The Eden Express_ A Memoir of Insanity - Mark Vonnegut [42]
The death of Feather didn’t faze our soulful wanderer in the least. He immediately set to work taking apart the Evinrude. “He’s going to kill all our engines,” I almost screamed, but I didn’t say anything. Eventually he got the Evinrude running and was roundly praised for his mechanical competence and ingenuity, which bugged me even more.
Vincent wanted to head for town that night and I had to play the wet blanket, saying that it was getting dark and pointlessly dangerous. Bright and early the next morning Jack, Simon, Vincent, Virginia, and I set out. Simon was just going in to bring the boat back. Jack and I were going on to Vancouver to check out tractors and new fruit trees, and to get staple supplies. Virginia wanted me to come so that maybe I would change my mind and go with them to California.
We spent the night in an abandoned cabin outside of town. Virge and I awoke to the sound of Vincent warming up the car. He was being very patient. We had little odds and ends of business to take care of in town and Vincent just sort of tapped his fingers, putting up with us with the endurance of a saint. He hardly said a word to anyone. The funny thing is no one ever called him on it. No one asked him why he was so anxious to get going, why he was in such a rush. He obviously didn’t have time to talk about it. He probably would have denied he was in any hurry or, more likely, just smiled sadly.
The seed catalogues were in the mail, so on the ferries down to Vancouver Jack, Virginia, and I figured out what crazy things we’d try to grow. Peanuts? It was great fun. Vincent just paced.
We stayed with Sankara, André, and Sy, three guys from Swarthmore who were more or less supporting themselves with a business called the Sunshine Movers. They had visited us at the farm a few months earlier and said we could stay at their Steven Street place whenever we were in Vancouver. It was the first time Virginia or I had been there, but Simon and Kathy and Jack had been there earlier.
The Sunshine Movers were a funny crew. I hadn’t known them well at Swarthmore. They were in the class behind mine and were part of a vaguely intimidating gang of militantly apathetic cynics. They were into drugs but their kick was taking monster doses and not being affected by them. André was the only one I had ever managed to have a decent conversation with. Sankara seemed too cool to bother and Sy too bristly and hard. In any event, these were all just surface impressions and it was very nice to have a Vancouver base of operations again. Rosanne and Bert had moved on to Victoria.
Somehow we managed to keep Vincent from leaving for California without stopping overnight in Vancouver. I had lots to say to Virginia and she had lots to say to me. We were reaching a new point in our relationship, getting to know each other again, even maybe falling freshly in love. But it was a bitch to try to talk or anything else with Vincent revving impatiently in the background. In spite of Vincent’s incessant, unspoken, single-minded racket we managed to get some good things said. She understood why I wasn’t going. I understood why she was.
There was a sense of closeness between us. It felt so good that she almost decided not to go. But we realized that this was happening partly from our anticipation