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Show RFVER Francisco Bay, but mostly Lonestar Peak seemed so remote and isolated that it was hard to believe it was in California. There I was, Henry David Thoreau with an ocean instead of a pond. Hiding out at Lonestar gave me time to think about everything I'd seen in the last year. Our low-rent travels meant that Rosie and I had met the kinds of people you'd never meet at a university or an airport. We'd met the people on the bottom, hoboes and winos and strung-out road hippies, alcoholic old Indians, and southern dirt farmers. I remember the first time I saw a man working a horse in an East Tennessee tobacco patch: I had no idea that people still farmed with animals in these United States. We'd seen hogans in Arizona and shanties in Arkansas and the tenements of New York City, and everywhere we'd seen a countryside that was drying up and blowing away, its life and youth sucked away by cities and corporations. We'd peddled through a town in Iowa whose slaughterhouse you could smell from miles away. We'd crossed a river in Detroit that had caught fire and burned down its bridges. We'd seen millions of cars and the Americans in them, affluent but uptight, hopelessly bound to a system that consumed the wealth of the earth at home and bombed it away with murderous extravagance abroad. America weighed heavy on my head. I wanted to describe all that I'd seen and learned in the hope that it might do somebody somewhere some good. I also thought I had a yarn that would make me rich and famous, which sounded all right. I resolved to write a great book. The title of this masterpiece, "Did You Ever Stand and Shiver?", was taken from a song by Ramblin' Jack Elliot called "912 Greens." Like Huckleberry Finn, this song was one of the inspirations for the river trip. I'd made several false -124- |