Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (48 page)

The sun of California is like white wine and pine sap. It may be a temperate sun, but it has an ardent nature. It lifted my heart with a heady buoyancy and spiced the air with a resinous tang. It shone down on me loyally up the coast road from Los Angeles, beating at me from the concrete freeways, beckoning me from Pacific breakers, winking from wind-stirred leaves and grasses. It followed me through San Francisco, bouncing off window panes and shining on long golden hair. It warmed the terra cotta ironwork of the Golden Gate Bridge, flashed off the teeth of a toll collector, hurried me over the rain grooves and up the highway until, a hundred miles further on, it came into its own among the forests and hills of Northern California.

Where the hot cement gives way to cooler asphalt and the highway begins to rise and fall and curve against the hillsides, the bike transformed itself from a running animal into a bird and leaned over to swoop and curl with the contours of Mendocino County. Somewhere there, beyond Ukiah and Willetts, where the highway meets the Eel River, I wound off to the right and flew in among the mountains, looping high up towards the sun and down again into a bowl of fertile land and golden sunshine.

The air was heavily scented. I smelled blackberry and hay and resin. Waves of vivid aroma reinforced my joy at being back on the land again, and I had to recognize the craving I had created in myself for landscape and space. For a while, absorbed in the mind-boggling materialism of Los Angeles, I had forgotten those thirty thousand miles of plains, mountains, rivers, forests, deserts, skies and stars, but they would never be erased from my subconscious. As with music, they could be ignored for a while in pursuit of some short-term enthusiasm, but the hunger would build up silently inside me until something as slight as a scent of pine or a snatch of piano would warn me that I was perilously close to starvation.

I rode round a slithering curve on to a straight section. The land rose to a high ridge on my left and fell away to the right in a more gentle slope that would bring it eventually to the Eel winding among the rocks far below.

I crossed a cattle grid, and then the county line between Mendocino and Trinity. The land here was sparsely wooded with oak, young fir, madrone and manzanita. I saw open grassland above me where the big timber had once stood. Near the road lay heaps of rusting machinery, the leavings of a saw mill abandoned when the land had been logged and sold. I knew about it from Bob and Annie. It was one of the signs that told me I had arrived.

A yellow mailbox was planted on a post by the roadside announcing the name of the ranch and I followed the track down the hill and alongside a big sunburned meadow. The track took me past one wooden house and a newly erected barn to another bigger house. It was early afternoon. I could see a horse in the meadow but no people. The noise of the bike seemed inappropriate and I was glad to put it to rest and let the sound fade into the silence. There were ducks on a small pond. A goat stood facing away from me, obstinately refusing to recognize the interruption.

I climbed some wooden steps to the veranda of the house and went inside. A big man with unruly fair hair sat sprawled in a chair smoking a home-rolled cigarette and staring straight at me with wide, lively eyes. I thought it odd that he hadn't got up to see who was making all the noise. He wasn't busy.

'I'm a friend of Annie's,' I said. Those were the words I was told to say, my credentials.

'Hi,' he said. He continued to look at me with engaging curiosity, as though I might turn into a rabbit. 'I'm looking for Carol,' I added.

'Oh,' he said, still gazing at me quizzically. The silence gathered again. I waited. There was no hurry. A wasp buzzed against the window pane. It was very peaceful. I knew what he was doing and I was enjoying it, two strangers alone together in a room, appraising each other, savouring each other like animals. People talk too much at first, just making publicity. It was hardly more than a significant pause. Then he got up, and walked to the window.

'They're down by the river, I guess,' he said pointing out over the meadow. Then he smiled beatifically.

'Heard about you,' he said, and grabbed me in a bear hug and kissed me solidly on the cheek. That
did
surprise me.

He told me how to get to the river, over the meadow, past a volleyball net and then left by Suicide Rock. I walked over the meadow bubbling with joy. It's that damned sun, I thought, the same sun that was shining on Cape Town in the autumn and on Rio in the spring. It gets inside me and bubbles like a leaky champagne bottle. Pretty soon I shall be engulfed in ecstasy. I can feel it coming.

At the other end of the meadow a girl was walking towards me, bare-breasted and trailing her shirt through the long grass from her fingers. She saw me and put on the shirt, holding it closed with her hand. When we met in the middle of the meadow, I said I was a friend of Annie's and looking for Carol.

'Oh. Hi,' she said, and released the shirt. T didn't know. We get some pretty creepy people come sometimes. Annie's down at the Swimming Hole with Bob, and yeah, Carol's there too, with Josie, Christine and Frog.'

I found the way easily, and met Carol walking up from the river as I came down. She was with two young girls, and my first impression was that she resented me slightly. I had never met her before, but guessed who she was. Perhaps I was feeling too pleased with myself. Perhaps I looked as though I thought I was God's gift to women. Whatever it was, I felt a distance between us, but it did not matter to me at the time. I felt no special attraction to her. She had straight, dark hair tied with an elastic band, a narrow oval face and a funnily shaped up tilted nose reddened by sun. I thought she was too thin. Even so, two things about her were striking. Her colouring was dramatic, russet as the ripest apple, and her eyes were big and grey. I noticed them without paying too much attention.

Bob and Annie, it seemed, had gone up ahead to the Camp Site, whatever that might be, and so I walked up with Carol and the two girls, who were Christine and Josie.

'And Frog?' I asked. 'Who or what is Frog?' 'You'll see’ she said. That's a treat you have in store.' I noticed her dazzling smile then, but it still didn't mean anything special.

We walked up slowly, talking. We talked about Ecuador and Venezuela, and gardens and marriages and rattlesnakes, and trees and Ohio where she was from. She had a warm voice, pitched a bit low, and a powerful Middle West accent that said 'Bahks' for box, and made me want to laugh, but Josie got in first with 'Are you a Limey man?', and so we all laughed at my outrageous British accent instead.

I learned that the ranch was a commune although they never called it that, and that they had six hundred and seventy acres of the most beautiful land in the world, bought cheap after it had been logged. I learned that people who cut down trees indiscriminately for profit were despicable, and that Carol worked the vegetable garden where, with a little help from her friends, she produced enough to feed twenty people. Also that someone we both knew in San Francisco was a nerble.

'What,' I asked, 'is a nerble?'

'A nerble,' she said, 'is one thing and a nonie is another. Ask Frog about nerbles and nonies. Frog is in charge of naming.' 'Who's in charge of Frog?'

'Honk shoes,' she exclaimed mysteriously, 'nobody is in charge of Frog. Frog is in charge of the world.'

She said it as though she meant it, but I got no further with my questions because we had climbed out of the river gorge and crossed a small clearing, and we were at the Camp Site. Some rattan matting had been set up as screens round a room-sized space in the shelter of a group of oaks. Inside were an old stuffed sofa and some easy chairs, a low table, orange boxes set up as shelves for food and things, and old carpets on the ground. An outdoor room.

'No, it never rains in the summer, well hardly.'

Annie was there and embraced me fondly. Bob too, and some other people. Everybody looked very pleased. Frog, as I had guessed, was a small boy. He stood on the edge of the circle and looked me over very thoroughly for a while. He was only four, but very tough and self-contained, a force to be reckoned with.

They said I should sleep there at the Camp Site. Josie and Christine were sleeping there too, and maybe others. Carol said we should go up to the cabin in the morning and she would make pancakes for breakfast. She said she lived in a wooden cabin up the hill on the other side of the county road, and I could find it by listening for the sound of the piano.

'A piano,' I cried. 'You must be joking.'

She smiled. I think it was the piano that made me begin to take it all seriously. A piano is a distinctly permanent thing.

Six hundred and seventy acres is a lot of land, especially when it is all up and down, laced with streams and studded with hillocks and humps of crumbling stone. I ambled around it for some time in the morning, looking for the cabin. A certain kind of countryside has always attracted me. I like streams of clear water running at a gentle pace over smooth rocks and pebbles freckled and veined with the browns and greens and yellows of mysterious minerals. I like grassy banks tied to the roots of ancient trees, and rough-hewn hillsides scattered with live and fallen timber, boulders and mosses, leaves and lichens, where creatures I have never seen can go about their business undiscovered. I love land that rises and dips, forever revealing and concealing secret places, intricate land with shelter and food for all kinds of life, big and small.

The power of this attraction was heightened enormously by my long journey. In Africa, Brazil, Chile and Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, so many places, I saw countryside which drew me almost with the force of destiny. It became too painful to be forever passing it by. I felt I had to stop somewhere and make some lasting connection with this earth, to become involved with it in some way. The power of the desire was overwhelming. I walked through the ranch, smelling the earth and leaves, startling deer, being startled myself by the sudden screech of peacocks roosting in a large oak, and thought 'This could be the place. This has to be the place.'

I heard the piano, and found the cabin on a gently sloping shelf of land. A stream ran along one side, lost under a thriving colony of blackberry bushes, and tall trees provided shade on the other side.

It was a modest cabin, square and set on piles, made of planking with a tar paper roof. The piano was in the front room which overlooked the valley through a large sheet of acrylic set into the wall. Also in the front room was a big, black, cast iron, wood-burning Franklin stove. At the back was a bed and a kitchen range. Behind the cabin was a clear space with an outhouse, a hose rigged up for a shower, and a chopping block. The water came in a tube from upstream.

The heat was beginning to build up for the day. All the doors were open and warm air moved through, carrying all the scents of the woodland. Carol was alone and we talked much as we had the day before. Nobody else came. I had to admit that suited me, and Carol did not seem at all surprised. I played a few pieces, clumsily through lack of practice, while she made breakfast. The aroma of coffee wafted through the cabin, followed by the smell of frying in hot butter.

'The butter is from Germany,' she said. 'Germany is one of our cows.'

'Frog again,' I said.

'You know it,' she said. 'Really.'

We ate our way through mounds of little soft pancakes soaked in almost pure maple syrup. The simplicity of the cabin, and the golden silence all around us, was affecting me profoundly. Halfway through the pancakes, I said:

T still don't really know what you are all doing here?'

She looked up with a flash of anger in her eyes. Then she snorted.

T guess there are some people here who'd like to know too.'

She tried to tell me something about the ranch, how it had come about out of the turmoil of Student Revolt, Flower Power, Civil Rights, the Women's Movement, the Vietnam War, all those waves of energy rushing across the face of America promising a storm of change and liberation.

'Some of us got together and found this land, after it had been ripped off by the loggers. It was amazingly inexpensive. Some of the guys who were at school together, they wanted to start a school here. One day we will. It's still my dream.'

'What happened?'

T guess when we got here we found we had too much to learn ourselves.'

I listened hard trying to understand, but every answer begged another question, and I didn't really want to ask questions. There were some people here, living on some land. Why or how seemed less important than the fact that they were doing it. In any case the only way to find out would be to do it with them.

Apparently there was this one annual crunch, the mortgage payment. Every year they struggled to make money, selling produce, hauling hay for a neighbour, maybe getting in money from jobs in the city, but they were not desperate. There was money among them, already inherited or in a parent's bank account. No question, one way or another the payment would be met. The Annual Mortgage Meeting was a symbolic crunch, when they looked at each other and estimated how much energy they had in the bank, and what kind of energy it was.

The Annual was coming up soon. I gathered that this year the energy was running low. There were fewer people living on the ranch than ever in its four-year history, only half of the twenty or more who had built their own small houses on various parts of the land.

'We put all our energy into our relationships, and the results are totally amazing. Really. You'd never find a more beautiful set of people anywhere. But, I don't know, we were on this big high, but it seems to be fading, which is fine but . . . it's really hard on the kids.'

'Look, you know what surprised me most when I got here?' I said, bravely. 'The mess. I mean, all the stuff littered round the big house. I don't understand how you put up with that ugliness. Doesn't anyone want to clear it up?'

T know,' she said sadly. 'It seems to be really hard for people to find that kind of energy right now.'

There was no doubting Carol's energy. She worked furiously in the garden. I spent most of that day and the next with her, at the cabin or in the garden. She told me things about herself which surprised and sometimes disturbed me. The disturbing things were about love, different kinds of love for people and things. It was alarmingly honest, but exhilarating too. Sometime during those two days, her grey-blue eyes got too big for me and swallowed me up. I forgot that I was only intending to be there for a few days, that I was already booked on a ship for Australia, and that I was only halfway round the world. The next day I rode the bike up the trail to the cabin and moved in.

I don't think I ever fell in love with Carol in the way I had fallen before. Love simply wrapped itself round me. She was made of it, and the ranch, I discovered, was full of it. It was what they had really come there for, and it was what I wanted more than anything else; to be alive and in love on land like that. A week or so later I rode into San Francisco and postponed my sailing from August to November.

I claimed that long summer, immersed in love and sunshine, as my reward for two years of physical and emotional battering. Although I had stopped for a few weeks at a time in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Rio and Santiago, though I had even fallen in love once before, a part of me had always been unattached, waiting to move on. The journey had never stopped, and all the while I was soaking up information and sensation at an alarming rate.

I came to the ranch brimful of feelings and insights which had had no release on the way. Like a cargo of perishable goods, they were threatening to rot in me. So I spilled my heart out on that land and among those people who had made it their business to share feelings and dreams.

There was work to do, a chance to leave something that would survive my passing. We built an extension to the cabin that widened it by a few feet towards the blackberry bushes, and gave a sense of new space that was quite palatial. We called it the East Wing, and moved the bed into it to receive the morning sun.

The blackberry bushes concealed a busy community of birds, frogs, rodents and various species of snake. The largest inhabitant was the civet cat, a kind of spotted skunk. For a while the entire wall of the cabin was down, and we lived as though in an extension of the blackberry bush, open to the stars and the moon and the cool night world. Then the civet cat took to visiting me.