• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

August September October November. More and more miserable, shakier and shakier, but still a damn good chief of police. Drinking more, not sleeping well, but there were so many good reasons to be upset that I saw my state of mind as more an asset than something to worry about.

Part of what I was doing was justifying what I had already made up my mind to do: split, chuck the whole city nine-to-five reformer bit and try to find some real answers to the nightmare life our society had become.

Another thing I was doing was confusing disability with virtue. It was easy to do since all the things that were disabling me were bad things. The frantic city pace, rush-hour traffic, callous institutions, war, racism, and greed were all from the same pot of stew. If enough people became disabled by it instead of just intellectually opposed to it, the whole mess would come to a grinding halt.

And it seemed to be happening. The gyre was widening. The center wouldn’t hold. More and more blown minds more and more blown out all the time. With all our preconceptions blown away we would be forced to confront the full horror of what was going on.

Today a slight inkling that all is not as it should be. Tomorrow a crippling pain in the gut. Today I can’t take rush-hour traffic. Tomorrow there’ll be no more war. All the generals and fat-cat fascists will be home puking their guts out.

December rolled around. I had done everything I could think of to improve security within the present administrative and budgetary setup. I submitted a report on all I had done, with a list of proposals and options for future organization, and quit, stating that I had completed the job I was hired to do.

My boss wanted me to stay on as his permanent trouble-shooter. The parking and garbage collection situations needed attention, too. But he was very understanding about the whole thing and told me if I ever needed a job to just come see him. We had spent many a lunch talking about my dream of finding some land and a life style that made sense. He hoped it worked out and said it was probably what he would do if he were my age.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN WEST BRANCH. Virginia was coming out of her trance and thinking about turning around. It occurred to me that she might be just testing me, making sure my politics, dedication, and whatnot were in good shape. How had I suddenly become the spark plug of this operation? I had thought about getting land before, but tying it up with communes, politics, and liberation, though I took to it like a duck to water, was something I had picked up from her and her friends.

One of the things that attracted me to Virginia was that she had such a strong show of her own. I had looked forward to a nice vacation from being the macho leader, but somehow things had got twisted around and I was leader but not with ideals that were really my own. From here on whatever happened would be my fault. Even if we turned around, by the time we hit Boston she would be fuming with resentment at the chauvinist pig dragging her around. She could rightly say she hadn’t suggested it. I had, in that weird charade, a milder version of that which had produced the British Columbia decision a few months earlier.

One way or another we decided to keep heading toward Vancouver. We turned north. We had heard tales of people being hassled by Canadian immigration on the West Coast. There’d be a lot less hassle going up through North Dakota. Maybe the Canadian cops wouldn’t stop and search us every hundred miles or so. Besides, Trans-Canadian Highway had a nice ring to it, and the Canadian Rockies were rumored to put their American counterparts to shame.

Minnesota, land of 100000000000000000 lakes. But more than the lakes I loved the blue roofs. No one back East had blue roofs. If we had flown to Vancouver we would have missed the blue roofs. It seemed like just the right color for roofs. It seemed like such a nice thing to do for the world, have a blue roof. I wonder if living under a blue roof is different