Ron Huber drives from Cheverly, Maryland to Corvallis Oregon in April 22-April 28 1985. Transcribed from his handwritten diary.
The Trip Starts.
4/22/85 These grease smudges are from tearing out a decrepit heater hose that had sprung a suspicious leak last night. (I'd taken my red VW Rabbit through a fully loaded road test up Hospital Hill in Cheverly, Maryland and along the Route 50 section between Landover Road and Kenilworth Avenue; I wanted to see how she'd take the strain. The oil pressure light had a red flicker to it, too.)
Parked atop a hill overlooking the orange lights of DC, the light atop the Capitol out, no one in session that night, I caught a whiff of the dreaded scent of antifreeze steam. Driving off the hospital's helicopter pad back to the house, and there a tiny pinhole shows its burbling self on the heater hose. At Pop's advice, I cut off the offending chunk and reconnected the remainder; to last until replaced with a fresh hose....
I finally take off, many partings, and roll down the BW Parkway, then west on the Beltway and finally onto Route 1, packed with commutists and the dreaded oil light/brake light complex goes on! At the College Park VW place, though, the oil pressure switch is clean and dry, still I acquire a new one and the requisite hose. When I come out, $19.85 lighter, I see the green sheen of a pool of antifreeze spread beneath RR. Revised heater hose has blown, but I'm in perfect condition to fix it, and do so, though the scowling Vietnamese janitor frowns at my mess. Finally, new hose on, water added to radiator, I am, perhaps. ready to roll again.
4:08 pm. Somewhere relatively close to Pittsburgh. Red Rabbit has been obstinately flickering its red oil pressure/brake lights when at an idle, but no apparent harm; lots of oil down in there. A lingering concern: the fuel pump has been chattering ever since I poured in some fuel injector cleaner--mostly methanol...and that endless drumming of my weird front tires.
Somewhere in Ohio, approaching Columbus. Ol Red Rabbit's been just hopping along. About 35 MPG, no oil or water problems. Listening to the good old AM country spectrum. Often, like "Love Radio WPIT", the musical yearnings of Waylon, Willy etc all get mixed with hot Christian paranoia along the Beast-harlot-barcode-Communists axis.
Starting to feel confident: well hey, bucko, just might make it somewhere....
Briefly in the midwest
4/23/85 Ohio and Indiana a fine cool breeze w/o any problems. Reached Ohio/Indiana border around midnight, made gangetic burnt offering about 50 miles before the end.
Hit a rest area about 2 miles from the border and set up my mobile homette: It works! Plenty of stretchout room, comfortable, snug, only slightly unnerving to have people walking past only a foot or two from my face under the rear hatch window...Took a walk to the back of the restaurant: dark fecund plough lands under flaring stars, though the mercury lamps tried their worst to hide outer space. Thin crescent moon had appeared but briefly in the western sky before setting.
4/23/85 Sunday. Mizooo! Halfway through Missouri and Red Rabbit keeps on rolling as though she'd go on forever. But I knew I must rest both she and me, both to avoid overheating her and because I started noticing electric blue afterglow trails around my hands. Time to rest. No doubt about it.
Still quandaryizing over whether to go west to Sacto then north to Ashland and Further!, or to do a more northerly poke and arrive in Corvallis soonest. Probably A-land then up as I may collect a friend or two to EF!ify along with me...Coffee is zinging me!...
The Kansas Cramp
Hateful Kansas! Dullest of the dullest of places. Most painful stretch of driving I've ever done....Once beyond the borderlands near Missouri, Kansas is mercilessly flat, mile after mile, hour after hour. Red Rabbit has no cruise control. My right foot starts to cramp unbearably. I shift around so that I'm using my left foot on the accellerator, but after another hour that foot too is wasted, shooting fiery bolts of pain from toes to hamstrings. I cast about for something, ANYTHING, see some bricks along the side of the road, pull over and try using them as weights on the gas pedal. Wworks, all right...the car's tachometer redlines--I realize I can't stop even if I want to, but there's nothing to stop for, so I grip the wheel like I'm in a jet or rocketship and race west into the horizon. With a maryjane buzz on, its as though the car is stationary, floating, while the landscape races past.
Too much, after a while.. I kick the bricks away, tried using the piece of broomstick I had for propping the hatchback open. That didn't work...Somehow, time passed, an occasional rundown restaurant at an intersection with a road heading into infinity at right angles. Cornfed-semi-bovine Kansas waitresses. Mercifully, the sun finally fell below the clouds on the western horizon
Into the West
4/25/85. Tuesday. Fitful decision-making all the way in from Eastern Colorado's flat cowboy plains where I bought an apple and a box of foil (heh heh heh) and discombobulated myself. As I soared through the lengthening shadows, I saw I was beset with a threefold possible futures split: South into hitherto unexplored parts of the southern Rockies; straight west on 1-70 through Denver and into the central Rockies, then through great chunks of Utah and so on; last but not least the wimpiest route: straight north just before Denver to Cheyenne, then west on 80, passing by the Rockies entirely through a broad pass in Wyoming. Probably fastest, but is that my overriding concern?
Anyway, 'twas a quandary and I earnestly evoked Shiva asking for advice on which tine of his fork to go down. Omens bulge suggestively, yet at Limon, CO I have a crisis of confidence, go no where and stare into Rip Griffin's truck stop cafe.
Remembering myself here years ago at 2 AM desperately gulping coffee and then paranoidedly hallucinating voices as I tried to sleep where a kindly mechanic had let me sack in his car while he worked the night shift....Voices, rude voices....And yet, last night President Reagan recited his speech and I, I heard a chorus of fnordian voices agreeing with each phrase as he spoke it....Hmmm....Snoresville finally at the 1st rest area past Limon, absolutely woozy with fatigue and sunburn fever, barely able to get my boots off, and I awaken once to piss in dark drizzle and again in unbelievable SNOW!
Beaners, Burritos and Shitkickers
4/25/85. In the midst of a spring, complete with a radio travelers advisors warnings. So what but worse, my water pump is leaking!
Oh Red rabbit! Hang in there, sweet machine, at least until Rock Springs, or even Rawlins, eh? More damned gurglings form the radiator hose and I , I can only hope for the best....Spent a fruitless mid-day trying to get a new upper radiator hose, but no go at three different places in Laramie...Just scored some antifreeze and adding that appears to the source of the problem. Let's see how this ends...
A bit of pathos near the Wyoming/Colorado border: "Natural Fort", a soft sandstone jagged upthrust, the site of the desperate defense by 160 Blackfeet Indians of their lives when they were surprised by 600 Crows. Unsuccessful, for all Blackfeet were offed....
4/26/85 Twenty four hours later...still in Wyoming... An endless snowstorm, and that sinister leaking waterpump became a waterfall when I finally slogged into Rawlins, about 2/3 of the way across the Shitkicker State. Gulped the worthless bitter brew of a Best Western while waiting for the damned engine to cool down. A bowl of "Texas Style" chili (with beans!) and I saw the leak was going for the gold, so to speak, too much of a leak to ignore or even to get to Rock Springs, the next big city westward of here.....So the sickening dull groan of fear whacked me in the belly and I looked up "foreign car repair" setting on the one of the two that has my birthdate in its phone number....What other criteria does one use at 5:30 pm in a snowstorm in a strange town when the emergency is ABSOLUTE?
So a phone call to City Auto Wholesale" 777 E. Cedar Street, and the quiet country voice listened to my anxious voice and allowed as he'd be willing to "take a look at it." Hokay....Fill the radiator one last time and rush cursing all the way to the place, a converted warehouse with a fierce-looking bearded fellow clearly running the show.
"Bring 'er in." and I putt-putted inside; that was 24 hours ago and she hasn't moved since. Danny the VW guy here, almost imperceptibly quiet voice, examined the sick critter, we talked, then he ordered a new water pump (right half) from a local parts place. It duly arrived, and I settled back in a soft sofa in the front of the place as Danny set to work.
45 minutes later he somberly informed me that "it looks bad." Seems the bolts that hold the pump on succeeded in snapping off, leaving the left half unuseful without going through lengthy work. And the "new" water pump was cracked and useless, wouldn't even turn.... The end all of it being I wasn't going anywhere that night. Danny found me a cheapish motel ($16) and one of the shop employees drove me to it--the Cliff motor lodge, a two story cheapo resort motel with inadequte heating and twin queen size beds. Took a shower and tried to read Shardik, but anxiety and caffeine ruined my concentration on the fine story of the great God-Bear...Sleep.
Awake at 6:30 am and naught to do, so strummed a bunch of Hendrix songs, some Neil Young and even Space Oddity by David Bowie.
Then twas 10 o'clock--checkout time-- and off to a cafe through a cold cloudy snowblown day. Caffeine jitters (will I ever learn to moderate my use of the damned drink?) And back at City Auto Wholesale, Danny has just ordered a used water pump from a supplier in Laramie, over a hundred miles away, to be delivered by bus....Now its 5 pm and no pump...Another night here? Gasp...And how was YOUR day?
4/27/85 Awaken with a scared dream about money depletion and found myself in Gary's bus, comfortably esconced in a thick bed with a propane heater hissing warmth into the room....
Gary, the bluff, gruff owner of City Auto, did me a fine favor last night. After I fumbled about in my car for an hour or two straightening things up, I got the brainstorm to ask him if Red Rabbit could be rolled outside so that I might sleep in her. He couldn't see why not, but felt he had to ask Danny as a matter of politeness; Danny being the surgeon, so to speak, who'd removed Red's heart.
Before long though, he floored me by offering me the use of his camper bus, complete with propane heat and coleman lantern. I readily accepted and gathered some bedding, a can of beans and my brother Rick's Gibson SG guitar, and the same fellow who'd taken me to the the Cliff the night before drove me to the bus.
He was blond, 17 and impressive in his tales of personal strife with the law. "I should be doing 40 years," said this downcheeked skinny lad, who races across town, scornfully pointing out ramdom teenagers on the sidewalks as "faggots". We narrowly passed a camaro, whose plump grim-faced driver geared down and passed up briefly, cigarette clenched in his teeth. We met again at a stoplight and the camaro driver blasted off down a side street when the light changed, gushing smoke from his nostrils like an angry locomotive.
"Faggot." sneered Jimmy, my driver.
We got to the bus, an elderly schoolbus painted white with green trim. The interior was well fitted out, with counters, closets, a kitchenette with stove, sink and table for four, a toilet and refrigerator. Jimmy and I wrestled out the large propane take from inside the bus and laid it on a welded-on shelf at the back of the bus. Jimmy fastened the copper pipe from the bus to it and we tried, unsuccessfully, to open the valve, he believing it opened clockwise, I counter clockwise, both to no avail. Jimmy went back to the shop, got a pipewrench and turned the thing open.
Wsssss! propane began jetting forth through the valvestem, icing the handle and my glove as I closed it back shut. The gas stank of garlic. Opened it again and the same thing, so gave it up for a bad job.
Before he left on his own directions, Jimmy gave me a motor tour of some of the bars he felt were acceptable to my station. Both, the Rifleman and the Wyoming, were in the pawnshop area of town, with painted-over glass and plywood fronts. Seedy-looking and not very inviting. Jimmy said they weren't REAL shitkicker bars, though one was a "Burrito Bar", such a place as half-Mexican/half Anglos frequented. Burrito? White on the outside, brown on the inside, he patiently explained.
Asked about bars that business types might frequent, he dismissed them with a snort. "Faggots." He only drank "hard straight whisky" he observed.
Asked about cops, dope and such things, he said twasn't no big deal. "They know you're here, you know" he said. "Who?" I said, startled.
"The cops. They keep an eye on everyone and everything They don't know exactly WHERE you are but they know you're here."
With that comforting revelation he took off, after warning me to keep out of the back alleys, as there were many burritos lurking about, who'd "just as soon stomp you as talk to you."
Okay....I unfolded my bedding , read some more of Shardik, then the light failed. I lay back on the comfortable king size bed, watch my breath turn into frost by the dim light of a street lamp, and dozed. An hour later, Gary rumbled up in his truck. I sprang out of bed, met him at the door.
Using a pipe wrench, he again opened the propane tank valve, which again gushed forth propane through its valve stem. He kept turning it and even more came forth, icing his wrench, pooling briefly on the bench, vaporizing in great fluffy billows that filled the air like fog. A single spark could've blown us to pieces, but miraculously, no sparks were glanced off the wrench.
Finally turned to its limit, the gas stopped leaking.
Don't know why it does that," he said as we clambered aboard the bus, which, it turned out, he'd fitted out in San Diego and driven all over the country from coast to coast before settling in Rawlins, where he was now owner of four businesses and 34 rental units. "I hardly ever get to see my family." he complained, but it was the complaint of a satisfied man, proud to be overworked.
We lit stove, lantern and heater and the chilly bus began to come to life. There'd be no problems with asphyxiation, he said in answer to my query, pointing at the numerous leaks around doors and windows.
After bidding me goodnight and saying he'd be around in the morning to shut off the propane tank, Gary left. I cooked a can of beans on the stove, carefully stirring to avoid boilover and lounged about, eating my beans, warming my feet over the heater and sipping a beer while glancing further into Shardik. Then to bed, though somewhat sleepless from coffee abuse.
Every hour or so, a train would grumble and roar through the trainyard a block away. Once a pickup truck load of teenagers unaccountably stopped outside the bus, engaged in a noisy drunken dispute then drove off again.
Now its morning. Woke around 7:30, trusty Wesclox baby ben ticking away beside me all night. Bundled up my gear, headed to a cafe for a much needed shit, and came back hurriedly, thinking of the sinister burrito gangs rifling the bus. Nothing disturbed when I returned, of course, but where is Gary? Its 10 am.
5 pm. Jimmy took me on the grand tour of Rawlins this morning. I finally stashed my axe under the bus bed and decided to walk down to City Auto. Perhaps by now Gary'd have gotten the water pump. Half a block from the bus, I saw Jimmy shoveling junk out of a demolished house's foundations. I joined him. The house dated from the turn of the century, but Gary'd decided to rip it down and sell the lot to a builder.
As we shoveled sodden trash and broken lathing out of the basement, Jimmy regaled me with more tales of his rugged life. Now, at 17, he was starting to mellow out and leave his wild times behind, he said.
We finished scraping the wet rubbish our of the ex-basement, several wheelbarrows full. Each wheelbarrow had to be raced up a precipitously high ramp into the pickup truck, splashing through poisonous-looking green and mud colored water up to the ramp, then a hard muscular surge up the 45 degree slope and thump! into the truckbed.
Done, we picked up my junk from Gary's bus and wheeled over to the shop. Danny was morosely uncommunicative as always, shaking his head and saying "nope" when I asked him for news. Discouraged and bored, I went racing with Jimmy to the town dump, zipping through town as fast as he could.
He honked and waved at a pair of teenage girls in a passing car, and told me how the driver had propositioned him; he'd told her he was known as a "helluva good screw", they'd gotten it on. The next day she called him up for another roll in the hay, but he told he he'd only arranged with her for a one night stand, not a two nighter, to her fury and chagrin.
As he told me this tale, we were bouncing along a dirt road at about 80 miles per hour, headed into the barren flats where the dump was. Passing the signs for Dead Animal Pit and Garbage Pit, we skidded into the "construction waste" area, backed to the edge of the pit (thickly dotted with used Christmas trees) and shoveled the wood and junk over the side.
Then a quick speeding race back into town, and Jimmy announced that we'd now go to see "Snob Knob", where the rich folks dwelt. We drove though a middle class region where two car garages and one story ranch houses covered the rolling hills, and were briefly blocked by a fellow trying to back an empty trailer into his side yard. Jimmy rolled right up to him. The driver grimaced and backed the trailer in, snagging the guy lines of a telephone pole with one of his trailer's wooden uprights. His co-worker shouted a warning and whacked at the wire till it sprang loose. We sped past, and wound up a boulder strewn residential canyon to the end of the road, where the mayor's magnificent brick pile stood.
Jimmy explained that as we were in a "Jimmy" (GMC 4X4 truck) we were were instantly recognized by all the middle class folk as either shitkickers, burritos or beaners. We rolled back through town, past the old penitentiary with its surprisingly low walls. The guard towers, one at each corner, contained gatling guns, he assured me.
At my request, we went to the bus station to check on the arrival of my waterpump. I recognized the place from years past, when I'd traveled by bus from Oregon to Maryland: a combination bus depot/roller rink. "Beaner and Burrito Central," Jimmy pronounced it.
The part was there! The depot master hadn't bothered to call the shop because, he explained, most places were still staying closed on weekends. Back to the shop. When Gary arrived, I told him and he went to get it. Danny was busy on another care, so I went tor a walk through town on what was now a fine spring day. Stopped at an antique store, wwhere the slow talkin' cowboy that ran the place tried to stiff me $5 for a two volume set of Shakespeare, and showed me a handsome Guild guitar he'd traded a saddle for.
I wandered back toward the shop, stopped at a flea market where among the usual used clothing and romance/cowboy novels, I was greeted by the owner of one of the two tables of books. He was a prison guard, making a little money on the weekend. Told that I was looking for a classic, " a book worth keeping", he rustled through his shelves and came up with James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," and "Coronado" a detailed history of the Spanish gold-seekers' explorations of the southwest. I bought them both for a dollar. He told me he might be offered a job in Salem Oregon as a marksman, and explained how a fellow guard was fired for missing an escaping con with his riot gun. "I don't miss." he told me. He was at least 60, with a furry, earflapped billed cap atop his skinny frame.
4/28/85. Awaken just outside of Salt Lake City. Another one of those crises: shall I immediately go north, up to Corvallis, Oregon, or stright west to Sacramento, then up to Corvallis via Ashland, etc.?
Even in the morning, I'm indecisive...omens? Shucks, there's omens favoring every point of the compass!
6pm. Stopped at Boise Denny's, next to the airport, having just dropped off my first hitchhiker, an enormously plump woman who'd been standing forlornly next to a dead VW bug. It had just given way under a combination of the heat, her weight and high speed. She was bound for Boise from Twin Falls to console her grieving sister, disconsolate over the recent loss of a friend. She called Twin Falls "Twin".
Resolved the destinationary dilemma atop a windy crag in Idaho's Sawtooth National Forest. I'd been tootling along Route 84, only a mile or so into Idaho, when I stopped at a rest area where a trio of tipsy locals tried futilely to used my prooffered spare fan belt to replace their broken one. Mine was far too small; their vehicle was a GMC 4X4 pickup ( A jimmy!).
While I wandered through the thick gnarled forest around the rest area, they somehow drove it away. I headed on into Idaho, Red Rabid running A-OK, but getting seriously bored by the unvarying 55 mph and uniformly distant mountains: the road stayed to the middle of the widest valleys, of course.
Then, while perilously reading the map and driving, I saw a 30 mile alternative route that would take me at least CLOSE to the Sawtooths by swinging around west by northwest while Rte 84 lazily looped north, then west.
Why not! I thought to myself. I'd been off the main roads a little as possible, fearing another ruptured hose or other mechanical failure while in the depths of some sgebrushy wilderness. But I was feeling confident, so I hit the offramp at the ludicrously named town of Sublett, and sped west, directly toward the snowy mountains, dodging occasional potholes and mooing at bemused cattle along the two laner. It led into the very small town of Malta--a few houses and some grain silos and farm equipment dealers neslted below the mountains. Malta passed, I rose steadily up Route 77 and after passing the local store, saw a sign that noted "Summit Creek Rd open". About 5 miles later I found the road, a gravel track leading up to the weathered face of a mesa. It was noon. I looked at the often steep track, judged Red Rab healthy enough and ground my way up the dirt road in first gear, ascending onto a windy wide-vista'd mountaintop covered with small barrel cacti, sage, mesquite and some varieties of small wildflowers.
The road ended at a sci fi-ish weather station a mile ahead so I stopped on a slightly lower ridge and, leaving the car slightly off the road, walked to a ridge-summit a quarter mile away to have lunch. Splendid views to the south of snowcapped summits in Utah, and the vast Snake River plain to the north, while beyond it rose like a dream the Lost River Range, clad in ice, seemingly floating in the air above the dusty plain in a long range of peaks disappearing into the north.
I nibbled a sandwich and some bean soup, and sunned. While walking east toward a canyon, I saw, beneath the wind-sheared form of a juniper, a low shelter built of the flat plate-sized rock shards that dotted the ground; the whole business only two feet high. While it was partly tumbled down, the way it was built under some very ancient branches suggested it had never been any higher. Indian shelter? Cowboy? I could find no detritus to suggest either alternative, but the very lack of tin cans or other junk made me feel it was of Indian origin.
Raised Shiva, dwelt on the travel question and flashed a decision to make directly for Corvallis, crossing southern Idaho on Route 84, then through Oregon diagonally, stopping the night in the southern Oregon desert, then going northwesterly through Burns and Bend, crossing the Cascades at the Santiam Pass and rolling into the Willamette Valley to Corvallis and thence to the base camp for some R&R&R. Yahooie!
Getting to and through Oregon
4/29/85. Son of a gun! Trip's end, I'm just outside of Corvallis, Oregon, soaking in some coffee before going to meet the mysterious Ecotopians of Oregon Earth First!
Oregon has unrolled past my eyes like a many-plotted movie. Sage desert, then scrubby conifer mountain forests. Stopped for the night a quarter mile down a dirt road from the trans-Oregon highway, about 30 miles east of Burns, Oregon. It was only 10 pm, but I suddenly felt I might be pushing Red Rab too hard, so I just as suddenly turned off the highway just before a sign saying Burns Ranger District. Onto the gravel road, dousing my lights as another car came grinding up the highway only a short way along the road. I came upon a puddle of unknown depth/muckiness, so got out and probed it before driving through; it was only two inches deep, rocky bottomed. Splash through and drove a little way down, out of sight of the highway and thus unlikely to be hassled: urban mentality--automatically assuming I was illegal being on a forest service-ish dirt road and sleeping without paying.
Out of the car, deep plugged-Eustachian tube silence, till I popped my ears, then scratchy thrumming of frogs in a tiny stream a little downhill. A truck grumbled through low gears as it passed the turn off and went down towards Idaho. Then heavy star silence with frog accompaniment...
I evoked the wilderness god, attuned to the slow biopulse of the late night desert. A large cloudmass overtook the moon, tried to swallow it but the moon's sharp edge cut the cloud like a mill saw. On a hill of my road, isolated conifers looked down at me; almost like a theater. I sang them a song of pain and puzzled rage, then brought out my brother's guitar case/casket and displayed the ax to the audience. Then I played a song to them, an instrumental.
When I walked along the road further into the forest, I had warrior energy coating me as I strode, grinning wildly, seeking some trophy beyond the pair of beer cans I'd picked up.
Suddenly, an odd low 'clank' upset my poised confidence. The hillside trees now seemed to hang over me hungrily; some strange surging force prickling my back as I walked/jogged back to the security of my car & western mind set.
Morning. Snug in my rabbit's belly. Did a wind sprint, easy to overexert in the thin higher altitude air! Puff puff out of shape..
Then off on the last leg...Zoom into Burns, where after gassing up and discovering my tire gauge to be 5 lbs off, I ate a breakfast of lima beans, while watching an enormous rail crane atop a great gantry grab mouthfuls of logs, raise them and slowly move them to another pile. Then I saw the entire gantry itself was on twenty foot wheels, and moved! As big as the space shuttle, and high above, a man sat in a glass box running the giant mechano-beast.
On through magnificent vistas of severe mesas in the distance and suddenly saw the Cascades rear their snowy selves in the distance, the final barrier before being on the west coast.
Bend, Oregon, finally, and after fruitlessly searching the library's newspaper racks for news of the Cathedral Forest Action Group toward which I was heading, I motored onward, into the Cascades. I took the Middle Santiam route: easy to see why Oregon Earth First! wants to keep them whole and roadless.
For a diversion I went down a narrow paved road called Jumpoff Jack's, just south of a mountained named Three finger Jack. It was a one laner with frequent turnouts to let vehicles by each other. A short distance down, I edged around a stopped logtruck and a jeep wagoneer with a scowling burly mustachioed fellow in it. I went down and down the winding road, beeping a warning around the blind curves. Finally decided to head back to Route 20 and started to turn when Scowler scowled by in his truck.
Then back up to Jumpoff Joe and down, down, down gorgeous deep forest valleys into the Willamette Valley. Snow covers the forest floors in the Middle Santiam in late April. Swaying down the curves of Rte 20 with trucks looming behind you leaves little time for looking at the depths of the forest beyond quick snatches. Only very occasionally does a denuded ridge, clearcutters' aftermath, appear. Quite probably they use the out-of- sight, out-of-mind principle, keeping a vision buffer of from a few hundred yards to a mile of uncut forest to preserve the appearance of primeval forest to the traveller speeding by in his car.
I feel daunted by the task: so many millions of dollars and political power invested in scraping away the Gaia-form and replacing it, if necessary legally and justified by the profit and loss picture, with a crude approximation monoculture.
What can our poor selves do against the technoid fantasy?
Also, my native timidity is rearing up now that the journey to Oregon Earth First! is essentially ended. Now I must enter a group dynamic, which I tend to shrink from, at least in the urban milieu, where most groups are either economically oriented or boringly pleasure-oriented. However I am reassured when I finally reach the place: confortably Low Rent, a wooden frame 2 story house badly in need of paint, dandelions filling the lawn, a treelined quiet street.
Nobody's home.
Guilded to the place by Donna, a gentlewoman I met at the I-5 exit toward Corvallis, we drove to the "office" which is deep in the older residential part of towen and knocked. Notes and ecological exhortations covered the door. The major note gave a list of potential occupations one might get involved in: painting, cleaning, finding a permanent site for the base camp, many other items.
I turned the knob; the door opened. and we were in a cluttered yet neat office/house, filled with typewriters, stacks and stacks of publications, mailings posters and other stuff.Overall a feeling of hip intelligence...Nobody being around, I left a note and Donna took me on a brief tour of some of the alternative sites in town: coffeeeshops, bakeries, bars, etc. Then I took her to her farm home and met Quimby Goat, Mr. Appleby the cat, Jimmy and Marcellus, dogs. I picked some nettles for dinner.
Donna, an interestingly eccentric recluse, as she feels labeled by many, mid thirtyish, long brown hair, not really shy, only biocentricized and a mystic practicioner. Her home is a cabin/farm further south toward Coquille, but she is staying in a charming sylvan cabin south of Corvallis while working at the college to earn some $.
Stayed over with her, played some music and talked of grace states. She made a splendid soup from the nettles, some fried onions, and Quimby's milk. Washed it down with tasty apple juice, and we ______ in her scented all-wood cabin, surrounded by lush greenery, two massive trees (one the largest maple I'd ever seen) a gurgling stream and (frown) a clearcut ex-forest. Eventually weariness closed our eyes and we slept. Then I gave Donna a ride to the Oregon State University greenhouse she works in. Promising to see her again. I wouldn't, though, for 8 months; her reappearance then, January 27, 1986 at this same cabin, would remarkably trigger my own (temporary) demise!
Earth First!
Then back to Earth First House, where again, nobody. My note however, had been amended several times, all of them urging me to call them. I called the first number, for "Lou", and got Sam who said he'd meet me at the Beanery, an uptoned coffeeshop hangout favored by the hipster set.
Sam's a treeplanter by occupation, about to head out into the hills. Sunburned weathered features, blond beard and longish blond locks with the Oregon drawl that immediately recalled my old friend Autumn. His enormous brother from New York was with him at the Beanery. He gave me some lowdown on the situation, mostly of how the authorities had generally been busting people at blockades, giving them 5 day jail terms with 30 days suspended as long as they stayed out of the Region in dispute. Sam wasn't at all into getting any of that.
We chortled together over Ned Ludd's ecotage column in the Earth First! Journal and Sam told me that Mike Roselle was in town, being a radical energy rouser. Getting things moving.
Then I went back to Earth House and in a few moments Brian came in. Bearded, piercing intelligent stare, gentle yet forceful, I liked him at once. After that first greeting and explanations we got down to business. I have him a list of my skills and he jotted them down and was delighted by my willingness to do research for him. Brian's a grad student in the forestry division at OSU.
Next Freda walked in, accompanied by a brace of big fidos. Introductions and all, and we got into a 3 way chat as they tried filling me in on the local situation. Good brainstorm session.
I made a list of the researchables and Brian pointed out the features of important areas on both a big satellite mosaic of Oregon and a trail map.
Freda is slightly pregnant, beautiful deep brown eyes and the fine complexion of Pacific Northwest women.
After watching an EF! slide show on the Old Growth, which Freda narrated from a script, we travelled to the post office, then a thriftshop. where I bought a small wood bowl for eating at the E-House.
Back to the house, and further discussions with Brian on his research topics, then I went to OSU's library through the throng of students, searched out Willamette Industries' [major corporate villain in the Santiam tree slaughter] annual report, xeroxed the list of officers and Board of Directors. Looking for the corporate interlocks-Willamette Industry and other megacorps And searched out an article on the company in Barron's weekly.
After a few hours I went back, met dark-souled poet Ken and another active person. They'd both participated in the take over of Montana Senator Melcher's office. We talked, then went to Squirrels, a bar, got mightily beerified and discussed the possibility of Melcherizing Les AuCoin, then played guitar and hand drum music till a neighbor appeared, flushed and bright with nervous tension, who asked that we stop as her 11 year old son was trying to sleep. Okay, okay. One of my drunkish compatriots pled unnecessarily of my newness to the place. Sleep.
Morning Ken gets up a little after me, grumping about the early hour (its 7 am-ish) and prepared a repast of coarse cut fried taters with red pepper and onions, and eggs.
We'd determined to go to the Middle Santiam today and Ken went to pack some stuff of his at another location, prepratory to moving out. Before he returned, Freda, who wanted to brainstorm up some poster ideas for a Bull Run watershed rally, B.R. being the water source for most of Portland, Oregon. She came over just minutes after Ken's return. The two of us still somewhat hungover from the night before, our brains didn't storm too well.
Then we headed for the hills. Cruising stonate through Sweet Home, Lebanon and tiny Cascadia. We went a few hundred yards up the wrong road before heading uphill up Rte 2047, which would take us to within a quarter mile of our destination: the Cutting Edge, where the forest primeval still was, in an area where a blockde camp might be set up. As we chugged along, on all sides were fascinating steeply rolling hills, bizarrely shorn of their forests, steep hills, gentle ones, canyons, all stumps and torn brush.
Right away we passed one of the company trucks, radio equipped, halted just a short way into the ex-forest. Its no game, I throught to myself, shifting into second gear, where I'd be for most of the journey, except when I had to crawl up or down incredibly steep hills in first, often only a foot of gravel to the side before precipitous drops down hundreds of feet of sheer cliff. One certainly tended to drive conservatively in these parts. Whew. More than once, Ken coughed a warning as we skittered a bit too quickly along a slope.
Some of the sloping roads covered with jagged cut rock were almost too much for Red Rabbit, but apart from one time when Ken had to get out, we passed most of the road with only a couple thwacks to the undercarriage.
Then we were there. O mystic moment, stumbling stonedly over the hummocky ex-forest, covered with sun-poisoned undergrowth turning yellow under the suddenly powerful solar radiation, down to the trees. I picked a great big one, climbed over the moss-covered dead branches at its base and Hugged! Rested that way, face in the papery deeply cloven bark coating the tree for several minutes, then when I moved back a herd of half a dozen or more elk skittered out of concealment only ten feet away before stopping only ten yards off. Motioned Ken over, we both grokked their hesitant beauty and as we stepped around the Big One, another rearguard elk burst out before us and joined the others.
We stomped around in the first quarter mile of forest, checked out the stream that thundered a short way in and after a while beat a retreat to the car. It was five oclock and we cursed the fact that we'd brought no gear with us and headed back in post-stonate silence, stopped for a few groceries and went back to EF! House in Corvallis.
TO BE CONTINUED....
Transcribed from written diary of Ron Huber 4/22/85 to 4/28/85