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While we were looking for land around Powell River we met Steve and Sandy. Two minutes after we said hello I loved them.

It seemed so right. I was getting off on the rightness of how I felt as much as on them. Why can’t people feel like this toward each other more often? Two minutes ago we were strangers, now we’re all warm and happy.

Steve and Sandy had just taken off from all the things we had taken off from. Just about our age. Looking for all the things we were looking for. They had a Chevy van instead of our Volks and a Malamute husky instead of Zeke. Steve played guitar instead of sax.

They were physically attractive more or less in the same way we were. Not dazzling, but no major improvements needed or wished for. They walked a lot like us, with the same loosenesses and tightnesses. Steve was athletic the way I was athletic, not a superjock but a respectable addition to any pickup game—football, softball, soccer—with no real preference. We probably would have split sets in tennis.

They seemed to have a pretty good man-woman thing. People who believed all the stuff we believed and were trying to make the man-woman thing work too were a pretty rare commodity. “See, Virge, we’re not the only weirdos.”

Sure, loving Steve and Sandy was narcissistic. A lot of positive feedback about what we were doing and thinking. Why not? Today Steve and Sandy, tomorrow Trooper Suchadolski. I knew that everyone was my brother and even felt it from time to time. Even with Steve and Sandy it wouldn’t have happened a couple of years ago. How could I ever get to Trooper Suchadolski without a few warmups with guys like Steve and Sandy?

A lot of the people into “alternative culture” had a hangover of bitterness about the things they had fled. They had been snubbed one way or another. They couldn’t play football, the cheerleaders wouldn’t go out with them, they couldn’t get decent jobs. They were looked on as ugly or failures. Mostly unfairly, mostly for petty reasons. The America they were fleeing didn’t seem to think they were worth much. So they were doing a very sensible thing, building a culture where their very real virtues and attributes had a chance, where they wouldn’t be just so much shit.

The bitterness left its mark. There was the nagging doubt: If the America they were fleeing had opened up her arms to them a little more, would they be out in the woods believing in all the things they believed in?

It went both ways. Those whom America had been nice to, who hadn’t been very shat upon, felt guilty about it. “What’s wrong with me that such a twisted no-goodnik thing liked me?”

Steve and Sandy were golden. They could have made it. Physically attractive, top of their class. America would have gone out of her way to make them feel welcome. But here they were out in the boonies of B.C. in a battered Chevy looking for land to build an alternative of some sort.

They were golden no more. Cops dying for a chance to bust them, customs officials hassling them, America praying that they would come to a bad end: “The blacks, the misshapen, the dummies, the graceless, I can understand. But you I loved. You were my hope. I would have given you anything. Told you my secrets, shared my wealth. But now you couldn’t drink my spit if you were thirsty.”

Golden no more. What did it? Dope? The war? The long hair? Steve and Sandy had a few horror stories to tell around the fire but they were all recent. Timing is important. If it had been much earlier they would have had scars; much later and it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Steve and Sandy were scouting the Powell River area for a home for their Buffalo tribe. That was part of why they were there. They were also there to get away from the tribe for a few days and think about things. Steve asked very gently about the possibility of the tribe’s coming to our place. We said we felt a little weird about saying yes to a whole tribe. It would most likely swallow us. If he and Sandy wanted to join