Driving the Labyrinth
Preface
In 2014, Lindy and I decided to move from Berkeley to Maine full-time. After putting stuff we wanted to keep on a van, we gave one of our cars to our son and drove the other, a blue 2007 Prius, on a meandering route to Portland.
I hadn’t given a thought to keeping a journal or posting a blog. The driving and its logistics seemed arduous enough, but the incorrigible writer in me won out.
We had last driven cross-country in 1980 in our mid-thirties. It was after we had already moved to California, seemingly for good, although we didn’t know that yet—either that it would be for good or that then it wouldn’t.
We came returned East to the Catskills, Liberty, New York, for that summer with our two young kids (ages 11 and 6), to stay at my father’s hotel, eat free meals, get daycare at Camp Grossinger’s, sort through our stored belongings that we left three years prior, and visit East Coast and New England family and friends. Then we drove back West in early September.
Those were our sixth and seventh coast-to-coast drives, all within five years of one another. We took pretty much the same route, leaving the U.S. in Vermont and returning from Canada in Detroit. In the course of those trips we got to know a group of poets in Toronto and on Toronto Island, the Kornblums in Iowa City (fellow publishers, of Coffee House Press), the beaches at the Great Salt Lake, and a Mexican restaurant and playground of animal climbing structures and super-twisty slides in Elko, Nevada.
When heading East in 1980, as we got close to the hotel, our eleven-year-old son Robin began telling his sister Miranda, younger by five years, about all the great things they could do at the Hotel—order milkshakes from the coffee shop and watch cartoons at night—she had been too young when we moved to remember. Instead, she had been asking for years where Vermont and Grossinger’s were in California: was it this block, or that block, or part of Tilden Park? Until she was it older, she didn’t get that it was over three thousand miles away.
Before 1980, we drove the round trip from Vermont to Berkeley and back twice—July to September in 1975 and January to September in 1976. We drove back out again when we moved there in June 1977. That made five.
The maiden trip to Berkeley was West Coast “beginner’s mind” for us. What set it in motion was Lindy’s assignment to attend a dance-critics conference at Mills College in Oakland under the auspices of the Vermont Arts Council, an organization for which she was did part-time gigs like Poetry in the Schools. The goal was to help bring dance in the schools and dance criticism to Vermont, though nothing really came of it in the brief time we lived in Plainfield afterwards. She did do dance criticism for the Montpelier Times Argus, our local paper, but mostly traveled to write articles on other things as a stringer for Vermont Life (like mushroom farms and goings on in the town of Stowe)
In 1975, Lindy actually flew to Denver, her hometown, with our two kids. I drove there by myself and met her there with the car. I had done the same trip solo, East Coast to Denver and back, twice before when we were going out together in college: the summer of ’65 when we lived together in Aspen and I drove out to meet her there, and December of ’66 to join her in telling her parents that Christmas that we were getting married. The second time I miraculously survived a spinout in a Kansas blizzard.
After I got the car from Plainfield, Vermont to Denver in June 1975, our whole family proceeded over the Rockies and Sierras. That was when we discovered the Salt Lake—Lindy’s next older sister lived in Salt Lake City—and the playground in Elko. We had thought then to stay in the Bay Area two weeks, the length of the conference and drive right back, but we were delighted to extend our stay to two months after bookseller Peter Howard and his wife invited us to house-sit for them on Colusa Street in North Berkeley while they went to Europe. The offer was a godsend. We were having a wonderful time and didn’t want to leave so soon. Little did we know that two trips later we would stay for 37 years.
We returned to Plainfield, Vermont that fall to find Goddard, the college at which we were both teaching, in shambles, the administration asking as many faculty as were willing to take the winter term off in order save salary, shut down some dorms and classrooms, and save fuel oil as well. We jumped at the opportunity to return to the Bay so soon. Lindy and I had plunged into the literary and holistic-health scenes: bodywork, internal martial arts, pick-up-softball, and childcare there during our two-month summer stay. We got to participate in stuff that was available nowhere else in the country then, at least not at the Bay Area’s level of depth, popularity, and availability. Where else in the States could you find posters for a class on homeopathy wrapped around lamp posts (as I did on our first day after leaving Lindy at Mills College and kids at their respective daycares) There were sprout and avocado sandwiches on micro-bakery bread around the UC Berkeley campus and t’ai-chi classes in Ho Chi Minh Park. Even after our bonus time at the Howards, we were just getting started: shiatsu, bioenergetic therapy, and more homeopathy for me, and dance criticism and bioenergetic therapy for Lindy. We also wanted to pick up our summer’s connections with other literary writers and publishers, a group that included poets and fiction writers like Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Geoff Young, Laura Chester, Michael Palmer, Ishmael Reed, Lenore Kandel, and David Meltzer and publishers like Bob Callahan of Turtle Island, Malcolm Margolin of Heyday, Don Gerrard of Bookworks, and Sebastian Orfali of And/Or.
Bookpeople, the distributor we shared, was in downtown Berkeley and provided natural-food lunches at which members of the book and avant-garde literary communities were welcome guests. That was where we got our first lessons in alternative publishing: sitting around the tables at Ashby and Seventh long ago. It had seemed like exile to have to go back to the student lunchroom in Plainfield, provincial Goddard, snowy, subzero Vermont, so that January after fall classes, we took the college up on its offer, enlisting a few students to help us drive both our cars (this time) back to the West coast.
We stayed eight months, right up to the last possible getaway moment to make it in time for fall classes, and took those classes, while I rejoined Sunday pick-up softball at Codornices Park. The highlight was Steve and Scott Gentile, sons of the former Oriole first baseman; they were ringers from the Campbell Carpets league team.
In late August 1976 we enlisted another Goddard student plus two ride-seekers off a bulletin board and arrived back in Plainfield a half-day before the winter 1976-1977 term. That brinkmanship was mainly because our Pontiac station wagon broke down in the high Sierras and had to be towed ninety miles into Reno. We spent several days there in motel rooms, waiting for the repair to be completed and then had to race the rest of the way with non-stop rotating drivers and sleeping kids in the wagons back.
Both caravans had been enjoyable and word spread at Goddard, so we had plenty of student volunteers when we moved to Berkeley in June 1977. At that point the college seemed about to go out of business and was laying off faculty. I probably could have been among the few picked to stay, but we had switched our loyalty by then to Berkeley and the counterculture. Our sole ambition that spring was to sell our house and bail. We figured that if we succeeded at finding a buyer in a deteriorating market, we would head straight back to Berkeley and stay there a year, during which one of us would find another college teaching job somewhere in North America. Meanwhile I had an advance from Doubleday to write Planet Medicine and was set to collect at least six months’ unemployment (it became a full year) We never doubted that, given a year, one of us could find academic employment and even at a less marginal institution than Goddard.
Jimmy Carter was President; we had just been through the oil crisis with lines at the pumps when folks were predicting the collapse of civilization and urban hordes ravaging Vermont. Paradoxically none of that seemed to be happening in California.
I described the moment in one of my favorite pieces of writing in Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage:
Two in the morning, our group disbanding under stars, Ewan
held a ceramic jug up to Sheppard who, stumbling along, took an
over-the-shoulder draught. “I love you, Shep,” the nihilist sculptor
declaimed, “but astrology’s a load of bollocks. Kohoutek’s a tiny fucker
that means nothing.”
“Nothing!” Shep howled. “You see how many heads of state it got!
You see how it cracked Tricky Dick through his weird Uranus! I kid
you not: what this baby sows we will reap a millionfold!”
I picked up Shep’s cue, “A luminous seed from 800,000 years ago
is putting its finger on us, setting lines of cars at gas stations. Those are
signs and emanations from the cosmos!”
The next day, biologist John Todd, founder of New Alchemy Institute
and an eco-superstar resembling both Mickey Mantle and Robert
Redford, affixed his own gloomy prognosis. “You’ve all heard Wilson,
and he probably took ten years off your lives.”
Nervous titters.
“I think he’s right. The bonds that hold life together are coming
asunder.” He described deranged birds, eye-less fish, dead seas.
“Then why even bother?” a student interrupted.
“If we can’t save it, at least we can depart with some nobility.”
“Oh great!” a different student said. “That makes it all okay!”
“Who knows? Miracles happen.”
Wilson rose to dispute even that glimmer of hope. “Once it begins
to wobble—and it’s wobbling—it cracks.” He switched metaphors. “The whole ball of wax is
coming undone!”
Eyes a-twinkle, John shook his head. “Wilson tells us that our civilization
is like a herd approaching a scarp. I have a competing vision:
solar houses, silicon batteries, restorative agriculture, power from wind
and tides.” He described fishponds of tilapia and carp, seeds from heirloom
cabbages, pigshit-heated rooms, Pelton wheels and windmills,
dragon and ley lines—a feng shui of hills and waters. He painted a
solar-hermetic civilization based on Ficino’s radionic spheroids, Zosimos’
golden staircase, the peach-flower stream of Tae Ch’ion.
A day after I had given up all hope for Earth, dinner in Montpelier
was a prankish occasion, John toasting Paracelsus, Pico, and sigils of
Taoist and Egyptian magicians.
I asked how he squared the contradiction.
“Our lives alone will resolve it. I’m with my friend Bucky Fuller
on this one: it’s utopia or apocalypse. It will be doom or rebirth. There
is no middle ground. The next generation will transform the planet
or see it die.”
Lindy and I had been caught up in our pilgrimage, throwing ourselves
into domesticity and children, ignoring global warnings as if they
didn’t apply to our private planet. When denial failed, I went for defiance;
I told myself we owed the universe that much. Plus, the heavens
were moving too fast to measure, an invisible comet the least of it.
Cognitive dissonance was us Baby Boomers’ lifetime occupation.
Our arrival was marked by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Then we bluffed our way through headwinds of discrepant futures. In
one probability lay overpopulation, famine, resource depletion, and
friends like Mitchell and Joanna telling us not to conceive children
to be annihilated by nuclear bombs; in the other was the Summer of
Love, Woodstock, New Alchemy, not interfering with possibilities
At our coming of age, Dion DiMucci sang “Teenager in Love”:
“One day I feel so happy, / next day I feel so sad.” That was no mere puppy
crush or mood disorder; it was—“each night I ask the stars up above”—the
heart of creation.
My life had been on the same bipolar yo-yo: flares of epiphany,
abysms of despair. Guided by alchemists and angels, spooked by dungeons
and demons, I tithed equally to their imagination.
In 1977, we rented a small truck, hired a driver for it, and sent him ahead to our friends’ Geoff and Laura’s house with our dishes, silverware, some furniture, and our core library, and then followed with two cars, a U-Haul attached to the station wagon. We stopped first at my father’s hotel in the Catskills to drop off assorted stuff we didn’t need in California—the basement storage we visited in 1980 We ended up dawdling there a week, while the students had a blast, hanging out in the lobby and around the swimming pools, hitting the dining room for the free meals.
Hard to believe that Grossinger’s went out of business ten years later and the pools, kitchen, lounges, and rooms became a much-photographed exotic ruins: http://miragebym.blogspot.com/2009/11/modern-runis-grossingers-resort-10-11.html. On various websites, you can see the collapsing infrastructure, exotic fungi on carpets, and fancy pools turned into ponds as the forest makes its slow advance across the patios.
Goddard didn’t go out of business immediately. The trustees sold part of the Northwood campus for apartments and slowly phased out the resident undergraduate program, the module in which we were teaching.
For the pittance we got for our house ($29,000), we should have held on to it a while longer—only a year in fact, for that was how much time passed before our buyer sold it to the poet Louise Gluck for more than four times what we got for it. Yet we were young and naïve, lurching from one ill-conceived agenda to another. As Plainfield was contracting, Montpelier absorbed it into its expanding suburbs.
As noted, we didn’t leave Berkeley after the proposed year. Neither of us found another job, though we applied in pretty much every region of North America. Instead, we settled in. Lindy worked for East Bay Center for the Performing Arts, then Contra Costa College and Far West Labs; I got another author’s advance, this time from Danny Moses at Sierra Club Books in San Francisco for a cosmology book called The Night Sky. While I wrote it, I got a teaching slot at a short-lived naturopathic college based on Planet Medicine. Then for a few subsequent years, I got paid to give an occasional lecture at other alternative-medicine institutions like the school for Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco and at the mainstream UCSF Medical School. We received small grants for book publishing and one larger one (with a salary) for a collective publisher distribution system We incorporated our small press as a California nonprofit. First, we founded an anthropological 501C3 and donated North Atlantic Books and our literary Io to it. According to Bay Area Lawyers for the Arts, it was simpler than trying to convert the press as such. There was no nonprofit status then for publishing poetry and fiction.
We bought another cheap house—cheap by Bay Area standards—$72,500 in the Mira Vista section of Richmond, the more suburban, hilly part of what was otherwise an urban ghetto, a fact that came into play when our kids hit public-school age, forcing us to move.
We barely scraped together the Richmond downpayment from our Vermont assets, but five years later we converted the appreciation into a house in Berkeley just below telegraph avenue. I described that in Episodes:
We had enough income by then to explore moving into Berkeley. To
that end, we enlisted Jerry Ratch, a local poet and real-estate agent
with his own small publishing company, Somber Reptile. After three
weeks of visiting homes and neighborhoods, he recalled a property
in a mostly student neighborhood off Telegraph on Blake Street. The
owner, a young contractor and friend of Jerry’s, hadn’t put it on the
market because he hadn’t finished cutting windows into a second-floor
bedroom he had created out of an attic. After the guy accepted a lowish
offer of Jerry’s crafting, our “somber reptile” found a buyer for
Amador, a twenty-percent profit in five years.
We moved from the middle of nowhere to the center of the universe.
Within fifty feet of where Blake met Telegraph—a block and
a half east of our house—were a Middle Eastern grocery, a bagel factory,
a combination photocopy/dress shop (Krishna Copy Center) run
by Punjabi Hindus, an herbal apothecary (Lhasa Karnak), a bazaar of
natural lotions and soaps, an Ethiopian restaurant, a Thai restaurant,
two used-book emporia (Shakespeare’s and Moe’s), a resource hub for
handicapped people (Center for Independent Living), an indy bookstore
(Cody’s), two atheneums of used records (Amoeba and Rasputin),
and a Weiser-like occult bookshop that Shambhala Publishing had left
in place when it moved to Boulder.
Closer to the Cal Campus, Telegraph became a pedestrian mall of
greasy spoons, Asian eateries, sundry shops, comix marts, and ethnic
markets. Up and down the thoroughfare, traffic flowed in near gridlock:
collegiate bustle amid craftspeople lining sidewalks and curbs
with stands of jewelry trinkets, pottery, art, and bohemian clothing.
Shoppers overlapped with dueling musicians, sightseers, and motorized
and hand-propelled wheelchairs from the Center for Independent
Living. The homeless, some with pets, camped along the walls, each
having liberated a section of pavement as their territory.
An urban veteran from his commute to prep school in Oakland,
Robin chaperoned Mandy onto the Avenue. Begging money from
either of their parents, the two made regular Telegraph forays, dining
at Blue Nile, which served platters of meat and vegetables lifted
hand-to-mouth on torn-off chunks of spongy flat bread, or Berkeley
Thai House, where they enjoyed spring rolls and stuffed chicken wings.
Charmed by their visits, waiters treated them as honorary adults.
Our kids found no such amnesty on Telegraph where The Hate
Man ran up and down his “private” sector shouting “Fuck you!” to
everyone, especially children, as loud as he could. A black woman called
all passers-by “Nigger!” Assorted philosophers riffed, railed, and outpreached
one another—a rivalry of evangelical Christians, Jesus-freak
Christians, Marxists, and conspiracy theorists. Their parlance included
biblical verses Left Wing agitprop, magical realism, and rants about
John Lennon, JFK, and UFOs.
A couple of blocks above Telegraph, Robin caught the city bus
to Head-Royce. One of us walked Mandy a few blocks to her new
grade school at Le Conte on Russell. We soon switched her to a small
European academy called “The Academy.”
We dug into the community to which we were enticed in the summer of ’75. We continued practices we had begun and reformulated our press around their themes. North Atlantic Books gradually changed from a purely literary publisher to early Mind Body Spirit: alternative medicine, martial arts, bodywork, nutrition, meditation, shamanism, and spiritual esoterica. Though we continued to publish poetry and literary prose, it became back burner. Among other drawbacks, there were no longer government grants to underwrite it. We never renamed the press; it remained North Atlantic Books in Berkeley.
Vermont and Grossinger’s seemed a million miles away.
Though we traveled back to my father’s resort for a breather in 1980, trips east became fewer, more years apart, relatively brief, and always by plane. The publishing company grew, flourished during the eighties, and began to support us. We joined a wave of presses at Publishers Group West and became a part of the largest alternative distribution group in the country. We stayed with them for twenty-seven years.
We moved from Richmond into Berkeley (Blake Street just below Telegraph Avenue) in 1983 and then in 1988 to a larger house on Woolsey not far above College Avenue, one that had space for part-time workers and a make-do warehouse for book storage too—a wooden floor over an indoor (Plexiglas-enclosed) swimming pool built by border-crossing labor for the owners of a Mexican restaurant on Telegraph Avenue. Our kids evolved into teenagers, went to college, left home. Life seemed to fly past.
For a while after empty nest Lindy and I struggled directionlessly, even living apart for nine months (1992-1993). During that time, I threw myself into psychospiritual practices in earnest. We aslo moved the publishing out of the house and hired staff. Seven years later. we sold the house on Woolsey and bought a smaller one on Yale Avenue in Kensington, a Berkeley suburb, like Richmond in Contra Costa County.
In 1996 Lindy and I began revisit Maine. We had lived there for three years after my residency in graduate school (1969-1972), before moving to Vermont to teach at Goddard. After I did nine months of ethnographic fieldwork with lobsterfishermen on Mount Desert Island, I taught college for two years at the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham while we lived in Cape Elizabeth, south of the city. After moving to Goddard, I completed my Ph.D. in Anthropology.
Our return to Maine in the late nineties was part of a side trip from our thirtieth college reunions at Amherst and Smith. Lobsterfisherman Wendell Seavey and his friends invited us back to Mount Desert and threw a party in Bernard for the occasion. It was to become, though we didn’t foresee it at all at the time (as we hadn’t foreseen living more than half of our lives in Berkely) Lindy’s and my return. Our kids remained in California, for we had unintentionally raised California not New England or tri-state kids.
After two longer visits to Mount Desert in the late nineties, we bought a cheap house in Manset, the original working-class district gradually subsumed by Southwest Harbor. In 2000, $130,000 was the new benchmark for inexpensive— our Berkeley houses after Richmond were anything but cheap, but we handled those jumps by continuing to leverage appreciation.
Starting in 2001, Lindy and I began spending an average of three months a year on Mount Desert, which is not functionally an island because it is connected to the mainland by a causeway. We gradually got reoriented to the East Coast and northern New England. The stays grew longer: five, six, then seven months, including full autumns and first snows. It was harder to break the skein of seasons and return to ever sunny or foggy Berkeley. Each year we did yearly exchanges in New York City of at least a week, as we reestablished family and friend connections there. More from Episodes:
We rediscovered northern New England with its deciduous and conifer
forests, great ponds, occult breezes, fast-moving weather systems, and
muggy summer nights. It recalled a forgotten planet where newborn
Robin pulled himself up on lichen-covered rocks and Lindy and I
galloped around the yard, horses with a babe. Five years later, Miranda
would be born.
Precepts of mindfulness I had cultivated in Berkeley dissolved into
towers of cumuli as my heart opened to what I had lost and found
and betrayed since nuptials in a Colorado backyard—the girth of a
lifetime. Sixty years had worked their molt.
We returned the following May—and again the next, and the
next. We stayed progressively longer as aughts passed into aught-teens.
When I grew up in seasons, I took their magic for granted. I never
noticed how in April branches suddenly spring to life, dormant wood
sprouting live cotyledons. After four decades in California, it seemed
witchcraft. Blackened snowbanks drained into mud; fireflies hatched;
grape and lemon crocuses, purple and white lupine, and bright yellow
forsythia bushes foreshadowed fields of dandelions and clover. The
stratosphere rocked with lightning and thunder. By August, blueberries
and huckleberries covered knolls and surrounded lakes.
In September, tansy and asters sprouted along roadsides; cranberries
and black chokeberries ripened on rocky summits. We got storm
windows installed and insulation blown into walls. By November, icy
rains and early dusks cast a dancing moon mask through sea fog. Deer
took over fields, streams flooded yards. As trees bared, neighboring
houses were suddenly closer.
We stayed for January and saw swarms of ivory crystals, walked
in snowshoes, and emailed pictures of snowpersons to grandchildren.
We rose early one day for chi gung in Town Hill, a twelve-mile drive
in rain and sleet. Halfway there we stopped behind a school bus, red
lights flashing, children in yellow rain gear led by moms across the road.
Windshield wipers thrummed over droplets thickening to ice.
Gusting leaves landed on wet stone where houses and trees were
painted in impasto strokes like a Dutch masterpiece on blacktop, déjà
vu of carpooling for Robin’s kindergarten in Vermont days. “. . . Old
child, young child, feel all right / on a warm San Francisco night.” We had
been delivered to time’s nether side.
It still gives me the chills that we flew back to Oakland from Boston on September 8, 2011. At the time, it didn’t seem like so much of a near miss, but as the years pass and 9/11 grows larger and larger in myth and as a historic watershed, three days seems like three minutes. When we got back to Kensington, we found that our renters had totally messed up the satellite TV and VCR, so brought in Jerry Coté, a friend and pro installer, to straighten things out in exchange for some writing lessons, our barter with him. When he got the picture back and saw what was happening, he called me in, stared agape for a few moments, and then uttered a line that still seems to be the best spot-on analysis of the moment, “Jeez, are we pissing some people off!”
Finally in the winter of 2013 Lindy and I completed our return by buying a second Maine house, this one in Portland. At the time of Hurricane Katrina we had decided we needed to get out of Berkeley before there was a major earthquake and civic authority broke down there too. That was what we told ourselves, but the real reasons ran deeper and were more unconscious. It still took more than eight years to map out and initiate the move.
I was up for selling the Kensington house earlier and living in Manset full-time, but Lindy didn’t think that she could stand full years in Downeast Maine, not once the summer folks left and winter set it. She wanted no part of the isolation and cold. Portland, on the other hand, had become a thriving metropolis, nothing like the place in which we had lived in the early seventies. With new restaurants and an arts and cultural scene buoyed by people fleeing expensive Boston and New York, it was becoming a regional mecca. Congress Street vibrated with new energy, and it was not the redneck vibe of main-drag Nevada City where our daughter and her husband had a second home; it was the New England of A Perfect Storm and those Matt Damon/Ben Affleck films, the Portland of the Triple A Sea Dogs and minor-league hockey Pirates.
There were even some faculty left there from our time there forty-five years earlier!
Our awakening took place during a home exchange when Steve Luttrell, a local poet—his email is still portpoet—brough friends together at a potluck. On that same home exchange that Lindy and I went for a walk to the port with umbrellas. The moment in Episodes:
In 2014 Lindy and I traded houses with a professor in Portland’s West
End. On our second day in town, we set out to walk to the Old Port.
The sky was blue with peace-loving cumuli, but rain was forecast so
we carried umbrellas. As we reached Middle and Exchange Streets,
the heavens turned pitch black. Streetlights came on, and the city was
deluged. Thunder roared continually; lightning flashed on cobblestones.
Under the drumming on our umbrellas, we strolled into a state
of romantic transparency.
Lindy said, “I just love this place.”
A month later, we were in Portland again, this time staying overnight en route to a performance by our daughter in Boston. By then I knew that we were finally getting out of Berkeley, the fantasy had turned real. The description in Episodes is somewhat repetitious of what I have already told you:
A month later we returned, staying overnight en route to a performance
by our daughter on the Boston waterfront; she was debuting
her one-woman show New Society.
On the way back to Mount Desert, we searched houses for sale in
Portland and bought one near the Falmouth line at less than a tenth
what it would have cost in Berkeley. We were appraising continental
drift and Fukushima-irradiated waters, home invasions and auto chop
shops, and a son and daughter-in-law who needed space from us to go
their separate ways.
Back in California we downsized, put our house on the market,
sold and then emptied it, renting space on United Van Lines for books
and belongings we would keep.
One day we were driving across the Sierras with young children. Another day we were driving
back, having left behind grown children with their families. We had fled the
stormish seasons of our Rocky Mountain and Eastern Woodlands origins
and New England courtship to live in winter-less paradise and
make a livelihood. It worked until, like all magic, it dissolved into
the lamp of Aladdin from which it arose. Then “irie” reigned, for
California was the ultimate “all that glitters.”
Novelist E. L. Doctorow’s critique of the Left became paradoxically
geographical, as he outed the “California fraud.” His character
felt as if somehow she “had been taken in . . . grown in this endless sun
amidst these awful flowers. . . .” He was putting paradise into a stereoscopic
View-Master and holding it there long enough for a hidden hell
realm to show through.
When fifteen years earlier Kensington police and fire officials
held a block meeting at which they told us that we lived on the most
precarious part of the Hayward fault and our houses wouldn’t survive
even a minor temblor, Lindy started a Yale Avenue earthquakepreparedness
group to raise money for shared supplies. She convinced
me to go door-to-door to give some of her canvassing duds a second
shot.
Canned spiels were her skill set, not mine. I hated knocking on the
homes of strangers even at Halloween but took the tour with her list.
I persuaded one reluctant woman but quit after a guy in a “Semper
Fi” cap said, “I’ll tell you what I told your wife. I’ll join if you buy
rifles and ammo because that’s what we’ll need when folks arrive from
Richmond and Oakland to kill us or, if we’re lucky, kick us out of our
homes.”
Gourmet-ghetto appreciation had amounted to community-less confetti.
We flew back to the Bay Area in December 2013, spent a few months preparing our house for the market. We sold it in June 2014.
We returned to New England as we had come to Berkeley, in an enchantment. Each time—going West, then going East—was as profound as it felt, grounded in a new planetary landscape and a distant music, turning secular life and quotidian decision-making into a vision quest. Emily Dickinson put it perfectly in a poem showing autumn brought Earth’s inevasible profundity:
These are the days when birds return,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies resume
The old, old sophistries of June,--
A blue and gold mistake.
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!
Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit thy child to join,
Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
And thine immortal wine!
“Oh, last communion in the haze” was everything I felt that made me not want to leave the Atlantic and return to Berkeley. I wanted the sacrament, the communion, the consecrated bread, the wine, everything that the angels, the spirits, the heart chakra of Mount Desert Island promised. I had enough shamanic and psychic lesson input. Now I wanted to live life out in the dumb anonymous landscape of nature: the gold parchments through the altered air, the occult breezes and signature messages in cumulus hieroglyphs.
The strange thing was, for how powerful an initiation the Bay Area had been, it now seemed on a deeper level fake; that we weren’t fully alive there, things weren’t ever really real, as say a simple trip on the F-train in NYC with assorted riders of assorted race and class and age from the upper East Side to Chelsea, with all the experience taking place there. The Berkeley initiation was necessary to get to needing something simpler and more basic. A class in Polarity or Breema seemed to be missing a crucial element, even as it provided so much else.
Something else had been missing before that in Vermont, something just as essential and irreplaceable. We found it we came to Berkeley and the big Western sky of open possibility and sacred sanghas in the summer of 1975:
The next morning, I dropped my kids at their respective daycare and
attended Dana’s second [homeopathy] class. From there, I drove a few blocks toward
campus and found a parking spot being vacated. I walked five blocks
from there to meet poet Diane di Prima for lunch at a tiny eatery
on Durant. She had assured me that it was the only source of good
Chinese food in the Bay Area. As I arrived, she wiggled a manuscript
free of a backpack, her selected poems back to 1956. She had already
ordered us spring rolls and fungus soup.
In Colorado, Lindy and I had attended her reading at Naropa
Institute, the Buddhist college in Boulder. After her set, we introduced
ourselves and I wondered if she might have an unpublished
book available. All but one of the initial titles on our Arts grant were
in production, but Diane Wakoski had asked for a rain check, so we
had a slot to fill.
Diane Wakoski may have been a Queen of Cups, but New York’s
other avant-garde Diane was pure Swords, pinup poet of SDS as well
as a heralded hermeticist and dakini. On discovering that we were
both headed to Berkeley, she promised we would conduct a publishing
transaction at precisely this caf..
After settling logistics—Diane wanted to typeset her own book,
a day job she performed for many texts and manuals—we meandered
through alchemy, Kellyiana, and homeopathy. I told her about my
“Freud, Reich, and Jung” course, and wondered if she knew where I
could find a Reichian therapist.
Dropping her chopsticks, she reached into her pack for an address
book from which she copied a name and address onto the paper
tablecloth. “Ian Grand,” she acclaimed, “one of the most powerful
teachers on the planet. He does bioenergetics, a refinement of Reich.
He’ll put you in your body all right; he specializes in poets stuck in
their heads.”
I received the torn triangle with thanks.
In Ann Arbor days, I misread Diane’s “Revolutionary Letters.” She
knew, for I had gone public in Solar Journal. In the aftermath of Mitchell
and Joanna’s visit, I accused her of sacrificing the individual for the
collective, matching male poets’ moon-goddess whores with her own
Che-Guevara/Ammon-Ra guerrilla. I jumped to the conclusion that
she favored bombmakers like Les over magicians like Mitchell.
My gaffe was an ongoing subtext of our meal. Though I was scrupulously
respectful, she couldn’t resist an occasional jibe. She explained
that she celebrated bomb-makers “only in the context of the divine
work of samsara.” I knew as much by then, so I made copious amends.
North Atlantic Books would publish Diane’s selected poems. A
year later I would send my student Sheppard to meet her—he was
looking for a mystical guide. They would fall in love, though he was a
generation younger. Fifteen years after Diane’s and my Chinese lunch,
they ran the San Francisco Institute of Magic and Healing Arts, to
which I sent my teenage daughter for lessons. Four decades later, they
were a couple in old age.
As we sipped rice tea, Diane confided that she always positioned
herself with one eye on the door. “That way I can’t be surprised; I
know the quickest escape route.”
“Surprised by whom?”
“The feds, Mafia hitmen, enemies of Malcolm—I’ve a daughter
with Amiri Baraka, I’m New York Italian. Maybe rogue magicians. Who knows these days?”
Berkeley/San Francisco could be either psychically incubatory or overly sacralized, and both at the same time. As with anything serious and profound, it took a long time, in our case decades, to experience the double-edged sword, the essential ambiguity, gauntlet, and gist, of anything.
As noted, we spent more than half our lifetimes in Berkeley (about thirty-eight years of which thirty-seven were consecutive, minus of course the spans in Maine during the last fifteen). It felt like total absorption and coastal relocation when we were there. Yet we came East for the summer of 1980, and as late as 1986 when our son was applying to colleges on the East Coast, we tried to buy a farmhouse in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Our offer was too little too late, and both our kids ultimately went to UC-Santa Cruz.
So for the first decade in California, we were still oriented back to New England. Then came a pure California decade after which, in 1996, we started coming to Maine again. So for one relatively brief stretch (1986-1996) of our thirty-seven “straight” years in northern California, we were unambiguously there, imagining it to be for the duration. It also happened to be our most intense period, including our children becoming adults, our separation from each other and coming back together, our most intense psychospiritual trainings. The whole affair—the sum Berkeley adventure—was effectively a lifetime within a lifetime. We came as a young family and left as grandparents.
When I proposed bringing a car East, Lindy balked at the idea of driving across the country at our age. Yet we wanted to keep a 2007 Prius on which we put very few miles—less than 5,000 a year because of many months per year in Maine. Of course, we could have shipped it and flown, but that seemed squandering an opportunity for adventure. I also wanted a buffer between California and Maine and to experience the landscapes and transitions in between. A road trip would be a way to process and unravel our life in California.
Lindy gradually came to a similar recognition—it would be too abrupt just to land in Portland on the same day we left Berkeley—but she initially preferred shooting straight across, which is what we had done in 1975, 1976, and 1980: Reno, Salt Lake, Denver, Iowa City, Ann Arbor, Toronto, Maine, with minor variations (like racing straight from Iowa City through the Midwest and Pennsylvania in a hurry to make the first Goddard classes in 1976). We did try a northern route after the summer of 1975 but gave up on interminable back roads in Oregon and looped back down to Salt Lake City.
I proposed a labyrinth. It would be a labyrinth spiritually, a meandering vision ques. Also, by taking our time and wandering about, we would make the drive less a grind or feat of endurance and more its own adventure and flow. Once we agreed on the plan, we spent a couple of months lining up stops.
By heading first to Los Angeles to visit our daughter, son-in-law and grandson Hopper, we in effect set a scoot across the southwest into Texas. Only after that would we wend north.
Los Angeles/Scottsdale (June 26-July 2)
It was 377.4 miles door to door, Kensington (suburban Berkeley) to the house of my aunt, Suzanne Taylor in West Hollywood. We had made the trip many times over the years, but this one was different: it wasn’t LA and back, it was LA as launching pad to going all the way east.
We spent a couple of days with our son-in-law Mike Mills and grandson Hopper in the backyard and around the house. Our daughter Miranda was directing the short movie that goes with the “Somebody app” she was developing then, so we only saw her briefly, in and out between shoots, (see http://somebodyapp.com.
We brought our entire collection of 33 and 45 vinyl records to them, as they used a turntable happily still, about 300 disks in all going back to our childhoods in the 1950s. A few years prior I had painstakingly transferred our favorite bands to iTunes and abandoned the turntable. The records, not easily transportable any other way, occupied a large chunk of our back seat, so we had plenty of space the rest of the way.
The time was bittersweet, leaving behind a fond, familiar scene and setting out on a life-changing adventure. No one else that we knew was breaking from the California mindset; they were like, “How could you leave here, this is paradise, and do you know, it snows there, and it gets really cold, and now there’s the polar vortex?”
So we felt very much out of the gestalt and mood, against the grain, loners again heading on a mysterious path to a faraway planet.
The trip from LA to Scottsdale was hot hot hot. We left at 6:30 AM to avoid commuter traffic and heat, and we earned temperatures under 80 until we crossed the mountains east of LA and left the fog. The thermometer worked quickly up to a max at 106.
We were the only ones picnicking just west of Blythe. The landscape may have been arid and baking, but the rocks and cacti were really beautiful.
It took 412.0 miles door to door from Suzanne's to the house of our author Mark Ireland (Soul Shift and Messages from the Afterlife).
We spent a few hours in the South Scottsdale Mall that evening, which was a classic late-capitalist faux city made entirely of shops.
Arizona seemed like LA with the California part removed and Texas in its place, re: the waitresses at True Food where we went to celebrate Mark's and Susie's 35th wedding anniversary, all blonde, very young, made-up to the point of embalming, and our one talked so fast with so little attention on what she was saying that I understood barely a word of the menu. I have no idea what the specials were, but I didn’t need to.
One detail you might not know: along the street are misters that spray cold steam on pedestrians as they pass, somewhat along the lines of heaters in the outdoor portions of restaurants when it's too cold otherwise. For me it was another planet. Sort of, how are things in Alpha Centauri (Avatar aside).
On our full day Lindy and I ventured out to shopping centers, lunch, etc. I hadn’t thought to bring a cap on the road trip, so I picked up a Brooklyn Nets one identical to the one I had bought at JFK airport the previous year and left in Maine. It didn’t feel sane to be in this much sun without one, and everyone else was styling head gear, mostly sports caps. I also bought two small kachina dolls at an American Indian shop farther down the mall, figuring to make these the first items in an altar space in the Portland house.
This kindled a flashback to our courtship years and early years of marriage, before we had children, when we collected Navajo and Hopi artifacts. In fact, we still had a Navaho rug hanging and Hopi and Navajo dictionaries though, after abandoning learning Hopi and/or Navajo tongues, I almost never referred to them anymore.
Mark and Susie were about to move to the other Portland—Oregon—to start a new job and be with their son after many years in Scottsdale. Their other son had died in mountains visible from their picture window, an event that had set into motion Mark’s second career as a guide to the after-world. Yet, as on our one previous visit, their Scottsdale life was in full terrestrial florescence—a dance in light and heat and air among the cactuses and rocks. For us, it was a stop at a modern suburban castle on a block of castles. We walked the trails around the neighborhood with Mark and Susie in the early morning, before the sun got too high. I did stir up one of their two free-range parrots (or parrot-like birds) by thinking to pet it the way they did—no strangers allowed, bub!, such a squawking and flapping of wings and pouter around the dinner table, disrupting the place settings, plus a sold beak peck. It was an embarrassing prelude to an otherwise-peaceful dinner.