The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [26]
The cooking got a bit fancier when we brought in a big old wood stove (a full day’s operation) and set up an inside kitchen. Then, if someone was willing to grind flour for an hour or so, we could bake bread and make pies with the apples and blackberries we had coming out of our ears. Occasionally someone would catch a trout or two or shoot a grouse with a gun John Eastman gave us, but mostly it was very simple vegetarian fare.
Nootka and Tanga, sisters from a Border collie-Samoyed cross, joined us in early September. Nootka was theoretically Virginia’s dog and Tanga Vincent’s, but both turned out to be generalized commune dogs. Samoyeds and Border collies don’t cross very well. Nootka turned out a lot better than Tanga and had a certain impish charm, but neither was much use around the farm and both were always underfoot, tearing things up and general-nuisancing. Tanga was an outright foul and obnoxious creature who should have been shot. Zeke’s nobility shone forth brighter than ever next to these canine misfits.
It was a great life. I didn’t mind the physical discomforts—smoke in the eyes around the cooking fire, rain, cold, lots of hard work, the outhouse, general dirtiness, being so far from civilization, the mosquitoes, the impossibility of keeping anything clean or dry. I loved it all. The only thing that upset me was having other people upset by this or that hardship. I wanted everyone to love it as much as I did.
I was in great health, better than I had been in for a long time, and in a good mood most of the time. I even cut down my smoking some.
I think I was thinking less than I had in years. Maybe it was just that thinking wasn’t the only thing I was doing. I liked thinking less.
Think think think. What a funny word. A funny sound, a funny meaning. Almost as funny as funny. I think I’ve probably spent more time and energy thinking than most people, but that’s a very hard thing to be able to say for sure. I don’t even know very well what thinking is, let alone have a way to tell who’s doing it and how much.
Thinking something worth thinking. What would that look like? That’s the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. If you want to get something, thinking might help you get it. But I really didn’t do very much of that sort of thinking unless you want to stretch definitions. There wasn’t very much by way of things I wanted. I’d been spoiled rotten as far as that went. I didn’t even think that kind of thinking was thinking. The kind of thinking I did was mostly a luxury item and it wasn’t much fun.
Some of my happiness, no doubt, was simple good old vanity. I had done what I had said I was going to do, and the pot was sweetened by having what we were doing be such a glamorous, romantic, noble venture. Through most of the early days I walked around with a giddy giggly cockiness bubbling inside, as if we were pulling off a particularly elegant jewel heist.
For years I had looked at wherever I happened to be and realized “I can’t stay here.” It wasn’t a panicky “got to get out of here” feeling as much as just sadly realizing that for one reason or another it could never be home. There were lots of good reasons to be upset by the cities—noise, lights, bustle, misery—but my reaction had gone far beyond intellectual distaste and had been literally shaking me apart. My serious doubts about how much longer I could have held out added a great deal to my joy at having found a place I could stay, a home.
I remember Victor, an early visitor, saying “I think I have more mosquito bites than not mosquito bites.” But the hardships were part of what we had all come there for, and there wasn’t much bitching about them. Besides, we found that there really