By Fred Owens
Laurie
and I will fly to Toronto this Thursday to attend the 50th reunion of
the class of 1968 at St. Michael's College in the University of Toronto.
I wrote a memoir about my college life fifty years ago. There are a few passages that seem a bit smug, but I
was simply having too much fun in college -- is that a crime? If a
story needs to have suffering and angst, look elsewhere.
Anyway the memoir is 20,000 words and much too long to put in this newsletter.
St. Michael's College is part of the University of Toronto. In Canada. That's right, I went to school in a foreign country.
Canadian
students had no fear of being drafted and getting killed in Vietnam.
That was a concern at the time among American young men.. There was
little debate in Canada about the Vietnam war because everybody high and
low thought it was a bad show.
The Canadian
government sent a token force over there, but there was no draft.
Canadian students had hazy plans about their future after graduation --
"might spend a little time in Europe, might take a job with my father's
firm"..... and so on. Meanwhile American students were sweating out
choices like teaching jobs and graduate school, which got you a
deferment. CO status? But you had to pretend you were a Quaker. Flee to
Canada? I know a few who did just that.
You
don't hear much about the draft these days, but it was serious business
back then. Guys like, say, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, devised ways
to avoid military service.
My own status was
1-Y or "available in case of national emergency" which is exactly how I
felt at the time. I didn't want to fight but if there was a national
emergency I expect I would have showed up.
So
they didn't need me in Vietnam, and why were we in that country at all? I
will go to my college reunion, class of 1968, and re-hash this episode
with my classmates.
Some served. My
roommate of three years was drafted into the army after graduation and
did his tour in Vietnam. I would use his name, but first I would need to
call him at his home in Dallas and get his permission. He's a man with
nothing to hide, but he's not inclined to draw attention to himself. He
served in the army and did his tour in Vietnam.
We will be ancient ones, fifty years later, discussing the pruning of
roses, the bragging of grandchildren and the travails of hip surgery --
so why not bring up some of the old war business?
Not everybody in Fishtown was an artist or poet. Some residents were simply odd fellows. Here is the story of Keith Brown.
Keith Brown was an
idiot, a man with serious mental health issues, who lived in a shack on the North Fork of the Skagit River
at a place called Fishtown.
You had to walk
across Chamberlain’s field to get to Fishtown, or else, if Margaret Lee let
you, you could drive out to her farm, and park your car there, and then it was
a shorter walk, but either way you had to walk.
Keith lived in
float shack moored to the bank. Years ago he had winched it up the bank during
a spring flood, so it never floated anymore, but it was built on top of Douglas
fir logs 2-feet in diameter and bolted together in a raft.
Keith’s shack was
almost level. A marble, placed on the floor, would roll slowly towards the
riverside of the shack, but this only made the place a bit more lovable –
giving it a tilt, but not something you could see with your eyes. The shack was
soundly built when Keith claimed it and moved in. He added a cupola on the roof
with 3-foot windows on all four sides,
for sleeping in the moonlight, or listening to the rain.
He tinkered with
electricity. He made a light switch from a fork, by drilling a hole through the
handle midway, so it could move back and forth, and if he pushed it one way
towards the contact point, the little light would go on.
He had catalogs from electric supply houses,
dog-eared, laying on the counter, next to egg shells, banana skins, diodes,
transistors, and lumps of lichen, car parts, fishing tackle, and odd sorts of
plastic bottles.. A research scientist in his own way, Keith transmitted the
news and the song of the River, via electronics that passed through
subterranean granite tunnels, which existed in his imagination. But Fred was no
scoffer. He had heard the voice of the man from Venus long ago after the desert
murder, so he listened to Keith’s fantastic theories without judgment.
Keith devised a
small windmill on his roof that powered a 25-watt lamp.
Otherwise he used kerosene
lanterns, and cooked and heated on a wood stove. He packed in his supplies,
walking across the fields to Dodge
Valley Road, and walking 3 more miles to LaConner
unless he got a ride, carrying a canvas rucksack, with empty bottles for
recycling on the way in, and beer and groceries on the way back.
His car was a 60’s
model Triumph, the English sports car. He parked that at the quarry, what
people called a quarry, but was really just a part of the hill that had been
carved out years ago for the stone. Keith hadn’t driven the Triumph in a few
years and the tires had gone flat, and the blackberry vines were starting to
grow over it. He had removed the trunk lid of the Triumph, and inserted a
plywood panel, a place to mount his lawnmower – that was back when he worked
for people, back when he wasn’t quite so crazy. But the Triumph was getting
moldy and starting to compost, as if everything was going back to the earth
sooner or later, something that even the farmers approved, because they never
threw away their old equipment, they just parked it out in a field and let it
rust, and the same way old boats, either sunk, or half sunk, or propped up in
the backyard – they all returned to the earth.
The dreamboats
were gone in 1986 – the hopeless rotted hulls, the beautiful romantic lines of
a wood boat that had once fished the abundant salmon of Puget
Sound. The dreamers came in the 60’s and worked on them, to
rebuild them, steaming oak planks in water-filled metal drums, bending new
frames on the old rotted hulls. But they were dreamboats, and the hippies gave
up on them, for the most part, although a few were launched, like the 32-foot
Bristol Bay double ender that Singin’ Dan rebuilt and launched and lived on
down the river from Fishtown at Shit Creek. Singin’ Dan came from Scandinavian
fishing stock, and he knew what he was doing.
But the dreamboats
were abandoned. They made picturesque hulks, and the other boats were just let
out to die peacefully, slowly sinking in the mud, landmarks with histories
imagined or real.
It was the law of
the sea, as Fred had read in Moby Dick in the chapter about abandoned
vessels. A boat, a ship, or the valuable carcass of a floating, dead sperm
whale were all bound by the same law – it was either fast or loose. If it was
“fast”, made fast to something, a pier or attached by a line to another boat,
then it belonged to whatever entity it was made fast to. But if it was loose,
if it was afloat, or adrift, or run aground, but on the sea, if it was
abandoned – you couldn’t leave a marker or a note saying you were the owner and
intended to come back and fetch it. If it was loose, then it belonged to
whoever might claim it, and that’s how Keith got his float shack in Fishtown,
because it was stuck on a sand bar just off the bank when he got there in early
70s.
He just moved in
and took it over. You could still do that in Puget Sound.
Nobody minded anyway, there were lots of abandoned houses and shacks around the
Valley back then – that’s why the hippies moved up there – free rent.
Keith had stained
teeth and he laughed with a mad cackle, because he was mad. He had brown skin,
so dirty it had acquired a patina, a sheen, like an old pair of pants. “I would
fuck him if he took a bath,” G* said, in her typical brazen way. B* and G*
lived in a shack that B* had built up on pilings, maybe a hundred yards downstream
from Keith’s place. You had to get off Keith’s shack on a gang plank over the
mud, then walk through the brush, bending under salmon berry pink blossoms if
it was Spring, and then cross by the haphazard fence marking Steve Herold’s
garden, and then hike up a small hill. It was a small hill, but it would have
been a very big egg, because the hill was shaped like an egg, and then what
creature would hatch from such an egg of a quarter mile diameter, lying oblong
and crosswise to the flow of the river, this hill bearing madrone trees peeling
red-orange bark.
Fred would take
that path, going through the madrone trees. “You always see them growing near
the water. You never see them more than a half-mile from the water,” Fred
noticed.
Over the hill and
easing down the stone on a rope tied to a tree just for that purpose, the
egg-stone of the egg hill, was a composite of small stones – like old cement of
geological age, over to the shack that B* and G* had built on pilings, where G*
said things like that about Keith Brown and other men.
Keith was the
canary in the coal mine, a symptom of changes in the valley. Fred had often
visited Keith, taking the stroll across the fields, and then the primeval path
through the old woods, coming up on the shack, sometimes in winter, stepping
across mottled leaves, working his way through the path, stepping around logs,
sometimes in spring when the skunk cabbage thrust up through the swamp near the
river.
Fred came to
visit, and if Keith wasn’t home, he came in anyway and built a fire and made
tea and found a few books to glance at. The porn magazines were under the
mattress in the cupola. Fred was a snoop. “I think I got that from my mother.
She always found my things and it always seemed accidental, but it was her third
eye, and I have the third eye, too,” he thought.
But the door to
the shack had no lock. He was always welcome. Or else Keith was there,
tinkering with something, and they talked. Keith had a way of talking that made
sense, but before you know it, it made no sense at all. “He’s half-mad,” Fred
observed. “He’s got one foot in this world and another foot in a far more
resplendent universe.
Afterward, after
Keith got arrested for arson, Fred said, “We could see he was going off the
deep end, but we had abandoned him, and he was all alone.”
Keith spent more
time listening to the voices – the CIA was after him because his electronic
inventions might generate enough power to over throw the monopoly of the
corporations and large oil companies. The CIA was linked with the ant-Christ
and Keith was the only one who knew that they had killed Lisa and buried her
under the Lighthouse Inn in LaConner.
Keith began
writing messages with a magic marker on his jacket and jeans – sayings from the
Illuminati, and quotations from Revelations – “Beware, the beast with 600 eyes
is coming.”
His cackle became
louder. The problem, Fred realized, was that nobody had time anymore. Keith was
the village idiot of Fishtown, but the village was itself disappearing, B* and
G* moved into town, to that yellow house on the hill. Paul Hansen was building
his 3-story log cabin (known as Fort Hansen) on a hillside on the reservation.
He didn’t come out to Fishtown anymore. Black Dog Allen was down in Willapa Bay working on oysters.
Avocado Richard
had taken over the cabin where Charlie Krafft used to live. It would have been
good for new talent to move into Fishtown, but Avocado Richard, besides being a
sculptor of dubious talent, was a mean, crazy drunk.
And, therefore, it
became obvious, after Keith was arrested, that Keith simply had fewer people
who would talk with him in his own crazy way, so he started listening to the
voices all the time. And the voices told Keith that it was his duty to expose
the CIA plot against him, and he could do that by setting fire to the
Lighthouse Inn. “I’ll burn it down, and then they will find Lisa’s body, and
then they will know the truth,” Keith said.
That fall Keith
came into town with a five-gallon can of gasoline. He climbed up on the roof of
the Lighthouse Inn, poured out the gasoline and lit the blaze. The cops came
right away, the firemen put it out. There was no damage, but they locked Keith
up in the mental hospital down in Steilacoom. He was incompetent to stand
trial. “He’ll never get out,” Jim Smith said. “They won’t let him out unless he
stops telling that story about Lisa and the CIA, but he won’t stop, and they’ll
never let him out.”
