

"But you see, Jill, then I get these other flashes, like what am I doing this for, getting so involved with her? I don't really, what you would call in the true sense, love her. I mean I'm not ready to go off and live with her somewhere - and I don't think I ever would. And I doubt if she feels that way either, about me. It's more like, just trying to enjoy the kind of love that does exist between us, for what it's worth."

Jill turns back to me, clear-eyed. She places a hand on my chest, in the bony middle ribs near my heart. "Okay," she says. "That all sounds very good, for you at least. Now what about me? Where do I fit in?"

I smile at her, broadly - out of nervousness at this examination, or joy at her continued interest? I forge ahead: "It's all so new, so unexpected for me, too. I don't know where you fit in. Where do I fit in?" With that remark I cup a hand lightly over the tuft between her slim, still-warm thighs. It brings a grudging smile to her lips.

"Well, we'll have to see what happens, I guess."

"Do you want to continue, like this, to find out where it takes us, or whatever?"

"Yeah," she nods. Then, inexplicably, she begins to cry again. "I do," she says, "I really do."

Our little flame of passion didn't take us very far. There were two more trysts between us - an afternoon spent largely at the Oakland Zoo, that ended in Jill's bed; and a night out for supper in a restaurant on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, also ending in her bed. With each rendezvous the flame had lost some of its lustrous power. On the final morning we agreed on the naked truth that was evident between us - that we might as well forget about pursuing this affair any longer.

What did I expect? The constraints Rondel had placed on my relationship with Glenda were trying enough for all three of us. To add the complication of a fourth player made the whole game untenable.

I barely managed to get away from Rondel's apartment to make my dinner date with Jill. Rondel was furious, seeing right through my attempts to tell him it was an innocent encounter; then when I admitted I'd slept with Jill twice already, he hit the ceiling.

"You slept with that fucking little bitch how many times?"

"Twice."

"You're sure it's not any more? Four, ten times? Jesus, Will, I can't believe you'd do this to me. When you know it'll be the end for us - for me, at least. You'll go on with your lily-white life, untouched by it all, cool as a fucking cucumber - and I'll die away here, everything finished. Do you think that high-falutin' job of mine at State means anything to me? Forget it. You're the only thing that I care about - without you I might as well end the whole miserable thing. God, I can't believe you'd do this to me. And Glenda? What about her? You must be fucking her on the side, too." (Now and then, yes, Rondel, I am.) "What does little miss Jill think about that, huh? Or is she just as callous as you, and doesn't care about such low emotions as love - just raw sex, come'n get yer gentitals here: I'm female, c'mere, you tall handsome guy . . . Sheeit, it makes me sick."

"Okay, it makes you sick. But look, what do you expect? I've told you all along I like women. I'm that kind of person, like it or not. You're not going to see me change, and give up women forever."

"Uhh-huh. Okayy-fine. So what are you doing here, anyway?"

"You're my friend. I enjoy being with you. I like the work we're doing together."

"Let me ask you this. Do you love me? Does that have any meaning for you?"

"Yes. I can say I . . . love you. Maybe you have a different interpretation - "

"Fuck your intellectual interpretations, Will! You do or you don't! Which is it?"

"Okay I do. I can say I do."

"You-can-say-you-do." He shakes his head back and forth, slowly. "Wow. I'll believe it when I see it."

"So what do you want me to say? Okay, I know. We've been through it before. But it's just so hard for me. I'm a man, goddamit. I need . . . when I'm in the presence of a woman . . ."

"Any woman?"

"No - although I am attracted on some level, I guess - "

"Come on, say it."

"Well, sometimes it just happens. A particularly strong attraction - "

"It's all in your head, it's your conditioning. Can't you see that?"

"All right. Maybe so. But it's there. For me it's real, or it seems real enough - "

"Yeah, seems. That's the point, man."

"Anyway, it's five-thirty already. I told Jill I'd be there before six. I've really - "

"Okay then. Will you be back tonight?"

"Uh, I don't know. I'll probably just, um, go back to Walnut Creek, gotta work in the morning - "

"Will you come back here tonight?"

I had to think hard on that one. I stalled: "I don't know."

"Yeah. Well, if you don't, you might as well forget about that Carpenteria thing, and the conference in the spring, everything. You might as well just stay away for good. 'Cause I'll just go in there and get that bottle of sleeping pills - I'm not gonna sleep tonight anyway, till you get back - but if you don't make it, that's gonna kill me. I say it right now."

"You leave me a lot of choice. Okay, how 'bout midnight or so."

"Mm-hm. I'll be here, waiting for you."

Eleven forty-five, I'm tossing around in bed with Jill. I've hinted to her over dinner, then explained the situation in the privacy of my car on the drive to her apartment. She has no sympathy. Maybe that's why she's colder in my arms tonight, more elusive. I haven't yet penetrated her. She seems almost angry, spiteful. I can't even ask what's the matter. I know, and that's worse. She finally lets me in, but I’ve got an eye on her bedside clock and realize as the hands edge past twelve that I'd better phone Rondel. "Jill," I whisper, "I'd better call now. He said he'd kill himself tonight." I pull out of her.

"You believe that?" She tosses her head on the pillow, fighting back tears. "It's just his way of keeping reins on you."

"I know. But he means it, too. He's serious. I know he'd do it. I couldn't live with that."

"Oh, shit, I don't believe it."

"Where's the phone?"

"Over there under the window. Why don't you just leave, then, and go back there?"

I put an arm around her chest, kiss her offered neck. "I'd rather stay with you."

"Oh, God."

I turn over and get out of bed, go to the phone and dial. It rings too many times. My heart starts pounding.

Finally, the line clicks open. Rondel's voice comes on, very deep and husky - and I guess, quite drunk. I hope he hasn't mixed any barbiturates in yet. I remember Hendrix.

Hendrix, Rondel told me as promised, had made Rondel's acquaintance before a concert in Washington, D.C. As the story went, it was love at first sight. Hendrix invited him to his dressing room after the concert. Rondel had hung around after, but Hendrix hadn't shown up - must've been diverted by reporters, or managers, or groupies - female, no doubt.

Hendrix at a later time choked to death on a deadly vomit of alcohol and barbiturates.

"H'lo?"

"Rondel, it's me, Will. You doin' okay?"

"Thass a funny question. It really is; ah ha ha ha ha. All depends on what ch'ou mean, as my mammy in Memphis used to say. Ha ha. How 'bout you, Will. How you doin'?"

"All right, Rondel. Listen, I wanted to check in with you, to tell you . . . I'd be late."

"Uh-huh. Late. You already late. How late is late, huh?"

"I mean, maybe you should go to bed, not wait up for me. I'll come over tomorrow night."

"Sheeit. Are you kidding? Who you tryin' to kid?"

I look at Jill, turned away but listening. "Rondel, I want to stay here at Jill's tonight. It's what I want to do."

No response.

"Rondel?"

"Ah'm still here."

"Okay, Rondel? That's what I'm going to do. I'll see you tomorrow."

"Whatever you say. But how you gonna find me, is gonna be your story."

"Bye, Rondel."

No response.

"Bye, I'll see you," I say and hang up. I can't believe I've done it.

But then, I haven't gained much, either. Jill greets me with a stony look.

"Aren't you glad I put him off like you told me?" I demand.

She shakes her head and sighs. "This is all too crazy." We put a token arm on each other's rigid bodies and lay there mute, first staring past one another into the darkness, and then overtaken, gradually, inevitably, by sleep.

I've forgotten to set the alarm, and when early light wakes me I realize it's twenty to seven already. I'll be an hour late for work, if I'm lucky. I jump out of bed and begin dressing hurriedly. Jill pulls an eye awake. I lean down and plant a kiss on her cheek. Maybe, I think, I'll try it again with her; maybe not. Probably not. She closes her eye, feigning sleep. I don't have time to get into another pointless discussion. She doesn't either. Our tacit agreement is made.

When I struggle into the baggage room, Sam looks up at me with eyebrows raised. The other guys look at me, then away. "I punched you in at six-fifteen, guy," says Sam, but the big boss noticed you missin' on the six-forty-five. He want to see you in his office, when you git here, he say. I dunno. I risk my job . . ."

"Gray," says the man with the waxed mustache who hired me six months before, "I don't know about you. It's becoming a pattern, these latenesses. It can't go on." He stood up, reached on top of a filing cabinet and handed me an ominous-looking pink paper. "This is your official warning notice. One more time, you're gone."

Jim, the speed-pushing union steward, has already talked to me. He says they have to give you two notices, before they can give you the heave-ho. I ask the boss about this stipulation.

"Christ, we already gave you the verbal warning. Now here's the second, in black-and-white."

"Y'mean pink."

"Yeah, right. Your work has been okay, Gray. Except for these fuck-ups on the ramp with the biffy covers. That was pretty serious, y'know. But we can't have you comin' in here an hour, hour and a half late for Chrissake. Or ten, fifteen minutes every goddamn day. What's the problem?"

"My alarm doesn't always go off." A partial explanation, which in itself is true. I had the five and ten minute "doze" switch on my plastic clock, and sometimes the final ring would never sound. I tried to explain this.

"All right. Well then I suggest you get yourself another alarm clock. One more time late, and you're outa here. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

Not even a week later, both alarms (honest, Boss!) failed to go off - I had no company, was sleeping innocently in my own bed - and I was canned from the best job I'd ever had.

My car loan was only half paid off, I'd frittered away most of the remaining salary, and now I'd be hard-pressed to keep up the rent - unless I moved in with Rondel.

Yes, Rondel had survived that dreadful night. And yes, he was a changed man. He looked like he'd aged fifteen years. His jowls sagged, his red eyes had clouded over with a film of resentment; his voice was withdrawn and raspy. His once-ready smile had vanished, and his boyish, clownish humor had soured into a bitter, cynical and sarcastic irony.

But things began to look up for Rondel when I lost my job at the airport, had to come to him for a place to stay until I found work again, and had to contemplate selling my independence, my car.

He'd already sent out feelers to a couple of lesbian friends in Nevada about a Thanksgiving visit, then cancelled. Now he talked again of taking off to the Nevada desert for a respite from all this murky coast atmosphere. It sounded good to me. I bought a pair of second-hand tire chains and we barreled off for nowheresville, around snowy Lake Tahoe and then onto the unregulated highways where I could cruise once again in fifth gear. The recently-adopted fifty-five mile-an-hour speed limit on California highways had rendered my "speed gear" obsolete. Now I could run with it, on into the clear, dark desert night with Hubert Laws's "Afro-Classic," a gift from Rondel for the trip, providing the perfect soundtrack.

I worried a bit, when we reached that windblown cowboy town, that the rednecks would see us for what Rondel thought we were (a couple of queers) and run us out on a rail, tarred and feathered. But no, all was mellow - maybe they’d gotten to know the pair of cowgirls in the old Kensley ranch well enough by now, so that such arrangements were nothing to get upset about.

We sat at the bar, shopped at the general store, walked the main street, hassle-free. Celebrated a belated Thanksgiving with turkey and trimmings; rode horses out on the snow-dusted range; gave sled-rides to the neighbor kids. It was great to immerse ourselves in country life, in the real American West, the Californian outback. Rondel had cooled down somewhat from our uptight, theatrical wrangling, to appreciate some of the lost innocence of that elusive "friendship" again.

On the drive east through the mountains I'd managed okay without putting chains on; but on the return trip west we hit heavy snow in the Sierras and had to use them for about half the day. Unfortunately they didn't fit very well: a loose length of leftover chain on either rear wheel would flap around and hit the wheel-well on every revolution. In shirt order the yellow paint was gone and the chain was whapping away at bare metal. But we had to put up with it. Worse for me than the noise was the prospect of trying to sell the battered beast in that condition when I got back.

There were other problems with the car as well. I didn't have a lot of cash to sink into repairs; yet I couldn't keep up the payments without a job, either. On top of the car/job problem I didn't want to feel dependent on Rondel and so wanted to contribute fair share of the rent for his apartment.

I was not unused to such periods of limbo, by now, and I'd developed several strategies for coping. Frequent consultations of the I Ching was one; writing was another. Imagery turned dark and foreboding: dead leaves, city walls, mourning songs. I always tried to maintain a cheerful outlook in letters home, so when I couldn't quite manage the usual innocent charm, I abstained for a while. I spouted off to old friends, Dana and Warren, instead, and received encouraging responses about the promise of hope, of love to come. I took refuge in a spirit of inner transcendence - partly achieved in the very telling of the tale of woe.

December 18

My moments of deepest contentment, lately, have come, paradoxically enough, in reaction to situations of worldly peril: no job, no money, car payments and other bills due and rent coming up and no money in sight and bad time of year to sell a car especially a convertible with a shabby top and broken resonator and headlights out and paint scraped off the side from snow chains bought used to save $5. Not to mention the all-present energy squeeze, the crush on green land, the hordes of new us, the end of the world; and so nowhere to turn but up and in, if not to down and out.

I tugged at my bootstraps and tugged again, and came up with a variety of new and renewed strategies for survival:

1. I could try to get back on at the gas station.

2. I could hope to get back painting with Mr. Haney in the spring.

3. I developed, in a fury of creative inspiration, a whole program of arts workshops for progressive schools, teaching creative awareness and appreciation by the simple but supremely flexible mechanism of translation or interpretation of one art form to another: using a matrix of words, movement, visual art and music. Thus, poetry into dance, painting into words, sounds to convey a sense of motion, and so on. Some combinations would be common, obvious: any vocal song, any dance to music, most album covers. Other "translations" would be more esoteric. I had confidence that I was onto a new and exciting approach to arts education and that, while I was hardly expert (indeed barely competent) in any of the individual media except language, I could probably lead a class through such exercises. I drew up a package of mimeographed descriptions of workshops at three graded levels - spiced with quotes by Alan Watts, Marshall McLuhan and Kahlil Gibran - and mailed them out to every alternative school in the Bay Area; then crossed my fingers.

4. I wrote to UBC again, asking for confirmation that I could be admitted the following fall to the MA program, and applying for financial aid.

 

Around this time, I also tried a couple of strategies for not surviving. Fortunately, I failed. The first consisted of swallowing a couple of unmarked capsules of some unknown, grayish-brown substance that I figured were probably powdered mushrooms. One of the Air Cal baggage handlers had taken it into his head to rifle through a backpack one day, right out on the tarmac; he'd proudly pulled out a pill bottle packed with these juicy-looking horse-caps. He gave me some. I saved them for the proper occasion - an otherwise boring day in December when I took one and the walked out to the nearby beach. Nothing happened. I took another. Still nothing, an hour later. Oh, it was a nice, mellow outdoor experience: the sea breeze, the sparkling sand, the wheeling gulls . . . but no supernatural high. They must have been duds. Just as well - they could have been heroin, strychnine, who knows what? After the fact, I saved one out to have tested at the free lab in Berkeley set up for testing drug samples. It came back marked, "No Known Substance." I threw out the rest.

Then came the drive south to Carpenteria for the long-awaited "Christmas Celebration." This was a multi-media production that Rondel and I had worked on for months. There was a core story, a traditional Christmas play, which was surrounded by a lot of New Age pageantry having to do with the heralded arrival of the comet Kahoutek in the winter sky. With the memory of my two speeding tickets in mind, I took it easy on the freeway south but then drove with abandon through the coastal mountains. It was hard to keep my eyes on the road with an incredible sunset over the vast dry valley and distant peaks, yet I was also enjoying what might be, I feared, my last chance to enjoy the thrill of handling a sports car on such a twisting, secluded course. I nearly twisted right off the mountainside. I took a curve too fast, and when I threatened to careen right off the road, down a precipice yawning over a valley thousands of feet below, I braked and spun a full hundred and eighty degrees, to a stop providentially in the middle of the road, facing backwards.

My heart raced on. I thanked my lucky stars that were just coming out, twinkling merrily at me; turned around gingerly and motored on to the coast. Dumb, dumb me, I nearly did it again. This time on a flat, coming out of the hills into Carpenteria, I took another curve too fast and tried to brake. My sandal caught in the gas pedal and I put on the speed instead of the brakes. I landed with a sickening crunch broadside against a signpost, wheels still churning dust and gravel, until I managed to bring the clutch foot down onto the brake. I was mostly unhurt - just a gouge on my bare right foot from the metal corner of the gas pedal. The car, however, had an ugly large dent in the fender, that would cost more than I cared to think about to fix.

When I got back "home" to Rondel's after our play, I asked my friend Mr. Ching what to do about the car. "He lends grace to his toes," Ching told me, "leaves the carriage, and walks." Oh; okay. That's pretty clear; now how do I sell this wreck? "Work on what has been spoiled. Supreme success. It furthers one to cross the great water." I guess that means Wayne, my buddy at the garage next to the car wash. He said he knows a guy who does bodywork cheap. And I can get a used starter for $25 . . .

---

I got on part-time at the gas station, starting Christmas Eve take it or leave it. Work would be sporadic, filling in as needed.

The much-ballyhooed comet never showed up.

New Year's Day 1974, I walk along Scenic Drive Beach with Rondel, in the rainwashed, clear cold January air. Crowds of couples amble free before a brilliant watery horizon, where two ships sit on the world's edge: one coming, one going.

January 2, the phone rings - I know it's Gerald, at the car wash. My first impulse is to ignore it. But I'm not really in a position to turn down work.

Rondel drives me in to Berkeley, not caring to rot at home alone. He drops me off, and I go to work cheerfully pumping gas. Around eleven, the owner, Bill Lee, drives up in his white LTD. He says we are to stop accepting credit cards. Big Daddy Texaco, he says, has squeezed out the little man, the independent retailer. I reply with the first thought that runs through my head: American democracy as we know it is dead. Actually I fail to grasp the full extent of the economic and political sense of the situation. That's okay - I just work here. A woman customer overhears and asks me if I want to run for President. I say no thank you, fill 'er up? Later we find out it was only a false alarm - or a dress rehearsal - and plastic money once again rules.

After work I shop for groceries, paying in food stamps that I've started collecting in my state of poverty.

I endure the hour and twenty-minute bus ride to 34th Avenue, across the Bay and at the far end of the city.

That evening I go with Rondel to see American Company Theatre's House of Bernarda Alba, an amateurish production of power and tragedy from another time and place. Its truth stands dark in my soul, however, as I sip warm sherry at home afterwards, my eyes glazed from within at the sight of the hideous walls imposed by society's rules against the natural forces of sexual attraction alive in the human breast. Today, I reflect, this repression is not nearly as rigid in form as Lorca saw in Spain, yet the hangups are there, the expectations, inhibitions, hopes, dreams and fears of everyone about whether and how they'll be matched with another sole human wish-bone. And so, I wonder, we've lost Nature for what?

The part-time job gives me time to peddle my arts workshops around the Bay Area. I make my pitch at Pinel School in Martinez, out in the dry, interior Diablo Valley near Walnut Creek. There's a dusty schoolyard, a one-room converted barn with twenty kids aged six to thirteen. I talk to the teachers - a wispy, fair-haired woman who looks like Joni Mitchell, and a man with a pony tail that flows down to the seat of his jeans. "Sounds kind of far out," the guy tells me." Why don't you try it out? Do you have anything you can do with them right now?"

Funny he should ask. At the moment the kids are running around, in and out of the barn, kicking up clouds of dust, shouting . . .

"Hey, everybody," the woman sings out, "come in and siddown, our friend Will here is going to try something with you."

Nervous titters filter through the dust. Amazingly, the kids troop into a cohesive group and sit on the floor at my feet. I'm standing there with my folder in hand, my button-down shirt, gulping: theory is one thing, but I've never actually stood before a class of actual, waiting children before. What do I do now? Their attention is a blessing, but I sense that it's a temporary grace. Already whispers begin; elbows start twitching . . .

The teachers stand back, as if guarding the doorway, watching. I open my folder, latch onto the first box I see in my matrix of "Level I: Up to Grade Six." In that box is the intersection of WORDS and MOVEMENT - good, one I've been working with a lot in the projects with Rondel. I read the suggestions I've written in the box: Act out single words. Body sign language. Pantomime. Use Nature, imagined objects, situations, characters. "Use imagined characters?" Now what did I mean by that? Hmmm . . .

The natives are restless. I hear muttering behind me, too, where the teachers are still standing, waiting.

"Okay," I start, "who wants to volunteer?"

No one volunteers. I realize I haven't told them what for.

"Okay, look. What we're going to do is take words, and act them out, put them into movement."

Blank stares.

"You know, like, wind" - and I take my arms and hands and swing them over my head, swaying and swirling back and forth.

A few nervous laughs.

"See what I mean? Give me another word."

A girl sitting cross-legged in the front says, "Barn."

"Hmm. That's a hard one, since it isn't moving. How about - "

"I know," says a thin boy at the side of the group. He stands up, holds his arms out and drops the forearms down, forming a squarish shape. "Like this."

I hear appreciative murmurs from the others.

"Yeah, great," I say. "You did figure a way to show it, even though it's not moving. That's fine. Now how about - "

I guess the boy felt slighted. He started flapping his arms and dancing around in the open space beside the seated group, yelling "Caw! Caw! Caw!"

Uproarious laughter rewarded his humor. A couple of other kids got up and started joining him. I stood helpless at the front and looked for help from the teachers. They'd disappeared. I looked back, and not a soul remained seated. The entire class had become a flock of raucous crows.

"That's good," I shouted. "Birds, a flock of birds . . ."

After a minute or so of this madness I managed to calm down that unruly but good-natured bunch, by moving on from the theatrical to the sedentary activity of having them color pictures to illustrate a story I read aloud.

"How'd it go?" the teachers asked me afterward, sipping coffee in the farmhouse next to the barn.

I told them I'd survived; that it was fun, even. We arranged a couple more visits - on a volunteer basis, of course. The school ran on a shoestring budget as it was.

I drove away in good spirits, high on nervous energy. On a lark I took the turnoff to Walnut Creek instead of driving straight through towards Oakland. I pulled up to the house on Hillcroft, parked, and walked up to the glass door. Glenda was standing in the living room. David Wine was there, too, and Jennifer, but I only saw Glenda: her eyes so round and black and deep with an infinite tenderness, that I was instantly swept into her power, under her sensuous spell, with no hope of recall.

---

Back to work pumping gas: I go over to serve two old black men in a pickup truck. They're muttering.

"What d'ja say?"

The yellow-eyed driver turns to me: "Oh, we was talkin' about somethin' you don't know anythin about." He pauses to glance at his companion. Back to me, "You don't know anythin about watermelons, do ya?" Snaggletoothed smile under the bushy gray mustache whiskers.

"Well I sure do like 'em."

"Bet ya never tasted watermelons like they're spose to be eaten - right out of the patch early in the mornin, nice and cold, and fresh. Taste better when ya don't have to pay for 'em, heah, heah."

I go on about my work, with thoughts of selling a car, a soul, a body, a life. I sense a return to old dark moods, lurking unseen behind windows on the back side of a city now stretched under an arctic sky; Mt. Tam shines its snow-peaked top into steel cloud strips burnt orange by a distant sun.

The huge pale moon slips up through its own clouds to take the sun's place in the high journey west. The comet is still away, waiting for a century more prepared to see. The city basks nevertheless under a rare night shine, as we settle for closer cosmic truth. First our own house must be put in order.

And the romance lingers.One hug and the surging has returned. Glenda, Glenda . . . How to distinguish between shades of feeling so large they can move the whole universe, is so difficult for the breathing cells of human brain that they rebel by just breathing, to wait out the waves of a storm-wracked sea of emotion. They bob on top, and the waves roll by.

Back in San Francisco, on days when I'm not working, and when Rondel's teaching, I consult the I Ching again, and again to try to steer myself to the right course of action - or to attain clarity about the course I'm on. Some questions are specific: what to do about the car, a career, my relationship with Rondel, or Glenda. Sometimes I just ask for a commentary of the time, advice for a philosophical outlook on life in general. The readings seem helpful, appropriate, at times quite pointed. On the other hand, the more coins I toss, the more the readings contradict one another, by feeding all my contradictory impulses.

Obstruction: Going leads to obstructions; hence he comes back.

Shock: Thus in fear and trembling, the superior man sets his life in order and examines himself.

Difficulty at the beginning: Nothing should be undertaken.

To take a maiden to wife brings good fortune.

If you are sincere, whatever you do succeeds; thus the superior man walks in lasting virtue and carries on the business of teaching.

Bound with cords and ropes, shut in between thorn-hedged prison walls: for three years one does not find the way.

---

In mid-January my luck changed and I managed to sell that albatross of a car. I had the necessary repair work done and then placed an ad in the Datsun Club newsletter, asking $1400. I figured a hundred-dollar loss after eight months of heavy use wasn't bad. Like the dealer who sold me the car, I had to hope the buyer wouldn't notice the shoddy condition of the convertible top. My task was more difficult because it was winter and the top needed to stay up. I'd patched it together with staples and prayed it would hold up. The off-duty sailor who came to look at it paid cash - seventy twenty-dollar bills.

I thanked the sailor, pocketed the wad and took the bus home to Rondel's apartment, where I gleefully tossed the pile of cash like a snow flurry in the middle of the living room. With Rondel looking on, smiling at my childish glee, I then arranged the bills in orderly rows on the carpet. I'd never had so much money to call my own before.

Of course, it wasn't all mine, exactly. I still had some eight hundred dollars to pay off on the loan my parents had taken out for me when I bought the car. But I felt flush, nonetheless.

Rondel suggested a celebratory trip to Yosemite Park.

"In January?" I wondered. "Isn't it all in snow?"

"Sure, but the park's still open for visitors. I've been checking it out. We could have a cabin for two nights for a reasonable price; I'll treat. It's all arranged, in fact. Whada you say?"

I felt somewhat uneasy about the way Rondel had cooked up the trip, and the way he may have envisioned it; but it wasn't any different from the way he treated the whole relationship. He was always coming up with these "special surprises" for me: personalized stationery, frames for my poems, candles and liqueur for a hot bath after work, fresh flowers . . . but that was his way. If it wasn't quite my style, even if it made me slightly uncomfortable to accept these tokens of a "special" friendship, it also wasn't my way to make a big deal out of it, to throw them back in his face.

"Sure," I told him. "You know how I like the mountains. How can I say no? I'll phone Gerald to let him know I'll be unavailable for a few days."

Yosemite in winter indeed is a land of enchantment, a paradise of tranquil majesty. We climb a trail around the back and up to the top of one of the sheer granite giants for which the park is famous, and sit cross-legged there on the pitted rock at the top of the waterfall, looking three thousand feet straight down to the valley floor, where the river runs, a ribbon of pure arctic green. Above us shines a snow-blue sky. Up where we sit at the source of the great waterfall, only the footsteps of a relatively few brave, wise souls have passed before us, here to lead us. And the misty thunder of the waterfall - the voice of the mountain god - has drawn us also surely and unquestioning to the source, up the star-sprayed stones of the trail; up past streams of silvery water to take into the mouth, with teeth against the rocks, and eyes shut in cold ecstasy; up among the granite skies and white horizons; up so high the cars below crawl like bugs.

---

On the 26th of January, Bill's Car Wash boasted a twelve-hour, continuous performance of gasoline theatre. From 9 to 9 it ran, billed as a "Surplus Gas Sale - while it lasts." With prices slashed in half, cars lined up all day, and we filled tanks and spare cans, and they drove around and came back for more.

On February 18th, when the "Energy Crisis" hit, cars again lined up for twelve hours, but this time to buy rationed gas, and at nine we closed up and went home. This was gasoline madness. People had lost their holiday mood of the sale and now were angry, impatient, nervous, sullen. A couple of fistfights flared briefly as customers jockeyed for position in line. The line stretched clear around the block. The limit was ten gallons to a customer. I guess they all thought it was the last gas they'd ever see.

And it was all their own damn fault, though they blamed "the fuckin' A-rabs." Old buddy Kevin had returned to work for a while, and we could only smile at these slaves to their machines, in their panic for a vanishing lifestyle. "Did you know," Kevin told me with an incredulous grin, "the average American uses only 150 of 5000 gallons of gasoline energy yearly on food and clothing? That’s, what, not even three percent for the essentials! The rest is all squandered . . . on what?"

"Whadya mean, 'gallons of gasoline energy'? You don't use gasoline for all that other stuff."

"Yeah, I know; it's just a statistic. If all the energy used was in terms of gasoline, see - "

"Hey, can I get some gas?" An irate, burly man in a Mustang yells out to Kevin from his bay.

"Yeah, awright, awright."

I have to go turn on the car wash for my customer. My thoughts dwell on the deeper implications of a hooked populace, the sense of the inner, spiritual being undergoing an energy drain of its own. The collective night ends wasted on pills, booze, dope and fatigued thought. The morning rings slow, slower each day, and the strands of cells on the inside of the elbow stretch once again to meet the gray curtains of the already afternoon.

That night after work, Rondel greets me with the news that he's been approached to direct some sort of theatrical production for this year's Easter Sunrise Celebration, an annual event held under a forty-foot-tall concrete cross atop San Francisco's Mt. Davidson. Do I want to work on it with him? There's a good chance I could earn a commission for writing an appropriate bit of poetry that Rondel's dance class could perform. "Sounds great!" I tell him, and we immediately go to work, selecting possible musical scores, dreaming up various processional movements, brainstorming angles for a ritual Easter poem.

In the weeks that follow, I read a Rosicrucian pamphlet, The Mystical Interpretation of Easter, which links the Christian pageant with its pagan predecessors, based on the return of spring, the renewal of the natural cycle. I take drafts of the poem I'm developing with me everywhere - on hikes to Mt. Tamalpais, on bus rides to work, to the laundromat. I work on rhyme and rhythm schemes, honing the imagery to a cohesive, meaningful unity of effect. Together Rondel and I settle on a musical background, Resphigi's Pines of Rome.

All along I'm wondering if I'm worthy of the twenty-five dollar commission I've accepted from the Council of Churches. Am I an avant-garde multimedia wizard on the first steps of the golden road to fame and fortune, I ask myself - or just some crazed, pseudo-intellectual hippie who's been hoodwinked by a homosexual choreographer into warming his bed at night in exchange for the relatively cheap illusion that my so-called art is art? Only time, I realize, the priceless perspective of time, will tell.

In the meantime the arts workshops - my own bag of tricks, that I don't owe to Rondel's connections - are taking off. I visit Pinel School once or twice more, and Mujji Ubu school in Berkeley half a dozen times. Meanwhile I have begun what might be a regular weekly class at a public school in San Francisco, Paul Revere Elementary. There are several other prospects still in the works. But, as things develop, I'm brought back to Rondel's influence in the end. The Pinel thing frizzles; then Mujji Ubu likewise feels they've seen enough. I shrug - who wants to work for nothing, anyway? I still have Paul Revere, where I work with an eager, responsive class of gifted kids - and where Rondel has gotten me in the door because he knows the teacher, a former lover named Peter.

Just to keep my options open, I reapplied to the University of Victoria, in case UBC didn't accept me for the MA program. I took care to write the letter and walk it down to the mailbox three blocks away in midday, when Rondel was at work. To flaunt my plans for independence at that point would have jeopardized the Easter project. And I didn't want to hold the whole city's Christian community to ransom because of my roommate’s insecurities.

---

An ongoing drama in the Bay Area now permeates the news: the kidnapping of news magnate William Randolph Hearst's daughter Patty by an armed revolutionary group calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army. They successfully elude police and federal agents for five months, during which time Patty renounces her family, her class, her name. Calling herself Tania, she shoots up a grocery store with a submachine gun, issues doctrinaire communiqués denouncing the capitalist pigs, whose days are numbered as "the people" organize and arm themselves to follow the courageous example of her comrades in the S.L.A.

I follow the story with a curious interest, like everyone else. Meanwhile my concern is focused more on the cultural life of the area, taking in everything I can, with Rondel's inspired guidance: Black Light Theatre of Prague, the Ice Follies, Under Milkwood, Purlie Victorious, Monet, Quetzal, The Hot L Baltimore. I sense that my opportunity has a limited time frame and so am eager to make the most of it while I am in the Bay Area.

I'd been too well nursed on the natural milk of Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, however, to be fully satisfied in the enclosed world of the stage. The human world: what a preposterously limited focus, I thought, when there was all of nature to be explored and savored; when one's true inner spirit was vitalized there. Humans had fucked up bad, and it was no wonder, when you saw how they treated each other on the stage. Of course such an outlook did not belong within the theatre world itself, so my role as "critic" was anything but public in the way of usual theatre criticism. Undeterred by lack of an audience, I wrote a meta-review in which I moaned my blues for a little fresh air on the stage. I called it "Blues Theatre" but it should have been "Theatre Blues":

Can there by any trace of landscape, any hint of the natural world on the all-too-human theatre stage? The interior psychological structures constructed by O'Neill, Pinter, Albee, Williams, Beckett, et al., at best permit only hollow references to the world outside, uttered in dreaming reveries or cutting sarcasms by characters hopelessly shut away from the light of day (and worse, imprisoned from one another in their separateness). It is tempting to suggest that the human predicament so intensely observed in modern theatre is a direct result of our imprisonment away from the sun in an overcivilized world. A more far-reaching analysis might uncover some deeper roots to the problem. This preoccupation with social interaction, so effectively dramatized on the stage, might turn out to be more cause than effect, relative to the technogical age. And thus the more conscious of the modern playwrights might be credited with turning this narcissistic sickness out to public exposure, with the surrealistic clarity of a surgeon's neon vision. One has only to ask then, in view of the debilitating alienation so starkly brought to light, what is missing in this patient's life--perhaps a little or a lot of fresh air and sunshine, a positive world view seen in some non-technological, "uncivilized" forms? Such may become fertile thematic ground in a theatre of an environmentally sensitive future.

And yet in these doomed contemporary characters' eyes may be seen a glimpse of that distant sun's reflection. The organic landscape, the natural impulse, does live in the the actor's capacity to feel, to emote, to move. He or she must carry the sun and the moon, the wind, the waves, the lion and the dove within, to the role on stag - just as the animal must, when caged in a zoo.

The horizon must shine from the eyes. But only when one knows within what is real and whole and living, can the actor then faithfully portray life's tragic or ironic disintegration. The actor, like the playwright who created the character, must sense the human parallel to the disintegration of a landscape once virgin and whole. For now, at least, that portrayal remains in the tragic or ironic mode. One might hope to glimpse these blues someday giving way to a comic, rustic folk melody--rooted not in the relic of a sentimental nostalgia, but in a reinvigorated human connection with the natural world.

---

One day Rondel tells me Allen Ginsberg, the world's most famous gay poet, is coming to read at San Francisco State. I immediately plan to go. Rondel has a class that day but he can give me a ride and drop me off early before the performance. The night before the day of the reading, I dream that I meet Ginsberg: I'm walking down a sidewalk in Berkeley, when up to the curb drives a van with that gang of fellow Beat poets, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg. At least, that's one way I remember it. Another version (you know how dreams are, playing tricks with the story line) has me riding in the van with them and then getting out to walk. Anyway, next day I wake up, ride over to the campus with Rondel, get out near the auditorium and start looking for the right entrance. Through glass doors to my left I see light and some movement, so I go in while a couple of bearded guys are on their way out with some sound equipment. I figure they're on their way to the main hall, so I fall into step with them on the sidewalk. It dawns on me slowly that the white-shirted electrical engineer with horn-rimmed glasses who walks at my side is the actual poet. I don't say anything - who am I? - but just keep walking beside him, like old buddies.

A surprise attraction during the reading is Allen's father Louis, himself a poet. Allen reads, chants and plays the autoharp, amplified through the speaker I saw him carrying in. Between songs and poems he jokes, raps, philosophizes about the coming of light at the end of the present dark age, the Kali Yuga.

After the reading I see Fred, who's flying high on the poetic energy. His hair is brushed up wild as a werewolf's - he's grinning madly, possessed with the intensity of the occasion at a level that is either demonic, or angelic.

"Wow, Will, you were here, too, were you? Wasn't that fantastic? And for old man Louis to show up, what a mind-blower! Ginsberg, I'm convinced now, is a true descendant of Whitman, Rimbaud, Blake, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky. I sent him some of my poems a couple months ago, and he wrote me back a nice note. How've you been?"

"Oh, all right. Been working on an Easter poem lately, for the Sunrise Service here, you know, the one on Mt. Davidson?"

"Oh, ah-ha." He stares away vacantly, pulling at his beard. I remember Fred is Jewish, that he shares that bond with the Jewish Ginsberg, and that Easter to them is as meaningful as a chocolate bunny.

"You know what, I actually dreamed last night I met Ginsberg, walking down the sidewalk, and then today - "

"Yah, I was planning to talk to him myself. I think he'll remember who I am, from my poems I sent him. I brought a few today, in case he has a minute to look at them." Fred holds up a sheaf of manuscripts, his eyes glittering. He turns to look at the stage area, where Ginsberg has been talking to admirers and is packing up his stuff. Fred turns back to me, says "Hey, take care, hah? I'm goin down now and talk to him," and strides off down the aisle, frizzed hair bouncing. I watch him approach the great man, shake his hand, and start jawing. Ginsberg listens patiently, nods, takes a look at the papers, says a few words. The animated Fred bobs back and forth, gestures, talks and talks. This, I surmise, is what it really takes to make it as a poet.

Back in my little world of personal preoccupations, I grope ever further into the tangled web of I Ching readings, seeking to shed light on my soul's state of limbo. "What is my destiny?" I ask. But that is not specific enough. I need to know everything:

What is my career course?

What is lacking in my life?

What is the obstacle?

What is the prophecy?

What is the problem?

What are the chances for love?

What is the course of life?

What is the unknown question?

I seek ultimate clarity by a complex series of derivations and diagrams, by which I reduce all hexagrams obtained so far to the most frequently occurring ones out of the sixty-four possible; and further, I go on to synthesize new hexagrams by examining the positions and movements of existing trigrams and lines. The new hexagrams thus obtained turn out to be some of the more familiar ones I've already seen: Obstruction, Shock, Wooing, Biting Through. At the center of the whole web, I finally pinpoint the golden mean of all this alchemy: Hexagram number Two, the Receptive.

Here is the world of earth . . .

the dark, yielding, primal power of yin. Its attribute is devotion. It is the perfect complement of the Creative. It represents nature in contrast to spirit, earth in contest to heaven, space as against time, the female-maternal as against the male-paternal.

It is favorable to find friends in the west and south, to forego friends in the east and north. Quiet perseverance brings good fortune. If he knows how to meet fate with an attitude of acceptance, he is sure to find the right guidance.

Yes, I say. Right on. This is right up my alley. Go with the flow, take what fortune offers. All is possible, if I'm open enough to possibility. The Receptive in its riches carries all things. It embraces everything in its greatness, as though in a vast womb. In the state of movement, of opening, it allows the divine light to enter, and by means of this light illumines everything. These mystical truths I know to be universal. Behind all the labels of pagan, Christian, Hindu or whatever, play these primal forces of darkness and light, heaven and earth.

For me, the reading is clear. Lucky or resourceful enough to obtain this one of the two primary, archetypal hexagrams, I set my course straight on its path. If my particular personal questions are not yet answered in detail, that's okay. The answers will come in time. My questing, anxious soul is put at ease with an all-encompassing faith in the larger workings, the world-gear of which I'm one tooth.

On one point I'm crystal clear, as the message is stated directly:

The Way of the Receptive brings about the female.

Resting easy in that certainty, I proceed to replace my own life-schemes with the earth-symbols generated by the Receptive:

It is Indian Summer in the vast Southwest.

The Harvest is already gathered.

The large wagon rests in the yard, awaiting its new load.

The Mother's belly is large; she milks the cow with calf.

The kettle hangs steady on a long shaft under the moon.

The multitude re-enters the black soil, awaits the closing gates.

---

At Easter time, Warren, my "friend from the Southwest," flies in for a visit, and to take in the Sunrise ritual drama. He awakes with Rondel and me before dawn, and we ride up together to the foot of the cross on the mountain. The dancers wander in, among the couple of hundred empty chairs that have been trucked up, unfolded, and set in neat rows facing the towering, white concrete cross. The Pines of Rome will go out over the PA system along with my voice reading "Calvary."

The dancers share nervous laughter, then become more centered, as they run through their movements one last time. The sky begins to lighten. People from all parts of the city start to arrive and find seats. There's a gentle rattling of the chairs, a soft murmur of voices from the gathering ranks of the devout.

Then, in a hushed silence of readiness, the first rays of sun peek through the branches of the trees, and we begin. There's a prelude of music as the dancers stand in formation in front of the cross. Rondel is watching from off to the side of the performance area. Closer in on the other side, I hold the microphone. With my long, brown hair and mustache, my doe-like eyes and calm smile, I must appear to some as the very figure of the Sunday School Jesus - and to others, as just another hippie, despite my pressed bell-bottom slacks and clean button-down shirt. I brush these flitting, self-conscious thoughts aside, and taking my cue from the music, begin reading my text:

From deepest center space, among all waiting stars,
O patient Father bring me to my new green home.

I remember your voice in the heavens flew down
through a clear night sky and was born alive in my soul.

I remember the hopeful children and their soft eyes
and their hair gentle in the wind,

And as I grew, I remember, I watched the branches
reach away to the western sky

I felt the blossoms break awake on a full spring day,
And I knew my blood,

the morning dew, would sure become as air
when the dark sun reappeared.

I comforted the lone beggar, breathed health to the
suffering girl, whispered sight to the blind

But when the desert sand saw storm clouds on the mountain,
and I felt on my neck the angels' breath,
I heard the prelude to my death.

I stand among the old trees, toes in the cool soil...
I walk on the sea of tranquility...I vanish in the air...

Rejoice! It is done! My Father, we've come to our new
green home! May all ever share this boundless peace
found deep within our pain -

And our tears shall sprinkle the clearest streams, and flow
to the oceans, and rise with the dawning Sun -

Bring Glory to Heaven and Earth! Sing Glory to Your Name!

I pause between the lines as the dancers weave, change formation, mimic trees and blossoms and dawning sun. Then, so quickly, it's done. The audience remains silent, in reverent respect. This is a "Service," after all. The minister takes over as the dancers clear away. I walk down the center aisle to a seat near the rear, more self-conscious than ever. Jesus or hippie? Artist or fake? Oh, well, it doesn't matter. I've done my best, and it seemed to work, anyway.

The service runs its length and the crowd begins to disperse. As I walk back up the aisle to greet the minister, I see two old ladies still getting up from their seats beside the aisle, weeping. They look up at me as I pass, and the tears and lamentations gush forth. I don't know whether to stop and comfort them, or what. Maybe I was the cause of their weeping! Were they offended by this New Age, airy-fairy perversion of the Easter story? Or were they touched, moved to new depths of understanding? I can't tell, and walk on by.

---

On the ninth of May, the Watergate investigation reached its inevitable conclusion. President Richard Nixon was impeached for high crimes against the public trust. I read the headline story with great relish as I walked up the sidewalk from the corner store in the cool of the morning fog.

I passed a postman on his rounds. I checked our mailbox. There was a letter from the University of Victoria, accepting me for their Master's Program in English the coming fall. The week before, I'd been turned down in my reapplication to UBC. Now fate had played out its hand.

I can't say that Rondel was taken totally off guard. No, like Nixon, my end was in store long before, and just required the laborious workings of time and "the system" to bring it to pass. Now that my departure from the Bay Area was definite, however, there was no way I could stay on with Rondel in his apartment. Though he was open to the possibility - holding onto some vain hope of a miraculous, last-minute conversion, perhaps - I knew his tragic mood of defeat would make life unbearable for me. I told him I'd inquired already about a place to stay with John, a guy I worked with at the gas station . . .

"Oh, yeah, you got it all worked out already, have you?"

"Well, I knew this might be happening soon, and - "

"So now you're gonna try it out with that coke freak and his nigger Jim, are you?"

"Aw, come on, Rondel. It's just a place to stay. They've got an extra bedroom in their house, they said I could have."

"What about Glenda? She won't take you back now?"

"Naw. She's in kind of tight with that guy David who moved in there."

"David? I thought there was another guy, you know, whatsis name, Loren?"

"Oh, yeah, him, too. No, I'm not going anywhere with her now, that's pretty clear."

"Yeah, right. So now you're on your own, then. 'Like a rolling stone' . . ."

"Yup. 'A complete unknown.' That's all right. I'm not going any further with this theatre stuff. It's all depended on you, anyway. Everything I've done."

"So that's it for the conference this summer, too, I guess. I'll tell them we'll have to cancel our workshop we were gonna do."

I supposed he was holding out that final plum to tempt me, but it was far too late. "Yeah, I guess so."

I started gathering my things together - my few clothes, books, toothbrush . . .

"You mean you're just - leaving, just like that?"

"I guess so. It's the only way."

"But . . . okay. You don't want to talk about this any more, I guess. Not one last night?"

"No. Listen, Rondel, I'm really thankful for all you've done for me . . . for letting me stay here, for - "

"Forget it. I don't wanna hear that. You know why I did it. And if you're gonna throw it all away, and ruin what's left of this poor life, you go on ahead. If I can't cope anymore, that's just my own, tough, black shit."

I went on packing without more words. Rondel watched, pacing, brooding, and when I was ready to walk through the door for the last time, he came up to me with a tear-streaked face. I hugged him, but turned my cheek when he tried to kiss me.

"Jes' the same as always," he blubbered.

"Yup. That's just me, Rondel. Good-bye."

---

"And one more thing," John told me.

"What's that?" No big deal, I thought. It was all straightforward so far.

"If some strange guy comes around asking for Jim or me, whatever you do, don't let him in."

Jim stood behind John and looked at me with large, serious eyes, for emphasis.

"Okay, no problem." I started to leave down the front walk. "Hey but what if you're home, if it's somebody to see you?"

"Doesn't matter. Find out who it is, first. Or tell him we're not home. Just don't let him in."

"Sure, sure, okay." These cocaine freaks. That stuff, I figured, must make you paranoid. Or maybe it was all that good Columbian weed. Oh, well. I wouldn't worry myself too much about it.

How was the neighborhood? That's what I had wanted to know. It was all black, in a residential area of Oakland. All black, that is, except for John and me. Jim was our resident black. He shared a bedroom with John. I suspected they were gay, but didn't care one way or another. Maybe just bisexual: I knew John had women friends. The last place these two had lived in, their landlady was the porn flick star, Marilyn Chambers.

When I asked about theft, Jim had said, "Ah, just lock the door when you go out, that's all."

So, I settled in with my few possessions, prepared to survive the summer with as much savings as possible, and set my sights on September.

---

The first order of business was a "new" car. I no longer had the use of Rondel's, and anyway I'd need one for travelling north with all my stuff. A guy at the gas station had an old Chevy for sale - a '56 sedan. Not the classic coupe, exactly, of either the '56 or '57 vintage. This was a four-door clunker that was built like a Sherman tank. But it had a smooth ride, everything worked okay, and it only cost $250: the limit of what I could spare. I named it "Shirley."

I continued to pump gas part-time, and squeezed in a month or so of housepainting with old Mr. Haney as well. The deadening days at the car wash were made bearable by a constant diet of John's Columbian weed. We kept our reddened eyes behind sunglasses most of the time.

When I wanted a stash of my own, I had the good luck to be accosted one afternoon on my way to the house by a teenaged black girl. "Hey, you," she said, bouncing up to me, "You live in that house, don't ya?"

"Yeah, I do."

"Say you wan' try some weed, b'any chance?"

"Uh, maybe."

"Got some right here." She showed me a baggie of it in her little purse she wore on a shoulder strap.

"Well, okay. Where do you - "

"We go in your house there, 'n try a little number raht now? Cause I don' know how to roll them things ve-well."

"Um, okay. Come on in."

I should have known - especially when she took a tour of the premises, while I rolled a joint from her bag. She came back in, sat down and shared the joint with me. It wasn't bad, wasn't great. I asked her how much.

"Fifteen dollahs."

Standard price, standard stuff. "All right. I'll get the money for you."

I stepped into the bedroom and took a ten and a five from my wallet on the dresser. I turned around to go out and there she was, at the door. What, I wondered, was she going to turn a trick now, or what? I was feeling pretty good, myself. But she just smiled and held out her hand for the money.

Suddenly I didn't trust her. "Where's the bag of grass?" I snapped.

Her brow knitted and she said in an indignant tone, "S'on the table where you left it, white." She backed into the hall and followed me into the living room again, where the open bag still lay on the table. Now I felt rude and unappreciative, guilty for my stereotyped prejudice. I gave the girl the money. She clapped it into her purse, puckered her lips and said saucily, "I gotta be on mah way, now. See ya 'roun."

That evening I noticed the same girl among the gang of kids skipping rope and playing tag in the street outside our house. She was probably fourteen or fifteen, I figured, and it appeared that a couple of the boys, maybe eight or ten years old, were her brothers, by the way she bossed them around.

---

A week into August, my days in Oakland were numbered - by the toes on my itchy feet. I needed a celebration of my impending release. It came courtesy of the crippled Presidency. Nixon was resigning, and would address the nation on TV. Kevin called me up and said there was a party at Colin's house - champagne for the festive occasion. A half-dozen of us gathered there to gaze in high spirits at the spectacle of the fallen king removing his crown - and then we realized to our horror that the king replacing him would be Gerald Ford, who when interviewed afterward looked and sounded like a wired-up Frankenstein:

"Who will be your Secretary of State, Mr. President?"

"Uh, the uh, when . . . the time comes to . . . uh select a Secretary of State, I will choose . . . the man who - uh will become (where was I) uh the next . . . Secretary of State. . . ."

"My God. Roll another joint, will you Colin? Looks like we're in for a long sleep, here."

"Hey, that bubbly gone already?"

"Let's put on Diamond Dogs now, and get really wasted."

"Yeah, or Blue Oyster Cult. You heard them yet?"

---

Now we return you to our regularly scheduled programming. In local news, an unnamed source in the L.A. County Police Commissioner's office disclosed today that Daniel "Admiral Cinque" DeFreeze, who was burned to death in the shootout with the Symbionese Liberation Army last month, was a former employee of the L.A. Police Department. DeFreeze was the self-imposed leader of the revolutionary, terrorist group that kidnapped Patricia Hearst last February. Today's disclosure fuels the continuing speculation that the SLA was actually a front organization for the CIA, or the FBI. Two other members of the gang, also found dead after the shootout, have been linked recently to those government agencies. DeFreeze's exact status with the Police Department was not disclosed. "He might have been," the source did say, "just an informer."

---

I'm sitting in the living room after work: I've got on with Haney again for this final month of the summer, and now I'm one week away from freedom. I roll a joint from my little stash, that will last me till I get near the border to Canada. The day's traffic jam, at the bottleneck from Berkeley to Oakland, as I sat in Shirley with her stifling old-car smell, was a killer. I thanked my lucky stars I had an escape route from this anthill madness of the city.

Now I sit back, puff away. One more week . . .

I hear a clattering noise from behind me, through the wall - or is it from outside? I get up and go into my room. The window over my dresser is open. I hear a scraping sound, and the soft thud of sneakered feet on the ground, then quick footsteps away. I rush to the window and look out - nothing. I look on the dresser where, ten minutes before, I put the two hundred dollars of traveler’s checks I just bought for the journey north, and where I kept my last thirty dollars worth of food stamps I've collected the previous the month. All gone. The little thief . . .

But the worst was yet to come. The traveler’s checks, at least, were insured against theft. I phoned the bank, then considered the police. Did I really want them to come snooping around? I figured I should wait until John and Jim came home, to clear it with them. When John finally walked in an hour later, I told him about the theft. I was incredulous, still hopping mad - mostly at myself, for sitting there like a dunce while the criminal snuck in right behind me. John laughed it off, as if, what did I expect, moving into a neighborhood like this? I wondered if he'd have reacted the same way in Jim's presence.

When John went back to his bedroom, however, he came out singing a different tune. His thousand-dollar stereo had been ripped off - right out of the house. Had it, too, gone through the window, earlier in the day? Perhaps - but then he asked me, "Have you let anyone into this house?"

I started to say no - then remembered the girl who'd sold me the grass. Uh-oh: "Well, there was this girl, last week. She came in for a few minutes to sell me a lid . . ."

"Where was she, in the house, exactly?"

Who needs the police? I thought to myself. "In the living room, mostly."

"Mostly. And she took a little look-see here and there, I bet, didn't she?"

"Well, yeah, she might have - I mean I guess she did have a look around."

John's face was red now, like a ripe tomato about to burst. He flung his sunglasses down on the coffee table. "Fuckin' idiot!" he said. "Didn't I tell you not to let anybody in here? That bitch walked right in there, took a look at that stereo, and lifted the spare key right off my dresser. That's where that key went, and that's where my stereo went - right out the door. I can't fuckin' believe it." He glared at me, as if expecting some ameliorative response.

"Sorry, John," was all I could manage, and meekly at that. "I guess we both got burned today."

When Jim came home shortly and discovered what had happened, he laughed gently.

"Oh, yeah, that Carla, man, what an easy job. Her big brother Terrence, her little brother Reddy, or even Chet, coulda been in on it too. Yep, that's what they wait for. A guy who doesn't know what's up." Jim shook his head sadly.

"Should we call the police?" I asked now.

"No - no." John immediately said.

"Why; you're worried about dope, or what?"

"No, it's not that. It's that Jim and I are planning a trip east next month. We don't exactly want the fuzz to get a hold of us before then, because we were witnesses to an accident a couple weeks ago, and we stand to get called for a trial date sometime coming up. We wanna split, not stick around for some endless series of court appearances."

"So if they want you for that, why haven't they come and contacted you already?"

This time Jim spoke up. "They have to serve a summons to you, personally. Otherwise there's no proof they contacted you." He was taking law at the university, and he sounded proud of his knowledge.

"Okay, okay. My travelers' checks are covered anyway. The food stamps - well, there wasn't that much. It's the principle of the thing, more than anything else. And your stereo - "

"Yeah," said John. "Fuckin'-unbelievable. Maybe I'll get another one, hot."

"Right," said Jim, with an elbow in John's ribs: "They prob'ly come 'round tonight lookin' to sell yours back to you, heh-heh."

"Fuckin' joker," said John, with a thin smile despite himself.

We didn't often have sit-down suppers together. That evening was no exception. I was careful to wait until the clanking dishes and muttering voices had cleared from the kitchen area, before I went in to make myself a couple of cheeseburgers on sourdough.

John and Jim had retired to the bedroom, where I heard their low voices still muttering through the closed door. I munched away, feeling glad all of this would be behind me in a week, when I heard a rapping on the screened door at the front of the house. Now who - ? I went to see.

There was a man wearing coveralls (like the kind Jim wore), a bushy, drooping mustache and red muttonchop sideburns.

"Hi there," he said in a friendly voice. "John at home?"

"Sure, I'll get him. Come on in."

I walked back to the bedroom, with the guy behind me at a polite distance.

"John," I called. "There's someone here - "

John had opened the door of the bedroom enough to stick his head out and see who it was. It didn't take much of a look to discover it was no one he knew, or wanted to know.

"Oh, shit," was all he said, in a low voice, and he gave me a look of pure, disdainful hate.

The guy behind me had already whipped out a slip of paper, and reached past me with it flapping in the air.

"John Davis, I'm serving you with this summons to appear in District Court on September the fourth at ten o'clock a.m., as a witness . . ."

John had withdrawn his head through the door, but the damage was done. The man plunked the paper down on the floor, nodded to me with a little smirk of gratitude, and walked back out of the house, letting the screen door swing shut with a bang.

Now I'd really done it. I heard the voices rise in the bedroom. I waited for the explosion, but it never came. The hatred and contempt from my housemates became the coldest of shoulders in the few, short days I had left there. We parted, the final morning, with a curt "Goodbye." Then I finished my packing by washing out some plastic gallon jars I was taking along for food and water storage. I poured boiling water in, clamped on a top, and shook. The compressed heat of the water quickly built to explosive force and gushed out all over me, scalding my bare thighs between knees and cut-off shorts. Karmic retribution, I suppose, for my recent sins. At least I didn't have to wait around for a day in court.

As the blisters began to bubble up from the cooked skin, I ran a cold bath and rounded up some first-aid cream. I lowered myself in the tub with agonizing slowness, then gritted my teeth and squinted my eyes with the pain. After a while the cooling water soothed the burned flesh; I dried my legs gingerly and then dabbed them with the greasy ointment. Then I called the hospital emergency room for advice.

"Oh, no, you never use that gunk on burns like that. The cold water, yes. That was a good idea. But now you'd better come down and have us dress those burns properly."

They washed the ointment off, ever so tenderly, then wrapped my boiled thighs with clean, dry bandages. I said I'd planned to leave that day. "That's okay," the doctor said. Just check in somewhere in two or three days to change the dressings."

Finally I loaded Shirley and took off. Of course I had to get stalled in the obligatory traffic jam on my way out of Oakland, but that was just a final confirmation for me that I was doing the right thing - leaving, and probably for good. Had I had enough of the life of the workingman, I still wondered? Yes. At least for a long while. Now I could delve with the unbridled sanction of academic credit into the fertile realm of "Nature in Literature" - and while satisfying my natural intellectual curiosity about the matter, also accomplish the necessary preparation for the teaching profession. After that - two years, or four years, or six, whatever it took - I could find a cozy position somewhere . . . in a small town near mountains, perhaps, at a private school or junior college, or even in a major college, if one could be found in such an idyllic setting. Hanover, New Hampshire, for instance . . .

Such were my thoughts as I headed out of the maze of concrete and metal and into the dusty highlands, the dusky coastal cliffs, with a slim volume of the poet Basho on the passenger seat beside me: The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

---

I packed two-tone Shirley full of all my worldly belongings and set off for the coast highway. What a relief it was to escape for the last time the traffic jams, and the Oakland ghetto, to get out on the open road of Highway 101 to Ukiah.

I knew Shirley was not in the best of conditions but I hoped she'd perform well enough to complete this essential swan song. The full load of books, records, clothes, papers and perhaps too many dreams and expectations, however, proved too heavy a burden and she stalled going up a hill near Lake Mendocino. I had to get out and flag down some help. A funky old pickup truck rigged with a wooden front bumper stopped to offer assistance. Its bearded driver, an obvious neo-peasant, said he could probably push me up the hill, if I wanted. Up sounded better than nowhere, so I agreed and his pickup did the job. With the brakes on and Shirley poised at the crest of the hill, she still wouldn't start again; but I figured I might as well harness all that potential energy, so I coasted down all the way to a stop that I steered for up a dirt side-road. there I let it hang for the night, with hopes for better luck in the morning. I curled up with a bottle of wine, dashed off letters to Jill and Dana, and fell asleep.

Next day Shirley started - with a last gasp on her last juice - and I got up to Eureka. I found a hospital there where I could change the dressings on my burns. They were healing nicely already, only second-degree, and not giving me too much pain. The worst was when the sweat started to seep in and burn with salt, in the heat of the August afternoon.

Before heading out of Eureka, I stopped in a gas station to ask about the stalling problem. The mechanic there asked if my air filter was dirty. it was fairly dust-caked, in fact. He suggested a kerosene bath. I found some of that and soaked the filter for a while, looking around me at the beaten grass, the tired old buildings, the kerosene tank, a pitiful stand of trees in the distance, and smelling the fumes of my recent, short-lived career in the atmosphere of jet-fuel. I buffered the acrid sensation with thoughts of my impending future in the musty air of libraries. Ironically enough, I reflected, it was in those dim interior spaces that I hoped to rediscover "nature." After all, nature - Nature, God, reality - were all subjective concepts, and as such were as accessible (perhaps more so) in literature than in the soulless and all-too-easily Disneyfied versions of nature to be found outdoors in America. Perhaps I would find Canada different, though, and could enjoy the best of both interior and visible landscapes. With a graduate degree in hand I would find a nice, pastoral place to settle down, with secure tenure as a teacher. My dream of self-sufficiency would be realized: not in the form of a rural treadmill, but on my terms - with the comfortable status of financial equilibrium.

I reinstalled the air filter and drove away, my future clear in my mind and the present scene improving steadily as I headed further north, on into the Klamath wilderness. At dusk I pulled off beside the road, and walked in to a hidden retreat up an overgrown creek, to bed down for the night. Alongside the stream I sat up in my sleeping bag and wrote out post cards I'd picked up in Eureka to send to Warren and Steve. Then I lay my head down on the living moss pillows and was lulled to sleep by subterranean sounds of seeping rocks.

---

I was glad to see the end of California and enter Oregon - until I discovered that Oregon epitomized this Disneyfication I'd reflected on earlier. It may as well be called Oregon Park, I felt, or Sacramento North. Yes, I would discover, there was ample forest, rugged coastline . . . even, I remembered from the trip with Brian, desert. Yet where people lived they created suburbia - or did suburbia create them, in its clean and shiny image? Transplanted Californians, these sun-children cruised their chrome and plastic world, on smooth streets past gentle fields of gold, in the finest cartoon fashion of a Ronald Reagan dream.

Maybe my perceptions were skewed by the harrowing experience I underwent on my descent into this all-too-lovely state, down what was described to me after the fact as "the steepest grade on the West Coast." I was just short of "empty" on gas and figured I wouldn't make it to Ashland; so I was hoping to make it to the little town of Siskiyou, coming down from the Siskiyou Pass. I had the brilliant idea to save the last droplets of fuel by shutting off Shirley's 327 V-8 and coasting down the hill. As I began the long descent, gathering speed, I turned the ignition off and put the automatic transmission into neutral. Then I really started to coast. I approached sixty and realized I'd better apply some brakes. They started to smoke. Then I thought I might have better speed control, and save my well-worn brake linings, if I shifted the transmission into drive. When I did so, the whole car bucked and chattered, and I thought I'd just murdered Shirley's gears. I slammed her to a stop and got out to have a look.

Both rear tires were shredded. They were retreads; what did I expect? The replacement treads had stripped right off, under the violent stress of quickly-changing torque. But no problem - I had a jack-all in the truck, and one spare tire. I would change one of the blowouts, hitch into town for a used substitute for the other, come back and put it on, and be on my way. Maybe with some spare gas as well.

I took out the jack-all, set it up under the rear bumper, and began to crank it up. Daylight appeared under the blown-out wheels. I left Shirley hanging there up in the air, reached for my lug-wrench . . . and watched in sickening helplessness as the tank-like vehicle swayed forward, pitching downhill and headed off the shoulder where a steep embankment fell off into the woods . . . and then she stopped. The jack-all had held her, reaching its limit of forward lean. I'd forgotten to block the front tires. With all that weight packed into the back seat, all my worldly goods . . .

Thus saved by a hair from disaster, I made it into the Rogue River redwood forest by nightfall, at the edge of Crater Lake National Park. Here I found true balm of shaggy, craggy wilderness to soothe my frazzled nerves. Next day I would drive into the interior of the Park, and then take time out from the motorized journey to explore some of this primeval country by foot.

---

I park the Chevy in a little wide spot, in tall grass next to high bushes, just off the little dirt road. Jungle drums beat from the thickets; guerillas scurry for cover. I close the front door testily, look around. A few mosquitoes, no problem. Coffee break time. I open the door again, pull the front seat forward, reach in the back for a book, a butane stove and matches, a baggie of coffee and a little saucepan.

I throw these into a nylon bag and traipse into the bush. I find a tiny clear spot and set up the legs of the stove. Now, water: I hear no creek running near. I go back to the car for a canteen. Bring back the canteen, pour a cup or two, set it to boil. Solitude, nature, peace . . . a few mosquitoes. I put up the hood of my sweatshirt and take out the book to read: Leaves of Grass. I move into transcendental realms of galaxies and atoms, molecules of flesh and currents of celestial energy, until steam rises in the air. I dump in some coffee and read some more, letting it steep.

Then sip as it cools, right from the pan. Elemental. Survival; essence. I look into the green tangle that surrounds me. Dinosaurs vanish in the distance . . . bushmen, too, and the herds of rabbits I would harvest if it got right down to it. With my bare hands? No, snares . . . somehow fashioned from, say, fishing line, car wiring, tree fibers . . . Three weeks to go before the beginning of school.

I take out a joint and regard it with reverence. Light it and draw deeply in. Ah, there. Reality, entered. Now to . . . what? Analyze, my life? Explore on foot, in mind? Sit? I stand up and look straight up to the sky . . . then sit back down again.

After an extended break I bushwhack back for my overnight gear, throw it into a pack along with some food, and set off into the high green . . . to wander in uncharted forests, watch hillsides sing a soundless hum, until the cool sunset finds me home, in time for brownies, banana and Basho.

It sort of worked out that way. Part of my camp food consisted of a jar of peanut-butter I'd laced with minced peyote buttons that Glenda had laid on me the week before I left the Bay Area - a going-away present. I was glad, here and now, to be able to forego pills for a natural trip. I also told myself, licking my fingers before setting out on an afternoon hike in the hills, that I wanted to feel my bare feet on the ground, and hear nothing but the sound of my own soft footsteps, in that lush forest dappled with soft sunshine fading.

Within half an hour of my magical meal I was seized by a paroxysm of pain in my gut - the peyote, right on target. I'd experienced it before. It was unpleasant, but still worth it, I tried to tell myself, gagging. The sour taste of half-digested peanut-butter crept into my mouth. The taste sent a signal to my belly and more than a mouthful came up. I retched, sending peyote porridge into the dirt, to enlighten the worms in their turn - as my larger body would, I reflected, if I were to die suddenly. Not an unrealistic thought, the way I felt. I retched again. Ohhh . . . I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, licked my dry lips. The taste lingered, peanut-butter with a cutting edge, vomit with a difference.

I took up my pace again, following game trails in an endlessly undulating, wild terrain. As dusk dimmed down I headed back up the general slope, sobered by a dawning realization that I'd lost my way. I only knew that my makeshift camp was perched on a ridge somewhere. If I didn't locate it by dark I'd be stranded all night, at a minimum, out there in my T-shirt and bare feet, with no food, no shelter; with the mountain chill, and the creatures of the night, coming on. The wild beast factor was no paranoid fantasy: I'd noticed large cat-tracks printed in the dust on the very paths I'd trod. Now I imagined the predator sniffing me out, following my fresh foot-spoor, stalking me in the heart of its hunting territory.

I circled again and again, following my own prints, thereby scuffing the trail while seeking new hints of my own beginnings; gradually ascending, with a somehow hopeful despair. Just as dark came on I found my trail of day that circled outward, now back to blessed bed, so quickly welcome under clear stars and wind, a soft, scented breeze. I curled up tight in my sleeping bag, holding my knees, then relaxing, drifting toward sleep, at last peaceful . . .

until I heard the rasping hiss of the cat - the cougar whose tracks I'd crossed, and now whose tracks had re-crossed mine. It sounded maybe fifty yards away. The breeze was wafting my scent gently but unmistakably in its direction. I decided quickly to risk movement: to find first the flashlight, then matches and incense stick. Maybe, I thought, rose-flavored person was not palatable to a prowling lion. Or just maybe, I hoped, that redolent smoke would mask my scent altogether. In any case, I took out life insurance Davy Crockett style, reaching for and opening and clutching my little pocket knife, as I lay stone-still in my sleeping bag in the fragrant dark and prayed to whatever gods send wild beasts on their way.

Wide-eyed and prey-eared I listened as the irregular hiss came nearer . . . then receded. Finally I could hear it no longer. I began to relax my grip on the little red knife. And then the wolves began.

It sounded as if the eerie howls were at least one ridge away. I wondered if the big cat was still around, would deter the wolves from approaching. There seemed to be two or three distinguishable calls, from different points in the black distance. This haunting cacophony went on for some time but eventually stopped. I waited, still tense, straining to hear the sounds of padded footsteps coming my way. It didn't happen. At last I was able to thank my lucky stars and fall asleep.

---

As I quietly packed in the morning, I felt as if I'd been reborn, with a psychic cleansing that replaced several layers of civilized skins with one thin but genuine layer of dust and sweat. I hit the trail with a reverent measure to my step, which gave way gradually to a longer, jaunty stride as I loosened in the brisk, then warming mountain air. Back at the wheel I drove through a snow-peaked, sparkling wilderness. I shouted songs out, joyful blues-style, on the long red road through green wet forests, in a roundabout circuit back west from the Cascades to the coast. I was headed to a place near Coos Bay where I would try to find a communal farm and a guy Glenda's friend Loren said he knew there, by the name of Steve.

It turned out to be a wild goose chase for a tenuous connection. I found the area I was looking for, about four in the afternoon; but then, trying to follow Loren's map, I got lost in a maze of logging roads crisscrossing clearcuts, like lines on a giant hand. Everywhere I looked were huge, ragged stumps, pimples on the bare ass of progress. The golden sun beat its brassy gong, kicking up dust from the impact of its soundless sound. The dust obscured the land and sky as one, in the world behind; the darkening world ahead was doomed before it began. The farther I drove the deader it got, if dead can be deader than dead. The gas gauge sank. My heart pumped dust. Finally the road sank down, farther and farther down, until ahead in the dwindled light I could see green trees again, skirting the elusive, but inevitable, highway. Thunderclouds had suddenly walled in the west. A few huge drops fell like water-balloons to spatter the dust in the road, and the dusty windshield.

I headed back to the nearest town for a fresh start on my directions, which I would follow manana. I was exhausted and bleary-eyed after the grueling day's drive. In the dark on the rain-slick, narrow road that curved past a farmer's field, my attention lapsed and I slipped off the shoulder into the ditch. Wheels spun - nothing.

Fuck it, I said to myself, stranded and strung out. I almost stayed right there in the front seat, curled up to sleep; but it was too cramped. I got out my sleeping bag and tube tent, straddled the low fence and slept that night in the rainy field.

At first light I bundled my soaked bedding back into the car. There was light in the house by the field, and smoke rising from the stovepipe-chimney. The name on the mailbox was "Riggs." It was an old ramshackle farmhouse, with a rickety porch and creaky steps. I knocked on the door. A chair clattered, the door creaked open. I saw a wizened, perspicacious face, eyes sparkling and intent.

"Yes, yes, what is it, come in, come in."

I entered. There was a small table in the center of the room, set for one, with half-eaten eggs, toast and a tin cup of coffee.

"Sorry to bother you." I almost said "sir." "I drove my car into the ditch beside the road last night, down there alongside your field. I wondered if you'd be able to pull me out."

He looked at me, head cocked and curious, with a smile cracking his leathery face. "Sure, sure," he snapped; then, "Here, have a seat." He grabbed a chair from the wall and slapped it down in front of me, at the table. "You want some coffee?" And without waiting for an answer, he'd snatched a cup from a shelf on the wall and was pouring it full from the pot on the barrel stove crackling with his morning fire.

I sat down, and Riggs took his seat again, resuming his breakfast. His hair stood in rigid peaks and brush-like bristles in all directions, grayish-white and thick around a face of mixed browns and speckled reds. He had not an ounce of fat on him but was wiry, energetic, like a scrawny alley-cat. This is what it takes, I thought, to be a steward of the land. I refused his offer of breakfast, feeling I'd asked enough. I had bread and cheese in the car for later.

He grunted and stuffed in the food, talking rapidly and gesturing to punctuate his hoarse and high-pitched voice.

"Yep, I's the original hippie around these parts, yes sir. I's here doing my thing long before those big shots over 'cross the way brought in their agri-business. Ha, they tried to buy me out. No way, I told 'em, I'm happy with mah turnips and goats - y'all just go right ahead though. So here I am, though my goats is gone, I just keep chickens now; too much milk'll clot your blood after while anyhow. Yep," he said with a glance at my long-flowing hair, "I'm just a hippie in disguise . . ."

He coughed to end his rasping speech and soothed his throat with black coffee. I followed suit in silence. He clicked his teeth together, wrinkled his pickle of a nose, sniffed and asked me where I was going, what I was up to.

"Oh, ah, just on my way north to BC, I'm moving there to go to school. The University of Victoria."

"Umm-hmm. Whadja miss that curve down there? Not the first time. It's banked the wrong way. I musta pulled out six, eighta you fellas."

"Yeah. I guess I was kind of tired. Got lost wandering through all those logging roads up out of town. I'm looking for a farm, a guy by the name of Steve - Steve something, anyway. I've got a map, here."

He shrugged me off, wiped his mouth and got up from the table, then chucked a few more sticks of stovewood into the fire. "Cold this morning, gettin' to be that way. Well, we'll go out and fire up that tractor, pull you right out."

He did, all right. I thanked him and drove on my way, another mishap survived. I figured I'd try those logging roads again in search of Steve's farm. The day was dry but the dust was down. After several tries I found the right combination of turns and drove up to a cluster of funky buildings on a hilly, partially cleared and cultivated patch of land.

A young, long-haired couple were mucking out a barn - the bearded man in overalls, the woman wearing gumboots under her granny skirt. "Oh, Steve," the man told me, "he's in town today." He'd barely paused in his pitchforking of the manured mass. The acrid stench stung my nostrils. The woman smiled a Mona Lisa smile and kept on working, too.

"Well, uh - "

"Say, tell you what you can do," the man said. He leaned on his pitchfork and pointed to a shack on the hillside. "There's a coupla potters live there. They're prob'ly just gettin' up. Go up and see them."

"Oh. Okay." I didn't really want to shovel manure, myself, anyway.

I knocked on the potters' door.

A voice said, "Yo."

I opened the door and peeked in. An orange-haired man with bright blue eyes was climbing down the ladder from a loft. I glimpsed a dark-haired companion kneeling up there, bare-legged, buttoning on a shirt.

"Yeah, man, c'mon in."

"Hi, I came to look up Steve, a friend of a friend in California. I'm just driving by on my way north, from the Bay Area . . ."

"Yeah, yeah." He stuck out a hand, to shake in the thumb-clasped mode. "What's yer name?"

"Will."

"Wendell. This here's Candice."

"Hi," she said, zipping jeans up to cover a thatch of hair.

All around them in the house were arrayed items of their pottery - cups, plates, bowls, vases, macramé vases, pitchers - in various stages of finish. An adjourning room with a wheel in it confirmed the impression that this building was their studio as well as their home.

They offered me a good cup of strong filter coffee, talked a bit about their work, asked me about my journey. After coffee they went right to work, they said, but I was welcome to make a sandwich or whatever, help myself, make myself at home. I thanked them and set about assembling an excellent sandwich of cheese, avocado, and sprouts on homemade bread. In an hour or so of the woodstove going, they told me, I'd be welcome to a bath. Wow, I said, that'd be great. I wondered if I smelled bad. I took them up on the offer, after watching them knead clay for a while and hearing about their former lives in California pushing brooms and paper. "Gave it all up, man, for the good life." Wendell smiled broadly, his face radiant. Candice snickered, and I wondered what secret, darker side of the story she was hiding. But I didn't ask. I was concerned to get myself clean, now that I was fed, and my stuff dried out.

The bath was marvelous. I imagined that the wood-heated water had a special, penetrating quality, to relax and purify. The potter's wheel spun, with Candice humming as she worked, and Wendel bustling about like the faithful worker bee around his queen. After the bath I reveled in the close warmth of the clean clothes I'd gotten out of the car. Then I hung up the heap of wet clothes and bedding to dry on a clothesline the rest of that sunny afternoon, while I retired early to a calm solitude in the dry loft of the barn. It was clean-smelling now after the morning's work below, and would make a cozy nest for the night, as the potters had suggested. I disappeared into a book, the biography of Kerouac by Ann Charters.

That book I read intensely. It stood for me right on the thin line I was walking, the road I was travelling, the rail I was riding, the life I was living, between the raw experience of America onrolling, and the gift of poetic jazz language to transform it all into ode, eulogy, celebration and discovery. Jack Kerouac's unique process of spontaneous revelation, at once self-discovery and broad portraiture of a nation and an age, formed his life and work and became the manifesto of a generation. My generation was left to read, to look upon the Beat legacy and decide for itself whether to ride the momentum already begun. The implications were vast, ranging from complete social revolution, to utter spiritual transformation. Or, between those two poles of possibility, was it simply a matter of a few overgrown punks - beatniks, hipsters, yippies, hippies, whatever - joyriding through the emptiness of the American night, singing a mad babbling score to a dying landscape, to a speed-frenzied culture with no more frontiers, that would gawk and giggle and create instead the soulless materialistic fantasia of yuppiedom? I didn't know. But I knew I had to find out. And I knew that to get enough perspective on it all, I was on the right track. Silence, Joyce had said; cunning, as much as I could muster in my rat's way through the maze of circumstance, choice and opportunity; and exile.

I slept ten hours that night, and got back on the road.

---

Up the coast highway to Newport; over to Corvallis and Interstate 5, on up through Salem to Portland and across to Vancouver, Washington. The next level of transcendence, away. One more state, the last. Now as I drove north, along the coast highway again, the vibes felt better. More remote, wide open, less settled . . . farther from California, closer to Canada. I passed a place called Grays River. That felt good. I began to feel that, after a bit more university, I might find a place near here to settle down. Wasn't there a community college in Aberdeen, in Grays Harbor County? I pulled off the road just south of Grayland, near a beach where I might lay out and sleep for the night. It was called Grayland Beach. Wasn't it all somehow too obvious, though?

As I pull out my bag and head onto the sand, I notice a couple of campfires farther down the beach. Sounds of guitars are gusting up in the breeze. A party of teens passes me, arm in arm, laughing, carrying bottles in brown bags. A whiff of marijuana teases my nose. An impulse rises in me to join them, enjoy their party for a while. Who knows, I might meet someone . . . no, I hold back, pass and hold my solitary sights on my lone path northward.

---

Next destination, Olympic National Park. It's beauty turns out to be everything promised by its location in the uttermost northwest corner of the contiguous United States. In my travels westward and northward, the appeal of the wild landscapes have improved in direct proportion to my progress in those directions. Here in the rainforests of the Olympic Mountains, the vectors converge on a primeval paradise.

To describe such a place, with stock phrases like "snow-capped peaks," "steaming jungles," lush alpine meadows," "pristine lakes," etc., would pale beside a good coffee-table photographic appreciation: at the rate of a thousand words per image. There, too, the square frame limits would gall, after seeing the place pure and free and wide open, with the living sphere surrounding it, from an irreducible vantage in such a meadow, before such a vista of peaks, above said rainforest, beside said lake reflecting it all pure and simple and free.

If there's action to convey, I can recall my trek along the bear trail deep in the Hoh River valley. I camped for the night in a flat wide spot beside the trail - unfortunately next to a huckleberry patch. I took the proper precaution of hanging my food bag up from a tree branch. That night, however, a bear in the dark was bushwhacking off the trail through that berry patch, right near my open-air bed, right under the tree where my food hung. At length the beast had its fill of berries, gave up on hope for the food bag to fall its way, and clambered off through the bush.

My last night before leaving, I camped just inside the park a few miles from Port Angeles. From there I would take the ferry next morning across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria.

In the morning I woke up and packed, now moving on automatic. The wheels were in motion. I skipped breakfast and drove straight into town, asked directions and found the ferry dock, drove right on, the last car before the ferry cast off and headed north. How many times, in casting the I Ching the last couple of years, had I received the prophecy, "It furthers one to cross the great water." Well, here I was, at last, taking that plunge.

---

Everything looked different in BC. The misshapen trees were gothic in appearance. Within their ominous circle, the campus of the University of Victoria was primly manicured, clean and a somewhat faded green. I quickly found Sedgewick Hall, the quarters of the English Department, a low, one-story building in the shape of a barracks, and painted a deep forest green. I was cordially greeted by the secretary as if I were an old friend. True, there were only seven graduate students entering this year; it would be easy to single us out for special hospitality. I was shown in immediately to see the Department Chairman, David Jeffrie.

He conveyed a certain friendliness, but with an intense aura of intellectual energy in his vigorous handshake, his high forehead, his steel-blue eyes. "Here, here, sit down, now, glad to have you aboard, Will, is it, or do we call you William?"

"Oh, either one will do." I was unused to the formal appellation, but somehow here it seemed fitting. The English way, I supposed. Only my grandfather, the lawyer, had called me that up till now. "William, I guess."

"All right, now, William, are you ready to sign up for your courses?"

"Uh, actually I just got here, just drove in a few minutes ago. I haven't even seen a course catalogue."

"Well, fine. But surely you've given it some thought. Now, what was your area of interest, specifically?"

"Oh, um, uh, nature. I mean, the study of landscape in literature. That is, not just landscape, but the consciousness of the natural world. It might be as subtle and indirect as Coleridge's theory of organic form, for instance, though in the case of the Romantics, certainly natural imagery was also a fundamental . . ."

"Yes, yes, I see. Well, how about some poetry, a Canadian literature course, research methods . . ."

"Hmm. I've had lots of poetry before. I was actually thinking of, you know, kind of a survey of all kinds of writing: essays, travel writing, people like Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, Thoreau, maybe John Muir . . ."

"Well. Do you know any Canadian writers?"

"No. None at all."

"Oh, well then. You should definitely have a look into that. We have Rosemary Sullivan doing Can Lit this year. She's top-notch. And it sounds to me as if - with your mention of organic form and so on, you might find what you're looking for in just about any kind of poetry. Now I teach a course in medieval literature, and - "

"No, I think I'm more interested in the modern."

"All right, then. We'll sign you up for Modern American Poetry, Studies in Canadian Lit, and of course you'll need the Bibliography and Research Methods in any case. How's that sound?" He stood up, closing the course catalog.

"Uh, fine, I guess." I was still seated, a little stunned by this precipitous arrangement of the next four months of my life. But this Jeffrie seemed to be quite sure of himself in his assessment of my needs. I would trust his judgement and go along with his selections.

"Here," he said, handing me the catalogue as I finally stood up to leave. "Take this along and if you see any problems, anything more appropriate, we can make adjustments. It was nice meeting you, Mr. Gray."

I left feeling somewhat uneasy about the whole project I was committing to. Medieval studies, the chairman's specialty, wasn't exactly fertile ground for literature about nature. Unless, I had a vague intutition, the term "nature" is really so broad as to be nearly meaningless - equivalent, you might say, to "God." One thing was now certain: for the forseeable future I would be exploring "nature," whatever that meant, in the library.

Next item of business was finding a place to stay. I headed over to Administration, to register and to ask about housing. I was steered from there to a bulletin board posted with notices offering housing. Nothing looked very cheap. Then I saw, as in a dream, a little card saying, "Camper, rent-free in exchange for farm chores. Rainbow St." I took down the number and rushed over to the nearby pay phone, nearly shaking with anxious hope. Surely, I thought, it would be taken already. "Yes," the woman's voice said, "it's still available. There is one fellow who came out yesterday. You're welcome to come have a look."

"I'll be right there. How do I get to Rainbow Street?"

I gunned Shirley down the mile and a half stretch of road from campus. It was like a boundary: on the inside, residential streets leading into the city of Victoria; on the outside, woods, fields . . . and on Rainbow Street, a small acreage with a herd of cattle, peacefully grazing.

I pulled into the driveway and looked around. Yes, it looked perfect. The name on the mailbox was McDonald. A little too perfect, perhaps? I'd see. Between the house and the barn, a little white camper was propped up on timbers. My new home . . .

Mrs. McDonald showed me inside it. An elevated bed, a table, a stove with tiny oven, miniature fridge, closet, and a few drawers and shelves for stowing things.

"Now, what we're asking is some help with the cows. Feeding morning and night, muck out the barn on Saturdays. Sometimes Joe'll want help with the ones in the other field, maybe some haying. He's out haying now, taking advantage of this good dry weather we're having. You ever work with animals before?"

"Uh, let's see. We had a pet dog once, some cats. That's about it." I felt a little sheepish about my inexperience, and had to chuckle. "But I'm willing to learn. My great uncles had pigs, and raised tobacco down in southern Maryland - in America." "America" - it sounded strange, like that, so foreign. Is that what you called it, from outside?

"Oh, you're from the States, are you? I thought you had a bit of an accent. Well, let's see. I guess since there's no pay involved, we wouldn't have to worry about that. Yeah, the chores you could handle, I think. You're a healthy young man, and you must have some smarts if you're over there at the university. Our daughter's over at UBC, her second year. You'll probably enjoy meeting her. She comes on weekends, sometimes, to visit."

The farmer's daughter, now, is it? Again, too obvious.

---

But Rainbow St. worked out all right. For a month I gorged myself on blackberries from the hundred foot fencerow the far side of the field: blackberries plain, in muffins and pancakes, on granola and porridge, in pies and cobblers that I made on my little propane stove. I got used to toting hay bales to the cows, mucking out the barn, even using a stall for my own toilet, because that's all there was. I rode the little tractor, nearly tipping it, taking bucket by bucket of the little front-end loader full of manure out of the barn - which I would also shovel clean every Saturday morning by hand, with shovel and pitchfork - and dumped it onto the huge pile out in the field. Every morning I carried four bales of hay out to the feeder in the center of the field and broke it up the way Joe showed me with my knee in the center, doubling it over and then peeling off flake by flake to fluff up into the feeder as the cows came ambling over, their big eyes lolling in gratitude, their giant tongues already licking their lips.

"And I'll bet you didn't know one end of a cow from the other," Joe said to me one day.

"You're right," I replied. "But I'm learning pretty quick. About both ends."

He smiled and scurried off with his Groucho Marx duck walk. He was a wizened, wiry little Scotsman who worked all day at the shipyard and then came home, constantly refueling with cigarettes and coffee, to run the farm with its 35 head of cattle, recreating his former life in Saskatchewan.

Aside from my daily barn and feeding duties, I also put in a hand haying, at ten cents a bale in the sweltering heat, heaving them up to stack on the truck twelve feet high. On clear October weekends I'd air out my book-dusty brain by chasing cattle with Joe all over the outlying field that was like a giant, undulating football field, or like Scotland at a glance. Only instead of the North Sea, or the sea of faces in a stadium crowd, there were only the mute, unfeeling, almost malign ranks of shaggy firs and cedars to watch us.

One fall day, Joe came out to the barn with his .22 rifle for the two-year-old steer in the stall there fattening. The rest of the herd was looking on from over the fence, and they set to moaning with an unearthly howl. As Joe led the steer out on a halter, the moaning increased to a crescendo. The cattle sounded like a herd of sick elephants. When I heard the fatal shot and came to watch the butchering, I was mortified, nearly sick to my stomach from the sight and smell and idea of it, so many guts, so huge and ugly and deadly. But I wasn't too sick to eat of the "hanging tender" that night in Joe's kitchen, that Mary cooked up so juicy rare and tasty, the choicest cut.

---

The university coursework was interesting enough. I was already familiar with the American poets, but the professor was excellent and I learned much that was new. All three of my courses were taught by women. The professor teaching Canadian Literature, so highly touted by the department chairman, and dashingly beautiful as a bonus, was indeed inspiring with her enthusiastic appraisal of all the works covered. And I hadn't even known there was such a thing as "Can Lit." Actually, half the writers left me cold, but I did catch fire with some. I was particularly smitten with Earle Birney, an aged bard, native to BC, whose focus seemed to encompass nature in all its many-layered manifestations. Particularly intriguing was his portrayal of nature in what I soon learned was a characteristically Canadian fashion: as hostile, menacing, dangerous, sinister. What a contrast to the bucolic, pastoral idealism of the Americans and English! (Though there had been a strain in the Romantic tradition going back into Gothic grotesquerie - the wild mountain fastnesses of Byron, even the Shakespearean moor.) In Canada it seemed that nature was regarded with a universal national sensibility: the urge for human survival. It made sense, with the harsher climate, rugged terrain, short growing season, fierce wild animals . . .

Both literature courses were offered at the undergraduate level. I was allowed to take them for graduate credit, since there were only a couple of graduate courses per se. One was required, for its relevance to thesis work: Bibliography and Research Methods. The professor was a hardened, gnomish woman with hair grabbed back taut into a top-knot, piercing eyes and an intense grin half-mad with excitement over the dusty history of the mechanics of bookmaking. She was a disciple of Toronto's great man of literary criticism, Northrup Frye.

There were six other graduate students, the most memorable being Peter Russell, who filled our little seminar room with the smoke of Gauloises and arcane tales of Ezra Pound and the troubadours, John Donne, cosmic chemistry and mammoth-steaks in Siberia. Peter was a poet in his own right, a personal acquaintance of Pound from Italy, and a lecturer in no less than fourteen university departments during a long but unconventional career. He'd been forced to enroll in the MA Program because no university would hire him for regular work without the degree. He characterized UVic as "the Kindergarten of the Arts."

In both undergraduate courses, I was the lone grad student. I therefore enjoyed some measure of status. My work, meanwhile, was expected to be of a higher quality commensurate with that status. There were a couple of elderly ladies auditing the Can Lit course, so it wasn't a matter of age. Rather, there was a little greater scrutiny on my participation during class discussions, allowance of personal time with the professor before or after class, requests for help with assignments by a couple of young female undergrads . . .

---

Thanks to Rosemary Sullivan's energetic efforts, UVic played host that term to a veritable cavalcade of Canadian literary illuminati, with Gary Geddes and Robin Skelton on staff, and guest readers including Irving Layton, P. K. Page, and Mordecai Richler. Some of them graced our Can Lit class with group interviews.

During our meeting with Richler, he expounded on his best-selling novel, St. Urbain's Horseman, on his efforts there to poke fun at sexual excesses and hangups.

"But in doing that," I asked him, "aren't you pandering to the public taste for pornography, yourself?"

"No, no," Richler insisted. "It's not my intention. I'm against that sort of preoccupation with sex."

"But your book is full of it. It's the dominant subject, in terms of the amount of content devoted to it. Surely you must have known you'd sell a lot of books that way."

Richler wouldn't buy my analysis of his motives. He waved me off and took another question, avoiding calling on anyone in my quarter of the Sedgewick lounge for the remainder of the period. Then he looked at his watche, stood to daintily shake Dr. Sullivan's hand, grunted a hasty goodbye and disappeared, but not without managing to shoot one final, furtive, resentful glance my way.