Looking for Ken Kesey in Eugene, finding permission and possibility instead
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Now, more than a year out of the Army, I had lost my momentum. I was teaching a class at a local junior college and stringing book reviews for The Patriot Ledger
—
but I was drifting. Walking Tess and watching the January waves thunder on deserted Nantasket Beach, I was dimly hoping a plan would coalesce out of the Atlantic mists. At some point I read Ken Kesey's novel 'Sometimes a Great Notion' and got it into my head to go to Oregon.
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Kesey was legendary in the Willamette Valley. After the success of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' and his subsequent adventures and misadventures, he had returned (some said retreated) to his family dairy farm. The old school bus from his Prankster days stood in the weeds in his yard, Day-Glo colors fading, still declaring its wistful destination: FURTHUR. He was sometimes glimpsed around town, but mostly he lay low, working on his books, one presumed.
Ken Kesey's bus "Furthur."
RCarlberg/Wikimedia Commons
Kesey had done his share of life's road-going; perhaps he would have wisdom to impart, I figured. So, during my first semester in the fall of 1972, adjusting to being a student again, I would occasionally tweeze his phone number out of my wallet and consider giving him a buzz.
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Eugene was quick to enchant me. If my Boston accent gave me away, I nevertheless felt a sense of permission and possibility. I was no one, so I could be anyone.
There was the feeling of being on the floor of a real valley, with the hills rising to the east and west, multihued in autumn, white in winter, emerald in spring and summer. The Willamette, the river that gives the valley its name, flowed past the campus's north flank. Close by were bookstores, record shops, places to eat and drink. There was Mama's Home Fried Truck Stop for breakfasts; Taylor's on the corner of East 13th and Kincade for burgers; Book & Tea with the invitation of comfy chairs and soft music; jazz nights at Duffy's; and, on any occasion, beer-smelling Max's, its peanut-shell floor crackling underfoot.
Neighborhoods of craftsman's cottages and small bungalows shaded by alders and cedars gave an impression of having evolved by a natural feng shui, with vintage stained-glass panels and ferns hanging in macramé slings on the open porches. And everywhere, moss grew on roofs because ... the rain. It was a presence, especially in winter, and this took some getting used to, but it was a soft rain, a mystical Irish rain.
The town had an air of peacefulness, as though it were bathed in endorphins, or perhaps I was. There were athletes everywhere and track history was in the process of being made, with Olympian Steve Prefontaine earning laurels as a running phenom. And waddling around on campus were ducks (which provided UO with its rather unterrifying mascot). The politics, like the surrounding hills, tended green, a vibe that could nip with sly humor, like the sign on the bathroom door at Taylor's inviting patrons to make a deposit in THE RICHARD M. NIXON MEMORIAL TRUST FUND.
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In classes, as a veteran in my late 20s, I was on the older end of the spectrum of students, many of whom were more competitive, more ambitious. I attended classes dutifully and continued to hold on to a notion that the academic experience might solidify around me as it once had and point a way ahead.
One day an archivist friend at the university library contacted me, explaining that Kesey, a UO alum, had deposited a trove of his notebooks, letters, and manuscripts and wanted to have them inventoried. Was I interested? She would be in touch with details. Also, there was a professor looking to round up a few grad students for a study group. Led by him, we would read and probe James Joyce's monument of high modernism, 'Finnegan's Wake
.
'
It seemed a crazy idea — but why not? I was in. Thus, with these projects pending, I felt my scholar's life in the Emerald Valley beginning to sync.
The author, center, with friends on the Oregon coast circa 1973.
David Daniel
Then, unexpectedly, my contact for the archive project announced it was off. Then the professor with a skeleton key to 'Finnegan's Wake' took ill, and
pfft!
— that project was gone too. I discovered I wasn't disappointed.
I found that although I was mastering a knack for scholarship and the critical mindset it requires, I wasn't that
into
it. I was investing more time in my own poems and short stories, leaking some into print here and there. I felt my life expanding outward. There were new relationships, weekend drives to Portland and to the high desert in the eastern part of the state. One weekend I biked the 60 miles over to the coast, where the ocean was bigger, colder, wilder than what I was used to, and camped in the dunes.
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A friend named Fred Widmer, an undergrad from UMass doing an exchange year at Oregon, was a talented fine artist, and for his final project he was going to produce a limited-edition volume of poems. He was making the paper and the ink, would bind it and illustrate the pages with his intricate woodcuts, but he had no poems. Was I interested in providing some? I was.
At the end of the spring term, 1975, having completed most of the course requirements and one of the field exams for the degree, I decided to leave Eugene. It is we who create a place by loading it up with living. I felt I had done that. Would the younger me, hungry in a different way, have stayed on? Probably, but that person was no more. 'Axolotl' came out — a very limited handcrafted edition of poems. The Library of Congress has one of the few extant copies.
I came back to Massachusetts where I've lived, teaching and writing, ever since. I never did call Ken Kesey. I kept his number in my wallet for years, the phone book page growing ever more worn with each unfolding when I'd show it to people.
Time, like the river, goes on and the places it has passed recede. Some you look back to with a sense of gratitude for having been there. For me, Eugene, Ore., is a feeling, a sizzle of rain on mossy roofs, the piney tang of Douglas firs, a reckoning, a love, a poem, a ghost, a dream.
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David Daniel is the author of nine novels and four collections of stories. His most recent book is Beach Town, stories set on Boston's South Shore. He can be reached at daviddaniel67@gmail.com.
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