Victoria to Arcata

It is now safe to say that the trip is propperly under way...

In Victoria as I mentioned in the last blog, we stayed with Erin and Steve and got a chance to hang out with them a bit which was really sweet and we got to ride in the coach boat for one of the Royal Vic midweek training sessions, the combination of these two things cemented in my mind that if I wasn't on this crazy trip I would be out at Victoria training through the winter for a Laser campeign with Steve's speedy laser group.

We also got to spend a bit of time with Alex and one cool thing that we did together was volunteer for an apple picking organization that picks people's apples from the trees in their yards at their request and then splits them between the food bank, the owner and the workers. These hundreds of apples were soooo big I could only eat three of them... seriously after 3 apples Ian E was stuffed. They were juicy and pretty sweet and you had to climb ladders super high up to get them. It was a really neet experience and a great way to spend a day. We took six or so home but then we realised that they would be confiscated if we tried to take them accross the border, so we made two liters of apple sauce for Steve and Erin which I am sure that they are sick of by now... try putting nutmeg on (if you guys read this) its great!

After a few more goodbys we made some last minute preparations and hiked to the Victoria-Port Angeles ferry in time to catch a noon or 1pm ferry. Unfortunately the ferry didn't run untill 4pm so we had some hours to burn. We bought some bread to go with our peanutbutter and settled in for a heavy conversation about the extent to which the ability to psychologically surpress or manipulate whims, fealings or gut fealings detracts from the meaningfullness of life. If you are able with time and effort to change your deeper fealings and beliefs as you see fit then what is the point of your life? Most of our actions take place in order to service our desires or beliefs, so if you can manipulate them...what does that leave you with. My answer is that it leaves you with nil; the super-monk with total controll over his psyche can chose anything as the values of his life and can chose to take any experience as painfull or as pleasant and so his life is meaningless. Is it possible for anybody with enough dicipline and training to become a super-monk? Does that make sense to you? Bother you? Seem right? Seem wrong? email me

One of the highlights of the ferry ride was Chris doing the bobble-head sleep. He was very tired and had no headrest so as he fell asleep his head kept swaying to the side or back and (speaking from experience as an avid bobbleheader) as the neck muscles relax, the head rolls to the side and you sink deeper into sleep suddenly the inner ear senses that there is head motion. Alarm bells go off and with a twinge of pannick the neck mussles tighten and the head bobbs back upright. With the danger averted and no more mottion the neck starts to loosen and conciousness slips away until the process repeats itself. One of the funniest things is that Chris didn't remember it happening at all. I have a movie of this taken with the camera but I have to show it to Chris first for him to decide if it is funnier than it is embarasing.

The ferry approached the coast and our trip was about to become international. We had all sorts of fears and precautions for crossing the US border having heard stories about refused entries staying on a permanent record and that visitors to the US need proof of ties to their country of origin etc. but for crossing as pedestrians on the ferry they seemed undermanned and unprepared for any significant hastle, though they could easily have sniffing dogs and stripsearch rooms behind a few sets of doors. At any rate we made it through the border crossing uneventfully despite Chris having mentioned that we were planning to stay with someone whome we had met over the internet.

Once in Port Angeles we made for the grocery store, stocked up and decided to hitchhike for half an hour below a streetlight because although it was dark, it was not actually that late. To my surprise (I was almost ready to pack it in) we were picked up within the time we had allowed. It turned out that this guy was on his way back home when he saw us and as he put it "I hardly ever see hitchhikers and I hitchhiked a lot when I was young so I really wanted to pay it foreward." He actually drove 45 minutes out of his way to help us out. This didn't fit in with Chris and my ideal of hitchhiking as an almost carbon-free means of transportation (including only drag from tire compression and added fuel for accelerating more mass) but we were happy to be out of the cold and this guy apparently was happy to be able to repay the favour a bit. Also we didn't learn that he went out of his way until we were well on our way. he was a local inependant musician.

He dropped us in a small town and we set up our hammocks in the rain in a forest. In the morning it was still raining hard and putting our bags down on the side of the road was all about avoiding the streams of water, it was raining so hard that putting the packs down in a puddle was inevitable. We looked a bit like drowned rats although out spirits were high and Chris was saying that it felt like we were at last far from home. Two girls about our age stopped by us in their small car and said that they were sorry that they couldn't give us a ride but that if we hadn't found a ride by sundown we should call them and they could put us up for the night. They gave us a phone number to call and wished us luck.... wow... part of me wanted to stop hitchhiking and play chess and read books for the day then dry out and make friends with them... but neither of us are quite that unscrupulous so we continued hitchhiking and soon were picked up by a very small car with lots of anti-war anti-neo-conservative bumperstickers. The driver had just come back to the US from a peace corps placement with an extremely small NGO in Uganda. Let me explain that sentance... As she explained it the United States Peace Corps is "one of... no probably the only good American institution." It gives members a humble living allowance, lots of free vaccinations, possibly a little bit of gear but I don't think so and then pays to fly you to a placement with a Non Governmental Organization that the Peace Corps has chosen in the area of the world (continent) that you choose. I believe that it also helps with the costs of your education too, but that might not be true. The NGO that our ride was with has no steady source of funding and only three or four members. They do mostly Aids awareness education and clean water well building. Their latest member came from a "money family" who donated a bunch of money to start some more well projects. They are now working on 12 wells which she thinks is crazy. I have heard that this is always a huge problem, getting the money from donors who probably have a preconcieved notion of where it will best be used (which may be totally erronious) versus keeping track of the money that is donated so that it goes to projects what won't have as much destructive impact as constructive impact. Uganda is best known in current pop culture through the film the Last King of Scotland which I very much recommend. So Uganda does have some attrocities in its past and has had (does have?) problems with dictators, but as always the people are warm, loving, resourcefull and friendly, though under-educated. Our ride was emphasizing how important litteracy is. She said that a lot of what she does is just writing grant applications and doing basic paperwork because she is one of the few that can do that. She mentioned that superstition is a problem because there is no easy way for an illiterate person to fact check. Lots of people in her community thought that she was crazy because she had a cat and it is common knowledge arround there that if you spend time close to a cat the cat's hair will gradually make you more and more asthmatic until you die. When asked what had compelled her to pick us up she said that her parents had raised her as a hitchhiker picker upper and that even if they hadn't done she would have been a terrible Ugandan if she drove by someone on the side of the road without offering them a lift. She definitely identified as a Ugandan and had learnt the basics of the Ugandan language (can't remember what its called) though she said that its a third language to her and she sometimes got it confused with her second language: Spannish and would come out with incomprehensible blabber. This ride took us all the way to Olympia and so I could finally stop singing Rancid's (I think) song "...cars pass me by but none of them seem to go my way...New York City I wish I was on the Highway... BACK TOOOO Olympia." She dropped us at a bakery where she used to work and there was a really cool publuc notice board under which we sheltered from the rain and eat some refried beans from a can. Chris went inside to change into his rain pants and buy a cookie so that they wouldn't be bothered by our presence, but instead they gave us a smile and some broken cookie bits for free!!

We hiked up the hill towards Olympia and a surfer pulled over for us with two beautifull dogs in the back but he was just driving into town. We found our onramp and set up (though dry erase markers do as much erasing as writing when the sign is wet in the rain). Before long we were picked up by a young college student in a CRV which was a bit disorienting because it looked exactly the same as my mom's. Our biggest shock of the trip came when we saw a severed leg and hand made out of plastic sitting in the back of his trunk under a blanket. He looked really uncomfortable and embarassed about it and later explained that him and his friends liked to drive around friday nights and wave the severed limbs at people which was a bit hard to believe coming our of this mild mannered guy. This was his first time picking up hitchhikers but we looked alright. He was a musician and was really into death metal crossover music, because of how amasingly technical and full of fealing it could be. He also likes twentieth centurey composers like Rachmaninov (sp?). He played us some really interesting stuff with metal transforming into jazz then back to metal and at one point there was one of those growler screaming voices harmonizing with a choire of normal singing voices for a really epic sounding choric finale. He dropped us off at a big mall in Portland and we parted ways.

In Victoria we had arranged a couchsurfing.com billed with a guy called Devidas who had generously offered to pick us up from where we ended up in Portland. After a bleak couple of phone call attempts we got through to him just at the mall closing time and he picked us up as agreed even though we had arrived a day earlier than planned!

Devidas is a really intelligent enguaging guy. He did his undergrad as a computer engineer and his masters in computer science but had given up on his phd because of the ridiculous lengths that you have to go to sucking up to people and publishing garbage before you can do things that you are interested in and become a tenured professor. He figured that if he was going to go through all that bullshit (my words) he might as well get paid for it. He had come from India for education and now lives alone in a massive, beautifull house in a big house part of town, yet appart from that he lives quite simply. He has a few rooms furnished modestly and he cooks his own Indian style meals and they are SOOOOO GOOOD. On top of picking us up and letting us stay with him for free he cooked for us and and we had really interesting conversations. He would make us chai with black tea and then Rooibosh chai before bed, all from scratch.

We were now more than ever faced with a predicament: how to accept this crazy amount of hospitality. He had a cleaner come so cleaning for him wasn't an option, we chopped a few onions and tomatoes, but our cooking is laughable in comparison to his, and he had enough money that any tokens of thanks would have seemed inadequate at least to us as their givers. We asked him how we could repay him and he answered by telling us about his notion of community. He said that in the West we have this crazy idea that we are all absolute individuals and that everything must be quantified, then whenever there is an inequity of generosity or where someone takes too much that isn't earned we get all bothered by our individualistic instincs. In Devidas' opinion this is a silly way to think. There is no way that we can repay our parents for the generosity and kindness that they showed us as we were brought into the world and we are social annimals. We are meant to look our for one another, help each other and depend on each other, not measure acts of good and bad and repay them mechanistically.

Right away a stream of individualist counter-arguments came my way: you don't owe that kindness 'back' to your parents you owe it 'on' to your children, this way of life will demotivate the donors and instill dependance in the recipients; but I stopped myself. I'm sure that for every individualist argument, there is a collectivist counter argument and I have started to piece together a collectivist philosophy from bits and pieces that I have heard on the trip. At first I was thrown off by the notion that you owe it to your society to reach your full potential (an individualist would say: No! You're only truly free if you can decide for yourself exactly what you want to do with your life) but in the face of the trend of dependance and demotivation that I just mentioned above, a belief that you owe it to your society to reach your potential could help to counteract or prevent those counterproductive trends.

Another way of presenting that belief is that the skills that you posess in life, say: fast running, quick thinking, creativity etc. do not belong to you (Individualist: sacriledge!), they belong to your society and your species and your world. There have always been quick thinkers and fast runners, you are just becomeing the custodian of those skills for your life time and as such they must not be used for purely individualistic ends, but rather they must be used in service of the world to which they belong. Now don't take me as being preechy, I don't hold these views, on many levels I am a nihilist. I don't believe in either the individualist or the collectivist points of view or rather I believe in them equally as possible human psychological constructions, each with strengths and weaknesses. But I DO think thats its important to be aware of both ways of thinking (and any others any of us may come accross on our travels). So to come back to the story...we find ourselves in Portland with Devidas and another couchsurfer who he was hosting for one of the days of our stay by the name of Tim.

Tim's favourite work of art is the movie Fight Club and he has been travelling arround the US for 4 years and was a bit grittier and abraisive than Chris and I, but he liked Chess and he joined us wandering around downtown Portland for the day that he stayed. The highlight of downtown Portland for me was Powell's book store. It is the largest independantly owned bookstore in the world. It occupies an entire city block, has 4 floors and then has a separate store a block over called Powells Technical books. The books were separated into colour coded rooms by group of subject. I wanted to read everything in the Purple, Red and Blue rooms, covering just about everything there is to cover about Philosophy, politics, religion, some culture, travel and classical litterature. That would still leave me with a lot of holes in areas like art and science but hey I only have eighty odd years (tops) to learn that stuff and act on it. But seriously looking as all the books that were there was a humbling experience. There is so much to know that you could never absorb a significant fraction of the tiny body of knowledge that humans have accumulated... and to top it off Powells didn't have a book that Chris and I were looking for called Anarchy, State and Utopia by Robert Nozick. There are a lot more books in the world than a city block.

The funniest incident with Tim was when we were walking down the riverside and this awkward looking guy in a collar shirt asked us if he could buy weed from us. It wasn't the first time that we had been asked, I guess my long hair and Chris's bandana trigger a few stereotypes. We sent him along good naturedly but Tim was really angry. As we continued along Tim decided that he must be a Narc and then went on a rant about how the US war on drugs was so random and poorly executed that the only explanation was that it was intended to instill a sort of 1984 style fear in the average (apparently drug using?) Joe while letting the drug producers and big time dealers go on unchecked so that the opression can continue. He got really bent out of shape about it and finally ended up in a bad mood, but first he went up to two bicycle-cops and asked them for the address of a police station and then found the supposed Narc and gave him the address of the police station.

That night Tim left and Chris and I stayed on with a list of other things we wanted to do in Portland the next day. First on our list was to visit an innovative homeless shelter project called Dignity Village. It turned out that the buss ride was 45 minutes and the place was both hospitable and fascinating and we didn't make it to other places on our list. I had been worried that the shelter might be a rough place and the organizers suspicious of us, but it turned out that we were given a tour guide who was a villager. He showed us arround and told us some of the history and details about the project. The way the organization works is that as a homeless person you can come to Dignity Village for a 24 hour visit in one of the visitor shelters or for three days as someone's guest or you could do a longer term say of a month which involves more chores and involvement in the community. If you want to become a proper resident you have to take an active roll in house building and fund raising, security and administration and other chores and duties. There are also meetings where the villagers come together, discuss and vote on issues and plans. Our tour guide was a gruff man of over 40 who held an executive position in the village administration. He was a friendly and entertaining tour guide but he kept appologising for not being as funny and upbeet as usual. He had just seen his ex-wife a few days ago and it had put him in a funk.

The houses at Dignity Village were a standard size I think 12 by 14 feet, but the new ones were alloed to be a bit bigger. They were all built on 18 inch stilts off the ashvalt pavement so that they were clearly moveable, since the city keeps changing their mind about the legality and extent of Dignity Village. They had a computer room and a common room, a security office, showers and portapoties emptied twice a month. They were starting up gardens and had a garage sale going. The house building material was all either donated or recycled and they recieved fruit, vegetable and other food and drink also mostly through donation. Their budget is $2000-3000/month and there are 54 people living in the village and unlike many other homeless shelters they are allowed to live in couples and with certain pets. At the moment they were in a money crunch which was very frustrating to them because there is no way the city could do all that they were doing for that kind of price and people have been pronouncing Dignity Village an international model for dealing with homeless issues, yet they still struggle to make ends meet financially.

At the end of our tour we wanted to spend a bit more time there so we signed out some hammers and helped with the construction of the new common room that would be off the ground and would have a stove inside. After a while we were taken aside by a wonderfull woman by the name of Phylis.

Phyllis had been to college, become a nurse, had a daughter, had some marital strife, and eventually become a grandmother. However her daughter had kicked her out of the house so that she and her son and partner could live alone together. Phyllis had no place to go and only a brief welcome at a friend's house and so she bought a tent and a sleeping bag and became a homeless grandmother. You're probably thinking that she would be full of rage and frustrations with the lack of respect of the younger generation, but Phyllis' outlook is that throughout her conformist life she had always wanted to escape and become a hippie, live in a commune and think and act freely, and now at the end of her life she had finally found a community of accepting eclectic, freethinking individuals and she was very happy with things. She had the attitude that she was living on stolen life and that every new day was a blessing. This was partly because of her condition. She was a visibly elderly black lady missing quite a few teeth and wearing a toque to cover up a bald head. She has two forms of cancer, each preventing the doctors from taking measures against the other, so her chimotherapy had stopped. She was had long since outlived her life expectations and was quite lively within her aged body. She said that she was comfortable with her new appearance because she had started studying witchcraft and storytelling and that she now looked the part of the old mysterious magical storyteller. She asked us what degrees we were and had been studying and then took a pencil, made a mark and said: this is a degree. She made a couple more apparently parallel lines and said, some people have two or even three degrees in their lives. Then she drew a dot a way away from the marks and said that these degrees are radii and that there are 360 degrees in a circle, so community is important because if you want to find out more about the whole circle you need to have lots of friends from all over with all different types of knowledge. She was full of these linguistic gimmicks and they were quite entertaining, though a bit heavy on the religion. A telling moment was when whe asked us: "where does everything in the world come from?" I said "Ourselves?" she said "God!" I said "...oh yeah..." But it did bring up an interesting collectivist philosophical concept. She believed that we are all part of the same great spirit, then we travel out into the the world and amass all sorts of knowledge and experience in each of our respective lives, then we somehow pass on this knowledge to the greater mankind. So we are all part of the same great spirit, separated only by our bodies and we all have different bodies so that we can amass all sorts of different experiences, then it is our responsibility to share the knowledge and experience that has been accumulated on our various 'journeys'. I thought that was beautiful: knowledge shouldn't be seen as a means to attain power, but rather as part of the commons (of course you can only have the commons in a collectivist society, because in an individualistic enough society the commons must be grabbed up as greedily and quicky as possible for personal benefit or else you aren't acting in self interest and are bound to be surpassed). (comments welcome)

Our buss driver on the way home was interested in our trip and started telling us all sorts of things about Panama where she had grown up. She had been a buss driver for 13 years and she was tentatively planning a trip to her old stomping grounds. She didn't want ot tell us how long it had been since she had been there because it would betray her age but she became very nostalgic the more she talked.

My overall impression of Portland was extremely positive. They have very good and cheap transit, there is a lot of green space, there seems to be quite a lot of openness to liberal thought, there were lots of alternative-looking people and the architecture was quite impressive because they have an urban devellopment limit that they only expand very rarely so that the city is dense, the land value is high, amenities are well kept and there isn't much 'urban decay'. The way the urban devellopment limit works is that they zone the surrounding areas of Portland so that the only viable thing on them is farmland. This prevents Albertan-style super-sprawl and reduces a miriad of urban problems. Instead of a dead downtown or one hour plus traffic jams, space is used more efficiently and logistics are simplified. I obviously don't know enough about it and maybe it can't all be attributed to this one policy but Portland rocks!

In a final act of extreme Generosity Devidas took his morning off to drive us 45 minutes out of Portland and asked: "are you sure you're ok here guys?"

We were ok. Our next ride was a lady who told us that she hadn't picked up hitchhikers in 40 years and that she and her friends used to hitchhike all over and that she had also been in the US Peace Corps. Her NGO was teaching basket weaving in Costa Rica. She said that she wished that her 26 year old son would go out and do something like this. Our next ride was with a international level poker player. He took us to a Casino on an indian reserve. He was a cab driver in his spare time and told us a few stories of his worst hitchhiking and cab picking up experiences. One of his rides back in the day had asked him if he could take nude pictures of him. He said that he wanted the driver to pull over or he might get violent. It worked... this guy was pretty big.

Our next ride was with the first couple that really fit the ignorant American stereotype, but saying that isn't really fair because when the husband was raging about immigrants and Russian spy planes and the horrible things he would do with foreign policy his wife was cringing and shaking her head, and in between his opinions he would announce that thats why people like him aren't allowed in politics because they are politically incorrect and he was ok with that. We stopped at McDonalds and Chris and I suddenly lost our appetite. They took us all the way to the coast and a little way down. There we gazed in awe at the beautifull Pacific Ocean and it's giant surf. We hiked out of town and down the road playing magnetic chess untill we hit another spectacular viewpoint. We finnished our game and climbed arround on the rocks before getting back on the road. we also had our first whale sightings of the trip!! Too far away and suddain for pictures unfortunately.

Our next ride was a short one to the grocery store in Newpoert where we stocked up on grub again and hiked to a state park where we spent the night harrased by racoons. The next morning we had breakfast on the beach and walked down a long breakwater and saw all sorts of birds and mamoth waves that sprayed half of the way over the breakwater.

We were warned about roadside pesticides on blackberries and hiked accross the spectactular Newport bridge. Our first ride of the day after a morning of beach going was Adam. He was a drug runner, who had supposedly just transported 22lb of marajuana up the coast and was on his way back home. He told us that he had been in the army in Iraq and that the horrific things that he had whitnessed had pushed him towards illegal activities. He told us that they had been kept awake for days on end while on duty and once he had fallen asleep and even punches and kicks from his buddy couldn't wake him up. He said that he often wakes up in the middle of the night thinking that he is waking up in the battle field being violently awakened by his buddy. He told of seeing horrible things and some soldiers had to shoot kids because they were coming at them with machine guns. He said that one soldier that he heard of had snapped and killed some unarmed kids too. He said that dog and cow carcases at the side of the road were sometimes packed with explosives and would go off when they drove by. He said that the US would bomb sewage treatment plants and other amenities and that they would often have to work in and near piles of unprocessed human feces. There was something about the way that he said all of this that made me believe him. Chris asked why the soldiers did these horrible things. He said that some refused but that generally people want to become soldiers so that they are really part of the country, so that they have actually done something for it.

We were dropped off at Yachats and bought phone cards. 5 bucks buys two half hour calls, unless you screw something up as I'm sure we will, in which case we will probably be double-chargerd some 65 cent surcharge. Let me know if you know of anygood calling card brands and where to buy them.

In Yahats we went wadeing and eat lunch. It was a really scenic, layed back town. Walking along the rocks we found a ridiculous hole in the rocks that spurted water high into the air whenever a big enough wave hit an underwater cave just right. It was pretty surprising the first time it happened.

Our ride out of Yachats was a fisherman who loved the unbelievable views just as much as us. He said that he had been making this commute for years but that it never grew old and he stopped a few times for us to take pictures. It was approaching sunset too and the sky was bluebird.

We were dropped at a convenience store outside of Florence and hitchhiked unsuccesfully untill 8:00pm. On a sign by the store it said: One Small Act Of Kindness Often Multiplies Into Many. Perfect hitchhiking propaganda. I had noticed the store owner come out for smoke breaks and watch us but thought nothing of it. Then she (Karen) approached us and said that if we didn't get a ride we could stay in her trailor for the night. Not only did she give us a place to crash for the night but she gave us wine in the evening and coffee in the morning. Then she gave us a bad of coffee and some filters for the road. We spent the evening playing with her friendly dog and having good conversation. She had a unique Northern English/American accent and had lived all over the world, usually on boats moored near town so as to avoid rent. On one of her boats she had a duck lay eggs in one of her planters and then her cat would warm the eggs while the duck was away. I couldn't believe it, but she actually had photos of it. Her philosophy was that everyone is welcome as long as we all get along. She made a point of spoiling us. she wouldn't let us make our bed or sit on the floor or anything. She said that one day when we have the means we should start taking people in randomly and show them an amasing, generous time.

In the morning she drove us in to Florence and we were eventually picked up by an elderly lady in a hippie buss. She drove past us and then kicked herself for not picking us up. She felt so bad about it that she decided to turn arround and come back. She said that she saw us waving and jumping and said that she recognised us as part of the rainbow family and welcomed us home aboard her microbuss. She identified completely with the Rainbow Gathering community and was all into hippie pan-spiritualism and had been an old groath logging protester and a Hawaiian nude beach frequenter. She talked about all sorts of drug experiences, but all of her stories were mangled and timeless. She rambled and went on segways and sometimes she sounded like a total hippie and other times she sounded like a worried stressed out older lady and sometimes she sounded like the average American consumer, but to be fair she had been through A LOT in her life. She had been sent to mental hospital after a falling out with her husband where she had undergone shock therapy. She said that one of the ladies she met there hadn't been given adequate protective gear and had been badly burnt. She said that once they had put her through shock therapy she actually had no idea how she had gotten into her cell or why she was there. She had also had cancer, but I understand it was in remission. She had had to come back to the mainland from living in her shack in Hawaii because her daughter was a heroine addict and she had generally had some pretty horrible treatment and extreme experiences. I think that the airy world of hippie ideology, friendship and community was her copeing mechanism. She could fall back into a cushion of good fealing and support at Rainbow gatherings and feal right.

Her buss held together alright but the steering was ridiculously loose: 30 degrees of play, and the muffeler had half falen off. The acceleration and automatic transmission was extremely sluggish and the buss was generally extremely difficult to handle. Her driving of it made us a bit nervous so I volunteered to drive and she accepted. It was a bit taxing but we made it through. We had an ordeal finding the campsight that she was looking for because it wasn't there, but after we got out Chris and I found time to walk the beach, climbed a sweet rock overlooking the beach and lay on the shore at night after dinner listening to the thundering of the surf and gazing at the billions of stars overhead.

We continued with our Hippie friend Carroll the next day and I pulled the buss over to pick up another alternative looking hitchhiker that Carroll identified as part of the rainbow family. I couldn't hear his conversation with Chris in the back of the buss over the engine and Carroll's monolog. We entered California and wound our way though stunning redwood forests until we found ourselves in Arcata California. It was saturday: the farmersmarket day and nine out of ten people were dressed in a way that I would have pegged as alternative in Edmonton. I bought a whole bunch of good vegetables and fruit and Chris and I split a yellow watermellon on the grass in the sun surrounded with children climbing trees and dressing up and artists making pastel art on the sidewalk. We talked to a couple of people who recommended that we go off and camp in the redwood forest with the other hippies and that is what we eventually did, but not before we met the artist who had made all the childrens' dressup clothes laying in the park. He believed that most of the economic and social problems inthe world could be attributed to aliens. Carroll had also recommended that we researched aliens in the library so that we could 'educate our minds'. this guy was quite coherant though. He had a few pieces of evidence but he wasn't interested in convincing us, just expressing his opinion. He told us about the last Burning Man that he had been to and how he wanted to free people's minds and save them through the beautifull art that he would produce. He had also been studying Capoeira for ten years and could do a lot of amasing maneuvres. he did a neat little dance/flip, then demonstrated how it could mbe modified into a savage martial arts kick maneuvre. He used the word beautiful a lot in strange contexts. Chris asked what he ment by it and he replied: 'life sucks... but you find a way to carry on'.

We went off to look for a place in the forest and came accross two other travellors our age who were also looking for a place to set up camp except that they had been in the forest for a few days now. They told us the ins and outs of the town, how to get free food if needed, where the computer is that I'm writing to you from, where the grocrey stores are, how the community in the forest works and how they keep the forest clean and inconspicuous and a few other invaluable tid bits for Arcada transient survival. We spent the Sunday lounging arround the Community Forest Park, cooking the food that had been donated to all the homeless people arround, wandering town, meeting the travellors and picking up US travelling advice and listening to the inpromptu jam session in the park.

I also had my first major distraction of the trip. After a bit of a conversation a beautiful punkish hippieish girl and her friends invited me and one or two others to come down to moonstone beach that night where there would be a party and the ocean and cliffs and caves, for though Arcata is a stellar city it is not directly on the coast. This happened while Chris was elswhere and I was guarding his stuff. If moonstone beach had been 10 miles south instead of 10 miles north I think I would have convinced Chris to go and I would have suddenly found myself chasing a girl and we can't have that.

Tomorrow we leave early for Berkeley or San Fansisco depending on which comes up with a reply to our couchsurfing request.

Beyond that we are thinking of cutting inland to the Grand Canyon before heading south accross the border.........

Lots of Love,
Ian

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