Chapter-- 

"Back there you see there's too much noise when one wants to say something. It can be a physical obstruction or a psychological one, what difference does it make? So what you think I mean is not what I meant. And from that miniscule difference great waves are created and they crash in unsuspected areas so the brain, rather than relaxed is startled all the time. Live in a mid-sized, non-descript city for a while where nothing extraordinary happens but the same patterns of life are lived as they are in any great city."

"So you are here to make sure the communication is clear and clean?"

"Oh yes, without a doubt. It's one of the keys to good health. Now that doesn't mean we like everything we hear, no, far from that. But we know exactly what has been said as the speaker intended." I began to observe to see if this was true. Odd little gestures would be exchanged that apparently both parties understood. And I was the only one they elaborated their thoughts and feelings to. With each other it was a clip and a quick. Whether it led to better psychological health I couldn't say. Some of them appeared the happiest people on earth. Others were a bit more subdued. They could get rowdy, a few of them at any rate. I could hear them laughing like wild hens while I lay on my cot usually reading a book Rasputin had in his library. Forgotten philosophical books usually written by authors who had the enthusiasm of a spirit that knows he will survive despite everything. Oh, they would laugh and laugh and after a while I thought they were laughing at me since I was absent and an easy target. They laughed as I heard it one time in a park of homeless people late at night as they drank and danced around a fire. But no, they were laughing for the sport of it, for the health of it. Thomas had told me that laughter, "expelled old thought," and "made new thought possible," so perhaps they were all laughing philosophers, drunk on the fact they could think without any consequence, therefore were free in a sense that others could not be. I didn't know.

"Oh you don't understand. It wasn't about getting back there all the time but getting back there in little bundles of time that seemed to last forever. Then you knew it didn’t last forever but for only a precious moment. Then what you thought and felt during that time was the most important time, nothing else ever came close. The mundane chore of life then took over and we were compelled to obey it because we knew we'd get back there in that way so we felt so wonderful and free. That's all it was. That's all we expected. And we tried to get good with the mundane chore of life but who can know whether we were or not."

I had become a journalist because the world was rotten and yet the good had to live in it. I wanted people to hate the rottenness the way I had but you get disappointed without question. The rottenness grows on them. They expect it and the good they interpret as comfort and safety.

I found that rather than victims of a society they were supremely arrogant and believed they were much better than the society. People I could admire but not trust because at some point the arrogance would turn on them and get pounded out one way or the other. No, not victims, not people who believed they couldn't make it in the society they had run from but their first entrance into the society must have been quite a shock no one prepared them for. It was a shock to be young, smart, lovely and be forced to the bottom of the totem pole. It was a shock to see what the world hated and why. It was not unusual. These types of endeavors were around from the beginning. I knew of distant relatives that had help build the Hopedale community and then go off and help found Tufts University. Ah, those with more sensibility, more intelligence had to have a break to play out their ideas and value’s. That made sense to me.

There were times when it was the real thing, other times I thought it was a dream of some sort that tricks you into believing it’s a reality until you wake up and you are in the same place, you are the same person you were before the dream. The people made it real, nutty as they could be. I learned early on the thing was to look and listen because later there would be time to filter out the useless from the useful.

There was a path. And it was long and gentle near the stream. I was warned of bear and mountain lion but I had a few dogs with me. I would sit on some broken logs once in a while and watch the dogs romp and play with each other. They told me in that way animals have to speak to humans, “what are you afraid of? Don’t fear human, we are here with the mother and she will protect us even as she devours us.” So I got up, took my walking stick and continued up the path. It had bends and at the bend were the vistas; valleys with little trails of smoke, the freeway, a slithering concrete snake as I had heard it described, a small mountain here and there and at the far horizon the dancing, shimmering rims of the Sierra Nevada’s where I had done some backpacking as a kid.

I would stay at the bend and then move on, each bend showing the same vista but from different angles. I sucked in the great smell of pine cone and would stoop to pet one of the dogs or all of them and move on. At these times the world faded into nonsense. Who needs a military up here or politicians? Who could possibly own all this? It belonged to God or the great spirit or mother earth and we were seduced into believing something beyond our own pettiness. It was beautiful. And then I moved on. And isn’t it ironic that after feeling these profound things I was confronted by a bear who had been rubbing its back against a big tree. It looked at me for awhile, didn’t say anything and then the dogs started after it. And it went after the dogs and I saw this nature tear itself up like a crazy movie. The dogs drove the bear out but I kept feeling the bear blamed me for the incident and went back into the woods to wait until it had an opportunity to rip me as it had been ripped by the dogs. It made me feel small and meaningless.

It had been a month since I had seen other people than the ones at the farm. C and I went to the little store at the bottom of the valley to get a few things and put gas in the truck. A big willow tree gave it shade and bells rang above the door when we entered. What I remember is the speed at which the heads turned as we made our way inside. Fierce eyes, old tired eyes, startled eyes, drunken eyes. And faces deeply creased with age or worry and stress. I flinched because I was not used to the types I immediately took in. Even my grandparents lived in cities. I wasn’t used to the rural types.

There was a small store and then a bar in the back with baseball schedules on the wall and a mirror that looked like a holdover from the old west. Some animal horns hung up over the bar but I couldn’t identify them. The waitress, a big scowling woman, asked us what we needed. I was going to say something clever, something urban but resisted and settled for a beer as did C. A few of the locals were sitting in a row next to us, not looking at us but listening and wanting to hear a good piece of news or something that would define us so they could put us in our place. I learned after a time that the rurals believe they live in a kind of heaven and hell all moshed together. Hell are the banks, the kids, the women, the economy, the boss, the government but the heaven is in the ability to surrender to nature and be whisked away into eternity. “Ah you see we know what it is and you snobby urbans don’t.” It didn’t seem to bother them that they were considered backward, provincial ninnies. They considered such opinions as jealousy because the urbans were forced to live in boxes piled up on each other and nature was rarely anything other than a reminder of death. But who knows?

One finally piped up, “you boys from that hippy place up the road?”

“Yeah,” C answered.

“Having fun up there?”

“Oh sure.”

“Smoke that pot up there?”

“No.” He lied.

“And what about you feller, you don’t look so rough and ready. Do you have fun up there?”

“I’m a guest. I live in San Francsico.”

“Oh I love that city. North Beach. The Giants and 49er’s. Can’t stand the people,” and he half laughed and coughed at the same time.

Things went silent for a time. We drank and looked up on the wall at the little signs posted there.

“By the time we leave here I expect things to be different. Computers will be running everything just like the futurists say they will. Little babies will get inplants rather than circumcised. Wars will be determined by who has the best computer. They're in the rockets they send to the moon. It’s just a matter of time before they put the components together and send it out to the public.”

“And is the public going to the moon?”

“They’ve already been there. They will go where they’ve never been before.”

“Fly through that horizon!”

That night I had a wistful fantasy about the world communicating with itself beyond anything before. People were going to make a lot of money. It would be a revolution. A true revolution in the factual sense of the word. And satellites would be involved. Words and images flying through the air. Some heads were going to get harmed, some heads were going to get enriched. I saw it, no question. It played in my mind. I remember my cousin and I were going to be the first people in space. And we designed a space ship on large pieces of butcher paper and expected this to happen. We were in the fifth grade. And then Shepard went up in space and I had to stand in my classroom and tell my classmates how jealous I was now that my cousin and I weren’t going to be the first Americans in space. So we changed our dream a bit and were going to be the first to land on the Moon or Mars, didn’t matter which one. But we learned that astronauts going that distance were going to have to drink their own urine for refreshment and so the project withered on the vine so to speak. And then when Armstrong walked on the Moon I was happy about it but felt a bit of distance as though I knew at that moment that dreams were ridiculous and simply fueled the more powerful to take them.

“We are easy to disappoint aren’t we?”

“Things get old pretty quick with both the young and old.”

“Then what do we do? Just let the dreams of others pass through us like an exotic play of lights that distract us from our own dreams? No.”

It was plain to me that this dream too, the communication of the world with itself, would be realized but not by me. All I could do was to anticipate it and not be knocked over when it happened.

David Eide
January 24, 2014