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I wasn’t thinking about my dread of spending my life in a Swarthmore enclave then. I wasn’t thinking about much except how happy I was that I had found land. Simon was a Swarthmore person but one more Swarthmore person does not necessarily a Swarthmore enclave make.

Simon finally arrived with Ted, another Swarthmorian. Simon seemed very eager, so we all headed up to Powell River immediately.

I was feeling a little jerky and clumsy about things. What was agreed to between Simon and me? Was he committed to buying in or just shopping? Was I committed to letting him buy in if he wanted to? Shouldn’t we sit down and talk a few things over? What did he want the farm to be? How did we know we were compatible? There were substantial sums of money involved, not to mention all the spiritual and emotional stuff.

Maybe it was just another situation in which I was being klutzy and dense. What bad could happen? But how did he know I wasn’t into some super-weird trip, that I wasn’t some sort of Charlie Manson? I couldn’t imagine any evil lurking in that Brillo-wreathed head with his usually smiling cherub face peeking through. It was a completely honest, unforced smile but I think it gave a lot of people the wrong idea. Simon could be mad as hell, but unless you noticed that he was trying very hard not to smile, it was hard to tell.

Is this how it’s done? Somehow I thought it would be different! There we were making the heaviest decisions of our lives, and from the way we acted we might as well have been co-chairmen of the decoration committee for the junior prom.

Problem number one: How do we get up there? We hung around the Powell Lake Marina half hoping someone would offer to take us up. But we were going to have a boat eventually anyway, so why not now? We went boat shopping.

There was a notice on the laundromat bulletin board: “Two plywood boats—ready for fiberglassing—for sale.” Marcel was the guy who had built them, a nice guy about forty-five or so with sad eyes. He hadn’t found what he was looking for in Powell River. He was selling these boats he had made and heading back to New Brunswick.

The bigger one, about thirteen feet, was just right. Marcel said he’d help us with the fiberglassing and take the boat down to the lake for us. The next day was sunny and dry, a good day for fiberglassing. He had some blue fiberglass coloring around, so we added that to the resin and fiberglassed the boat blue. There wasn’t a lot of blue coloring so the boat came out sort of an eerie blue, almost transparent in some places and opaque in others. We put her in Marcel’s truck and followed it to the lake.

Hippies love to name things. Everyone likes to name boats. Watching our boat in the truck in front of us, we tried to come up with a name. “Blue Marcel” was perfect. The old gold-painted outboard motor that was thrown into the deal became “Moldy Goldy.”

Moldy Goldy, who had shown some reluctance to be an engine back at Marcel’s place, lost all ambition in that direction once she was placed in the lake on the back of Blue Marcel.

So now we had a boat but still no way to get up to the farm. Everyone tried to coax Moldy into pushing the boat. New spark plug. New gaskets for the carburetor. But all to no avail.

While we were trying to get Moldy interested in her old line of work we asked around about other outboards. Dick was a pilot for the charter pontoon plane outfit that flew out of the marina, mostly taking loggers to camp and back. He had an old racing Merc 25. No neutral, no reverse, just point it and go; racing prop and the whole bit. Sold. It was the perfect addition to our shoestring transportation corps. The racing Merc became simply “Dick.” That was perfect too. I was naming up a storm.

Dick was an interesting engine. The throttle was open. We were running along fine at what we thought was top speed. But Dick, after sitting around for a while, was just warming up. We started going faster and faster. About halfway up the lake we had to run at half-throttle for fear Dick would tear the boat apart going