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It was getting dark as we docked. After considerable crashing around in the brush we managed to find the trail. The trail wasn’t very well cleared, but one way or another we managed to make it up to the farm. Just enough fading light for a quick look around the place, then a full moon and aurora borealis. It seemed like a good omen even though the two phenomena were in competition. Two kinds of light. Simon seemed dumbfounded by the farm’s beauty.

We spent several days up there, exploring and setting up a rudimentary kitchen. A beachhead.

Back down to Vancouver to figure out how one turned stocks into cash, get a chain saw, other tools and supplies, and the rest of our stuff.

Ted went back to California on his way back to New York and law school and all that. Virginia, Simon, Zeke, and I headed back up to Powell River with the two loaded cars.

Simon toyed around some with the idea of getting Ted to stay. How could he go back there to all that shit? I remember being slightly jealous and/or admiring. How could anyone take New York or law school, let alone the two of them together? Why wasn’t Ted incredibly depressed by the prospect? I mean, what hope was there in that? What joy? What adventure?

One thing I noticed about Simon was that he was a very different sort of man from me. Not better or worse but different. He was the sort of guy the football team used to make fun of or just ignore. His fogginess, his athletic ineptitude, was something I liked. I saw so much of my own athletic carriage, my coordination and quickness, as a fraud. It was an image I had sought and aspired to in a very conscious way for very superficial reasons.

Being shrewd and quick seemed like bad things, part of the typical American syndrome that had landed the world in such shitty shape. I hoped that being around such a noncompetitive man as Simon might help me drop some of that shit in myself. He was well over six feet and quite strong. He just didn’t seem it.

When we drove in next to our old site at the Powell River camp ground, the people next to us were pulling up stakes and throwing everything into the trunk of their huge, beat-to-shit De Soto sedan. It was dark and we could barely see each other but somehow a conversation got started. Joe, Mary, and their child Sarah had been traveling all over B.C. for about a year looking for land. Money was running out and Joe had just taken a job in the local pulp and paper mill. They were giving up the dream for a while and moving into a little rented house in town. Somehow it was decided very quickly that we were friends. They told us we were welcome to stay with them any time on our town trips, which we were to do many times, and we told them that they were welcome up the lake.

There was some more work to be done on the boat. The way the bottom flexed with good old Dick pushing her along was pretty wild. I put another rib in Blue Marcel and gave it another coat of resin. While I was at it, I put another seat in, for comfort and a little more strength. Then there was always our eternal project, trying to get Moldy interested in being an outboard engine. It seemed like a good way to learn something about engines, which was one of our weak points.

While I was working on the engine and Virginia and Simon were off getting groceries, Vincent showed up. No one had any idea that he was coming or even knew where we were.

I was glad to see him. He was supposed to know something about engines, but I was so happy about the way things were turning out that I would have joyously welcomed anyone. The more the merrier.

I should know Vincent a lot better than I do. We were classmates for four years at Swarthmore, shared a house with four other guys senior year, lived together with assorted people in two separate places in Boston, and then again in B.C. He’s average height, blond, blue-eyed, very pretty to look at, and might have been a decent athlete if he had realized he had a body. All I can really call to mind when