The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [35]
Apparently he ran a hotel in Berkeley for a while, but beyond that I know of no work, regular or otherwise. I doubt if he ever had or ever will have much money. When I met him he had nothing but a few pieces of clothing that were the products of inspired dump picking and the like. I never heard him complain about having no money or brag about it either. He appeared to have some sort of faith that whatever he needed would gravitate toward him and it seemed to work out that way.
I never saw anyone in any situation anything but happy to see Luke. I have a feeling he could walk in on Nixon fucking chickens and Nixon wouldn’t mind. Luke wouldn’t mind. The chickens wouldn’t mind.
He just about destroyed my car one day. Town was upsetting him. He decided he had to get back to the farm, but our boat wasn’t there and no one was going up the lake that day. I don’t think he really thought that by some magic there was all of a sudden going to be a road to the farm, but he might have. More likely he figured that maybe one of those old logging roads might get him part way there and he’d walk the rest. He had a compass. Predictably, he didn’t get far. The car was hopelessly enmired, and there was a big operation to get it out of there. But the curious thing was that no one, not me whose car it was or any of the other people who had to salvage the situation, was the least bit angry with Luke.
We were angry with the highway department for not putting a road where Luke wanted to drive. We were angry that there hadn’t been a boat at the lake for Luke to use. We were angry that one of us or someone hadn’t been with Luke to keep him from getting upset.
How Luke had managed to survive this long was always a mystery to me. He’d do things like throwing a flimsy boat together with a few pieces of scrap wood, cut another piece of scrap wood into a paddle, and just vanish into the wilderness. A few days later he’d reappear, smiling, on foot, telling us about how his boat had sunk about ten miles up the lake and he just sort of moseyed his way back.
There was a thing he said a lot that summed him up in many ways: “Nothing is poisonous.” The first time I heard him say that was in response to my look of disbelief as he picked up the deadliest-looking mushroom I ever saw and ate it. Later, when I was learning about mushrooms, he slipped often enough to let me know that he knew pretty much all there was to know about them. It’s typical of Luke that he was embarrassed by and tried to conceal this sort of expertise. He appeared to look at it as unnecessary garbage he had cluttered his mind with before he learned to trust. He wanted to believe he was picking mushrooms according to vibes, but he was always very careful about inspecting those we picked before letting them go into the pot.
Luke was organic to the nth. He was the hippie’s hippie. He even had misgivings about agriculture. He claimed to have gone for months at a time eating nothing but wild food. It’s possible; he knew more about edible wild plants than anyone I’ve ever met. Of course he claimed it was just vibes leading him to his next meal. Meat, of course, was out of the question.
Luke had a deep mistrust of even simple tools. The chain saw drove him up the wall. There was little love lost between him and most internal combustion engines, though for some reason he did have a certain attraction to Moldy Goldy and a few other things, like my car. There was nothing dogmatic or fashionable about his attitude. He just couldn’t stand to be around anything he didn’t love. That he loved my car was a great source of pride to me. In time I came to trust his instincts almost as much as he did.
He was probably the least manipulative, least conniving person I ever met. He wasn’t perfect. He tripped over his own rhetoric from time to time. “The truth