LAST JOURNEY

2. Owls on the Hoof 

       When we pulled into Forks, Washington we were surprised to discover that a large gas station had been built upon the lot where we usually parked and repaired bikes. I checked around for somewhere else and everyone kept talking about how they weren’t “insured” to cover having our Bike Bus set up on their property. Eventually the owner of the Auto Parts store pointed to a little triangle of land which he asserted “no one owned”. So we set up there. But it was still tenuous.

       Business wasn’t exactly booming, not like it had always been in times past, but we were a little early in the year for bike season. We made enough money to eat and managed to tuck a little away here and there towards this year’s trip to the national Rainbow Gathering which was to happen in northern Minnesota.

       One day a woman came to see me about a bike. She had an ebullient personal charisma. Maybe it was her pretty face or maybe it was her beautiful watermellon-sized breasts, I’m not sure-but she was sure pleasant to talk to. It’s great to meet a woman in her forties who has such beauty and spirit.

       I mentioned the book I was writing and she seemed very interested. She told me I should meet a friend of hers, Diana Frantz, who lived at a place called Faith Farm Christian Community in Quilcene, Washington. I kept it in mind.

       We headed north and east along highway 101. As we approached Quilcene I drove slow and kept my eyes open for the Faith Farm sign. Eventually, tucked into an expanse of forest it appeared amidst a small group of white buildings nestled in rose bushes and dandelions: Faith Farm. I pulled the Bike Bus onto the old road that looped through the buildings, and parked. And so it was that I met Diane Frantz and her husband Merle and all the other folks who lived on Faith Farm. We stayed there for two days, during which I repaired all the bicycles they brought to me, probably about twenty solid hours of work, plus I gave them a couple of rebuilt bicycles. I also talked at length with Diane and Merle about the book I was writing. I even read aloud the two chapters about the church community in Vermont where Ellie and I had had such a wild confrontation. Diane agreed to read my book and correct the spelling. I was looking for some objective criticism too, some sociological input from another intelligent source. I sensed she might add a bit of that. Perhaps Merle would too.

       One of the residents, Ron Frantz, approached me as I packed up my tools in preparation to leave and offered to give me ten dollars for the work I had done on the Faith Farm bicycles. I had made up my mind to do it all for free. I have to do that sort of thing once in a while to square my debts with the universe. People who have left the rush and tumble world of profit and gain to struggle together to make a safer and kinder world for their children do not come by money easily. I thanked him but did not accept the ten dollars.

       I had no idea at the time that this visit to Faith Farm was the beginning of a long friendship.

       But I had almost accepted the ten. The fact was that we intended to drive the fifty year old Bike Bus half-way across the continent to the Minnesota Rainbow Gathering to happen in July. We would need all the money we could accumulate to pay for the expense of that long trip. But I knew we would stand a better chance of making it if the God or Goddess of the Universe knew we were doing our part to support the Faithful hearts upon the planet. Besides that, ten dollars was a drop in the bucket compared to what we would need.

       It was early June when the old Bike Bus lumbered up Snowqualamie Pass and rolled eastward across the State of Washington. The engine sounded pretty good. It should have sounded good; after all the money I had spent having it rebuilt the previous November...

       But the huge rig seemed to be leaning more and more to the right side, and bottoming out on the right rear whenever we went around curves.  I checked it out. Sure enough—we had a couple busted leaf springs. I began looking for a large garage that could do the repairs.

In Lewiston, Idaho the Mac truck dealer charged us ninety bucks to fix it right. That’s a big chunk of money for us. I hoped we could make it up by doing some Bike repair somewhere soon. We camped off the road in an undeveloped area beside the river for the weekend and wondered if locals would notice our rig and bring us some business. We made a hundred dollars.        A reporter/photographer named Mike Venso discovered us camped there and really thought we were cool. His mind was totally blown. We talked and talked and he shot roll after roll of photos. He wanted to get down as many details of our unusual life as possible.

       We left Lewiston, headed for the Lapwei Nez Pierce Indian reservation with the intention of doing some bike repair there. He followed us with his car and spent the day with us doing more photos. His story appeared in the Lewiston newspaper’s Sunday supplement a couple weeks later. He sent us a copy of the newspaper and also some nice enlargements from the shoot.

       We made a couple hundred dollars on the reservation and I felt a lot better. Some of the Indians were definitely prejudiced against white people and there were a few moments when we didn’t feel real safe. But the fault was largely my own.

       There was this little bar on the reservation. It was mainly for the locals and it was a dilapidated and crusty place. But I was feeling happy because I had had a good day financially and the Indian folks seemed so ethnic and pure and even kind. So I wanted to get among them even more and after it got dark I rode my bicycle to the side-street bar and went inside and sat down and ordered a beer.

       The Indian folks weren’t real conversant, but eventually a couple of them warmed up to me a little and I felt better and better. One of the things I remember from the conversation was when an Indian lady said I was kinda brave to come in there. I asked her why? She looked at me like I was nuts. She said:

       “You honestly don’t know anything about this bar at all? And you’ve never been here before? You’re just ‘passing through’ and decided to stop in and have a beer?”

       “That’s about it...”

       “Jees.”

       We kept talking. She got into describing some family problems and even crying a little. She was past thirty and starting to get a beer belly, but it was obvious that she had been quite a looker ten years ago. I felt kindof honored that the only woman in the bar was talking to me. The smoky room held mottled red faces and the other conversations blended together incomprehensively. My euphoric feeling prevailed.

       Emotionally I felt a strong kinship with Indian peoples. I had been persecuted and imprisoned in my life by the white race of this land, by their foul bureaucrat thieves who wage war on innocents and steal children to punish people; those excellently dressed extortionists, zombies who chew up your golden dreams and spit them in your face.  Although I was white myself, I had learned to look upon my race and know its capacity for treachery and insensitivity. I loved to fix bikes on the Indian reservations. I loved seeing the Indian children racing around my Bike Bus on their bicycles. I loved teaching them to do their repairs correctly. I knew their keen intelligence, their simple human kindness, their natural sense of humor, their love of family and of culture. I filled my own emptiness when I was among them, the emptiness caused by the way my race had callously imprisoned me for my crime of conscience, and the way my race had torn our children away from Ellie and myself, left us wracked with pain and tears, broken on the shores of time. The children’s laughter on these reservations healed us both. And their parents were as kind. And they were strong and good. Even though they had been persecuted by the white race for so many generations. I felt I was an Indian too, in a way....

       Once when I was repairing bicycles on the Quinault reservation in Taholla, Washington, I had watched the Indian children working on their bicycles, and something came over me and I began to cry a little, silently. I couldn’t help it and I couldn’t stop it. So I went inside the bus where no one would see me. The children’s wrinkled grandmother came to the door of my bus and looked in and saw me and asked what was wrong?

       I told her how I felt about things. And I told her how beautiful the Indian people were to me. And I told her I felt so sad because I didn’t have a drop of Indian blood in me. I felt so disconnected...

       She looked at me for a minute and told me not to worry about it because although I didn’t have any Indian blood in my veins, I truly had an Indian heart... I can’t tell you how good that made me feel, especially coming from her.

       And so there I was sitting in that bar, feeling all those emotions, and talking with an Indian woman on the one side of me and an Indian guy on the other side. And I felt I wanted to do something nice. So I told the bartender that I’d like to buy a round for the bar. He got real serious all of a sudden and he said to me,

       “No, you don’t want to do that...”

       And the woman sitting beside me also urged me not to even think of it. I asked them why not? They kind of smirked that I would be so dumb. They told me the bar was having a quiet night. Usually the place rocked with fights. The Indian folk might seem gentle to me but I shouldn’t mistake the fact that they were a keg of unstable dynamite. The bartender flat told me again in no uncertain terms, “Don’t buy a round....”

       But I did buy a porcupine necklace from an Indian craftsman for fifteen dollars.

       We pulled out of town the next day heading east again.

***

       The old Bike Bus has never liked mountains. She might have liked them all right when she was young, back in the forties, but all her parts were groaning with age. Leaving Salt Lake City we began ascending the steepest passes she’d been on in many a year. We stayed in first gear for miles at a time. The first time she popped out of gear the explosion was so loud it was like a terrifying crack of lightning. It shook the entire rig so violently that I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I pulled over to the side of the highway to see what it was, but couldn’t see anything. The occurance became frequent. We experimented with ways to prevent it. The only way that sort of worked was if Ellie exerted maximum pressure on the shifter to keep first gear in place whenever we ascended steep grades. Or we could shift down to granny gear. But that was super slow going, like two miles an hour and it took a lot of gas too.

       We couldn’t stop and repair it. The last time I’d replaced the rare old F51 Fuller five speed transmission it had cost me seven hundred dollars. So we crossed our fingers and gritted our teeth and just kept rolling. And we made it over some pretty bad passes. The engine seemed to be running rough so I pulled into a gas station in the small town of Laurel and had the mechanic have a look. I figured a three dollar set of points and having the engine timed wouldn’t do it any harm. Thirty dollars later we were on the road again but the engine wasn’t much improved. The problem turned out to be a bad intake manifold gasket, not points or timing. I hate spending money needlessly when I’m counting every penny.

       But those weren’t the only mechanical problems. The Bike Bus needed at least one good tire. I located a wrecking yard on the outskirts of Butte, Montana that brimmed with old trucks, “Montana Truck and Car Salvage”. They really got a kick out of seeing our Bike Bus roll into their yard. The owner was a kind-hearted giant-sized guy. We got to talking. He sold me a half decent tire and mounted it for twenty dollars -- which was about as fair a price as I would ever find. Then he told me he had just the rare old transmission that I needed and he said he’d sell it to me at a bargain price—$250... It hurt to put that much money out at that time but I was afraid that if I didn’t snap up that transmission right then and there I might quite possibly totally blow up the old tranny in the middle of nowhere where one wasn’t available at any price. I figured I was money ahead since I had made over two hundred dollars back in Lapwei. Buying the tranny wouldn’t break me but it would sure put a crimp on things.

       I bought the transmission but I didn’t put it in right there. I set it on the back bumper. I figured I could install it later, whenever I found the perfect place and time. Actually I hoped I could make it all the way to the Gathering without messing with it, since it looked like we were past the worst mountains.

My wallet was way too thin. I sure hoped to do some Bike repair somewhere soon. Montana is one long state. It seemed to go on forever. As we approached North Dakota border I began looking harder for the sort of little town that might appreciate our services. Custer, Montana was just right. The mountain community had one main street and a couple little businesses. Mostly the folks roundabouts were prosperous sugar-beet farmers. Not that anyone could tell by looking at the town.

       We filled up with gas and sat inside the cafe and drank some coffee. Our monster Bike Bus involved us in the usual incredulous conversations. I offered to repair bikes for the local folks during the rest of the day and they thought that was wonderful. So we set up and did a rousing business until dark and made about a hundred and fifty dollars. We rolled out again the next morning.

       What a hoopla festival when we crossed into North Dakota. Goodbye Montana. You were beautiful but after rambling over eight hundred miles of your mountains in our fifty year old bus we were sure anxious for the peace of mind of some North Dakota flatlands.