Chapter 1 

I was surprised to run into my old friend Michael in a cafe I frequented along the broad thoroughfare known as Shattuck Avenue. I was having my usual plate of lasagna and garlic bread with a glass of beer when I spotted the old friend in a corner, against the window, writing furiously in a notebook. It was, after all, a city of writers. And if a person wasn't writing they were a client of one of several therapists and if they weren't a client they were a therapist and many times the clients became therapists and the therapists became clients. Michael was in the corner with his elbow propped up on the table and one hand lazily rubbing his cheek. It was late afternoon and the people began coming home from work, catching the afternoon bus. There was always the crazy woman condemning the students, telling them that they were evil. Always the poor huddled behind their packages.

I looked for a long time at my friend. The last time I had seen him was during the anti-war days. Michael had decided to avoid the draft by going up into the mountains and hiding out. I had seen him several days before the event was to take place. I was, of course, sympathetic and gave Michael several books to take with him. One was a treatise on anarchism by Prince Kropotkin and the other was Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. "These will entertain you. You will understand them completely," I told him.

Frankly, I had forgotten about him in the intervening years. The war ended, the south fell, Nixon fell, everything fell as the nation plunged into an unfathomable pessimism, an abyss that had carried me far out into the periphery of things.

I felt a little jolt when I spotted him. There was a kind of reticence as if going up to him would open a can of worms I didn't want to open. There was always the question of his my reappraisal of those years. But, then, didn't I feel strong now? Didn't I believe in myself and what I was doing? Certainly. So, I got up off the chair and moved over to the table.

"Well, you made it out of the woods ok," I said.

Michael looked up. He had the expression of enormous sadness. It was not a good expression in a young man but there it was. Then an expression of astonishment. I noticed little flecks of gray in his hair.

"What? You! You're still around this place?"

I laughed and sat down at the table. 'I've thought about you over the years.' I was lying but it was kind lie, a necessary lie I felt.

Michael grunted a little and then they told each other what they were doing in the world these days. They reminsced until nothing more could be dredged up of those they knew and the experiences they had shared. And those experiences which had marked them off from each other and from the world they despised as young people.

I said to him, "I discovered that you end up despising yourself and the real fight is with yourself not the world so you settle. The world is what it is and lets you be everything you didn't want to be until you make peace and try to do what you wanted to do in the first place."

"Seems true but there are many things you can't know until you take your hated self out into the woods."

I made a dramatic sweep of my arm toward the desultory downtown of the city and said, "my woods, my lonely woods."

"Ha. I understand."

"So, when you left here that Saturday, tell me, what happened?"

Michael waved the question off as if he didn't want to talk about the past. Then he up righted himself in his chair. 'I went into the mountains and stayed with a group of people.'

"Ah, I want to hear this story." And I settled back in my chair waiting for the tale to be told. Not that I expected anything since a lot of people ran off to the mountains. They went to Canada and Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Netherlands, Australia and dozens of other spots on the globe. The mountains were a place you drove a good car through and rolled down the window so there'd be a crease to let in the frosty air. The good of the mountain was usually inaccessable by road and had to be worked at to get to. Mountains were fabled until you stood on one and saw it for what it was. Well, the scientists assured the modern people that it was this, this and the other thing.

My favorite mountain had local fame. The pioneers came in through the Walker Pass in the early days and were told to keep Mt. Diablo "on your left side" and you'd run into the Sacramento Delta and River and get up on to Sutter's Fort. The Spainards had scoped it out and given its name or made the Native name into a Spanish one. Even today you could find the holes were the good women ground up acorns to make meal. It had provided one of the most pristine views in the world but with all the traffic and industry that view was cut way down.

A friend of mine claimed he had camped up there and heard the wailing of dead Indian ghosts dancing in one of the many meadows it had but I hardly believed him. I wanted to but put it down to a bit of editorializing on his part. People who lived in or near the Rockies scoffed at my mountain. "That's a hill, not a mountain. It doesn't even have a peak." Maybe it didn't have a peak I didn't know but it was mine and when I worked in the area I always made sure I would stop and look out toward it and think about the Spanish and natives. I would think, eventually, of the dinasours like the saber-tooth tiger and wooly mammouth. They stomped around in those parts back in the day. And the weird camel that had been fossilized on a rock near the college. They all jet up and played around in my imagination for awhile, to take away the taste of work. 'You know," I often thought, "those creatures were as much a part of life as the humans I keep running into."

“So you want a tale do you? Everyone wants a story these days. OK, I can tell a story. It might not be a professional story and slicked up but it will be a damn story and you will be interested. I thought about my pals back here in the city many times while I hid up in the hills. Are they living normal lives? How can they considering everything? Are they still mere students or have they taken a stand because life is no longer something to laugh at? Do they even care about me?”

“Oh, don’t worry plenty of people cared. I used to get call from your mother, from your sister, and our mutual friend Ted. They were, at first, sick with worry. Then I tried to convince them that you were well and were on an honorable vacation away from the mess as I called it.”

“Yes it was all a mess. We were mesmerized by the mess and it exploded in a lotof vectors out from the center.”

“Whatever.”

“Well believe me I thought I was going to die, no question about it. I was hoping to get arrested before that happened. I lucked into finding the place I did. I met an old Indian in a bar up along the Sacramento River and the old guy told me about a group of people up this mountain and told me where to go to find it. So I hitched a ride up into this weird town and started a long walk up a half-dirt road to where the Indian said this place was. As you may remember I wasn’t much of a nature boy. Every sound startled me and I would stop waiting for a mountain lion or bear jump out and eat me.

Of course I was young and idealistic in those days. It was easy to do because it felt as if the world was going to sink down into the beautfiul nothingness of night, pushed ahead of schedule by the human animals. Ok I said, the Earth will die and all life will end. I had better do something memorable. I had better try and be better than anything that has come along so that there will be pity somewhere, sorrow even, as the dark ascends. I was crazy as most youth is. Crazy youth how I long for thee! Gone now and so I know the bitter fact that the Earth will go on forever and ever and life will mutate beyond anything we can imagine and no matter what I did I would be less than the saber-tooth tiger, a kind of floating ghost of what was. And no one, not five thosuand year ago, not five thousand years in the future would take note. And that five thousand years was approaching fast! That's when I lost my idealism and decided to plunge heavily into the world and get myself buried in it.

I wanted to hear the story but not completely. I didn't want to be reminded what took me a few hazings in hell to get out of. Dumb youth thinking it will outlast its enemies. I was fortunate to live in a city that had taught me, make bond with the enemy but don't become the enemy. I wanted to hear the tale of my old friend, a guy I had spent a lot of time carousing and protesting, talking and riding stupidly along looking for mates; wildly good mates.

He did look more like the steam had vaporized out of him, as if he had settled and had beliefs of some sort. He had been a journalist and wrote for the so-called underground press; stories about crazy taxicab companies painted up in psychedelic colors, draft dodgers, topless dancers in San Francisco, and the endless clubs where Joan Baez or Dylan would play. All gone now for burrito stands and parking lots. Well, things live in the mind as well as places. I had been a bit more conservative and looked askance at a lot of the doings of that time. There were ineluctable beliefs though. There were things shared outside of odd handshakes and beards. In Berkeley I had seen Japanese hippies and German hippies; Estonian hippies and Kenyan hippies. I saw laughter with every type of face. It was good. "When youth is behind you keep it hidden in a safe place and don't let the world in." That's what I was told at some point by someone who I had already forgotten. A work guy. So, I wasn't quite sure I wanted the story but I had time, now, and I was curious. A bond is made. It breaks through circumstances you don't control. And then, there it is ready to connect again, with those memories piling up like the bridge commute, car after car, word after word, an effortless flow through a kind of universal resistance.

"Now friend, tell me your story."

David Eide
January 24, 2014