The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [32]
Maybe just being open to things being connected made us see more. Now I shudder whenever I find that sort of connectedness creeping into my life. Then I couldn’t get enough. There’s something happening there but I don’t know what it is. Do I, Mr. Jones?
TOWN TRIPS. Powell River was a two-supermarket mill town. Its raison d’être was the world’s largest pulp and paper mill, which used twice as much water a day as New York City and could be smelled as far away as thirty miles if the wind was right. The whole time we were at the farm, the smell only got up to us twice, but it was hard to forget it was there. Some neighbor for Eden. Blowing it up was one of our playful fantasies.
Sometimes we went two or three weeks without anyone going to town, and we would have loved to dispense with town trips altogether, but we were a long way from selfsufficiency. Fresh vegetables and building supplies were the usual reasons for going. While we were at it we did the laundry, picked up mail, exchanged books at the library, and paid social calls.
We never went down en masse. Town trips were seen as a royal drag, so two was the usual crew. Besides, with more than two people Blue Marcel couldn’t do the trip in less than three hours.
There were no set teams. We went in all possible combinations. Who went was usually decided on the basis of who hadn’t done town duty in a while and/or who had expertise on whatever tool or building material we needed and/or who had some medical or other personal business to see to.
Except for one solo desperation run of mine for tobacco, it was always an overnight affair. Considering Blue Marcel’s speed, there was no other way to play it. We had a variety of places we were welcome to stay, including a commune on Prior Road about ten miles out of town; Joe and Mary’s place in town; two abandoned loggers’ cabins a few miles by dirt road from town that had been taken over and fixed up by three refugees from New York, and a few locals like John who were always willing to put us up. If we weren’t in the mood for any of these, there was an old twenty-four-foot, double-end lapstrake boat with an unlocked cabin tied up at the marina. No one ever seemed to use it, so we slept there from time to time.
There was a short-order greasy spoon, the Thunderbird Restaurant, which we usually patronized on town trips. We called it the Works in honor of the house specialty, which was a hamburger with mushrooms, onions, peppers, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and a hot dog thrown in. At $1.75 it was the best deal in town. The Works also had one of the finest juke boxes I’ve ever run into, and it was conveniently located directly across from the laundromat.
After three or four weeks of bucolic peace, suddenly seeing cars, electric lights, newspapers, your own face in a mirror was always a little jolting. Sometimes it was a kick to see all the shit we were getting away from, but more often the hassles and ugliness made us want to get back to the farm as quickly as possible and work our asses off so we’d be able to cut town trips to once a year or so.
That town trips were more and more upsetting was a good sign. It meant that the farm really was changing us. We were more and more in tune with natural and divine harmonies and more and more sensitive to discordances we had once accepted as being part and parcel of life. Being out of it we now look back on our society and see that it was worse than our wildest condemnations.
MERCIFULLY, the winter rains came a few weeks later than usual that year. We finished the roof in the nick of time. When the rains started, much to our delighted surprise that crazy goddamned thing didn’t leak a drop. We were still short a few walls on the third floor, but most of that work could be done out of the weather under our magic roof.