CANADA/US/CAMPER TRIP 1968 1 of 2
July 27 - September 4, 1968
Saturday, July 27: Nothing seemed to get done on time. Last night's packing got me practically nowhere with heaps in the living room and heaps in the bedroom and entrance hall and suitcases half full all over. Mike says it'll be ready by 10 AM, so we arrange to catch the 8:45 train out to Hempstead. Avi shows up with George, which turns me off, and we two have words about the trip already: he's dogmatic about what he believes and I'm dogmatic about what I believe, and George and Rita are called in as referee more than once. Train ride out is crowded, but we manage to sit together and come up with topics of conversation. Walk to Hempstead Ford and they're not quite ready, and get instructions on heater and gas and oven and water (but not on choke or grease jobs or non-pressurized water) and leave about 11:45. Avi drives and we all experience the difficulty of truck driving: WAY up in the air, with power steering weaving all over the road, and bumps producing huge bounces from the cab springs. To my place starved and find parking on 57th and eat lunch amusedly in Chock Full of Nuts until 2. I fuss and pack while they take things down and we decide to leave the hibachi behind and Avi gets exasperated at my slowness and drive to his place at 3. I wait outside and wait and stand and look at passing people, and he's out at 3:45, insisting we look for batteries. Places closed and places that are open have them not, then I demand we go back and pick up hibachi and snorkel stuff. He demurs, we go, saying final goodbye to George and Rita about 4:30. Get terribly lost in small roads and poor maps, so that we're not far along at ALL by dinner. Decide we're starved and get into Scenic Highway, take first exit, reject sandwich place, and end up with Greek salad and sole and GREAT peach shortcake, and get told we can sleep in back, where the experiences of page one took place. The camper is cozy and ours, yet we have trouble sleeping, and wake during night, and get up tired and a bit touchy. It continues. July 27 notes: Fantastic spate of discoveries. Avi shits the first time and keeps me laughing for ten minutes: you shit and KNOW that your balls are dangling into the heap sitting just below you. The smell in the small enclosed room rises steaming up, and you grunt knowing that every tiny movement of your movement is transmitted through the delicate springs of the cab. Effort is taken so that the shit is soundless, so it takes longer: a work of art! Then, since he'd saved it from lunch, from the huge dinner, even beyond, AND since there was, oh, yes, the banana, the heap overfloweth, and, horrors, one flushing sufficeth not to rid the bowl of the heap. And the tissue doesn't quite go down, and the second flushing still leaves marks, so he's got to wipe the bowl with a tissue and that needs a third flush. He later remembers that he's glad he didn't describe the size and shape of each particular convolution, with two or three streamers for effect. And how each grunt left its imprint in the stools. Then later I had the thrill of taking the first shower, and finding how slippery the toilet seat was after I stooped to my feet to soap my fundament. Then Avi tapped me twice at night, at 2 AM to say we both couldn't sleep, and wonder why: Avi fears that each approaching footstep is a vandal set to put a bomb under the camper. Up at 7:15 and absolutely FUSS to 9:15 (eating, however, lovely scrambled eggs).
Sunday, July 28: Back to highway and as we drive through lovely rolling hills and valleys of the Adirondacks, we become more and more happy we decided not to drive at night. In addition, we wouldn't have gotten to falls by 2 AM, but even if we had, it wouldn't have been illuminated, since the lights cut off the latest they ever do during the month of July: midnight. We settle into the routine of two hour shifts at the wheel, and come to the conclusion (proven later in the trip) that the radio isn't much good at picking up stations, so most of the time we talk, or Avi reads his book on that Jewish uprising in the German Prison or, more likely, dozes. Again have trouble with naps and directions as the maps give very little detail of the roads around Niagara, and what detail is given is usually ignored by the cryptic road signs, and as often as not we switch from lane to lane at last moments due to some TINY sign telling us that that OTHER direction is the one we wanted to take. July 28 notes: All of a sudden it's Wednesday, July 31, and I've written nothing. All days sort of seep into one after Niagara Falls (where we parked at "Point of No Return" at north tip of Goat Island at 8:15, walked down via Three Sisters to Terrapin Point for Horseshoe Falls, walked up to the Cave of the Winds for franks, and down for hilarious spume-covered trip, up for Luna Island and American Falls, and walk back to car where I want to go on helicopter, Avi doesn't, I decide to go: I must be 2 for $14, and not 1 for $7, decide NOT to go, find his $80 Travelers check on pavement "If I give you $80, will you go?" He says yes, then sulks as woman and two kids go and return, old couple go and return, two men go and return, the "reserved man and son" go and sun comes in and out and Avi comes out of sulk. THEN the terrible married couple has "reservations" and we demand money back, and fuss about $10 and four singles versus two fives and four singles and back to car for LONG drive to Rainbow Bridge and across and get to Canadian Park and NO parking spot except "for dinner" and at 5:30 we get GREAT balcony view of falls at the Refectory and have great ham steak and Avi has a raspberry shortcake which falls short of the fabulous peach shortcake of the evening before. Wander Park to Maid of the Mist, and at 7 PM find last boat is at 6:45. Climb sandy hill to Skylon, and up for view of lounge and dining room and all and walk down road to drive back across to US to Observation Tower and up and down and walk to American bottom and up at 9:15 to Viewmobile and Cave of the Winds for ride to bottom for Gorge Walk and get fabulously close to base of Horseshoe for photo and back to top for ride back and I buy book to read (since I can't write since I slam finger in car on Sunday noon---ouch) and Avi writes and sends cards and we're back to Canada at 11 and walk along to see bright white on Bridal Veil and red and green and violet on others and we're cold at 11:45 and out toward St. Catherine's, where we end up at 1 AM in desperation into a provincial park spending $1.50 for a curb parking site alongside what turns out to be a huge, cold, ore-boat laden Lake Ontario the next AM). All fade into one, marked by little guy from Iron bridge going to some town down the pike, and Ray Murdock going from (flies, little male humping big female of dashboard, wicked-looking orange-eyed giants that land and flatten with a scary plop, gripping on your pants, the cat-like eyes impassively defiant).
Monday, July 29: Up begrudgingly because of our late night last night, and I'm out to investigate the john and the lake as Avi fusses. There's a fierce cold wind, but the air is incredibly clear (a fact I remark on again and again until Avi is probably ready to clobber me) and it's a job to drive through even mediocre scenery because we can SEE so far. Got to a gas station that's so far out it's out of gas, but tank is being filled by truck and we wait, longer because it's being filled with high-test first, then get gas and listen to car stereo set and read old NY Times Book Review and sales blurb for Mercedes and we're on our way. Lunch in the Georgian Bay area, but it's oldish and poorish from the ground, though I looked nice from the air when I flew over it to Vancouver two years before. Things unpainted and unrepaired, and nothing NEW built for a number of years---and that's why some Canadians are so unhappy about their relation to the US---the good people move to the US, the hippies move to Canada. Most investments are American and the profits go to make US pretty, not Canada pretty. It's just like traveling through the US thirty years ago, probably. Drive on and on and end doing 376 miles, stopping quite a bit before sunset at the Mississippi River, inviting in its tree-lined quiet. Wander along on and off log floats and talk to fisherman and get out hibachi (and lawn chair) to cook steaks that turn out pretty well. Avi and I wax low and gentle in our tones, and the candlelit camper seems finally something to enjoy, even though cars pass us on the strange dirt road through the night. The Canadian sky of stars is out of this world in splendor.
Tuesday, July 30: Start out latish and rather quickly pick up a young hitchhiker who's going 50-60 miles from one small town to another to look for a last month of summer work. Avi grills him mercilessly about his home, family, father's job and farm and car, income, expenses, schooling, Indians, Negroes, Chinese, Jews, likes, dislikes, dates, businesses and incomes from town, and so forth until he's literally interviewing the kid as if Avi intended to invest in the community. We listen to the radio for awhile and kid is awkward and open and no fun at all. He gets out in gentle rain and we go on to pick up someone else in Sunbury, who's going the whole 300 miles to Port Arthur to see his girl. Avi and I introduce him to Twenty Questions and he fails in "Geography" and he too is grilled by Avi about everything, including those nasty rumors that Trudeau might be homosexual. (Oh, ONE day we even saw a moose.) Avi goes so far as to nod in his corner while I'm driving and let "my hand just slipped down onto his thigh and he didn't move." My disgust for him seems to grow with every thing that he does. With no bread, we decide on bacon and hotcakes for lunch, and they're great eaten in the windy clean air in a small pine grove around a little lake. It REALLY feels like we're in Canada. Later it starts raining and lightening hits a telephone pole alongside the road. Speed slows to NOTHING as we move behind smoky trucks into a flooded Port Arthur. Splash and roar into town, leaving him off. Cyndy is ready for us tomorrow, and we drive past huge rocks to drive down quiet road for the night.
Wednesday, July 31: [DATEBOOK: Stu and Claudia and Cyndy in St. Paul] Marvel at the HUGE rock masses along this area, and say goodbye to the last slopes of Lake Superior, finally resplendent under sun and clouds, and look at fantastic sleeping giant and other rock outcroppings that make this section memorable.
Thursday, August 1: [DATEBOOK: Wreck camper. "Twelfth Night."]
Friday, August 2: [DATEBOOK: St. Paul: Les's light show.]
Saturday, August 3: Now Sunday AM, and we're finally on our way after Borelli agrees to buy a $2020 Ozark from Jasper, and we're at Jasper's from 1 to 6:30 while guy finds mattress and lamp cover, puts up supports for lower bunk, cuts hole for bunk support, re-screws the table back, rushes to shut off the propane when a loose connection permits the entire water heater housing to burst into flames, melting the plastic bag containing the warranty, which half burns, testing the water heater, which has to be turned on for an hour while smoke and smell pour out from the burning silver paint on the grill, tests the kitchen sink water to find that there's one connection not made, which is cannibalized from another unit and fixed with great inundations, finds light bulbs for both the 12 volt and 110 volt light sockets, screws on the latch on the between-camper-and-truck storage door, unbolts the wrecked camper and lifts it off, bolts the new camper down after raising it a few inches because the overhand rests on the top of the cab (making the antenna useless) cuts a new sliding panel for the back screen door (too small) renails the thin wooden paneling around the door when the two-spiked nails have pulled through, lights the refrigerator with the laughably small freezing compartment, gives me a ten-foot toilet holding tank hose (either too big or too small, depending on how it was supposed to fit) for the 20-25 flushings, explains the heater and sink, and sends us on our way at 6:30. Sunday at 4 PM we stop in Mitchell, South Dakota, and watch lovely blue-eyed tanned fellow with shaving nicks show us around a mink farm for single, double and triple pearls, beige, white, blue, black, and brown mink, some "done" (mated), fed, handled without gloves "just for us."
Sunday, August 4: [DATEBOOK: Badlands to interior South Dakota.]
Monday, August 5: Badlands our first sight of "the official trip," and the sight is glorious. Lined buttes and mesas of crumbling dried clay, fantastically mosaicked into intricate patterns of decaying soil. Sunset hits us as we climb one of the "windows." At 1 PM Avi begins to use mail clippers. We bounce out of the Badlands after looking at and climbing and pointing at chipmunks and having a good time in general. Continue on to Wall and stop at the Drug Store, and I find that 29 x 31 white Levis are a BIT too tight, but 33 swims, so 31 x 31 sounds like me, but then they have no shorts. A 40 foot replica of a dinosaur, a six-foot rabbit, an "ice-water" well that tastes suspiciously like tap water, a band that tootles and rolls its eyes, miles of souvenirs and cold beer and clothes and jewelry and drugs and a back yard with trees and popcorn stands and fake Indians and cutout heads on Indians and cowboys for photographing, and all filled with loud shoving people, SOME of them lovely fraternity boys in short tight pants and sweat shirts and pimples and big feet and tanned arms with golden-curled hair. Back to drive to Rapid City and it turns out the Ford 3/4 ton truck needs a grease job and oil change every 1500 miles! Stop at gas station and begin to fill up on water again and decide their garage is too small to handle us (see a stream of water from lawn sprinkler above the road (and hear thump of newspapers on front porch, sliding up against the screen doors) pushing aside the pine needles and grass clippings and making the ants scurry out of the way and am taken FORCIBLY back to childhood in Akron---it WAS rather different from NYC) and down the block to find (at 5 PM Avi is clipping his nails AGAIN!?) they'll do it in 45 minutes to an hour. GREAT. Across to 20 cent laundromat and 20 cent dryer (for 2 cycles) and talk to lovely RZ license plate from Colorado who's up with the greyhounds his father trains and goes to school (one year so far) at the University of Montana in Missoula. He's 18 or 19 and nicely chested under the Wedgwood blue and white striped polo shirt and nicely full under his dirty yellow swimming trunks, and his golden legs are shapely down to the nails on his dirty toes. Then Cyndy decides she has to go to the doctor at 4 PM and (some kind of fungus---are you sure you're not pregnant? YES, I'm sure, as if she were having her courses), and we drive her over and drive BACK convinced something is wrong with the car, and there is: we've been driving with the choke out. So here at 5 I sit stewing in the cab waiting for her to come out, after I went in to say "I'm waiting for Cyndy Victor, who's inside now, and I have to go to the men's room, do you have one?" (Was miserable Thursday night. Went to Twelfth Night with its insistence on the primacy of love, regardless of whether it's temporarily unrequited (Viola and Duke) or Lesbian (Viola and Olivia) or homo (Duke and Orsino) or typical (Duke and Olivia) or humorous (Malvolio and Olivia, Aguecheek and Olivia) or raucous (Belch and Maria) and I see BEAUTIFUL fellow, 6'6", khaki uncuffed trousers straight on long legs, level gaze on mine under close-cropped blond curls, and it was the level gaze---eyes peering out from flawless skin---that got me. He seemed SO agreeable, SO possibly accessible. Maybe I DID look odd in my blue old-man's pants, my red velour sweater, in my long hair and short whiskers, but he DID look at me, and I DID love to look on him. So AGAIN I rethought the trip, and was direct enough to tell Avi that I thought we were incompatible and we shouldn't continue the trip. He went into a purple funk and was quiet for the next few days, while Cyndy remained carefully neutral. It certainly turned out that three traveled better than two -- two can battle while the third recuperates for the next battle with one of the other two. And at this moment, with Cyndy here, Avi demands my birth sign (WHAT'S MY SIGN?) and reads that Cyndy and I are difficult to get along with on trips. I'M PACKING, he shouts to the wondering ears of the people whose lawn we're parked on, onto whose grass the pent sink drainage drips because Avi heeded not my warning not to fill the sink while the neighbors watch. Then on Saturday we have a grueling talk (while my stomach knots) in which the paradox of: Avi is incompatible with me, any two can fall in love, is batted grotesquely back and forth. And then, while the springs transmit any movement of one to the other two, we three bounce again across the countryside, remembering that tonight is the night we call Chuck and add a fourth to our menage. The discussions will probably grow cubically, and the 4x4 triangle should be most interesting indeed. Can't WAIT to see it. But again, then, I wonder, WHY am I traveling with Avi and picking up Cyndy and Chuck? WHAT do I want from the trip? To relax. It hasn't been relaxing so far. WHO would I want to be with? Someone I loved. WHO can I love? Anyone? Avi? Cyndy? Feel JUST lousy. Why aren't I finding the one I will love? WHEN? HOW? (Steadily it gets hotter and hotter, until in Rapid City a dry heat bakes over us, blazes through the floor of the cab, a dry heat that whips away the perspiration as it forms, sapping the body of water, enervating the mind, making salt tablets seem necessary and gives Cyndy's doctor the clue that she might be pre-diabetic by the way she's been gulping water. The sweat-smell gathers in the armpits, the fingers grow sticky while writing, and there's a hot ribbon of irritated flesh under my neck where the beard is just as content to stick into the flesh as to stick out, and the greasy hair is never off my greasy forehead and there's a fringe before my eyes almost continuously. Friday ended quite spectacularly with Les's slides for his light show for ASA. Some of his multilayered geometric constructions have melted into glass and ash looking patterns which shed no color on the screen. They melted, he explained, when the heat got to them. Totally destructive art where the red stood, then flowed down over the black, melting the image on the non-screen. This was his front wall, including windows with drawn shades partially curtained, the window frames and curtain rods, and the rotating fan, whose slick blades created a greasy underglaze of shimmer for whatever pattern was projected onto it. We passed in front of the double projectors and found that the shadow from one projector, with the dominating slide, would be etched in the pattern from the subordinate slide. This led me, mesmerized, to point to the window shade, and there, at times, a green hand at one angle and a red hand at another angle did weird things with other shadow-causing parts of the body, and formed a black shadow where they joined. Hand-movements that I loved as graceful made the effect ever more strange, and then Cyndy shut off the fan, and the revolving vanes produced a perfect stop-motion stroboscopic effect as the fan slowed from one eyeball stop to another. Then the pattern actually appeared to be CARRIED ALONG with each vane, and the round areas went askew in a strange way (8:20 AM, August 6: it strikes again! Start out at 5:55 AM---Avi up and raring to go, but Cyndy wants to sleep, so we dress and go out and walk around the lake in the rising sunlight. Everything is perfectly clear, fishermen already ruffled the mirror surface of the lake, and Avi leaps on, full of enthusiasm. Back to camper at 6:45 and I insist on exercises, so I pump up the air mattress and lumber away, doing only 10 pushups, 15 sit-ups, and 100 run in places because I'm so out of shape. Into cab finally at 7:40, lovely early, and drive off down to Crazy Horse, and I hear flip-flip out window, but right rear tire if OK in my mirror and right front is OK as I crane out window. Cyndy says we'll stop to check left tires---in mirror for left rear she can only see a shadow. Crazy Horse is a huge mountain with some small sort of construction, and we decide $2 per car is too much. Avi is constant dissenter in "What cave do we go into" talk, and almost simply because Cyndy says she want to go into Jewel, Avi says he wants to go into Wind. So I say we go into both. We drive BACK to 87 and go to Needles Highway and see a truck stopped ahead of us, looking at us. At the same time, as Cyndy slows, there's a pop and a hiss and a flop-flop and we obviously have another flat! Left rear is terribly misshapen and we have no guarantees---the tire was only a factory second, so there's $47 down the drain. Driver said he SAW we were so low and wanted to warn us, so he goes into town to telephone. Thank God for Cyndy's AAA membership. We mutter and mumble, doing absolutely NO communicating, and I sit in cab for awhile until clacking of flashers drive me to grass shoulders to brood for long long minutes. What lousy LUCK! But it's not luck, it's just our stupidity with CARS. I'm sure every traveler checks gas, oil, water, and tires at every gas station, AND before he takes off in the morning. This is just a very time-consuming, money-stealing way of teaching us to be the careful travelers that someone like I USED to be will look at and say "My God, you spend so much time checking the car, you don't have any FUN." And no amount of VERBOSITY will convince HIM half so strongly as the experience taught US. So I sit and brood in the grass, starting to write but stopping for the doldrums. Then I start again, knowing that the discipline of writing, even when I don't fell like it, but when the time is available, will be good for me. Sit and stare at the rapid-moving ants, expending huge quantities of energy going very little distances, then mounting the huge blue bulk of my Levis, venturing onto it, then encountering an unforeseen, never-before-experienced blow from a finger that sends it spinning into the grass a foot away. And I conceive that people are like ants, living, for the most part, out of contact with these enormous forces called people. And most of those who DO have encounters with people must many times meet instant death: totally mashed by a step, writhing with bug spray, crippled and mangled (and quickly gotten rid of, I'm sure) by a finger-flick beyond their ken. HOW like us. Whole civilizations of us (like ants in the jungles) living without ANY encounter with people, with NO concept of anything LIKE people. Then other civilizations (like ants in woods or parks) who can live for generations without encountering a person, then, widely scattered, a survivor will attempt to communicate "A huge---An enormous---A fantastic," to which the person, like the cartoon strip, can say "Here I am, the world's biggest adjective." Some manage to live with man constantly (colonies in camps, on beaches, in homes) but undoubtedly construct untrue, hugely complex mythos about us: gods, never dying, of unforeseeable power, of far-ranging activities (How could an ant in a kitchen conceive of a car to take the person who chased him with bug bomb yesterday 500 miles in a day. What's a mile? What's a day? What's a person?" They can hardly hope to know us, and meet us only as THE COSMIC FINGER, THE CRUSHING SIT-DOWN-IN-GRASS, THE BEARER OF THE GAS. We are simply incredibly alien, meeting under only the most disastrous of circumstances. How might a god be to us? We may touch only in religion, or drugs. But remember how ODD the concept of "seeing like this" as ONLY a principle of drugs or religious uses. As if the reality were so far ABOVE religions or a white powder of a certain mold, or our reasoning, or words, or our intuitions. How far above EVERYTHING some sort of reality MIGHT be. How far above an ant is a car? Finally, at 9:30, a small kid from AAA arrives. As he works, I join Cyndy by the stream, rather fetid, and turn over rocks and logs to watch the ants run and the tenacious grass taking root in the rotting wood. We stare at green-legged grasshoppers and the orange-black and red-black carapaces of flying beetles. Ants, aphids, wood lice, almost too small to see except as cream dots streaking across the rotten damp wood. At length, at 10:20, we drive into Hill City to Texaco, where Cyndy and man had words about service, then went to Mobil for gas and HE volunteered to get tire. At 11:20 he returns with tire, but later reveals he doesn't have a tube. Avi reads and Cyndy snoozed and then we all meander off to lunch and I get great chicken in the basket. At long last he gets a tube, removes the spare, puts on the new tire ("Never, never buy seconds---they're not worth it") Seconds---sure, it got a blowout on the second day---the tube is slashed in two, and there, in the tire, is the stub end of a nail. Goddam nail. So, at LONG last, at 12:20, we're off again.
Tuesday, August 6: [DATEBOOK: Flat tire. To Moorcroft, Wyoming.]
Wednesday, August 7: [DATEBOOK: To Brooks Lake, Wyoming.]
Thursday, August 8: Finally drive into the Tetons, Cyndy getting more excited minute by minute, and Avi and I trying to ogle to her expectation. I'm feeling rather depressed, though, and though the view is great, I don't ooze enthusiasm. Stop at all the turnouts, getting the hard glint of the sun out of our eyes as reflected from the silvery plaques. By Jenny Lake the view gets through even to me, and we stop for lunch, which they eat in the cabin and I take to the side of Jenny and look up at the mountains, down at the hikers on the trail, and across the lake unfortunately ruffled by boats with motors. Through the museum and hiker's registry and gift shop, and the book of color plates is buyable and bought. When we entered the park ONLY Jenny Lake was full at 10:30, but as Cyndy dithered about wanting to swim, we went toward String Lake, seeing the sign that all but Gros Ventre (to the south) was full by 2 PM. Avi wouldn't say what he wanted, I didn't care, and Cyndy tossed out so many alternatives we were dazed. We DID swim, but I spent a half hour SEARCHING for my snorkel-mask strap, and settled into a blue funk. To rouse myself from the funk I DID swim in the oozy lake, sitting on a rock and watched Avi and Cyndy talk to a camper across the lake. He (and his friend) were invited over, and at 6 Mike and Matt were introduced to me with a solid, sensual handshake. Back to the camper to chat, and we invited them back at 8 if we go to Jackson. A ranger passes by and talks to me: you can't stay here. OK, rain pours down, and Matt comes in wet and we talk, waiting for Mike, who's soaked and possibly bitten by a black widow. Talk horribly goes away at that point, and I have to bring up "Look, let's see if it COULD be a black widow." We drive off in the rain to Jenny Lake Lodge, who doesn't admit them. Then to the ranger station, where we all sit and talk, find there are no black widow spiders in the valley, all places full, CAN park at String if we say we're TIRED, and Avi and Cyndy ask if I want to put up a mountain climber in the cab. OK. Back to String Lake at 9:30, climber into cab, and Mike and Matt want to borrow sleeping bag and tent and hibachi and Avi gets angry at them and us, and Cyndy and I sit and talk at edge of lake. Ranger comes again and exchanges words with Avi, and threatens a citation. What to do? Climber sleeping, hibachi hot, citation expensive and time-consuming since we must meet Chuck on the 10th, ranger a bitch, no one helpful. We stay. I sleep NOT at all; Avi takes in climber at 2, and at 4 he leaves, shouting back "Thanks a lot, ya fuckin' queer," and at 6 I'm up to look at absolutely tranquil String Lake. Largest disturbances caused by a congregation of water striders, whose waves died out only yards away. Clouds rose and fell about the mountain, and finally five ducks swam out and broke the mirror into shimmering slivers. Ranger came back again, I HEAR what's said, and he ends by saying, "If I see you again---" and mashing fist into hand. I get back, Avi says "get into bathroom, here he comes again" and hands him a citation. Avi feigns losing wallet, gives him a letter envelope as address. Golub/Roberts thing again. I'm out, laughing, and we look for Cyndy. Wait to 9, leave note on a tree, and off to Moose. Long talk with agreeable ranger, then citing ranger comes in, black eyes and thin face taut with fire, saying we should all be fined. We sell our story at great length, and finally he decided CYNDY is the cause of it all, and SHE should be fined. I make her out to be mildly psychotic and Avi replies that he should use "role-reversal" and see that he should certainly change his tactics with us. He blows up, shouts us out of the park, and indicates he never wants to se us again. Avi and I can hardly resist smiling in triumph. Back to String Lake and THERE'S Cyndy and Matt and Mike, who listen to our story and we say we MUST get to Coulter Bay Village for next night's reservation, and they'll repack tent and wait for us. Coulter is jammed and FULL sign is just being put up. We go for loop after loop and finally find the Humphrey's camper from New York, leave two notes and my chair, and get back to a frozen Cyndy two hours later in the rain. Nothing left but to go to Jackson: two guys will get hitches to dryer climes, Cyndy will rent a car and hike around, then fly to Minneapolis. Fine. Avi is bitchy as possible and starts while three in back are packing. He's eager to get rid of them and his spirit is catching. To town and gawk at antler arches, lovely things cruising and tourist atmosphere. Eat in Silver Spur, a great meal, and out to meet Cyndy and talk. Avi's a bitch; guys are gone. I'm in the back with Mike and we cruse, and BOUNCE along roads. Cheap places gone; desperation. Round and round and Matt is off feeding his face and Mike is decisionless. Finally I take their stuff off and say GOODBYE. Cyndy confuseder---try to find her a place, then she joins us for Fish Hatchery and Elk refuge and we have coldly pleasant last evening together before they leave next day at same airport at which I get Chuck.
Friday, August 9: [DATEBOOK: Tetons. Sleep at Coulter Bay.]
Saturday, August 10: [DATEBOOK: Yellowstone. Chuck arrives, Avi and Cyndy leave.]
Sunday, August 11, 9AM: Chuck still sleeps, or rather snuggles himself from one cozy position within his down quilt to another. He was so exhausted by 6 PM yesterday that he was willing to forego the last steam phases of the unbelievable Castle Geyser to plead fatigue and a headache to eat and go to bed. So we drove down through the park, seeing a bear finally, holding up a 50-car train while the first ten cars enjoyed the beast, the other forty wondered what was wrong. We ate and fussed and finally got into bed at 10:45. I woke at 6, again at 7, and lay thinking until 8. Then it was too late for me, and I sewed the hole in my blue-white polo short, showered and washed my hair and went out to look for an outhouse. The small campground was already cleared of the travelers and the seers, and was left to the lazy and the holdover campers. I circumnavigated the place, and decided that the woodsy path leading away from the road was the unofficial john. The fog was thick earlier, but as I walk in my polo shirt in the 60+ weather, the sun warms me and my hair begins to dry and feather over my forehead. Just as the geysers yesterday gave me proof of the development of fountains, so the early morning woods showed me the development of decorated trees: each tiny pine was interwebbed with spider droppings, and dewy cables connected one tree to another, the connections gleaming in the dew-lit sun. And at the end of each down-pointing needle hung a crystal bead of water, absolutely regular and pure. I urinated in a little grove of trees overlooking the river, and watched the brain-coral mound of bubbles slowly sink into the wet ground. The smell of camper's shit came to my nose as a delicate morning fragrance, and a tightening of my balls led me to look for an even more secluded place to jerk off. I went down toward the river so that the overlooking bluffs would shelter me from eyes who would not understand my morning celebration. I unzipped my jeans and settled the shorts comfortably into them around my upper thighs, then pulled them up in back to warm my ass. Then I smoothed my tight shirt down so that I could enjoy my ready body and leisurely came to full erection. Since I had not come since the morning in the john on Brooks Lake, my balls tightened toward completion almost immediately, and my bent legs on the sloping ground permitted me to slowly bring myself to maximum tension. I lovingly fondled my cock to taut redness, then, reluctant to prolong the preplay of the geyser and delay the eruption, I gently clasped the barrel in the palm of my hand and projected milky pearl onto the moist ground below. I breathed hardly deeply---it was the most natural orgasm in the world. As I went down and the last drops oozed forth from my wrinkling head, I grasped them between two fingers and used the moist pine needles as a scented finger bowl, then rearranged my clothing and started back to the truck. Products of modern science, tissues resistant to water of pink, yellow, and white, had been gently beaten to a pulp by the rain, and formed soft-sepaled moss roses everywhere along the side of the path. A greasy paper towel turned into a lichen-covered white rock under a spider-decorated pine. I watched a long dewy frond as it became lighter as the sun evaporated the dew-beads, and the silk sheen of the web lengthened as the strand sailed upward, the first support of an impossible web. I got my notebook as Chuck made a possible overture to arise, but he doesn't call to me as I go back to the stream bank to write. I sit on a rock in the middle of a perverse side-current going upstream, caused by an eddy in the river at the tiny inlet to which the children come to throw rocks, which make noises like gargantuan fish coming to the surface for titanic gulps of air. The neatly-gutted carapace of a creature floats in the water, seemingly a cross between an air-borne wasp, with fragments of what could be wings moving lazily from his gutted thorax, a waterborne crayfish with his antennae and mandibles, and a long land-burrowing scorpion or bug with its curved, segmented posterior. I dislodge it from the rock against which it laps, look closely at it, then throw it back, where it vanishes in the darkening water when the sun goes behind clouds. A feel on the neck leads me to roll off a small chartreuse fly, which falls into the water, does not wet it, and struggles, crippled, in its cocoon of surface tension. It's now almost 9:45, and 11 hours sleep is enough for ANY exhausted person, so I'm up to wake Chuck and continue on down for one last day, hopefully hiking, in the Grand Tetons.
Monday, August 12: Get up at 8, giving Chuck 9 hours sleep (down from the 11PM-10 AM yesterday of 11 hours), and I get chair out for eggs and we eat and drive up to Yellowstone. Drive around Yellowstone Lake and see many many fishermen, then stop at Black Dragon's Cauldron to see things much differently than I remember, and even the guide book is wrong as a fumerole appears as a mudpot. Chuck is limping badly from yesterday, and as we drive to Canyon, he has to be persuaded to look from Artist Point. Canyon is unbelievably spectacular - maroon, red, green, chartreuse, brown, gold, and yellow, yellow, yellow rocks and green trees clinging on impossible crags. Get to Uncle Tom's parking lot and Chuck goes to short trail to look at Upper Falls, but balks when I suggest climb to bottom of Lower Falls. I ask if he wants to get groceries and he says yes, so at 2:30 we part company. He expects me to come back when the hail starts, but I huddle under a tree and don't come back. This time the hail is somewhat smaller than at Lake Solitude the day before, but bigger than the few tiny ones that fell the day before THAT at the Yellowstone-to-Teton Parking. But then, as always, it slowed and promised to stop a number of times, and I finally decided to go down the trail, after watching sleek pairs of wet legs walking doggedly up the trail, heads bent in the single determination to return to the top of the hill and rest. I descended alone, marveling at the construction of the open-ironwork stairs and bridges, which permit a breath-catching view of the rocks a hundred feet below my gingerly placed foot. But no hail or rain makes the hiking-sole texture of the stairs slippery, no small blessing with the glistening precipice stretching impersonally below me. Down and down the stairs I go, and I still pass people puffing up, wet from the spray and the rain. I get to the bottom to watch two lovelies fooling with a color Polaroid camera in the wet, and the green streamer of the falls seems even longer as the falls are swollen with the rain. Every little dry gully down the mountainside is now alive with flowing water, all streaming white down to the white rapids below. And what endless fascination to watch the spray! Dashed from the invisible surfaces at the end of their fall, the waters dash upward again, pulverized into a powdered-sugar spray by the water or the rocks. This then twisted upward struggling away from the frenzy at the base of the fall, like (can it be starting again? After Avi and Cyndy left, it seemed I was left with the perfect companion (Chuck): willing to do anything I suggested, able to fall asleep and remain asleep with any light and noise going, knowledgeable about little, yet knowing much, full of hours of ear-filling conversation, or capable of silence, looking for adventure, yet not overly interested in anything, not bent on reading, or writing postcards, as compulsive as I, as willing to spend money as I, as willing as I to forgo a bath or a shave or a meal, but yet there is a fuss, overwhelming in its triviality. I take the dishes, dirty, standing upright in the sink that can be plugged, wash them each one and leave them, soapy, in the sink that cannot be plugged, then rinse them back into the other sink, leaving them, clean, upside down to drain. He, dear he, washes them again. I see them draining on the sink and ask "Did you wash them again?" Alas, he did. An endless, stupid discussion follows, just as endless and stupid as this writing. So I stop and go, tired, to bed, at 10:10 PM, 8/13/68, in the campground of Lewis and Clark State Park, Montana.
Tuesday, August 13: [DATEBOOK: Dodge City drive, and to Lewis and Clark Caverns.]
Wednesday, August 14: 11:30 AM. Write, write, must write so I don't scream at Chuck for taking so long for nothing. Fuss, fuss, fuss, and worst is in driving, where he dawdles along the most boring highway at the slowest possible speed. And then there's the continuous parade of clothing: shirt, sweater, alpine sweater on, sweater off, alpine sweater on, shirt off, sweater on, ad infinitum, with meticulous foldings and arrangings, only to sit it on the front seat to be bounced around. Up this AM at 6:30, I take shower, to caverns at 8:35, too late, and get out at 10:30, then down for gas and groceries and water and a rest stop, and still he fusses, not ASKING me if I want to keep on writing before he drives off (depending on my common sense when he starts to say "Could you wait one minute?") by having ME ask HIM "Are you waiting for me?" Lunch on 14th is great, after we drive two miles back to pay the fellow the $7.50 for gas he thought I paid and I thought he paid, as we stop at 1 at a roadside table (the ever-present odor of shit from our holding tank prevailing) and eat a yummy quick lunch and get on our way again by 1:40, heading for Glacier.
Thursday, August 15: And still around the circles go. (How lovely the English language is---or how imprecise. Is that "I'm still going around in circles?" or "The circles (of life and death and thought and birth) are still going around?" or "We are all of us still going around in circles?" or "We are at rest, yet, paradoxically, we go in circles?" Yes, all, and none, yes, the paradox. Again ---in any discussion, it ultimately comes to paradox. Why? Because life is a paradox (so, come to the Paradox, old chum), because words are unable to take the place of living, feeling, being, even thinking, and those who insist in words reap nothing while those who invest in doing and living and loving reap life, which is the greatest and only reason for living. I lay in bed this 9:15 AM on August 15, 1968 (and what difference does the time dimension make to thought?) In Flathead National Forest (what difference do the dimensions of elevation and longitude and latitude and segment of earth's surface and position of the solar system and position of the galaxy and position of the universe and position of the cosmos make to thought?) and listen to the rain, the ever-continuing rain, and have nothing to do; so I think. In the same circles. Do I quit my job at IBM? Well, why not? Yes, I enjoy the people there, and can talk to them, but I'd rather talk about THEM than about their subroutines or their technical or professional problems. How much better it would be to put the trivia of the job AWAY in dealing with them. Work is taking an increasing amount of my decreasing (for I grow older, which is a truism---yet why should the dimension of time matter here?) energies, and I become increasingly disinterested in the technical. It's all nits. It's all fussy people fussing with details. Computers and computer work are far removed from the elements of LIVING. I have the security I wanted so badly, now let's use it, I say. And it's not possible to become terribly rich in computing, and it is in writing, and I'd like to know what it feels like to be terribly rich. So it's stages. I liked school until I knew what a job was. But I'd gone to school long enough to get a GOOD job, so that was OK. I liked the job until I learned what living was, but I'd worked long enough to buy myself a GOOD living, by writing, so that was OK. If things go well, I'll like writing enough to succeed in that, and get an income which means I can pursue my OTHER hobby, people, as well as or in place of, however it strikes me, my FIRST hobby, writing. Sure, I have reason to ponder my decision to quit. It's merely changing the direction of my life. But, in reconsidering for about the tenth time, it still looks like an OK decision. But then a new decision, do I or don't I take LSD this time around in New Westminster, leads to more pondering this morning, and the possible reinforcements from the session started me on these circles which whirled so that I began writing this. It may be that I'll have the mystical "God is Love and Love is I and I am Everyone and Everything is Nothing and I am Important and tops and singularly blessed with my I-Knowledge and all is light and truth and optimism" experience. It may be I'll have the negative "I am nothing and people live their lives fighting for something impossible and life is a farce ended totally with death and nothing anyone can do will change a thing. I'll never fall in love because I'm scared shitless of losing control, and in the LSD session I'll fear to lose control and have a bad trip and end up as fucked up as Andy after forty trips of hell" experience. So maybe I'm fearful for the first time for taking LSD. But maybe the fear is good because it will lead to a different trip, and this will open even MORE vistas. But what more vistas can there be? My third trip was for the most part thoughtless and certainly wordless (like a sleep, like a death, like a rest between lives), yet I had to grasp for words afterwards. There are a limited number of words, and a limited way to express them, and feelings so far surpass them that I may feel at a complete loss to BEGIN to think about what I felt in LSD, let alone put words side by side to give someone else the feeling. On the other hand, why not? I STILL fear death, STILL fear flying, STILL fear that "the death you most fear" will be my actual death and I'll be in the same hideous double-bind as in the SECOND session. So I begin to hope that LSD would just TAKE OVER and kill me (horrifying!) even though I DIDN'T want it to. THAT is the death most feared! MY actual death WHILE taking LSD, and the firm knowledge that the session is "watched" helps me not at all in my fear that, driven to a corner again, my physical heart may stop (Is there also a bit of lack of trust in those watching me, too?? Fearing they couldn't be trusted to keep me from dying? But then, when my time to die comes, who CAN keep me from death?) DEATH. So I fear I'm setting myself up for a bad trip---I fear my fear of death, and I fear to act upon my fear of a fear. And fear, fear, fear, becomes a nonsense syllable, and STILL I FEAR. The opposite of fear is faith. If I have faith in a good experience and in the guides, and in their wanting to HELP me, I have a good trip, there IS God and Love and the mystical union because I have FAITH in it. But if I DON'T have faith I get SHIT out of the trip. That is good and solid and real and smelly, sort of the ultimate reality. Faith is invisible and tentative and willful and suspect, sort of the ultimate OPPOSITE to reality. So if I want the REAL, I can settle for SHIT. If I want the UNREAL, I can get the cosmos in my very me. All is in, all is cellular. What a good word: cell. I, some cells of me, die every day. The cell next to the dead cell might, if thoughtful, be appalled at the death of the cell next to him. Death, how appalling, it might think. But I, my body, lives one. A new cell is created, not necessarily right there at that instant, so that the cell next could be reassured to think "Ah, life goes ON, the body (of which it has no knowledge, unless it takes it on faith (WHAT A FABULOUS ANALOGY. And it doesn't matter if I heard it before and have forgotten it, or whether I'm thinking of it new now, the POINT is it FEELS like a good analogy NOW, and that's the END of it) that it IS part of a larger body that lives on even if it dies---in fact it MUST die, since a cell has only a certain life-time, and if each cell INSISTED on living longer the BODY would die due to the destruction of the "normal" formation of the cell. (But cells are also PRISONS, keeping one cell and its contents and molecules and structure completely AWAY from other cells, except merely a SURFACE contact.) There's also the though that people ARE living longer, the bodies ARE getting bigger and stronger and smarter, and more HUMAN, so that each new cell must somehow be BETTER. Each CELL maybe can live longer and get bigger and be stronger and ward off disease better (due to immunizations) and produce better offspring (due to more vitamins, more vitality, better radiations, "better" LSD "damage" to the germ plasm! Chardin's Omega Man might exist BIOLOGICALLY, SCIENTIFICALLY, as SCIENCE produces immortality by PERFECTING the cell. If the CELL is perfect, the BODY is perfect. If the BODY is perfect, then the Omega Man, comprised of ALL bodies, is perfect, IS omega. So the cell MUST die to be replaced by a BETTER one. The first five leaves of a tiny tree MUST die and fall off if the tree will be permitted to grow enormously with 50,000 leaves. So each infitron must be perfect to form a perfect nucleon, and each nucleon must be perfect to form a perfect atom, and each atom must be perfect to form a perfect molecule, and each molecule must be perfect to form a perfect cell/compound, and each cell/compound must be perfect to form a perfect body/inanimate object, and each body/inanimate object must be perfect to form the perfect ALL-THAT-IS-LIVING/ALL-THAT-IS-NOT-LIVING, and BOTH have to be perfect to form the perfect INFITRON that both surpasses AND underlies everything. The NOTHING that IS EVERYTHING: I/LOVE/GOD/EVERYTHING/NOTHING. So again, even when originally depressed, I rocket to some sort of apotheosis or transfiguration. So why NOT take the LSD. If lives are series of battles, this is one of mine, and no MATTER what the outcome, I'll be different. But that's not true---I'll be the same. I'll STILL be ME, no matter what I DO. Remember the revelation? Words, how silly; drugs, how silly; fear, how silly, even HOPE, how silly, let alone vacations and work and music and geography and history and fear. So NOTHING IS. Yet all that IS IS, and EVERYTHING IS, so everything is nothing and I'M HUNGRY so I'm stopping to go and EAT.
And after eating I feel better, just as I did before after shitting and pissing. I suppose eating will be one of the harder things to keep up with once I'm away from the schedule of work. I'll have to exert as much pressure in fixing lunch, for example, as I exert in writing. Wrote the cards to Mom, Rita, Grandma, Helen and Jimmy, Cyndy, Avi, Stu and Claudia, Gladys, Joe, and Peter. Then I make the suggestion: maybe it's raining here and NOT raining on the other side of the continental divide. So we're ready and off, but gas attendant tells us that all Montana is covered all day today with rain, but we go on anyway. Early driving is boring along a lake and the mountains are relatively low, but then clouds clear long enough to give glimpses of peaks HIGH overhead, and when we stop to look at the little Matterhorn, the clouds obligingly part to show the characteristic beartooth effect of the concave sides of that peak. The green and red argillite glisten with wet and I gather a dozen rocks of white, yellow, red, green, black, brown and marbled. Into car again and fog closes in, but later again clears and we have fleeting glimpses of snowy peaks sheer against the sky. The fantastical element takes over, and soon the mountains loom more impressively than in sunlight as two or even three bands of clouds emphasize their height. The Citadel takes on an Olympian grandeur as clouds obscure the mundane base but reveal the Ionic glory of Athenian colonnades at the peak. Mist rises from the valleys like sun-seeking ghosts; clouds lay in horizontal striations mirroring the lines of snow on the buttes. Streamers of cloud rise from ravines, looking like forest-fire smoke, except for the coincidence that they always rise from the darker clefts of the hills. At times there are only haphazard blotches of cloud, with windows opening onto tree, rock, or snow at random. Anywhere water was wont to fall, it fell; from the skies, over rocks in the torrents of the streams, down the face of Weeping Wall in an orgy of tears, swelling the existing falls, and sweeping in curves over the road where there were not to be falls at all. Construction crews warned us, with their cutting up of the outside lane into jagged rock fragments, that heavy rains filled gullies and eroded the lanes and ate out road underpinning and caused mad avalanches of water-decayed earth. The road ascended into total obscurity, and turnoffs offered views of the interiors of feather quilts. At times the road looked as if it ran through tranquil piney lowlands, then the veils would part and a craggy snowy face would frown from above the road, or a glance over the side of the road would fall to the green foam rushing far below. The fogs ascended, descended, moved laterally, without pattern, or direction. Glacier National Park was a chaos of fog and rock and the swish of car tires on wet pavement, and the rustle of raincoats being put on and taken off. Heaters were on, condensation formed on windows, breath showed. Lunch was a fantasy of fried bologna, melted cheese and buttered rye bread fried into the most outlandish toasted sandwiches ever. Tea-warmed at least, we continued down from Logan Pass, ever watching the silent majestic covering and uncovering of the heights of the Rockies by the persistent fog. We drove all in dripping leaves, jeweled pine needles, the sound of pebbles and tires slishing as they divide water, the sheen of wet rock faces, the green fresh smell---it seems so RIGHT. Even the sunless sky and the clouds seem more fitting for the pugnacious profiles of snow and rock from mountainsides. Certainly snow belongs in cold and mist and wind, not in hot sun and the warm smell of dried grass and dust. GLACIERS, the word, evokes winter, and the wintry weather was ideal for the view (and the rationalizations). Notes: Through Glacier, mailing postcards in St. Mary's and last few miles into Canada. No Alberta map, only British Columbia map. Canada 2 starts extraordinarily slippery for first ten miles, then rain comes in "Blood" (Indian, not Negro) country, and road gets better. Gas a wood house with garrulous old guy who sells us gas, groceries for 5% exchange and tells us wrong place to stay: Sheep River. Get to gas station and get told "Okotoks" and it isn't bad. Hibachi wieners and roast marshmallows inside and bed about 11, hoping for a better day tomorrow.
Friday, August 16: Gary Joltz just wanted to talk. He and two friends had been drinking all night and came out to the river at 8:30 to wait for the liquor store to open at 10. His wife worked for Canadian Bell, he'd just bought a 50 volume ("US made, of course") set of encyclopedias for $400 for the kids he expected to start in two years. "If I remembered everything I read, I'd be a millionaire now." He told of 3,000,000 US Indians versus 225,000 Canadian Indians. The 21,000,000 US Negroes, the 21,000,000 Canadians (coincidence?) and the 200,000,000 Americans. Canadian GNP in the billions and we talked of what to see in Calgary (Husky Tower three feet taller than one in Houston, the zoo, Heritage Park), when he and 16 friends had a blast in Banff and urinated on the hundreds of trailers and tents that they found around in the morning and catching (I could have said eagle or hawk, but I don't know what kind of bird, so I won't say what kind of bird) a big bird and throwing it into a tent shouting "Hawk, Hawk!" We talked of the Negroes he knew and how he had no schooling. He built up Rogers Pass and Okanagon and said we had to see it. How Canada was becoming urbanized and how fast Calgary was growing, and how last year more Americans moved to Canada than Canadians moved to America, and how in 1966 Canada was all of HALF the population of the US, and he blamed it on the English domination. After driving up Okotoks Highway, get to Calgary too early for baking as time has changed from DST to Standard; get gas and water to 80 lbs, and then later groceries and exchange. Drive into Banff and get LOADS of stuff and I come up with itinerary. Drive Banff drives 8,1,2,4,5,6,(LATER) then across to Kootenay, after getting gas at Eisenhower Peak. To HUGE burned area and to Marble Canyon for slides, dinner of sausage, and bed at 11.
Saturday, August 17: Wake at 6 and see all the clouds over the peaks and doze and come until 7:30, then decide it's time to get up. Sort of wait for Chuck to do dishes, but he never seems to get to it, and crux comes when I decide to plug the sink and turn the water heater off and sit in the cab and write. I can't turn the water off until the dishes are done. Do dishes and Chuck STILL isn't quite ready, so I write yesterday and we get to Marble Canyon in 30 seconds flat. There a series of panels shows me I'm all wrong: the tall, bottle-brush tree I'd "identified" as Douglas Fir was known to be Lodgepole pine with its "two needles in a packet." The spruce turned out to be identifiable only by its four-sided needle and mottled barks and Chuck spent much of the morning looking for 'two-dimension" in twig arrangements to characterize fir trees, which have FLAT needles. He's singularly unobservant, having to be TOLD why the needles of the dwarf juniper grow in whorls of three. The canyon is profound and shadowy in the morning light, and the water looks mixed with come in its milky luminescence. So we walked along the vagina of Kootenay Park. Found how to sit on the outward sloping group of three guard rails, and had the usual prolonged puzzled eye-exchanges with young men in tight trousers and bulging hairy arms. I find my "thing" here, rocks of brown shale tilted slightly, separated from surroundings, which up close resemble the most fantastically huge apartment complex. The beautiful PARALLELNESS of the strata, and the CONGRUENCE of the curves, similar but not exact, of each airy balcony, broken by randomly-placed clumps of moss simulating hanging gardens from the sweeping terraces. Oh, how I wish I had a camera for these. Three such rocks caused me to stop and gasp and stare, and I even sketched them for possible "Visionary Architecture" enlargings. The falls themselves were silvery filigrees which, when stopped by the eye FOLLOWING the spray into the canyon, rather than staring at one point and having the watery blur pass by, turned into the bulky lace of a crystal chandelier, each second being dashed against the marble rocks below. I spent some time "posing" on the slippery marble rocks, then we got back to the car about noon. Drove down through the park, mountains and streams on every side, tooling down a Banff-Windermere Highway which had lost (a bird, magpie, cutely picks its way to within a yard of me, cocking its head this way and that until a slamming car door startles him into flight) all its arduous glory after being modernized entirely too many times. Stop at Aquacourt parking lot and walk one-quarter mile to the building, change, shower (the bushes are FULL of magpies, deftly picking tidbits from the wet ground, and rapidly chewing before dipping for another), and walk into the 100 degree heated pool. "Swim" until tired, then return for glasses and towel to watch some of the natural bodies walking around, then swim again, rest again, swim and leave. There are still the screamy babies, pesky kids, straight lean adolescents, chunky young men with bulging pouches and muscled thighs, balding fathers looking over their families, aging men asking "Mama," fat in her gray suit with flesh folding over the kneecaps, if she wants a towel, and grizzled old men with washboard middles showing years of upkeep. The water is, as everyone acknowledges, bathtub water, of very LITTLE buoyancy, and on getting out the breeze feels very chilly against the warmed body. Shower and change after, forget to return my key until Chuck reminds me, and eat in the restaurant until 3. Down the motel row outside the park to Radium Junction, and up at new 95 along the Columbia Valley. I fall in love with the Columbia Valley. A rainstorm passes us, dramatically lighting and shading the enclosing peaks, and the leaves and needles in the valley shine with a preternatural light. Two rivers flow through, and swamps and hoglands and lakes reflect the serene trees which line them. Apart from the highway we stand on, and the railroad immediately below, the land looks new-born, freshly-minted, it's day ONE of the world. One white bird (an omen?) Flies far away, then, nearer, two white birds take wing together (oh God, I hope an omen). Sounds of trees and rivers and green rise from the valley as the auto echoes die. The air is pure, the light is clean, the valley is untouched and beautiful. There are still such places to be seen and loved, there are still the feelings in me which can see and love such places. Back up toward Golden and the clearing sky leads me to propose we detour off to Glacier and Revelstoke, the discussion bogs down and we drive toward Glacier, seeing the sign for 44 miles to refuel AFTER the last station, and we evaluate our 1/4 tank with apprehension. Again it's the Columbia Valley, and again it's beautiful in a tranquil way, not dramatically striking like the parks. The parks may be a paramour, the valley could be a love. Consume gas into Glacier, fill up with Premium since they have no Regular, catch a glimpse of the Illecillewaet Glacier and leave the camper clicking by the highway to walk back for the rainbow (and partially double-rainbowed) view of snow and glacier topped mountains melting into foamy streams under our feet. A CPR train passes going each way, once waving to Chuck and making him feel "like a kid again." But here again the roadside mountain identifiers point to cloud-shrouded summits, and after passing through the second set of snow tunnels we turn around and come back. Stop at the Loop to look at the trestle towers of stone, and again at Illecillewaet to see the whole mountain. Perversely, as we turn back, the weather AGAIN clears. Back to Golden and Chuck pouts when I don't go INTO town for groceries, so we retrace, shop, and drive Kicking Horse Canyon in a rainstorm, up hills and across mountains made gloomy and ominous by the rain. If contrast is the essence of differentness, the weather has permitted us a wide range of contrast. Slippery turns, sudden cars coming out of the fog, quick turns onto rumbling bridges, glimpses of height and depth unknown on the sides of the roads; I gripped the wheel and drove toward Hoodoo Creek. Arrive to find an impending slide show at 9 PM, five minutes, found a spot in the first loop, out to a droning naturalist on wild flowers, and sneak back to the truck for steaks and a critique on my driving and bed at 11. May the next day be better, as we have only three days left for Yoho, Lake Louise, Jasper, and the drive to Vancouver.
Sunday, August 18: I'm up and out early enough to have a good writing session between 8 and 9, and we finally see the Kicking Horse Canyon that we saw so little of the night before. Again it's cloud fantasy time, as the sun seeks to dispel the morning mists, yet the heavy clouds try to move down, and there are again dream views of mountains and snows and glaciers and clouds all jumbled together. Drive to Emerald Lake, swarming with tourists, including a blond father in orange loden shorts, and we feed ground squirrels from scavengings from the garbage pit: apple cores. Take the trail to Hamilton Falls, past the leaky conduit for water far below, and Hamilton Falls is small and falls obliquely into a cleft in the rock, and I get feet and shoes wet trying to look at the reservoir at its base. Thunder down the path to change, and pull out after two warnings that our back door is open. Get to Natural Bridge, with a good-sized rapids underneath, a salt lick, or marshy area we can't interpret with no animals around to lick, and then to Takakkaw Falls, first sighted on the careening road before us, then full 1248 feet from the parking lot. Progress to falls delayed delightfully by a herd of ten female and small elk drinking, pausing, splashing to cross the creek and run into the forest for safety. Scale the talus for a better wetter view, and the spray is enthralling. Finish Yoho at 2 and drive a gravelly 1A through Kicking Horse Pass to Lake Louise, a national disaster area. We get caught up in traffic and see the Inglenook Cafeteria, an A-frame glass expanse which looked inviting. It looked inviting because it was empty, and it was empty, we discovered, because everyone was standing in the food line, while one person tries to serve the 3 PM lunch crowd. Wait only a minute to see that the line was not moving and out in disgust. We follow long line to parking lot and walk ALONGSIDE Chateau Lake Louse to see the bit of lake put aside for the plebeians. Then, further, it goes in front of the grounds and they're open! Inside to the manicured lawns and the croquet fields and terraces and poppy beds, and up into the musty, oak-paneled, damask-draperied, old-person- upholstered halls and promenades and sun porches and dining rooms. They're all closed and we follow signs downstairs to the snack bar, where a little horrid boy is absolutely the living end of snotty spoiledness, merely having to grunt piggily to have his mother jump to attention. They leave at long length and we order, and only then do I get my idea, leave, and scout out two chairs free on the lawn outside, overlooking the Victoria Glacier and Lake Louse. Take food out and enjoy incongruity of POOR people on RICH people's grounds. But all in all Lake Louise is sad, and we're out and up to Moraine Lake, which captivates me with its solitude, blueness, and the snow-capped peaks looming over the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Walk along a path along its edge and sigh with content. Find no camping place there, so out along to highway until almost into Jasper, and find a place high on the hillside to sleep.
Monday, August 19: Up at 7:30 and out at 8:30. Drop shit in holding tank dump (Chuck: I'm changed for life), get to Columbia Icefield Snowmobiles (later), then to Sunwapta and Athabasca Falls. See Mountain Goats. Lunch delightfully along Athabasca River. To Mt. Edith Clavell for magpie and chipmunk feeding, and glacier-looking for a moment. Then to Jasper Lodge where Chuck hears about Mrs. Lines, to Maligne Canyon after the Fish Hatchery and beautiful pronghorn deer licks salt. To Jasper and eat in Holiday House, get Chuck's reservation, to Whistlers through UNCANNY night drive (later) and bed at 10:45.
Tuesday, August 20: Get Chuck laboriously up at 6:30, and he gets into shower before I get out of bed. With this and that, we're on our way at 8:30, and at 9 get told that Robson is closed; we're a bit stunned, but decide there MUST be a way around, and continue. Fog over everything. Find NO impediment before Walemont, and drive, drive, drive, eating lunch at 2:30 at roadside just SECONDS before seeing roadside tables. Drive more, eating snacks and talking of LSD and seeing the Fraser River Valley, then get information about 401 and get into New Westminster just before 8. Liza doesn't answer, Dorothy tells me John's on vacation, and tells me to call Frank at 9 AM the next morning. We eat in the bar at the Royal York, and Chuck hates the cheeseburger and I tolerate the salami pizza and like the roast beef. Drive him to the airport after trying Liza thrice, and get a map of Vancouver and locate Gilford. Leave Chuck and wish him luck, and drive across Vancouver to her place. Park on Lakeside and buzz her and she answers. Joins me for a drink at Hotel Sylvia until 12, and I try cruising to no avail (anything for a bed) and fall asleep at 2, awkward with passing cars and pedestrians and the street light.
DINNERS - in Moss Hall; on Devil's Stovepile; in Throne Room of Carlsbad.
IN RAIN FOREST: Cock tree (2 of them); Octopus; Impossible; Stalactites, clothes, PERFECT ghosts. One COMES ALIVE and waves.
Wednesday, August 21: Wake at 6 and laze to 7, when into traffic picks up. Get to New West by the Kingsway by 8:30 and take truck for grease job. He directs me, carefully and slowly, into garage and there's a crash from above and he looks gap-mouthed up and says "Now back up." There's a 1 x 5-inch rent in the metal from colliding with a ceiling vent. We chat of that, he caulks it closed and says seven miles per gallon is OK. I'm off to Mr. Wilby, who chats sickly about "No trouble at all having another," and Frank comes in and essentially says he can't. Meeting at 6 today, and people scheduled for Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday. John IS away, back Tuesday. Chat with Frank about LSD, chromosome damage, and the Generalists in September's MacLeans. Out to get camper into parking lot and to breakfast at 11, calling Lisa and saying I'll be over at 5. Eat and shower and get dry cleaning out and search for shoe shine and find none, sit for laundry and back at 3 to get first session's reply. I have to type it, and get finished at 5---learning enough to think I've had ANOTHER, for getting enough to know I don't WANT another. Drive again to Liza's, parking OFF bay this time, and get up for drinks and talk of Czech invasion and Susan and Vancouver and off to dinner at 7, but have to wait at Hy's at the Sands until about 8:30. Have absolutely lush meal of baked potato and butter and bacon, and carrots and steak Marianne, with Bearnaise Sauce, and salad and onion soup and conversation turned and toward the end got strained, particularly between 10 and 11 back in their apartment, when again I'm TERRIBLY weary. Can hardly articulate (many drinks and two wines didn't help). Out to street at 11 and fall into bed and NO trouble getting to sleep at ALL.
Thursday, August 22: Up at 7 and get things together and see that quart of ice cream is melting, but sort of ignore that to get on my way. Go straight to the Nanaimo Ferry and I have to ask whether SECOND ferry will take 10 foot camper and they say no---but non-Canadian Pacific MAY have---but I didn't question it. So I have to go the long way. Down to border and get maps, and find ANOTHER ferry, but she doesn't have limits, so I take chance. Drive through uninspired and rather poor countryside (not at all quaint like the Eastern Canadian Provinces) and get to ferry at 11. Eat sandwich and clean refrigerator, giving ice cream to fat lady who has her own spoon in car behind. Look at jellyfish and rocks and boat comes at 12, led by lovely tall black curled fellow with semi-aware beautiful body. Onto ship and shit and look at whitecaps and eat popcorn, and into Port Townsend at 12:35. Down to Olympia and get gas from VERY fat lady and stop at Visitor's Center to take walk to Marymere Falls. Before the showers start I feel really great in woods, lush undergrowth glowing green with moisture and everything silent and sweet-smelling of pines. Get "kinship with nature" feeling and get off path to peel off with pleasure and jerk off with gusto. Climb to the falls, nice in that they trickle coherently down 90 degree rock, rather than dash themselves to spray in the air, and back along stream to car. Into museum and get caught by hairy legs bulging under tight shorts and lovely cow-like gaze, but that's what led me to jerk off. Into Rain Forest (later) and then at 19000 miles to the Pacific at Destruction Island. Talk at Kalaloch at 8 and shower and get to sleep in the last camping site, unfortunately out of hearing range of the breakers on the Pacific.
Friday, August 23: Again there's rain, but I want to hear lecture at 8, so I zip to phone at 7:45 and tell Chuck I'll meet him at 3, then back to beach 4 where I'm the only one there. Get great tide pools tour until 9:45 (later) and eat breakfast there in the parking lot, cleaning up stuff and throwing out much trash in preparation to meeting Chuck---whom I've MISSED. Can't decide which way to go, but it starts raining and I get stuck behind HUGE lumber truck and I decide to avoid second Rain forest turnoff. By the time I get VERY slowly through H???? and Aberdeen I decide I can't take coastal route either, just have time for lunch and a drive to Portland. Even that fades as the rain pelts down, the highways are slippery and traffic jams are led by two Volkswagons in tandem doing 40, and letting the rest of the traffic capable of doing the limit of 75 behind. Have a couple of slippery scares, and stall once when two cars in front stop in water to the hubcaps. Still it pours and yet I get to 35 miles of Portland at 2 PM, and there's still time. The "Business 5 to Vancouver" grips me, I forget which Vancouver it is, and find myself enmeshed in 25 mph city traffic. Lose 5 finally and turn through street by feel, to find myself going against arrows to Portland. Turn around and finally settle to another route 5. In left lane when I see "City Center" right, and CAN'T get over as bastards behind lean on horns. Decide to take the next exit, but IT goes to highway to the Dalles, and only get off at 30th Street. Go wrong way until I get map open and check Grand Park, turn and drive and turn and drive and take Broadway Bridge at 3 and get stranded deep in Portland Friday afternoon traffic. To Hilton at 3:15 to greet Joe and Murray and Milda. Chuck hops in, we eat Papaburger for dinner and camp aside LOVELY Lake O'Dell.