I left Love's Labor Lost at Stratford on July 14, 1979 with Bud Rose in his gold 1974 Comet. We were headed West; a trip we had been planning for about a month — since I told him at the By The Way Cafe that I had a strong urge to go to California. He said he was going that way too; that we should head out together.
Before leaving Toronto I stopped at Miriam's. Bud suggested the meeting because she wanted to see me off. With my green canvas trapper Nelson backpack and traveling guitar I smiled and she smiled back. Miriam handed me an envelope. "Aren't you going to look inside," she asked, as I pocketed it. The letter contained photos of our time in England. "I hope something comes of your songs."
"Take care," I said, and was off. Apart from having dinner with her the night before, we had not seen each other for a month. I finalized our break up by doing something crazy — standing on the hilltop where we had originally met, and asked for her hand. She said "If you must ask you must know the answer is no."
I quoted some of Rudyard Kipling: "If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run..." Then ran down the hill and disappeared. It must have looked weird to see me running down the hill.
Bud and I played a duet on 'A' harmonicas into the night, finally crashing out with both of us putting the front seats back. Sleeping in the car was so uncomfortable that we ended up outside in the ditch. I told Bud about the first time I had hitchhiked across Canada in 1971, when I got a ride with Julie, a young runaway who was traveling with a guy named Roger. That time we crossed the prairies jamming on 'E' harmonicas. Not long after we arrived in Vancouver there were demonstrations and I helped the two disperse when the riot act was read in Gas Town. I visited Roger in Ottawa just before flying to Europe and he told me that her parents had put up billboards all across Canada with a message to her to come home, 'we love you.' She walked out of a hostel one morning and saw her picture on a billboard. It freaked her out at first and ultimately brought her home. That was around the time I learned to play a song on violin:
How I Learned How to Play Violin on Wrecked Beach
It was a short walk down to Wrecked Beach near UBC to get to where the nudes were. On the way I explored some abandoned WW2 bunkers with peace graffiti in them, broken wine and pop bottles and evidence of all sorts of anti-establishment behavior. Through the bunkers' opening people were playing Frisbee on the beach; I threw a few shots with them. I had at this time not yet perfected my toss, and went on with my life such as it was.
There were nudes and squatters on the beach, and one had a bright red painted violin. I asked if I could play it; it being a long time since I had played my green nickel guitar. I sat in the sand and taught myself You Are My Sunshine. People passed by as I struggled over and over to get the notes. As soon as I completed the song correctly one time I went to the beach and sat down.
Some people smiled at me, having heard me struggle through it. I came to some people I recognized from the hostel, and dropped my garments in the sand. A man named George with red hair and extremely fair skin was doing calisthenics with his mouth and tongue because he wanted to be a disk jockey. As the day progressed under the pure blue sky Mr. Chameleon — that's how I remember him — turned bright red. He was totally red, except for his tongue. I found a shiny quarter in the sand and put in my pocket.
Sunday morning we arrived in Sturgeon Falls, at my uncle Ron and aunt Armond's place, but my grandma was still at Mass. We had breakfast of tea with toast, eggs and tomatoes. Armond was crying because a recent flood had destroyed her house. She showed us pictures of the devastated village taken from the cross on the hill. Her house had been right across the road from the river and didn't have a chance. "Why is the Canadian Government doing so much for the boat people," she said, "When people are suffering here?"
I hadn't seen grandma since 1971 when I first backpacked to BC, with eight cans of beans and my long hair. (The beans lasted all the way to Regina, I could fit a can in each of the side pockets of my army surplus jacket.) As usual she said, "Oh, you're one of Fern's boys.
We passed Lake Lauzon under a clear blue sky, with me playing guitar in the front seat and Bud jamming on harp. "Sault St. Marie had one of the best roads we ever encountered," Bud said, "Two miles of blissful potholes." At a picnic table at Pancake Park we ate curried vegetables.
A myriad of stars and a glow from the other side of Lake Superior could be seen from our campsite. We noticed the fleeting flickers of the Aurora Bore Alice mingling with the Milky Way. I awoke to Bud's mushroom soup and serenaded two girls from Sault St. Marie. Bud kept repeating the tune to my latest song; Great Engineer.
We walked to the beach and sat beside the two girls; they seemed to be out of a Canadian version of an Ingmar Bergman film, called The Shores of Lake Superior. "Write down Bud has yet to take one photograph." So Bud went off to take a few pictures. He lugged his 8 x 10 camera about twenty feet from the car, set it up so that it was ten inches from the ground and photographed some moss. While he was shooting I learned Spoon River, which had been left taped on Paul's door just before I left. I lamented the loss of my capo. Before taking off I met with Paul and Alcatrash on Bloor Street, which was under construction, and sat on a bulldozer after an all-nighter. I played Soft Shoe.
Ate some lunch by a rock Bud photographed and played Blue Whale Blues. Playing guitar in the passenger's seat was rather uncomfortable. As we were leaving Pancake Park a middle aged man stared at the griffin necklace I was wearing as if it were Satanic. He pointed to the cross around his neck and said "This is what you should be wearing."
I pulled out my new Oxford edition of my Bible and showed it to him. "You don't have to be concerned about me."
Most of my entries I made in the journal as we crossed Canada focused on the vegetarian food Bud whipped up. Bought vegetables in Thunderbay and created a midnight salad by the river with mosquitoes swarming around. We stopped at the Great Western Hotel in Irvine Alberta for a beer. Had a salad in the park by the covered wagon monkey bars. A freckly faced kid was throwing rocks, and a train rolled by while Bud talked about his Yoga instructor who advocated extreme hygiene after bowel movements. I was thinking of the two tins of tuna I had stashed away in case I got really desperate.
On the outskirts of Medicine Hat the song, When I Need You, came on the radio, so I turned it off. That was Miriam's favorite song. The DJ said it was Wild Rose country. I drove most the day to Calgary wearing my Florida t-shirt, cut off jeans and argyle socks. In the evening I finished the book of Genesis.
We made it to Banff; got a campsite at Tunnel Mountain, showered and went downtown. Stopped in at the school of fine arts where Bud showed his photography portfolio to some students. I ran into Liz Anderson, who went to school with me in grade 10; she showed me around. We went to some Hot Springs at Sulfur Mountain and then walked along a nature trail stopping occasionally to look at the wild flowers.
Meanwhile, back at the campsite Bud was cutting up some mushrooms for soup. The soup tasted awful. I was getting tired of vegetarian food. Sitting on the park bench Bud pulled out his portfolio again. I looked into a Nikon F3, my first time ever, and felt like a kid looking into a Kaleidoscope or perhaps a cheap brass telescope. We decided to go on a hike. We asked directions to the Gondola Lift, and a girl with strawberry complexion and wisps of white hair blowing in the sunny breeze told us the way. There were too many tourist lined up at the gondola so we went to Johnson Canyon to see the waterfall and the Inkpots. The road was camper-to-camper traffic; we played a duet on the blues harps to pass the time.
With most of Bud's 35 mm camera stuff in my green Trapper Nelson we walked along the river with the railing, passing loads of tourists. At the waterfall, where we were blasted by the spray, Bud kept setting up the camera on the tripod for pictures, so I encouraged him to keep moving. A family passed me with their pet beagle, and asked me to blow a few notes on the harp so the dog could sing along. The dog wailed as the shutterbug kept clicking away.
Past a narrow swinging bridge we ran into some down and out country folks sitting by the river. Bud ate a bun and some rancid cheese squeezed out of a tube that they offered us. The bun was moldy; the cheese was old, hot and fluorescent orange looking. The man was totally nude sitting on a rock beside two girls who were dirty and tattooed. They talked of the local grizzly bears they had to contend with in their wild existence. The vision of the country folk against the majestic mountains and the fluorescent cheese was more than I could endure. I urged Bud to push on.
Spent time composing an impromptu symphony by tossing variations of rocks into the ink-pots, which were perfectly still pools of pure water. Bud supplied the bass runs with larger rocks. Some of those large rocks came pretty close to hitting me. Bud stopped for a long time to photograph some moss on a rock just as the sun went behind the mountain. While he was engrossed in that wranglers lead two wretched ponies past me in a scene straight out of a Wilf Carter song. It was dark when we arrived at the parking lot by a narrow bridge where a man and his girlfriend stood beside a motorcycle embracing the moonlight.
We left Banff. Bud slept in the ditch of a huge hairpin curve by a hill and I slept on top of the hill twenty feet above the road, a safer place, amid the dried weeds and barbed wire fence where there was not much space to drop off.
"Did I ever tell you about my pet dragonfly... I was in Golden BC fighting forest fires and had the day off in Golden. I went with David, one of the first Jewish people I ever met. We were both planning to go to Europe. I went with him to the post office and a dragonfly alighted on my shirt and stayed there. David was not impressed. A year and a half later I ran into him in Italy in a youth hostel, when I was on my way to Oslo and he was on the way to Africa. I played him Talking Forest. He wasn't impressed by that either. He did laugh at the line: 'The lunches were unbearable as a matter of fact, the bears would steal them and then bring them back.'"
"You know Miriam never could have married you, because you're not Jewish, Bud said, taking a cryptic tack as we went down the road. "So It's just as well that you learned how to put out fires."
The day we left Toronto there had been an article in the Star about the moon landing; it being a decade since the event, so I shared about my human scarecrow experience at the cherry farm. That's what I was doing when man landed on the moon. Bud and I joked around about it, as I made up an extemporaneous song.
We stopped for gas and checked the oil. Beside the garage was an old Coca Cola cooler used to store worms for fishing. I looked through Bud's Ikoflex medium format camera at a large sand hill that was falling like a halter top into a 'V' shape. Bud called me back to the car. The car had two souvenir feathers stuck into a crack on the dashboard. Made it to Vancouver and saw a lousy production of the musical No No Nanette in Stanley Park...
The height of Bud's trip was to stop in Carmel, California, to see "The Master Himself." It was July 28, 1979, the day Bud arranged to see Ansel Adams for a portfolio review. We visited him at his residence overlooking the bay and watched the Pelicans that swooped in single file among the rocks. I think they were pelicans. Ansel Adams was congenial to even me, as I sat and waited under a huge antique drum above the doorway.
I had seen all the photos in Bud's portfolio — including one that I thought would be extremely strange to show one of the World's Greatest Photographers — Girl in the Snow. Bud had a double exposure shot of a short nude girl lying in the snow. If you take a nude photograph of someone on a white drop cloth and sandwich it with a nature shot of a patch of snow in the woods, it became 'Art.' The model, of course, was Miriam. Bud must have gotten her to pose after she had completed her stint with weight watchers.
The first time I saw The Girl in Snow was at a party at Miriam's place the last weekend of 1978. It wasn't a pleasant experience. That was just after I had seen Miriam in a disco with another guy. We had both bought new suits in London in the summer of 78. She bought a burgundy velvet dress suit, and I bought a tan Harris Tweed three piece suit. We had never worn these suits until the very day, when we both went out on our own, and ended up at the same disco. Paul was with me at the time and took me up to the CN tower. From the lofty revolving tower he said "It doesn't look good. You had better forget about her." I didn't want to go to the party, but all my friends were there. Nearly everyone looked at the contact sheets. On the trip to California I had seen the shot at least five times, and now Ansel Adams would see it.
Called up Lucy C. and went for lunch at Mike's Munchies in Manhattan Beach. It had been seven years since we had traveled together in Norway and we had a pleasant chat. I played her a couple songs that she requested; Tree and The Wind, and Firecracker Day, explaining that I had changed the lyrics to them to become Philosopher and the Clown and the Yodeling Frog. She told me that her father was sponsoring her medical degree at Yale.
The last I'd heard from Lucy was a post card of Le Mont Saint-Michel in France on April 10, 1973. "Dear Toothpaste—BURP—As you can see, I'm still floating around Europe, currently with my father and sister hitting all the fancy restaurants in France. I saw Eric last week and found out the big Dominique is doing the sky scene. I got hung up in Amsterdam all winter working in a meditation center of all places—De Kosmos. The weather is nothing to write home about. Love you Lucy.
Things were starting to fall apart with Bud. We had fun roller-skating in San Francisco, visiting the King Tut Exhibit, eating at Sushi bars and seeing the ruins of the old beach house. But it got strange when we stayed with some people in LA who were doing LSD. I made the mistake of driving them all to a nude beach and was the odd man out because I declined their drugs. It was a mistake to chauffeur six back seat drivers with their perceptions totally out the window. Sitting at the nude beach, Bud confided that things weren't working out, that we should go our separate ways. He gave me an eagle feather for good luck. I had made a tape of six songs to show around L.A.; he wished me well. As I sat there, before leaving Bud for the last time, I thought about the Squatters hut that I had found at Wrecked Beach on Vancouver Island in 1971:
After reaching Long Beach I found at squatter's hut, which was about three feet high, made of driftwood. I put down my trapper Nelson pack and took out the clothes that needed washing, and washed them in the ocean. There was a line of debris, flotsam and stuff that had washed ashore. I struck up a conversation with a blonde girl with an afro. She sat by the squatter's hut and rolled a cigarette with some tobacco that she had in a tin. Said she was fifteen and looking for adventure while traveling around with her parents in a camper. The most adventure that I could offer her was to read her my poetry. Shortly after she went back to her parents, two older guys; the athletic type asked about her. "She's fifteen," I said, "And traveling with her parents."
"That doesn't matter," one said. They were drinking wine from a bottle. I had seen the two earlier in the sand, with only their heads showing. They went off in the direction of the camper and handed me the last of the wine. As they walked away I noticed there was a snail in the wine. I didn't drink it. I walked to the rocks and watched the waves make momentary monuments of magic. When the sky became dark some kids with torches made circles of glowing firewood and threw then in the air like the kids did in the book Painted Bird. It was hard to sleep in the hut, with all the sand in my sleeping bag.
In a phone booth off Broadway I made my way up to the letter 'S' in the phone book with one measly roll of dimes. Cliff Stone listened to my demo, in a seventh floor office on Hollywood Boulevard, and didn't like them. I looked at the pictures of country and western stars on the wall, and played him a few more country songs. His opinion changed. He wanted Merl Haggard to do Great Engineer, and Dolly Parton to do Sugar Heart.
Having done that, gotten my foot in the door, I flew to San Francisco to make another demo. When I boarded the cable car at Powel and Market, the morning was clear; the street people hadn't come out yet. I felt good taking the cable car, the same feeling of exhilaration that I had crossing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. The morning had been sort of magical, except for bombing with my audition, to busk at Fisherman's Wharf. I played Tour de Farce and San Francisco Bay Blues. The man said "We don't need anymore folkies." As I walked across the street something happened that would change my life forever.
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