Ron Huber Travelogue
Heading East from Oregon. Late Autumn 1980

Ron Huber's travel diary from Late Fall 1980. As the log opens, Ron, now dubbing himself "Aries", is at the Lorien commune in Butte Falls, Oregon. He then travels to southern Oregon, then by hitch and bus to Salt Lake City, en route to Maryland. He is in the pre-depression mode of a manic-depressive cycle. His thinking has been influenced by Timothy Leary's 1970s book on the stages of intelligence evolution. "The Intelligence Agents"

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East from Lorien.
For weeks, Aries had prowled around the mountain commune, feeling a slight but growing desire to return from the wilderness back to the regulatory heart of his nation. Yet he hadn't acted on it. Days would pass in meditative reverie, rarely broken by a visit to one of this fellow communards, who lived in varying degrees of rusticity, from sod-covered dugouts to canvas and pine branch lean-tos.

Baguse, an expatriate Iranian who despised both deceased shah and geriatric Ayatollah, dwelt with his teenaged American girl friend in a tipi on the northern slope of the up thrust butte that dominated the center of Lorien. A jeweler by trade, Baguse eked out a living by making silver rings and pendants set with turquoise, amber and other precious gems, which he'd garnered on rambling journeys around the globe. He sold these at arts and crafts fairs, sidewalk sales and private orders.

When he wasn't forging rings or traveling, Baguse would commonly spend days and nights immersed in the pleasures of his girl's flesh, rolling around his tipi while the towering pines drizzled pine needles against the canvas cones. Aries rarely visited them. They were mostly oblivious to the rest of the world, a pair of tantric adepts entwined in their private universe.

Spearman lived in a burrow. Or rather, a dugout slowly sagging over beneath the weight of its roof. Vaguely Cro-magnon in appearance, with broad sloping brow, prognathous jaw and bowed legs, he occupied himself with tanning sheepskins and deerhides, or sitting on some lonely boulder, rolling cigarettes and dreaming Paleolithic dreams. Aries often visited him, spending an evening crouching around a smoky firepit, silently watching beans and rice bubble and burn in his rusty kettle while coyotes wailed in the distance. Sometimes they would rove the tangled forests, stalking the wary deer with bow and spear, and feast on bloody flesh and coarse unleavened wheatcakes, and lie content, blinking drowsily into the fire.

This was profoundly satisfying to a certain primordial side of Aries' psyche and perhaps more than anything else kept him delaying his return to the Capital.

But finally he left, telling no one. He first spent a week at a girlfriend's house in Ashland, until he could put up with her battles with her two ill-mannered kids no longer. Then he slipped away, meaning to thumb to Klamath Falls, then travel by bus the rest of the way.

His first ride left him at the crest of the mountains, near where the shield wall of the Siskiyous, dividing California from Oregon, meets the Cascades. There was an inn nearby, and he strode in and, out of habit, drank a cup of coffee. It was dusk and he walked a quarter mile east along the deserted road, which was flanked by immense Douglas firs stretching off endlessly into the distance. A well used deer track appeared on the south side of the road; he followed it a short way to a game trail junction of sorts, where a small clearing, well scored with deer tracks, offered a creditable campsite.

Aries unpacked in the growing twilight, eating a few crackers smeared with peanut butter. He sat on his unrolled sleeping bag, strummed desultorily on his guitar, then put it aside and picked up a paperback. "Catastrophe Theory", by Alexander Woodcock and Norte Davis. Sunlight fades rapidly.

The authors begin to discuss the limitations of conventional mathematics, but it was soon too dark to read. Aries lit a candle, then blew it out; the forest is tinder-dry and he doesn't want to come close to starting a conflagration through drowsy carelessness. Also he feared detection, though vehicles growl past on the nearby road infrequently.

Into the sleeping bag, having searched out projecting stones from beneath it. He cannot sleep, because of the coffee. The Milky Way appears overhead, and between fitful snatches of drowse, he notes that it appears to rotate counterclockwise.

Finally, he tried auto hypnosis and is pleased to find that yawns begin within a half minute. Just then some large animal comes crashing through the forest nearby, thudding out clumsily, snapping branches. He bolted upright. A bear? If so, then what? Throw pebbles at it? Growl? Play dead?

But his worried thoughts were superfluous: the animal (bear? deer? Must be a deer) crashed off around him, clattered across the road and alerted a pack of hounds who bayed after it. Back to his hypnotic chant: 1,2,3,4...1,2,3,4.1...2...3...4... The yawns always begin on 2, gathering strength through 3 then crashing into his throat on four....1...2...3...snore.

Morning, strangely lit by both sun and gibbous moon. Aries ate some granola, swigged a bit of foul tasting water from his canteen, and packed. The road deserted, he walked along it breathing in the piney fragrance. After a mile he stopped, strummed some Neil Young. "All along the Navajo Trail / burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails..." A car pulls up. He loads his junk in, climbs aboard.

The driver, mid thirties, well-trimmed red head and beard, is a psychologist running a clinic for emotionally disturbed children in Klamath Falls.

He tells Aries a few case histories, replete with beatings, molestation and other forms of familial mayhem. Shortly, they are out of the mountains, in arid pasture land dotted with farms. Crewcut children await school buses at farm mailboxes.

Klamath Falls is ugly, nondescript. A few rows of old store fronts, fuming mills. Few Indians.

The psychologist drops Aries at the bus terminal. As he unloads his baggage, Aries asks what a good methodology would be for an analysis of TVs physiologic effect. Psychologist says a wide ranging approach would be best. Study effects of TV on posture, interpersonal relations, brainwaves, glandular secretions, everything, Should be a long term study.

They part. Aries went into the terminal, gets his ticket. It is 9:30. Bus leaves at 3:33. He checks his pack, went to a coffee shop, then to the library, where he perused the Oregon papers, read part of a book by a fellow Huber about computer thieves in NY and glanced at a copy of science magazine.

One thirty pm. Aries searched out a food store (Klamath Co-op), bought frozen bread and cheese. Then, searching for a used book store, he spied the Animal Care Thrift Shop. There he buys Milton's Paradise Lost and Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Romans, both excellent long trip stories.

3:33 No bus.
4:00 No bus.
4:30 the bus arrives and he boards. Trailways has hit upon a new way to economize: No ashtrays. He wonders as they set off across the flat dryness of eastern Oregon, what the bathroom looks like.

Alturas, Ca. 6:20 The bathroom is...serviceable. Gaping shit-encrusted toilet hole, sloshing with excrement pickled in disinfectant. Tepid running water with metal plaque warning against drinking. Plenty of paper towels and asswipes.

Back in his seat, he ate "sprouted 8 grain bread" and chunks of Monterey jack cheese. The bread was stale. He examined the wrapper: "Lifestream Bakery, Richmond, BC Canada." Canadian bread in a Klamath Falls food store? He ate it anyway, making a clumsy sandwich with clods of cheese, then opened Plutarch.

Writing of Romulus, Plutarch admits the unreliability of his sources. And truly, the tale, which Plutarch culls mostly from Diocles of Pepaethus, has an improbability about it. Romulus and brother abandoned, Moses-like, upon a river in a wooden cradle by his grand uncle. Rom and Remus suckled by wolf and later fed solids by woodpecker. R and R founding a city of outcasts and fugitives, then kidnapping women from the neighboring Sabines to provide themselves wives. Romulus vanishing one day (he'd recently stripped the patrician class of administrative powers, thus not surprising that he'd disappeared mysteriously).

Not a bad tale, all told; suitably apocryphal for the founder of an empire. Aries looked up from the book, found himself chugging through Tule Lake, California. He looked vainly around for the remnants of the concentration camps where Nisei, Japanese Americans, were imprisoned during WW2. No detention centers in evidence. Only listless agriculture: hayfields, barns, irrigation ditches. Around the valley, great fingers of lava, eroded, knobby, stretch around in random directions, like misplaced jetties or dikes.

An hour out of Alturas, they passed a forest fire. Aerial tankers flew ponderously over it, dumping water and or fire retardants, A helicopter zipped about with a water barrel hanging beneath. It hovered over a nearby pond.

"Couldn't do much firefighting with a little barrel like that" Aries noted to a fellow rider behind him.

"Sure it could" the fellow countered. "Must carry 500 gallons." Still not much for a 1,000 acre fire, Aries thought, gazing at burning bushes.

11:00 AM Mountain Time. Approach to Salt Lake City. All of last night Aries spent in semi-wakefulness as the bus lumbered through Nevadic wastes. Several stops but he'd stayed on, trying to gain a few more moments of unconsciousness.

Then a breakfast stop at Stateline Casino, though Aries had already dined on granola and milk. But he slurps a brace of coffees and, on the way back to the bus, dropped a nickel in a slot, yanked the arm and surprise! five nickels poured out. He scooped them up, made for the bus. A winner.

"No smoking permitted on the bus in the state of Utah" announced the driver as they growl across the state line, exchanging Nevadan salt desert flanked by lunar mountains for Utahn salt desert flanked by lunar mountains.

Utah grew greener as Aries read Paradise Lost, irrigation changing sparse sagebrush to hayfields. Then a sprinkling of houses turned into a torrent, and they arrived in Salt Lake City, passing the turgid blue gray rankness of the Great Salt Lake itself, dotted by a few sailboats.

At the terminal, the driver told eastbound travelers to disembark, prior to boarding their next bus. He was immediately contradicted loudly by a number of passengers, who protested that this was an express bus to New York. The driver was non-plussed. He reddened. Then he went back on the intercom, asked east bounders to wait aboard while he found out the correct itinerary. In a moment he reappeared, apologized, said this bus would continue on after fueling. Aries and the other passengers disembarked. The Burger King appeared singularly uninviting. Aries asked the ticket agent when the bus would continue on. The agent glances at a clock, estimated 35 minutes.

Were there any groceries nearby? Aries wanted to replenish his dwindling food supplies.

No, replied ticket man. No food stores nearby. He started to turn away.

Not even within 6 or 7 blocks? Aries persisted, thinking half an hour adequate to travel such a distance and back.

Well yes, the desk jockey admitted, brightening. About four blocks. Go two blocks east, then two blocks north. It'll be on the left side.

Aries jogged out the door, glancing at his watch. 25 minutes. The blocks are huge, double the size of city blocks in D.C.

After one block, he is across the street from the main Mormon temple. Not as large as he'd imagined it would be, and surrounded by a recently built wall of tan brick. He paced rapidly around it, dodging well-groomed hordes of Mormons promenading about. 20 minutes.

Finally around the blasted thing, which fills the whole of one of those immense blocks. There are Mormons everywhere, like lemmings lost in the desert. All natty, pink-faced, ga-ga over their enormous church.

There it is! Temple View Market. Aries jaywalks, runs inside. Grabs 4 hard-boiled eggs, lump of onion cheese, loaf of break, Pays. Zips back out, sandals flapping. 15 minutes.

Back around the Mormonic citadel, dodging the crowds. Aries gets a sinking feeling. He may be left behind if the bus leaves early. The traffic is thick. Curse these latter day shitheads!

He rounds the last corner. a bus comes out from the terminal, pulls away. Too far to catch up. Is that his bus? He catches the bus number. Yes! That's it! It growls off, trailing smoke.

Duffiled! travel-writer Paul Theroux would groan. Aries stalks bitterly into the terminal, glaring at the knots of strangers huddled into TV-equipped chairs. Time to snarl at ticket man.

But then a few feet before the counter, he saw a pair of fellow east bounders.

Saved! He walks over, gasping with relief, and informs them of his moment of terror.

Ten minutes later they left, zipping through the steep canyons of eastern Utah. Aries read more of Milton. He became tired of the gushing tributes to God in Book III, in which the Almighty, spying Satan creeping onto earth, nonchalantly abandons his latest creations, Adam and Eve, to the archfiend, apathetically declaring: