Free The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut

we’d need up there anyway? We had taken the big step. The others would become clear as we went along, just like all the other steps in this long, strange journey.
    One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, has worked just fine so far. No percentage in changing our mode of operation now. It seems an awful lot like someone or something is doing a first-rate job
of taking care of us. This whole project is a little nutsy—I mean, if you had told me a few years back. But look at the breaks we’ve gotten. Something or someone must have something in mind for us. Why fuck it up with overplanning? I think maybe whatever or whoever doesn’t care much for planners, or maybe it’s just that it finds them hard to cheer up. Whatever-whoever seems to need a little slack to work with. Well, we’ll make damn sure it has plenty of that.
    In late August ’70 the farm became our home.
     
    OUR NEW HOME AND FAMILY. Jack and Kathy signed on shortly after we got there. They were often referred to as the little people. Kathy was five feet tall at most and Jack hit maybe five-three. They had both lived in the same house I did my last two years at Swarthmore, but I still can’t say I knew them very well. They were good friends of Simon’s. Both were borderline blondes with blue eyes, but Jack with his scraggly beard was considerably more scruffy looking.
    Kathy had a Wisconsin-farm-girl wholesomeness that years of heroin addiction wouldn’t have put much of a dent in. She had cheer-leader good looks and a soft Rubensesque femininity that contrasted sharply with Virginia’s tallness and spare lines. If you were to pick out someone at the farm to call normal, it would be Kathy.
    Jack was generally quiet, but it was a strong rather than a shy quietness. He was into Zen and mountain climbing but in a very nonflaky way. If there was anyone at the farm with feet firmly on the ground, it was Jack. He had a much more tangible reason for being there than the rest of us, too. He was our official draft dodger. Kathy and he had been together since their freshman year.
    Sarah and Beowulf were the next additions to our motley crew. More blue-eyed blondes. Sarah was a close friend of Virginia’s. She was beyond a doubt the driftiest person there, but drifty in a very lovable, loving way. She was very bright but just wasn’t paying much
attention. Whenever I said anything to her I always had the impression that I had just woken her up.
    Beowulf was an unknown quantity Sarah had found in Oregon. He had a ramrod-stiff spine, a darting weasel face with eyes that never seemed to blink, and a wispy, almost-not-there beard. He made his own clothes and wasn’t much of a seamstress. That and his stiff, machinelike way of moving gave him the look of a hastily thrown together puppet.
    On our first town trip, we stayed with Joe and Mary and met Luke, whom they had found a few months earlier in the Kootenays, a mountain range about halfway between the Rockies and the coast. He came back up the lake with us and fit in like a charm. Physically and spiritually he was much more like me than any of the others, and I came to feel almost as close to him as to Zeke.
    Vincent passed through for two or three weeks every couple of months or so, and other friends and strangers would drop in and stay awhile, but the above plus Simon, Virginia, and me made up the basic cast.
     
    Shelter was the first order of business. There were two standing structures—a roof on eight-foot stilts with half-walls on three sides and open on the fourth that had sheltered a tractor in the old days, and the towering house that McKenzie had said had no value. We set up a kitchen in the smaller structure and set about redoing the house.
    McKenzie was right about the house and we would have done much better to tear it down and use the materials to build new ones. It was strangely built; set on a foundation of dug-in logs with hand-split eight-by-eight uprights every two feet, it rose about