Free Spirit Read online

  “Misty, did you know all the corporations are making the sky poisonous?”

  “I got a lemon-lime sucker at the bank yesterday and two gumballs.”

  “Banks put all their money into nuclear holocaust development.”

  “I watched Bambi on TV after church.”

  “I never saw it but my mom told me that Bambi is really sexist. Girls should be able to save themselves. The worst thing a boy can be is macho. The worst thing.”

  “My big sister, Krista, came home from the rodeo after curfew last night. It was past my bedtime, but I was still awake, and she got into a huge argument with my mom, but then they said they loved each other and they loved Jesus. And I know Jesus loves them.”

  I didn’t understand what a curfew was, although I was vaguely aware that Somoza’s death squads imposed them on the barrios in Nicaragua. I didn’t really understand what a bedtime was, either, but I inferred that it had to do with going to bed. “Misty, last night, before I went to bed, my mom was sitting on the floor painting with gouache and listening to Flora Purim records. And she was drinking wine, and I really wanted some wine too, but she wouldn’t let me have any. But I kept asking her for some, and finally she gave me some, and I drank it, and the wine was really, like, sour, but I drank it anyway. And then I started jumping over her painting of a lesbian woman who slew a dragon saying: ‘Tell Saint George to forget it.’ And I kept jumping, and she grabbed me like: Whoom! Right out of the air, and I fell down, and I wanted her to be sorry for doing that so I started coughing over and over until I made myself throw up a little bit. But then she said: ‘That’s what happens when you drink wine.’ Then I had to sleep in the cold room. Isn’t that ironic?”

  Misty stared at me in silence for a time, and then the bell rang.

  Of all the nicknames I received in first grade—including Big Nose, Elvis (because of my hairdo), and Josh Doesn’t Wash (which had some truth to it)—the most accurate was probably E.T. My failure to speak a common language undeniably set me apart, but my fundamentally differing conception of reality was positively extraterrestrial. I thought that school was an academy for learning knowledge, and I behaved accordingly. I diligently spent each minute of class time applying myself to the lesson at hand. My sense of self-worth rose and fell with the plus, check, or minus grading system. But performance in class seemed to be irrelevant to my classmates.

  “Hey Dwayne, did you get all the way through to letter G by recess? I did,” I called after the big kid with feathered hair.

  “Shut up, nerd.” Dwayne didn’t even bother to turn around.

  Nerd. This was another nickname and was proof positive that some other criterion for popularity was at work here. In fact, it seemed the worse you did at your studies, the more popular you were. Dwayne couldn’t even recognize any lowercase letters, and he had a whole gang of boys that followed him around.

  “Guys,” I called out to Dwayne’s gang. “Did you hear that Anwar Sadat was assassinated?”

  Dwayne shook his head in pity, and his gang continued trading Matchbox cars.

  The children weren’t the only ones who thought I hailed from another planet. I spoke at morning circle about visions from my past lives too often for that. The teachers knew me as the boy who successfully lobbied to have his minus changed to a plus for putting the sugar cookie in the inedible column with the chair, rather than in the edible column with the carrot. And I was the boy who came to school regularly with notes from my mother requesting that I be given less conventional art projects and more creative math problems. The teachers rolled their eyes and set me up at my own special table so I could do addition with my finger in a tray of sand rather than with the unimaginative pencil on the boring paper.

  From my perspective, the teachers didn’t have a lot to offer. At first they came across as knowledgeable, but once I got the real story from my mother I realized they were almost as small-minded as the children.

  “This is a toothbrush.” The health teacher began her presentation on oral hygiene. I sat in rapt attention like Powhatan watching his first display of musketry. I returned home with brushes and floss and little tubes of toothpaste. “Claudia, I’m supposed to use these every day. Twice a day!” But I came back to school the next day, reeducated and armed with facts. “These,” I began my indictment, holding out the unopened toothpaste tubes to the health teacher, “are poison! They have fluoride, artificial sweetener, and chemicals in them that will kill you.”

  The same cycle of enlightenment and counter-enlightenment repeated itself when I learned of the festive holiday of Thanksgiving that apparently everybody celebrated. I returned the next day preaching about Native American genocide. “Did you know,” I asked the art teacher, “that Indians to this day are still being driven off of their land? The government took away their forests and meadows and now they want their rocks. For the uranium. So we can make atomic bombs to kill every last woman, man, and child.” I shook my head in disgust. The art teacher shook her head too. We lapsed into silence. I sat with my hands folded while the other kids made paper turkeys out of their handprints.

  Winter came soon after Native American Genocide Day, and the mile walk to the bus stop became an arduous trek through unplowed snow. I’d grown so disillusioned with school that after a few days of slogging my way to the battered yellow bus I decided to call it quits. We’d reached the end of the driveway when I announced: “Claudia, I’m done with school.” She nodded knowingly, and we retraced our slushy steps back to the half-built cabin. She was right. School was no place for kids. At least not a kid like me, whatever kind of kid that was. We warmed ourselves by the fire and picked up where we’d left off in A People’s History of the United States. Claudia began reading: “Even the school serves only the purpose of furnishing the offspring of the wealthy with those qualities necessary to uphold their class domination.” This was more like it. I interrupted Claudia’s reading in a contented alien voice: “E.T. phone home!”

  School passed on into a memory of the fall. Now it was winter’s turn, and icy winds howled up the mountain. Legions of snow buried the roads and barricaded our door. Our rickety little cabin was ill prepared. Half of the building was still a jumble of cinder blocks and rebar, and the half-inch of gypsum board that should have formed an interior wall now faced the full fury of winter. The single-paned windows provided no protection from the arctic wind that circled our cabin, so we bricked in the windows with stacks of books, pillows, and piles of old clothes. As temperatures dropped, two of our three rooms were rendered unlivable iceboxes. We retreated into my mother’s bedroom, where the wood-burning stove kept us alive. We huddled around it for weeks on end, feeding branches and logs into the blaze.

  After a month or so, the firewood ran out, and we stumbled through the snow drifts, looking for standing deadwood to bring down with the chain saw. Claudia pointed through the hazy, milky air: “Look, Josh. There’s a dead tree!”

  “Don’t say ‘dead,’ Claudia.” Something about our condition seemed too fragile to throw words like that around. We felled the old pine and dragged it laboriously through the mounting blizzard. We split it into rounds at the doorstep and shuttled the wood into our bunker of warmth so that it might sustain us for another week.

  A deep freeze burst our water pipes, and the tap went dry. We took to hacking icicles off of the eaves and melting them down for drinking water. Bathing was a trickier business, and I went several months without a proper bath. Cleanliness just wasn’t important enough to bear scrubbing myself down in melted snow. With the cold persistently gnawing at my lungs, it was only a matter of time before I got sick. A deep bronchial cough plagued me for a couple of weeks and then I finally succumbed to a nasty fever that kept me sweating and hallucinating for a couple more. By the time I was feeling myself again, we’d begun to run out of food. We rationed what we had and miraculously managed to live the last couple of months off of kidney beans and ketchup, canned soup, and chewable vitamins.

  As
much as we subsisted off of dry goods, though, our real sustenance was books. The power of the written word transformed those unbearable cold and endless winter nights into fantastical voyages into worlds of imagination. By the light of the flickering electric bulb, we read about the Cherokee Trail of Tears, King Arthur, and CIA assassinations in Latin America. When the bulb burnt out, we read in the golden glow of candles the works of Marge Piercy, Ethel Cook Eliot, Ray Bradbury, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Ursula K. Le Guin, and Robert A. Heinlein. When these books ran out we began reading our 1967 Encyclopedia Britannica, beginning with Aabenraa-Sønderborg, a district of Denmark. Thus began a process that I completed eleven years later when I finished reading the final Britannica entry for Zworykin, Vladimir Kosma, an American electronic engineer and inventor known as the father of television, a device I still had not yet had the pleasure of owning.

  It was April before winter’s wrath finally abated. We were down to one can of minestrone soup and beginning to eye the dry cat food when spring suddenly blessed the mountain. The forest crackled and gurgled with the thaw, and soon the mountainside was awash in color. New life chirped and sang out on all sides as we unblocked the windows and let the light pour in. Ms.Ms. and her sons Farfel and Fluffer sunned themselves with blinking, ecstatic eyes. My dog, Babe, rolled exuberantly in the mud and caught up on the thousands of objects that needed sniffing. I ran around after him, soaking up the warmth of the sun. Then I remembered school. Somewhere down the mountain all of my classmates were still in school listening to teacher Greg, still trading Matchbox cars on the playground, still playing Smear the Queer at recess. I winced, waiting to feel pangs of guilt, anxiety, and uncertainty. But I stood my ground, feeling nothing amiss. Sure, everyone else my age was in school, but I’d seen school. It had nothing to offer me. I wasn’t missing a thing.

  Claudia, Babe, and I thaw out at the half-built cabin on Mount Lassen.

  During the long winter, Claudia had explained the Doors’ song “Five to One” to me. “Listen to these words, Joshey: ‘They got the guns, but we got the numbers.’ That means the government and the corporations might have the police and the means of production, but we outnumber them. So long as the People are being exploited, it’s just a matter of time until we rise up and take this country back.” But she was wrong. I knew that now. They had the guns and the numbers. They had everybody—except us. We happy few. We didn’t care about sports or Jesus or television. We didn’t need to go to school. We were free. Free to wander the world and choose our own destinies. I raised my arms skyward with a clear conscience. Nature was my classroom.

  By day I wandered our rambling eleven acres of scrub forest with Babe at my side. I picked manzanita and blackberries and ate apples right off the tree. In the evenings, my mother read the Narnia books to me by candlelight, and we slept under the stars on our little wooden porch. Fueled by magical visions of Narnia, I saw the landscape with new eyes. This was a new world just waiting to be explored and, like Adam before me, it waited for me to name its every part. I dubbed the climbing tree “Smilax”; the new kitten was “Reepicheep”; the horse-shaped manzanita tree was “Bree.” Our cabin was “Cair Paravel,” and the little ribbon of water that ran by it was “Narnia Creek.”

  Over time the twin forces of confidence and curiosity pulled me across Narnia Creek. Babe and I began wandering up and down the mountain pine forests on our own, discovering hidden glens, babbling brooks, and sacred groves. We ranged for miles and miles without ever feeling alone. A guardian spirit seemed to course through the natural world around me, its breath on the breeze and its heart beating in the ground below me. During those golden months, the presence of that sacred spirit wove itself into my being and never left me. They were the happiest of my childhood. I woke when I wanted and slept when I felt like it. I played and wandered where I pleased. I experienced what few have: freedom to the fullest. There can be, perhaps, no purer freedom than that of a boy loosely supervised by a free-spirited mother in the midst of the wilderness.

  SEVEN

  Little Man Won’t Get High

  I was six years old and couldn’t think of anything better than an endless summer on Mount Lassen. We had forests to explore, books to read, and carob chips to mollify dreams of chocolate. What more could we ever need? But, according to Claudia, our quest for Utopia had stalled out on Mount Lassen. To hear her tell it, we were stuck in sort of the opposite of Utopia. “Think about it, Joshey. The people in town are drunks, the teachers are violent, and the only acceptable topics of conversation are sports and Jesus.” My mother told me she was lonely, still longing for that magical mix of consciousness and land-based living. She was depressed, she told me, which meant always sad. And just when I began to worry about her, she came running back from the mailbox, breathless with excitement. The Rainbow Family was holding a festival up in Idaho! A real gathering of the tribes! Brothers and sisters from every intentional community in North America would be there. This would be our gateway to Utopia.

  When summer came, we left a mountain of kitty chow for our cats and dog and bused and hitched our way north on I-5. In Portland, Oregon, we stood in the pouring rain for three hours, our thumbs out at the end of an iron bridge. I glared at the passing cars. How dare you not stop for us? Can’t you see I’m shivering?

  Eventually some merciful stranger picked us up and carried us east on I-84 along the Columbia River Gorge. After several more rides, towering green forests wilted away into yellowing dusty flatlands and then high desert. Claudia and I found ourselves east of Baker City, Oregon, walking alongside a dry creek bed. My water bottle was almost empty. The steady rumble of cars had withered away until all that was left was the crunching of gravel under our feet. The creek bed narrowed until it finally collapsed into a mound of sand. My step soon began to falter. I had never experienced so much heat and light and dust. It was like walking into a ceramic kiln.

  Suddenly, Claudia stopped. She pointed up into the sky.

  “Look Joshey! A red-tailed hawk! It’s your totem animal!”

  Back home I had a Ranger Rick magazine with glossy pictures of birds. I had once told her I thought the picture of the red-tailed hawk in flight was “beautiful.” This, she decided, meant that I had chosen my totem animal. Whenever we saw any bird bigger than a crow, she’d get excited and say: “Look! A red-tailed hawk!”

  This bird was not a hawk but I recognized it from the same Ranger Rick. It was a vulture. A turkey vulture, if I remembered correctly.

  “Look, Joshey! It’s circling! It’s a good omen!”

  I knew what that meant and watched in horror as the circling vulture was joined by another.

  “Look! Another one!”

  A wave of dust blew across my face, stinging my eyes. My lips were cracked and there was nothing to drink. Out here I was just another lame animal condemned by the immutable laws of nature. I was walking vulture food.

  My eyes narrowed, and I could see the horizon shimmering in all directions as the sun boiled the living vapors out of the land. The heat played tricks with my eyesight, distorting the dirt roadway so that it looked like it was moving. And then it was moving. From the west came a new column of dust, winding its way through the scrub brush. Out of the haze, a blue bus soon became visible. Its engine growled as it slowed. It was an old school bus, repainted so thickly blue that it looked as though it was hewn from cerulean rock. An array of feathers and crystals flashed from behind the windshield. The side windows were covered in Indian tapestries. The bus came to a stop in front of us. Although the door was opened with a manual handle, in my mind I could hear the dramatic tshhhh of a hydraulic chamber being opened.

  The driver gazed down at us in amused contemplation. He wore round purple sunglasses and a Dr. Seuss hat. His long beard was pulled together in a braid that flounced across his linen tunic.

  He addressed us with an air of deep solemnity: “I’m Driver Dave. You hombres goin’ to the Rainbow Gathering?”

  We grinned and rushed forwar
d. The vultures would have to go hungry that day.

  Driver Dave took a deep bow from the driver’s seat, waving his white-gloved hand with a flourish: “Welcome to the Roach Coach from Roachberry Farms!”

  We clambered onto the bus. Tapestry-covered foam mattresses lay where iron benches had once been riveted. Up front a couple of guys were sitting cross-legged smoking a hookah. A dreadlocked couple crouched in the back, playing bamboo flutes. These were our people!

  After a couple of days of bucking and bouncing along dirt and gravel roads, the Roach Coach from Roachberry Farms suddenly stopped moving at the edge of an interstate. Nag Champa smoke and the goofy vibrations of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band filled the motionless air. Driver Dave broke the stillness with an announcement: “Dudes and Dudettes! We are about to hit God’s own open road, which means we’re gonna follow the Fifth Golden Rule. I’m gonna lay it down on you right now. Are you ready? Here it is: No smoking any of them fuuunny cigarettes or hittin’ the boooze till we hit fifth gear! Got it!?” Everybody cheered.

  The Roach Coach jolted forward, and I felt the blessed smoothness of pavement beneath us for the first time in two days. Driver Dave called out: “First gear… second gear… third gear.” Everyone chanted along with him. The engine grunted and whined under Driver Dave’s relentless command. “Fourth gear.” The Roach Coach shuddered and creaked as we picked up speed. “Fifth gear!” The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” suddenly blasted from the Roach Coach’s quadraphonic speakers. Driver Dave pumped his fist in the air and then victoriously produced a huge bottle of whiskey from beneath the dashboard and began swigging greedily from its open neck. He passed the bottle back, and smoldering joints were passed forward in return. “We’re on our way, Joshey!” my mother whooped, one arm around her new best friend Michael, the other waving a wrinkled white spliff in the air.