In the Moment

I found an old church van for sale in Southern Illinois, and a preacher gave it to me for 300 dollars cash. I threw a futon in the back and painted a red Kamikaze sun on each front door, knowing I would not replace the license plates. That Sunday, I flew the extended cab Econoline through the Shawnee National Forest, across the Ohio River, and into the rolling hills of Kentucky. My Siberian Husky Sequoia was car sick and vomiting everywhere. I stopped for gas, and he somehow shit on the dashboard. Some lady bringing in carts brought me some cleaning supplies from inside the market. I cleaned up and then took Sequoia on a proper walkabout the parking lot, where he peed but once.

Through Mammoth Cave National Park, I cruised, windows down, all the way to the horse breeding plantations of Lexington and then into the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Kentucky, up a steep range on the Virginia divide. I turned off on a dirt road, and the powerful V8 engine roared as it switch-backed to the top of the ridge. The breaks squeaked as I went down the steep, flipside, deep into a forested ravine. At the bottom, the road ran right through a flowing river. So, I floored it and plunged the giant whale into the rushing water, steam exploding from the hot engine as it hit the cold. The tires clawed at the bank of the other side of the river before we were washed away.

I drove slowly up the long driveway to the top of a bald hill planted with winter crops, with views of mountains in the distance. The sun was starting to set, and a large barn was aglow. A hand-painted sign read “Welcome Home.” Dogs ran out to greet me, and Sequoia went nuts and leaped out the window, chasing a goat. Then a few people came out with hugs and an invitation to dinner, which was just about to be served. The scent of heavy spices was in the air.

Inside the barn, a kitchen pantry stocked full of jarred fruits and vegetables and endless racks of herbs and spices. In the kitchen, a colossal wok steamed. Long wooden tables lined with other wayward folk waiting for a free meal. A wood stove crackled in the middle of the large open room, and sleeping lofts sat empty above. In the back of the barn, private spaces were sectioned off with bookshelves full of herb and astrology books, and there one could get away, if even for a moment.

Dinner was ready, and a few more people arrived out of mysterious nooks. There were babies, children, teenagers, people of all ages, elderly, frail, young, and strong. I wondered where they all had come from and why, philosophy, poverty, adventure, drugs? We ate sauteed vegetables of wide varieties and drank tea. In his early twenties, one guy named Charlie swallowed six cups of coffee under dirty brown hair that hung in front of his sleepy eyes. At the head of the table sat Jahway. Jahway was a soft-spoken, towering figure who everyone seemed to revere. He had a Roman nose, sunken cheeks, dark brown eyes, and long brown hair, well-conditioned and brushed, unlike Charlie's. Jahway was barefoot and controlled the whole scene silently with a glare of orchestrating eyes. It was undoubtedly a feral place yet functioning at his command—tightly wound about the finger. He was omnipresent, Rainbow Mafia, and kept everyone in check, and let me know with a slight glance.

Jahway had a private house up on the mountain in the woods, just out of sight of the barn and this motley crew. The hillside was his perch, where he could do yoga, smoke his private stash of opium, and doll out marijuana rations in peace. The rest, huddled in the barn, shivering around the woodstove, drinking cup of tea after cup of tea, trying to simply satisfy the endless stream of personal needs. Meals were made from root veggies grown here, and milk was collected from the sheep, but most of the other food was saved from dumpsters whenever anyone would make the two-hour trek into town. In town, odd glances we made, kind deeds done, eye-rolling and handshakes, and a prowling sheriff with his own marijuana plantation. In the six months, I went to town but once, enough to get a good view of the locals, trade for goods and services, and meet a man about manure. He had two swollen twins, red hair, overalls, and freckles, who bounced around in the back of their daddy's truck on the way back to their trailer-strewn farm.

Shoveling shit—probably around 12 years each—they shoveled the shit out of the shit while most of us were taking safety breaks. Safety breaks were essential while using chainsaws. Jahway had brought his baby boy Phoenix along with us. Pheonix was cute and had wavy yellow hair, fat dirty cheeks, red lips, and a saggy diaper full to the brim with toddler-piss. Phoenix crawled off in the woods for an hour or two while the chainsaws moaned. The man sold us some wood too. All we could chop. Hell, anything off his land we wanted. After loading the cut-wood and the twins shoveling the shit onto a trailer, we spent a half-hour searching for Pheonix and then crawled back into Jahway’s suburban that ran on Mcdonald's french fry grease.

I spent most of my time hanging out with Dan. Dan was an old man with long scraggly grey hair and looked like a retired trucker. Dan lived in an old, broke-down van up on the hillside. He called me Geronimo and Sequoia, my spirit wolfdog, but I’m unsure why. We didn't talk about much, we just smoked joints, Dan, through his nose, and we would sit in the trees and listen to the birds. Sometimes I would go up the hillside alone to the Woodhenge, a structure made of logs resembling Stonehenge. One day, I could swear I heard tiny giggling coming from the bushes, and I know many here did, but maybe it was the drugs. One day Jahway took us all on a hike up to the top of the mountain, whereon the peak, he had carved out a massive heart in the granite—in honor of his late father, an old hippy who had originally bought the farm back in the late 70s.

One day a small circus arrived, the Blue Monkey Group, they called themselves, out of Indianapolis. A traveling gypsy band of guerilla thespians, magicians, jugglers, and tricksters. Their leader was Bart Simpson, “If you're ever in Indianapolis, look me up in the phone book—you’ll never forget my name,” he said. Bart purchased a small piece of land from Jahway on the mountainside, and they had come to build a monkey village of tree houses where everything was connected by long, swinging ropes, resembling vines.

A few days later, a few of us piled into a VW bus—Max was the driver, mid-fifties, had a 20 something-year-old girlfriend with him who wore a tiny ballerina dress and leggings; an ugly, dirty sweater, and pigtails, nose ring, dirty bare feet, but sexy all get out. Max and Charlie were good friends, but they were fighting over Max’s girlfriend. There was also Mike. Mike was a nice guy, and I was glad he was tagging along. He was an ex-con in the late stages of AIDS, he was dying, but Mike still looked strong—he was a big, stocky guy with a lot of meat on the bone. Mike told me he was a Merry Prankster with Ken Casey in the 60s. He said they used to dose cops with rainbow acid at dead shows, sometimes using Super-soakers. We took a two-day trip down south, and Max screamed, and Charlie cried over the girl the whole way to South Carolina. They were having it out over who went next to get a chance to lie in the back and make out with the girl with the pigtails until we ran out of gas.

When we ran out of gas, they had the girl stand with a sign asking for help. Then we found a Denny's. As it turns out, Denny's never turns a hungry person away who asks for a free meal—take note. But Charley wanted to set a good example, so he offered to clean the bathroom. They gave us each a plate of eggs, bacon, and toast, a side of biscuits and gravy, and a glass of orange juice, or in Charlie's case, coffee, coffee, coffee. Then we spent the night in someone's backyard Max knew somewhere in Georgia, or hell, North Carolina, maybe.

I was never quite sure what the point of the trip was, but when we returned a day later, Jahway was gone, somewhere, maybe Mexico, and there was a massive weed shortage. The whole place was out of whack. Things were in chaos. Everyone was grouchy, and there wasn't much food as the dumpster in town was dry, a car broke down in the stream, and a goat had Mastitis. And Charlie was having a meltdown about running out of coffee. He said no one was allowed to talk to him, and he mopped by the stove. The Blue Monkeys had high-tailed it back to Indie before the motley crew smoked all their weed, and Mike and I drank what was left of the chai. Outside, Sequoia had gotten into chasing the goats, and the goats had gotten into the habit of chasing him right back, knocking him out cold with a good butt to the head.

Muck had become of the utopia, but soon Jahway returned from Mexico and built a fire down by the river, where I had parked my van. Everyone had gathered around and told tidbits of old stories. Still, mostly we sat quietly and passed joints, gazing back and forth between the blaze and the milky way, until one by one, everyone went off to bed, disappearing into the dark, as Sequoia and I crawled into the back of the van and fell asleep to the sound of the river.

A few hours later, I woke up and barely made it out of the van before vomiting everywhere. Sequoia even vomited everywhere. And I spent the next couple of hours walking back and forth in a torrential rainstorm from the van to the outhouse up the hill. I finally fell asleep just before sunrise. I slept late and crawled out of the back around noon, stepping into knee-deep water. The river had flooded and washed the lawn chairs downstream. I pulled my van up by the barn before it was washed away, and I went inside to dry off and warm up next to the stove. It was a cold foggy day. Everyone was sitting around the woodstove drinking coffee, rolling cigarettes with the sacred sweet-tobacco Jahway had returned with. Someone brought me a bowl of oatmeal and then passed me a bowl of marijuana. And crawling down the ladder from the loft above, with his eyes squinted and his hair disheveled, Charley said, “Good morning.”

I looked around as old Dan inhaled a joint through the nose and wondered if we were finally settling into life. I realized yes, in the moment, we were, in fact, and it was not all that bad—it was actually kind of nice to have a warm cup of chai on a cold rainy day.