Monkeyshines
chapter thirteen
Jimmy and I returned from England, and Peter and I looked for a piece of land to buy. The Bloomington farm we’d rented sat next to a freeway access, and the landlord, Dr. Olaf Aavik, expected far more money than we could afford. We saw land in Missouri for $30 an acre. Around Bloomington at that time, land cost $300 to $500 per acre. During the winter of 71/72, Chris and I looked at a farm in Tangier, Indiana. We would buy it and move in the following spring.
We got 87.5 acres for $12,500. Duke and Marie held the mortgage. The price included a house, barn, timber, coal, spring, lots of morel mushrooms and ginseng root, and some high quality clay deposits. The land was just above the flood plain of the Wabash river.
The man we bought it from, Ward Norman, had been a conductor on the Wabash Cannonball. He and his wife, Juanita, were the up side of American Gothic. They invited Chris and I to stay for dinner the first time we visited the property. They seemed to be gentle, working, country folks and were easy to like. They’d raised their kids in the tiny house, and infused the whole farm with years of good feelings. The place had a kind of purity.
The guy next door plowed his ground using a team of horses, and most of the people in the area seemed to mind their own business. We thought we were getting away from the urban flak and getting back to the land. Some people probably saw us as the arrival of urban flak in their backyard.
We’d possibly been lulled into a false sense of security living on the edge of Bloomington. We were on a farm, surrounded by corn fields, but there were colleges in Bloomington that promoted eclectic social norms in the community. Our landlord, Doc Aavik, had become part of our family, subtly, quietly, without anyone planning it.
Aavik was a dermatologist who immigrated to America from Estonia. He came to the house from time to time and smoked with us. Once he lay flat on his back in the middle of the kitchen floor, stretched his arms out and seemed to ponder the ceiling. I thought he luxuriated in the acceptance available to him at our house. He wanted to feel accepted and secure. He told us he‘d been ‘liberated’ three times in Estonia during WW II; by the Germans, the Russians and the Americans. He was very conscious of how social right and wrong could flip-flop overnight.
We stormed onto our Indiana farm with great energy. We brought our palomino horse Clyde, our Billy goat and its nanny Gladys, a piano, a 1949 Ford hoist-bed grain truck, and about a million pounds of tools and gear. Ken and Betts stayed in Bloomington for the time being, and James was living in Albuquerque, so Peter, Maggie, Chris and I got the place going. I was crazily optimistic, hoping we'd develop a communal wonderland where countless family, friends and neighbors could work, share each other's company, and grow old with sublime disregard for the violent and grotesque machinations of a surrounding society that, I felt, ridiculed the meaning of the word by calling itself civilized.
We all went to auctions. Like happy vultures in tuxedos. Maggie and Chris gardened and looked for paying jobs. Peter and I cut timber from our ravine where we planned a small dam and a pond; we planted alfalfa in the pasture and a bunch of marijuana seeds that, supposedly, were from all over the world; and we bought an old racehorse named Bella Rosa, five geese, twelve chickens, and five Duroc hogs. James came up from New Mexico and my cousin, Richard, came from New York to help, and we built a splendid new chicken coop, (so splendid that Chris and I moved into it for a time), a three-room addition on the house and a three-car garage, both with underground electric service, and a new fence. Peter and James went to Norfolk, Virginia to get the bus for Steak 'N Shake, and after they delivered it, we built a fine new outhouse from oak, white ash and black walnut that we'd cut from the ravine. The outhouse had a stained glass window in it, three holes from which to choose a seat, a magazine rack, and a crescent moon cut in the door for ventilation and light. We also cultivated vegetables in a full-acre truck garden.
This took seven months. Simultaneously, we lived a counter-cultural lifestyle that wasn't always satisfactory. We aimed to cultivate an extended family based on voluntary cooperation and equality, but our society's historical model, based on hierarchical domination of the weaker by the stronger was deeply imbedded in our habitual ways of feeling and thinking. This created emotional pulls and tugs that were a frustrating distraction. The potential conflict between our reorganization of our extended family and the community's commitment to a long term status quo was little on my mind.
Signs were there to be seen, but I didn't see them. I suppose we all knew we were at risk, but we didn't give them priority. On October something, in 1972, while my mother was visiting us, I was up on the roof of the garage nailing down shingles. Six county sheriff and state police cars sped up the road and turned, real fast, one after another, into our front yard. They fanned out on the lawn, skidding to stops. Doors flew open and a dozen uniformed men with drawn weapons leaped out and assaulted my farm. (Actually, I never felt comfortable thinking of it as my farm. I periodically marveled at the idea that the very ground under foot could ‘belong’ to any one. I saw the ground as a platform on which to work or play.
Mom stepped out through the side door of the house and looked up at the approaching police. I flushed as a wave of denial swept over me, and I tried to imagine that this wasn't happening. Of all the stupid things I'd allowed myself to worry about recently, this wasn't even on the list.
I slid down the backside of the garage roof, jumped to the ground, and crept into the root cellar which was adjacent to the garage. I flashed to Hersey's description in “Hiroshima” of people's atavistic urge to hide under leaves after the A-bomb exploded over them. That's how I felt, sitting there in the dark root cellar, still hoping reality would change, but knowing that the inevitable gun muzzle would soon stick its nose in, and when it did, a voice behind it said, "C'mon outta there. Watch how you move, or you're dead."
A deputy took me over to the house where my mother was about to be handcuffed. I said to the sheriff, Gary Cooper, "I'll cooperate with you, but, please, let my mother go. I don't want her to see this." A deputy handcuffed me while the sheriff and state police detective sergeant Lloyd Heck argued over whether or not to arrest my mother. Cooper ‘won’ and Ma was released. Cooper took me into the house, I showed him our shotguns, and gave him a small bag of pot.
The other raiders found the pot plants hung up to dry in the chicken coop. It was exactly what they hoped to find, apparently. The deputies were all excited and joked with each other. One of them brought the grain truck over by the chicken coop and they loaded the plants onto it. Two hours after the raid began, the last deputy returned from the search of the property.
Chris, Maggie and I were taken away. As we left for the jail at Rockville, I asked Sergeant Heck, "Why are you going to so much trouble, and putting us through this?"
"Because it's against the law," Heck said after a brief pause to consider his answer.
"I mean, why is it against the law?" I asked. Even at that time, I didn't feel that Sergeant Heck was simply a mean man, and he seemed to think seriously on my question. I thought his answer was an honest one.
"Because if people are driving under the influence of marijuana, you can't tell, if they have an accident." He looked straight at me with no apparent malice, and communicated sincerity that his idea of the law was reasonable.
The sheriff staked out the farm and waited for Peter and James to return. I was told later about the grim, moonlit scene when the sheriff screamed in a window that everyone should stay still or he'd blow their fucking heads off, and how my mother got upset by his language and the intimidation, and how James jumped on the sheriff when the sheriff pushed her. Cooper left Mom at the farm again, putting Peter and James in the old jail with me.
We were rabid and hyper in the jail that night as we tried to sort out what happened, but we agreed we'd seen more police cars driving by the farm recently, and eventually we remembered seeing light planes from time to time circling overhead when we were out in the field.
We'd assumed that if we didn't sell the grass, we wouldn't be bothered. We learned that we were put under surveillance almost the moment we moved in, first by the mailman, then by a sheriff's deputy who’d sneaked onto the farm to see if marijuana grew there, and finally, by airplanes that flew over to photograph our patch of marijuana when it was still a baby.
A law required the sheriff to instruct land owners to destroy marijuana growing on their property, and the law described no exception, even for circumstances where the cultivation might be intentional, but I learned there were laws, and then there were laws. I should have learned that already. I asked several times why the law requiring the sheriff to instruct us to destroy the marijuana was ignored in our case, why we weren't simply told to burn it as was done with everyone else. For answers, I got half sentences and double talk about ‘real farmers’ and ‘dope dealers.’ I thought this was a good example of a double standard of justice - a major, major monkeyshine. It seems that some people spell justice, just-us.
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Monkeyshine #4, the Double Standard, one set of rules for our guys, and another for theirs.
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Mom called a friend who recommended a lawyer. She gave this lawyer, John Lawson, 5,000 of our precious dollars. We bailed out in time to read about the monster bust in the local paper, where our pile of leaves was reported to be worth $93,000, and where we were described variously as an organized drug gang from Chicago, crazed hippies who were about to deluge the grammar schools with narcotics, and nervy entrepreneurs who planned to sell pot to the tourists attending the local “Covered Bridge" festival. Peter and I went to the newspaper editor and said, "A lot of what you printed was untrue. Why didn't you talk to us and include our side of the story in your coverage?"
The editor said, "Gee, we always print what the police say. This is the first time the criminals, er, the arrested ones have come in to give us their side."
We met with Lawson at the farm, but the discussion deteriorated into a strange polemical lecture by Lawson on the merits of American civilization versus the Russian system. His bottom line seemed to be that the interstate highway system in America, all by itself, proved that our way of life in America was superior to that in Russia.
We couldn't seem to get the message through to him that we didn't know shit about life in Russia, and saw no connection whatever between our possible views on Russia and our legal situation. I told him our interest in marijuana was peripheral to other concerns, like dams and buildings and such. I admitted there was an element of ‘Boston Tea Party’ dissent in our behavior. And we raised the issues of personal privacy and religious freedom, and other rights we thought were guaranteed by the constitution. In this case, we insisted, our right to these freedoms and due process of law had been denied. I later saw that, in my case, there was some self defeating psychological compensation going on, in that I ‘possessed’ marijuana in part to confront the fear left in me from prison. It was a little like going into the shop full of wasps in Turkey without a shirt.
We needed to assert our right to smoke whatever the hell we wanted to smoke, absent an honest argument that this was illegal under the constitution or caused anyone harm. To our minds, making marijuana illegal was like making cherry pie, aspirin or coffee illegal.
There was an economic element, but it was distorted by the government. The prosecution disregarded our demonstrably honorable work at the farm to concentrate on the fiction that we were criminals. They told reporters all manner of balderdash. We had hoped we might sell some of the crop, if we had a surplus, and if the ethical circumstances were right, absurd as that may sound. But it was also clearly, if rarely, in my mind that genuine criminals were entering the marijuana business in direct proportion to the profits available. I thought a good harvest would allow me to undersell the market sharply, thereby reducing the incentive for criminals to sell marijuana, even if it might only be a token gesture on my part. Naive? Sure. Criminal? I didn't think so.
The law gives ground for even the most antagonistic positions, and one can defend any idea they like, BUT American law includes a long tradition of a concept called mens rea. This means that there must be, "in the mind of the accused," a conscious decision to violate a law, without which intention, a crime cannot have been committed. We never intended to violate a law, we sincerely believed the marijuana laws in question violated the constitution, and that Congress had no authority to create or enforce such laws.
Not that legal penalties shouldn't be assessed against actions such as ours, but our offense was on the order of speeding, accidental homicide or civil disobedience. It wasn't a crime. Maybe we lost some of America's legal finery when marijuana was declared a ‘National Security’ problem.
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Monkeyshine #7, The usurpation of authority by "National Security" fiat. (See Goldings' Lord of the Flies).
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We eventually found the hidden blessing in this disaster. We were forced to move on from our naive experiment to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our society.
Lawson worked out a ‘deal’ that required us to sell the farm, move away, and seek ‘drug counseling.’ We'd have sold it anyway, because the insurance company cancelled our coverage, making us too vulnerable. The sheriff's insurance man bought our land, and we auctioned our possessions, despite the railings of a poor, deranged, fundamentalist woman who came to the auction to harangue the buyers. She argued that people shouldn't buy any of our things, because we'd use the money to pay a lawyer. I actually felt cleansed after unloading our infinite assortment of possessions.
Emotionally torn by the experience, we considered burning our buildings, attacking the town, and slaughtering the sheriff and his men. But only for brief moments. Despite the political influence in the area of KKK types, the local people we knew were mostly working folks, and they remained supportive. We felt obliged to behave as well as we could.
As McGovern went down to defeat, (we were the only people in our township who voted for him), and Nixon scratched dirt over Watergate, we folded our tent and slipped away.
We went to Chicago, bought a van, and drove to California. We met Dr. Donald Wesson, a psychiatrist in San Francisco, who agreed to supervise our drug counseling program. He took our histories, did some testing, and sent a letter to the court confirming his willingness to work with us. While waiting for the court to confirm this plan, we drove up to Eugene, Oregon to visit Bob Moyer, a speech and communication teacher at the University of Oregon.
We attended a meeting in Eugene regarding events at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where the American Indian Movement held a position surrounded by FBI agents. We’d passed there on our way west, and met people taking food and ammunition through the lines. The Eugene meeting was addressed by Standing Elk, who apparently represented the force at Wounded Knee. The issues were the nature of the action at Wounded Knee, and the support the Indians sought.
Standing Elk's speech was short and sweet. He said, "We have the supplies we need, and we thank our Black, White, Yellow and Brown brothers and sisters for their support, but what we do at Wounded Knee, we must do ourselves. It is for our people. They must see that we are not afraid of the White government. We have been defeated by the Whites, but this is not enough for them. They want the thing we have left that they don't have. The courage of our people. At Wounded Knee, where White soldiers killed so many of our women and children, we show that we can still say, like our grandfathers, 'Today is a good day to die.'"
It was inspiring, but a bit anti-climactic in a room full of people, many of whom seemed to hope Wounded Knee would signal a general uprisings across America. Some spoke openly about how many armed fighters they could field, which targets they should attack, and how many troops their actions might engage. Electricity was in the air. The Indians at Wounded Knee were in a unique and powerful position. Their fighters included some of America's toughest combat troops just back from Viet Nam. There seemed to be a real question about the outcome if National Guard troops or state police were sent to handle them. And there was concern that regular army troops might be reluctant to assault their recently discharged brothers. So Wounded Knee was surrounded by ambitious lawyers with shotguns. After some weeks of defiance, the Indians decided to leave. They slipped through the FBI cordon one dark night and disappeared.
Bob came with us when we left Oregon, and helped us analyse our options as we traveled down the coast. We could cross the border into Canada and disappear, or we could find a suitable place in the U.S. and await developments. We could split up or stay together. It appeared that Indiana wouldn't prosecute beyond filing a bench warrant that would be acted on only if we troubled authorities elsewhere. It was a big ax over our heads. And it was normal procedure for that state, so we bet on it. It meant the less contact with police the better.
We visited a former philosophy professor of mine in Laguna Beach, and learned of a yacht about to sail to New Zealand. We contacted Dick Johnson, the trip's organizer. He was an airline pilot, appeared well off, and claimed he was an ex-CIA agent. He must have smelled us coming a mile away. After two meetings with him, we decided he was sincere and trustworthy. We described our situation. He described his plan.
We'd loan him money to buy the Nam Sang, a 73' cutter-rigged sloop that had set the world record in the Transpac race from California to Hawaii. She became the McGuffin. That's what Alfred Hitchcock called the thing in a plot that everyone chased after, like the Maltese Falcon. Nam Sang was part of the crumbling estate of a record company magnate. She just been repossessed from some junkies who’d taken her to Mexico where they used the sails for tents, and generally let the boat fall into awful condition. She was being auctioned off, but wouldn't bring a fraction of her worth. We'd fix her up, and start a business sailing back and forth to New Zealand. Johnson would be the skipper, and we'd make a living buying, selling and transporting artifacts and other specialty items. We'd have virtually no contact with police (American), while technically remaining in American jurisdiction. It seemed tailor made. We went to work on the Nam Sang.
It was pretty exciting. The Nam Sang had been owned by a movie star, Ray Milland, among others. She was commissioned as a spy boat in the Pacific during WWII, and she was a gun runner in the Philippines. The Nam Sang was built in Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1934 for the America's Cup competition. She had steam-bent white oak framing and two-inch teak decking. The planking was 2 and 3/4" Honduras mahogany, painted blue. She carried 17 tons of lead in her keel for ballast, had an 82 foot hollow, black, aluminum mast, and lots of super expensive stainless steel equipment. The stairs down to the main salon were one side of a 500 gallon stainless steel fuel tank. The diesel engine pushed her along easily at ten knots.
The time came to sail, but Johnson suddenly couldn't go. He had a problem with the coast guard, he said. We should go on without him, he said. He'd meet us in Hawaii with money and gear, he said. Peter became captain, and he and Bob went down to the beach to leanr navigating with our sextant, the only navigation equipment we had.
Dick said the weather would be fine, so we sailed west out of Long Beach Yacht Club into the dead of night. We had a crew of 14, two of whom had some sailing experience, Big John, a teenager who’d sailed his dad's boat off Newport, and Jeff, who’d worked on a fishing boat. Everybody else was green as grass. A very bright green or they never would have gone at all.
Johnson probably didn't expect us to sail. Our mortgage contract required him to start paying us back when the boat reached New Zealand. If the boat never got to New Zealand, or we got into some kind of trouble and disappeared, Dick would get a cheap boat. But we'd just driven a van across the U.S., and Peter was a bona fide mechanical genius, and Bob had located himself with the sextant in Long Beach several times in a row. We were sure we could sail this fine boat as far as Hawaii.
We left at midnight and the weather was fine - as fine a dense fog as there ever was. We couldn't see one end of the boat from the other. I was soon as seasick as a pig. Then we nearly hit a Russian submarine. The sub shined a light on us, and Peter turned on our biggest flashlight and pointed it at the sub. The sub then turned off its enormous spotlight, and the crew saw the big red star on the sub's conning tower.
We motored on in the fog taking great care to avoid the offshore islands. Sometime after midnight a fire started. It was extinguished without damage to the boat, but we had no more power except from the batteries which we saved for starting the engine. We lost the refrigeration and were left with a burning curiosity to talk to Dick's Coast Guard buddy who’d just re-wired the boat. Peter found a dead short in the system that caused everything to burn up as soon as the bilge pumps were turned on. No more bilge pumps, no more running lights.(Later we learned Dick's "Coast Guard buddy" was an undercover investigator gathering evidence against Johnson for violating maritime law on chartering vessels.)
Peter spent the rest of the night jury-rigging manual bilge pumps. Everyone then took shifts to keep them operating 24 hours a day for the rest of the voyage. I'd stopped thinking of it as a trip and was thinking of it more as a voyage. If anyone had the slightest bit of nerve left, they'd have suggested we turn back. Later, Peter admitted that a single request to turn back would have persuaded him to do so. We sailed on.
Christine ran the galley, a feat in itself, and tended to me as well. I spent a lot of time hugging the toilet. I puked for ten days. Actually it was dry-heaving, as I put nothing in my stomach but a little water for ten days. I felt sorry for the crew when I wasn't feeling sorry for myself, as they had to endure retching sounds almost continuously. I was sure I'd eventually get over it, like the others who were seasick, but I didn't. I refused Dramamine; I was told it could cause a habit. After ten days I took Dramamine. It was that or jump over the side.
The Nam Sang had four below-deck areas. The fo'csle (forecastle) at the bow end, the main salon after that, an ‘after-cabin,’ and then the captain's cabin. Chris and I were in the after-cabin, Peter, Maggie and Bob were in the captain's cabin. I only saw them occasionally while I was sick.
Reeling around on deck one day, I saw a man go overboard. It was John Keck. He was riding in a bosun's chair suspended from the end of the boom. The crew took turns doing this. It was a wild ride. The boat sailed along at 7 or 8 knots, and Keck was bouncing and skimming along the water, when he suddenly, inexplicably spread his arms, letting go of the line attached to the chair. The bosun's chair was really just a strap of canvas that wrapped under the persons' seat, and as soon as Keck let go, he was sucked out of the chair, and the boat quickly drew away from him.
Two or three of us yelled, "MAN OVERBOARD!" I saw the horrified look on Keck's face as we left him in our wake, and he stroked the water with great vigor. Chris took a position on the stern and locked her eyes on Keck's position. Peter threw the life preserver toward him, the kind mounted on a javelin so it could be thrown effectively, but the javelin part broke in half as it was thrown, and the life preserver fell uselessly a few yards from our stern.
Keck fell further and further behind, and soon he'd be lost in the infinite horizon of identical swells, and we'd have no idea where to look for him. We'd had no drills, so we learned how to recover a man while doing it.
Peter yelled, "Prepare to fall off and come about." Crew members looked for stations that weren't already manned, and Big John yelled more orders, different from Peter's. Big John's idea was to head into the wind and stop the boat. Peter told Big John to shut up and come about. Keck was now invisible to everyone but Christine.
In order to come about, the rudder had to be turned, and the boom swung across to the other side of the boat. A hard vang secured the boom, so it had to be released before we could come about. I crashed into Peter at the cleat where the boom was hard vanged. What a look he had on his face. He was unused to confronting serious dangers with such a bunch of greenhorns. But the crew finally turned the boat.
The Nam Sang ran back on a reverse course, and I wondered what sort of funeral service would be appropriate. Ten minutes of searching and we sighted Keck stroking mightily on a due west course. We hauled him aboard, and then laughed about who would have made Hawaii first, John Keck or the Nam Sang.
People still rode in the bosun's chair, like Jeff the surfer, who had no fear, even in situations where he should have had. When he was at the wheel one day, he saw a blue glass float bobbing in the water, the kind fishermen use in their nets. It was the size of a basketball and was a prized bauble. Saying nothing, Jeff let go of the wheel, ran to the side of the boat, and dived overboard. He swam to retrieve the float while the rest of crew either fell over sideways, ducked the boom as it lurched about, or spilled their lunch on themselves.
Jeff took rides in the bosun's chair even after everyone else quit. Everyone else quit the day an oversize telephone pole passed between Big John and the boat while Big John was riding in the Bosun's chair. We were all surprised that such big, dangerous stuff floated around in the ocean. It could have easily killed Big John or holed the boat.
There was a spot of foul weather halfway across, but it wasn't severe. And we were becalmed once in water so flat, it was like a bathtub. And somehow, garbage accumulated there. Tennis shoes, styrofoam cups, plastic bags, floats, pieces of wood, and bits of paper were strewn about on the surface of an ocean gone perfectly still like a pond without ripples. We used some precious battery power to start the engine, and motored off looking for some wind.
On days 12, 13 and 14 of the voyage, as we were theoretically approaching Hawaii, Bob took lots of sightings with the sextant. Peter kept him company during these procedures until the day Bob said, "What do you think, Peter, am I doing this right? I mean, I think I'm doing it right, but sometimes I'm not sure." Bob seemed anxious as he spoke.
Peter said gravely, "Bob, I don't want to hear this now. The time for telling me you aren't sure about how to navigate was in Long Beach. You said you could navigate." After that Bob took his sightings alone.
By the 15th day, Bob looked tense all the time. And we almost lost the ship's cat, Nemo, that day. We'd hauled in a tuna on the trolling line. It was cut up and cooked right away. The beating heart was thrown on the deck for Nemo. The heart made one final beat that took it over the taff rail that ran around the edge of the boat. Nemo leaped after the escaping heart and, like a cartoon cat, found himself over the water and about to fall into the sea. He twisted his body around in mid-air, and jumped back onto the boat from an invisible platform. He was a nervous looking cat when he got back on the solid deck.
On the morning of the 16th day, the battery powered radio direction finder picked up music. It had a range of only 50 miles, so we had to be near Hawaii. Bob's hypoxia left him, and he went from ash gray to rosy red. By afternoon he knew we were dead on Hilo. The radio confirmed this, and a school of dolphins appeared to escort us into Hilo Bay.
I never experienced anything quite like the mixture of joy, relief and anticipation that followed the vigorous shout, "Land Ho." The crew crowded around the bow pulpit, and stared forward to assure themselves it wasn't just another cloud on the horizon.
They stayed crowded around the bow pulpit to watch the zany antics of the dolphins. There was no doubt these zesty mammals were playing with the boat. They swam alongside the bow then, one at a time, as though playing a kind of tag, each broke suddenly across the Nam Sang's course, letting the boat come within inches of touching them. They did it over and over again. They stayed with us until we reached the main channel into the harbor. As the sun set, we entered Hilo Bay.
The Nam Sang's blue hull and black mast made her look like a shadow as she slipped into a quiet corner of the bay. We dropped anchor, put our two man boat over the side, and began ferrying the crew ashore. Two rowed ashore, one rowed back. Keck and I went first. We pulled for the nearest hotel lights some 250 yards away. Keck rowed back to the Nam Sang. I climbed up the shoreline rocks to a manicured lawn. Thirty yards across the lawn, a hundred people were celebrating in a travel brochure luau. I waited for more crew to come ashore, then Chris and I went to get a hotel room so we could all take showers.
We’d wasted little fresh water washing or shaving the last 16 days. We did not blend inconspicuously with the luau people. As we emerged from the darkness to cross the lawn to the hotel entrance, mystified looks followed our passage.
The sun and saltwater had scoured all our surfaces. We were like pieces of driftwood worn down to the harder inner material. We were brown leather faces, shocks of bleached, salt-coated hair, faded cutoffs and torn worn-out shirts. Our minds were scoured as well. Surface tension and self-consciousness were gone. Only hard simple thoughts remained. I saw how people sat in their chairs, the size of the panes of glass in the hotel's entry doors, the dimensions of the lawn, the colors of the flowers strung around people's necks, and the feelings of each person I met, but I wasn't distracted by these peripheral details or self-conscious. It was a difference in the mind that I might describe as the easy feeling of walking with no suitcase after walking with two heavy suitcases.
We rented a room, and most of the crew showered. Peter wouldn't leave the boat. By morning, the keel was finding the stony bottom of the bay, and he moved Nam Sang to an excellent mooring alongside a concrete pier where the professional, mostly Japanese, fishermen tied up. There was electricity and water. There was easy access to central Hilo. There were repair facilities. There was a telephone, a grocery store, and a movie theater. But there was no Dick Johnson.
Peter called him in Long Beach several times over the next few days. Johnson had an infinite variety of explanations, comments and suggestions, and another convoluted plan he pressed us to adopt. He never got angry or admitted that he wasn't really our ally, and he always found a way to evade our demands that he comply with our agreements. He knew we were desperate for his cooperation, and he promised it. But he didn't deliver. Eventually he made thinly veiled threats about our problems in Indiana.
One gorgeous Hawaiian day, as we stood on the pier alongside palm trees, birds of paradise, wild gardenias and the Nam Sang, I said to Peter, "Do you want me to go on with you to New Zealand, or should I go back?"
Peter said, "I don't think we're going to get much help from Johnson. Do what you think best."
"Well," I said, "I wasn't much help from Long Beach to here. I'm afraid that, if I go on with the boat, there won't be anyone on the other end of the rope."
Peter wouldn't define my role. "You gotta' do whatever you think you can do." he repeated.
I said, "Well, I'm going back and see what I can do with Indiana and Johnson. When you say, 'Michael, I need you,' I'll come."
"Okay," he said.
We'd agreed earlier, when we realized our lives had become complicated beyond our understanding, that we'd always try to ‘do the right thing,’ whatever that might mean. We thought Mark Twain made sense when he said, "If you always do good, you'll gratify some people and amaze the rest." We had hostile opponents who outweighed us. Our defense strategy was to amaze them.