When I was a Vegetarian and Killed Rabbits (1981-1984)
When I was in my mid- twenties (in the early 1980’s) I lived for about three years outside of Olympia, Washington, on a property that nearly abutted The Evergreen State College (TESC.) (Parenthetically, I was living in Olympia when Mt. St. Helens erupted about 70 miles south of us– but it really wasn’t my fault!) I lived in a tiny wooden cabin (about 10’ x 10’ with a half- loft) that I helped to build which had no electricity or running water. I cooked on a propane camp stove, had a gravity-feed cold water system, used a kerosene lamp and a small wood stove, and crapped in an outhouse. Looking back, it was the second-best time of my life, with only the period when our daughter was about six – to – eighteen months being more fun and rewarding.
For two summers prior to moving to Olympia I had hitch-hiked across the country and then drove across the country with my dog Murphy and, following my childhood interest in U.S. state capitals, I had visited my favorite capital city name, Olympia. I pretty much instantly fell in love with the town, the quaint shops and the friendly people. So I went back to Baltimore, sold the only stuff that was worth anything (a pretty decent stereo system, albums, and reel-to-reel tapes, etc.), packed my funky old car (with the back seat torn out and a wooden bed installed which extended from the back of the front seats into the trunk) and moved with Murphy to OlyWa.
Soon after I arrived my car died , I met my first new OlyWa friend named Fletcher who took me under his wing, introduced me to a lot of people and told me to sign up for food stamps. One day Fletcher spent the day driving around town (in his purple Gremlin), turning my few hundred dollars of food stamps into cash (buying $1.05 worth of food and getting 95 cents in change, etc.) I took the cash and the little savings I had and bought a brand new bicycle. That was my only form of transportation for the three years I lived in Olywa. I rode my bike in all seasons and all weather (mostly rain.)
Fletcher told me there was a hippie college outside of town, and encouraged me to sign up for one class at TESC (I think it cost about $150 per semester) to get access to the library (with the Macintosh stereo room,) the nude beach, the saunas and showers, the free concerts and free movie nights, etc. Hanging around the campus I then found out about a nearby property with a mostly-built cabin and agreed to finish the cabin and live there rent free in exchange for giving the property owner one day of labor per week. The labor mostly consisted in me helping the owner (a young guy originally from MN) build his amazing passive solar house, clearing brush on his approximately 10 acre densely- wooded property, and helping him with his burgeoning hot tub rental business.
I signed up for a writing class at TESC. I think I was the best writer in the class and was encouraged when the class sometimes asked me to read my stuff out loud twice, when no one else was ever asked to do so. I bought an old, used Underwood typewriter and began working on my great American novel with the working title 49 Days in Balto (a play on the expression “49 days in bardo”, the place that Tibetan Buddhists believe you go after death for up to 49 days.) The story was a meandering discourse which theoretically was trying to answer the question: “What happens when you put a chameleon (Doug) into a sensory deprivation tank.” In reality the story was barely lucid and it really didn’t provide many insights into mine or the characters’ lives. But as an excuse to write every week it fulfilled some some purpose, I guess. . .
I became the film critic for the college newspaper The Cooper Point Journal, which meant anytime I was in town I could duck into the State Theatre on Capitol Street or the Capitol Theatre on State Street and watch a movie. I saw some movies (Reds, Cat People, etc.) four or five times. I had a weekly radio program on the college radio station (KAOS) where I read my novel-in-progress—it was a great motivator to keep me writing, knowing that at 8PM every Monday night I had to fill up an hour broadcast! Murphy would greet everyone at the nude beach and I wound up meeting a lot of people, and having a pretty steady stream of girlfriends for the first and only time in my life. Life was sweet!
The first year or so that I lived in Olywa I had only occasional odd-jobs like doing some light carpentry for my writing teacher so most of the time I had no money and what little cash I did have usually went to paying for canned dogfood for Murphy (I definitely had my priorities straight,) or to buy a hand tool. I volunteered at a local food co-op which meant that twice a month I cut and wrapped big blocks of cheese into small blocks (and ate a lot of the cheese!) and bought my food in bulk there. I lived the first year on Masa harina (corn flour,) pancake mix, popcorn (flavored with brewer’s yeast) and vegetables. I supplemented my diet by eating apples that grew in an abandoned orchard off the trail between my house and the college. I was a vegetarian mostly by poverty, I was young and strong, and this was the only time in my life that I was actually thin.
I also ate wild mushrooms that grew in the woods around my house and on the grounds of TESC. In this regard I was extremely lucky to be on campus when Paul Stamets, the internationally- renowned mycologist was a teacher in residence. Stamets had recently published his seminal book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies, and he took students on nature walks, showing us all the different edible, hallucinogenic and poisonous fungi. One time he held up two mushrooms that looked absolutely indistinguishable to me, and he told us that one was mildly hallucinogenic and the other was always fatal! After that I only picked the most easily recognizable shrooms: chanterelles and Liberty caps. One nourished my body and the other my “soul.” Magic mushrooms proved to me that what I had always assumed was a lie was in fact true: there is a oneness, a universal interconnectedness to the world. I guess some people discover this through meditation or prayer, I found it through chemistry.
My first girlfriend in Olywa was named Margarethe, originally from Long Island, NY, who was truly a beautiful free-spirit– a kind of a Ruby Tuesday girl. I met her one night when I was coming home after dark, walking my bike down the narrow winding trail through the woods that led to my cabin. As I approached the cabin I could see that the kerosene lamp was lit– this had never happened before. When I entered my home she called out a name, but it wasn’t mine; she was in the wrong house. Just my luck!
Margarethe and I were pretty much inseparable for a couple of months. One day I was picked up hitchhiking by a logger who gave me a job burning the brush that was left from when he cut down some trees on a suburban property not far from me in West Olympia. Margarethe helped me that day. I had burned brush for my landlord where he showed me how to mix a few gallons of used motor oil with some gasoline to start the fire. Well, this day I screwed up and poured a few gallons of gas on the brush instead! When I lit the fuel I heard a huge rush of air and watched the fire leap to tree-top heights! The fire actually started to scorch some of the adjacent standing trees, not far from the house. I can remember standing there with my heart pounding, my mind already imaging me being locked in jail for arson, when Margarethe came up behind me and, putting her arms around my waist, spoke next to my ear, “Well, at this rate we’ll be done in no time!” After what seemed like an eternity but was probably about a minute, the fire died down, we got the work done and we got paid for the job. Not long after that day Margarethe left me for a new boyfriend, her guitar teacher1.
In my second year in OlyWa I dated a woman named Pat who was a part-time bunny- sexer. That is she was hired to go to peoples’ homes to determine the sex of the rabbits they mostly got at Easter. It turns out that it’s really hard to determine the sex of rabbits as their genitals are tiny and both male and female rabbit genitalia look very similar. Even with her experience and using a magnifying glass, Pat didn’t always get it right. But her job was to separate the sexes so that the owners would have only males or only females, otherwise they would soon be overrun by rabbits. Pat often got to keep the rabbits the owners didn’t want. She would sell them if she could and eat them if she couldn’t.
One day she asked me to come out to a job with her because she was going to kill rabbits and needed help. Killing rabbits is a two- person job because after the first rabbit is killed the scent of blood is in the air and the caged rabbits go mad. So my job was to take the rabbits one at a time to Pat, who was stationed out of sight of the caged rabbits and to make sure I didn’t get any blood on me in the process. This worked pretty well for the first couple of rabbits, but soon the jig was up and the caged rabbits began to scream and shriek (they sounded eerily like human babies) and to claw at me. I had to wear long leather gloves to protect my arms. I was not a happy camper. When it was over I told Pat I wasn’t going to do this anymore.
That night Pat made breaded fried rabbit for dinner. I hadn’t eaten any meat for over a year but I thought that I had “earned” it, so I ate some, and it tasted a lot like fried chicken and I liked it. Not long after that I got a job as a janitor waxing floors in commercial buildings at night in Olympia, Tumwater and Lacey, and occasionally as far as Tacoma. With my now steady paycheck I started to eat meat again pretty regularly, and I never stopped.
At least a couple times a year I hitchhiked to the Skagit Valley in the North Cascades to “recharge my batteries.” I fell in love with the area near Marblemount and camped there for a few days at a time. I dreamed of owning an acre of land and building a cabin but I had zero dollars and nothing came of the dream. One time I made a pilgrimage to Desolation Mountain and spent the night in the fire-watch cabin that Jack Kerouac had worked in one summer.
On the property I lived on in Olywa there was a sauna shed, with a wood stove and a big old-fashioned lion-paw porcelain bathtub. The tub water was heated by water running through coils of pipe at the bottom of the stove. When I wanted a bath I would make a fire and sit in the sauna, waiting for the water to get hot.2 Anyway, one day I met a girl named Daria and invited her to take a sauna with me. That was our first date!
Daria and I lived together for many months in Olywa and were together pretty much every day except for the two weeks when I took my solo Alaskan adventure while she stayed at home and look after Murphy.
That summer I hitchhiked from Olywa up to the Canadian border, and from there hitchhiked north through British Columbia into the Yukon Territory to mile zero of the Alaska-Canadian Highway (ALCAN.) Amazingly, I was picked up by two young guys in a pickup truck who took me the entire 1523 miles to the end of the ALCAN in Alaska; as I lay in the back of the truck, tucked into my sleeping bag, wedged between a motorcycle and an ironing board I watched the vast landscape roll by for a few days. The second night I saw my first Aurea Borealis from the back of the pickup. It was majestic (and magnetic!)
I had my first taste of Matanuska Valley Thunderfuck (pot) when another hitchhiker, an Alaskan native (Inuit?) and I shared a joint along the side of the highway near Fairbanks. I woke up startled on a beach near Homer thinking that I was surrounded by snakes until I realized that giant kelp had washed ashore during the night. A few days later I had the first near-death experience of my life in Denali National Park. In those days (maybe this is still true?) there was a park bus that drove the only road in the park, and it was the only passenger vehicle that was allowed in the park. I took the bus and told the driver that I wanted to hike for a couple of days and he recommended a spot. After a half hour or so he stopped the bus and pointed to a distant horizon and said that this was a good place to hike. He told me to hike to the river2, cross it, and continue hiking for the day. I asked him how was I supposed to cross the river, and he told me that it was low enough that I could walk through the water to the other side.
I had never hiked in mossy terrain like this (taiga? tundra?) and about an hour later when I reached the river carrying my heavy backpack I was sweating. I took a couple of steps into the cold, cold river and the water was already up to my knees. A few more steps and the freezing cold water was at my waist; before I knew it I was being swept downstream! I somehow scrambled back to shore, panting hard. I decided to put my camera in a plastic bag and stuff it in my backpack, and grabbing the backpack and holding it above my head, I charged, like a maniac, into the river again. This time I made it about halfway across before my feet were swept out from under me. I scrambled to find footing as the water rose up to my shoulders! I kept scrambling, moving forward, until I somehow made it to the opposite shore. I lay on the moss, absolutely exhausted, completely soaked and freezing in the afternoon sun. I stripped off my clothes and tried to find something dry in the backpack. We weren’t allowed to make a fire, so I wandered to a nearby tree and pitched my tent, got inside the tent and inside my damp sleeping bag and tried to get warm. As I munched on protein bars slowly my shivering slowed down and I fell asleep before darkness fell, feeling grateful to be alive.
The next morning I awoke at dawn, and needing to pee, I unzipped the sleeping bag and the tent and stood outside. The first thing I saw was a bear, maybe 150 yards away, standing over what I took to be a dead caribou (moose?) with its chest ripped open! That was enough for me– I had no business being out here alone and unarmed and I wanted to be gone. Silently I packed up my camping gear and wearing only my socks, boots and underpants I went back to the river, this time looking for a safer place to ford. I found what I hoped was a safer place and made my way back across the river, this time without the water sweeping me off my feet. In a hour I was standing back at the road thinking: I SURVIVED! When the bus stopped for me I climbed onboard and, seeing it was the same driver from yesterday I pretty much lit into him. I told him that I had nearly drowned and that he’d better stop telling people to “walk across the river.” He said that he had crossed the river himself a month earlier, but I reminded him that a month’s worth of summer snow melt can turn an easy stream crossing into a deadly river drowning, especially for unsuspecting and unprepared morons like myself!
The rest of my Alaskan adventure was much more serene. I hitchhiked to Anchorage and took a cruise ship to Prince Rupert, B.C., watching orca’s with their calves breaching alongside the boat during the day, and sleeping out under the magnificent starry sky in my bag on the deck at night. I got lucky again when a couple of guys who were returning from working on an Alaskan canning boat for the summer drove me all the way back to Tacoma. They even gave me a mason jar of fresh salmon that was the best and sweetest- tasting fish I have ever eaten.
It was about this time that I began to developed an interest in robotics. I went to the school and the public libraries to read about robotics, but I never found anything that seemed practical, that I could possibly experiment with myself. I had not yet heard of personal computers which were just becoming available, and, ironically, I saw my first Apple store (I wasn’t even sure what they were selling) in Olywa the day I left the Pacific Northwest for my return to the east coast.
The rain had finally got to me. Actually it wasn’t so much the rain as the overcast days when it only threatened to rain but you couldn’t see the sun for a week at a time. I constructed a tiny teepee out of firing strips and plastic sheeting, rented an IBM Selectric typewriter for a week and ran an extension cord to the pump house so that I could bang out a copy of my novel-in-progress (200-300 pages?) before I left town. Then I said goodbye to Daria (as it turns out, only temporarily) and Murphy and I rode back to Baltimore in a van full of students going home for the holidays. My Olywa adventure behind me, I returned, a little sad, but still eager to see what would happen next.
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1 I kept in touch with Margarethe for a year or so, even visiting her once at her parent’s home on Long Island. I met her brother who sailed rich people’s boats from New York down to Florida in the spring. He invited me on one of those trips but it was a disaster for me: no matter how many Dramamine pills and patches I used I kept throwing up. For me ocean sailing was endless days of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror and constant nausea. I definitely do not have salt water in my blood! I got off the boat in North Carolina and sheepishly took a bus back to Baltimore, determined never to sail on a small boat in the ocean again.
2 This was the Teklanika River that nearly killed me; later made famous in the book and movie Into the Wild about the life and wilderness death of Christopher McCandless.
3 Someone had left a copy of the novel Justine (the first book in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet) in the sauna and every time I made a fire I would pick up the book but I never got into the story. So I read the first few pages about a dozen times until one day it clicked and I couldn’t book the book (or the rest of the quartet of books) down. The Alexandria Quartet is probably my favorite work of modern fiction.