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Show RIVER river than the Sahara Desert is a sea, being a serpentine stretch of sand that winds through a black-earth valley. The river of sand intrigued me, and made me wonder how people could be so river-starved as to call sand a river. I spent the rest of my childhood in the fattest land ever known to man, where conveniences cover the face of the earth and an empty unhappiness dwelt at the core of life like fierce worms in a plastic fruit. Like many members of my generation, I could watch from my tract home as new tract homes ate up the bordering farm fields and empty hillsides. Before my eyes our burgeoning consumer society literally consumed the San Luis Rey Valley, destroying the natural world that had made it such a charming place. Spiritual desolation hangs over the lower half of California as thick as smog, part of the reason that the spiritual consolation business is so big down there. It left me empty, looking for something to fill the holes. Eventually, it brought me to folk music. I remember being fourteen and listening to Ramblin' Jack Elliot with my buddy Vince and thinking, "There's something here," though I couldn't figure out exactly what. Jack Elliot led me to Woody Guthrie, the Okie balladeer, and as I grew older the more Woody's vision came to mean. I wanted to see the America he sang about, the back roads and the railroad yards, the dusty prairies and the wide rivers, the fields and orchards. As it was, I went to college, which naturally just feed my desire to do something real, to experience life instead of just study it. I wanted to meet truckers and farmers and miners and builders. I wanted to see the land. I wanted to live the music I'd come to love. Huck Finn caught up with me in 1969, during my sophomore year at the University of California at Santa Cruz. I was studying history and drugs, so exactly when it happened I can't say, but it was in the spring and it occurred to -A2- |