Free The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut Page B

thing that upset me was having other people upset by this or that hardship. I wanted everyone to love it as much as I did.
    I was in great health, better than I had been in for a long time, and in a good mood most of the time. I even cut down my smoking some.
    I think I was thinking less than I had in years. Maybe it was just that thinking wasn’t the only thing I was doing. I liked thinking less.
    Think think think. What a funny word. A funny sound, a funny
meaning. Almost as funny as funny. I think I’ve probably spent more time and energy thinking than most people, but that’s a very hard thing to be able to say for sure. I don’t even know very well what thinking is, let alone have a way to tell who’s doing it and how much.
    Thinking something worth thinking. What would that look like? That’s the sort of thing I spent a lot of time thinking about. If you want to get something, thinking might help you get it. But I really didn’t do very much of that sort of thinking unless you want to stretch definitions. There wasn’t very much by way of things I wanted. I’d been spoiled rotten as far as that went. I didn’t even think that kind of thinking was thinking. The kind of thinking I did was mostly a luxury item and it wasn’t much fun.
    Some of my happiness, no doubt, was simple good old vanity. I had done what I had said I was going to do, and the pot was sweetened by having what we were doing be such a glamorous, romantic, noble venture. Through most of the early days I walked around with a giddy giggly cockiness bubbling inside, as if we were pulling off a particularly elegant jewel heist.
    For years I had looked at wherever I happened to be and realized “I can’t stay here.” It wasn’t a panicky “got to get out of here” feeling as much as just sadly realizing that for one reason or another it could never be home. There were lots of good reasons to be upset by the cities—noise, lights, bustle, misery—but my reaction had gone far beyond intellectual distaste and had been literally shaking me apart. My serious doubts about how much longer I could have held out added a great deal to my joy at having found a place I could stay, a home.
    I remember Victor, an early visitor, saying “I think I have more mosquito bites than not mosquito bites.” But the hardships were part of what we had all come there for, and there wasn’t much bitching about them. Besides, we found that there really wasn’t much that couldn’t be done, it was just a lot harder to do. We were getting rid of
the insulation, partly out of curiosity about what life would be like without all the insulation we were used to, partly out of guilt at what that insulation had cost, partly in the expectation that the insulation was about to be wiped out anyway by one or another of the disasters we saw in the apocalyptic smorgasbord of the future. We thought it was good for us.
     
    What gave me more pleasure at the farm than anything else was playing my saxophone. After putting in a good day’s work clearing brush or chopping wood, I’d get out my old tenor horn, climb up on the roof, and play my heart out. Sometimes I’d be all tense and jittery and my hands or mouth would fuck up, but more often things fit together like magic and I’d sit up on our funky roof on our funky house, looking out on the mountains, feeling completely at peace and in harmony with the world and like I could play forever.
    One of the things that made it all so wonderful was the acoustical properties of the valley. It held the sound just enough to give each note a lingering resonance without giving it any echo. That valley was made for music, especially the tenor sax, especially my tenor sax. Wherever I had played music before, I always had to contend with other sounds—cars going by, the hum of an electrical appliance. The only other sounds at the farm were an occasional wind and the melodic babbling of the stream running over the rocks. Although I may have