LETTERS 

"My impression of the place? The landscape was grotesque and stark in places. Manzanita flourished from the creek to the road looking like old dried coral in some empty ocean. The surrounding hills were covered with a thick sea of pines with bare spots I imagined were inhabited by a mountain lion. There was a time, believe it or not, that I felt cloistered. Up the long road from the town I saw lush farmland and pasture with old threshing machines in the middle of a brilliant green. Everything looked asleep and passive as the wind blew over them.

And there was always smoke from various chimneys and dogs lingering in front of doors or roaming out by a herd of cattle.

There was one place of subtle energy where I felt utter peace. It was in the shadow of great pine trees, near the sound of the stream, as sun filtered through arching limbs and the air cut through my mind. I would stand in this spot for as long as I could. But, in all other places there was the distortion created by granite, red dirt, and Manzanita. It was as if this place was the exhausted result of a violent fight within nature.

And I was not naive. I had known about communes and the whole movement toward the god-loving earth. In fact my friend, Jake, who you might remember went so far to join an Indian tribe in the Sacramento Valley. It was a tribe patched together by an old medicine man who wanted to teach the young whites the ways of the Indian. Jake got busted for growing hemp but I think he made it through ok. At any rate, the purpose of these things, the will behind them, was the will to health. We dissolve and fly apart under the pressure of the artificial so these mountain types had sought out a healthy alternative. And, I have to admit, for a long time my impression of them was of women giving birth to babes in the dry furrows and men sitting around smoking hashish from corn cob pipes, and large feasts of fresh vegetables and ample red wine with laughter and conversation echoing through the valley of the mountain.

Some of that, my friend, is true. But it is also true that they were a common lot of people looking like a band of itenerant farmers. Sometimes they looked as if they had been struck dumb by something.

© 2000 David Eide. All rights reserved.

David Eide
February 24, 2000
Back to Jobs page
Back to Letters
Back to Laughing Sun
Back to Oasis