Follow Natural Peaceful Paths through Every Living Day in this shared journey down natural paths of ease and calm.Some twenty-odd years ago when I lived in the Bay Area—and they were very odd years—Ken Kesey brought his magic bus to Berkeley as part of the mayoral campaign for ‘60s counterculture icon Wavy Gravy. (The estimable Mr. Gravy—who had discovered in the ‘60s protests that police didn’t hit people in clown costumes—was campaigning with the slogan “Put a REAL clown in office,” and questioned his opponent’s experience because “he’s never even been to jail.”) Anyway, after running into Kesey at another author’s reading at Black Oak Books, some sequence of events happened that I don’t recall, despite that I’ve never taken LSD. All I clearly remember is that I ended up on Kesey’s bus, taking pictures of the intricately decorated interior—only to discover later that, for the only time in my life, I had forgotten to actually load film in my camera.
I was mortified. It bothered me for years. An opportunity and a memory like that, and such a basic bonehead move cost me the photos? I couldn’t come to peace with it until one random day when I realized I had been pranked by the enduring Merry Pranksters spirit. I laughed out loud on the street. Apparently I was supposed to be experiencing that free moment, not capturing it to keep. That was the prank’s message. Either that, or my own projected madness had simply become consistent. Whichever. I reached tranquility with the memory either way, at last.
A recent weekend brought the memory flashing back. The Kesey family is still deeply involved in creating culture in Eugene—literally, since some of them are in the yogurt business—and Kesey’s bus was out for Eugene Celebration, the annual town party. (There have actually been two buses, and this is the second of the two. It’s the one named “Further” instead of “Furthur,” although it answers to either name. It’s the very same one I climbed on, decades previous.)
“Please don’t climb on the bus,” now says the polite label on the front bumper. And the explanation of the bus history encourages everyone to take pictures: “She likes that,” it concludes.
So Kesey’s bus rolls on without him. There’s no longer a decision to be made about being on or off the bus, because you can’t get on. And the pictures the pranksters denied me back then I now captured with my iPhone—no film needed at all. Everything seems turned a little upside down.
Or is it? Perhaps it’s just at an opposite point on the circular cycle, as the earth turns around the sun, which turns around in the galaxy, all of which turns along the same paths of spiritual quest as always. The acid tests may be history—and I still have no interest in taking any—but other paths of inquest are equally present and urgent for those seekers whose time is now. There are always new seekers, and in the seeking there is always Further (and Furthur) to go. It’s eternal. As long as we’re the ones alive, there’s another mile to be explored, another different bus to climb on, another new way to screw up the pictures and confuse the memories. It’s all rather funny, if you look at it right. If I close my eyes and forget the film, I can hear Kesey laughing at the grand cosmic prank. I can still see the radiant glow he had, the aliveness that was somehow just a touch wilder and brighter than most.
I should keep Kesey’s glow in the present tense, for I think he’s still pranking me from beyond the grave. When I went to look at my iPhone pictures of Further, one and only one was inexplicably upside down: the photo of the bumper sign asking us not to climb on the bus. What’s the prank this time, I wondered? I’m guessing Kesey is hinting at just what I’ve spoken: that it’s not his bus we should climb on now, but our own, with new wild colors and different laughs and quests, equally wild and free. There’s just as much to celebrate now, to protest, and to explore. Indeed, there is always Further and Furthur to travel, inside and beyond.
