The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut

gotten higher and more excited jamming with first-rate musicians, I’ve never felt so completely and deeply satisfied as when I was playing duets with the stream.
    The way I played music there was the way I wanted to farm, chop wood, cook, make love, raise children. Everything. A lot of it had to do with things I felt while I played. If only I could feel that sense of total absorption in what I was doing when I was doing other things. It was more than absorption, it was spontaneity, competence, a sense of
grace and playfulness, of being in touch with an inexhaustible source of energy and beauty. It was a lot like playing with Zeke.
    I was finally just plain playing music, playing music just for the moment. I wasn’t practicing so that I could knock ’em dead at some later time. The music was finally an end in itself. Making the perfect music for the perfect moment for the perfect place.
    Music there was all music could be. It did all music could do. There was nothing second-rate about that music. And maybe most important, it was ours. We weren’t crammed into some stadium or concert hall. We weren’t dependent on any electronic gadgetry. Our music fit in perfectly with everything else there. We had brought up a battery tape deck, a really good one, but there was something jarring or alienating about it. We only played it once or twice. It didn’t seem to fit in.
    Serendipity. One time only. Fantastic beauty now, and then gone forever. There was something delightfully subversive about playing music that good that far, far away from New York City’s recording studios and the like. Who would have thought that here, twelve miles by boat from the end of Highway 101, twelve miles by boat from our nearest neighbor and then a mile and a half by foot on that old abandoned logging trail, was where it was happening?
    Simon had his trombone shipped from back East, Jack bought a flute, and Kathy unpacked her violin, which she played very well. Now and then we got some nice music going all together, but the sax and the trombone tended to drown the others out. The solo numbers seemed to work best.
     
    We had been weaned on horror stories of frictions between communes and local people. We figured things would be different in Canada and weren’t expecting real, heavy trouble, but neither did we expect the degree of warmth and help we got. There were some funny looks from folks who weren’t exactly in love with longhaired people,
but it was so mild compared to what we had learned to live with in America that it was almost pleasant when it happened. What hippie hating there was up there was strictly amateur.
    Mr. McKenzie dropped in several times to check on how we were doing. He’d shake his head in mock disbelief and pain at the condition of the teeth on our chain saw and then sit down and while away the afternoon sharpening them right. A Mr. Palermo, who had lived up here helping his uncles in the old days and had a cabin at the foot of the trail, came by at least twice a month. He told us how they used the old irrigation system and what grew well where, and gave us all sorts of other invaluable information. There was a big-shot executive at the pulp mill who used to bring us huge plastic bags of seaweed, which we were particularly fond of for compost. Bea and Sam, who ran the marina at the foot of the lake, were constantly putting themselves out for us.
    Several times when we went down to the lake to swim or fish we found big boxes of dishes, tools, winches, rope, saws, all sorts of useful things. “Here’s some stuff I don’t need.” John Eastman. He had spent most of his life living and working in the woods of B.C., or, as they call it, the bush. He taught us how to use the chain saw, how to fell trees safely, how to split shakes and planks out of cedar, the best way to season firewood.
    If it hadn’t been for the help of the locals, things would have been much tougher.
    Part of their reason for helping, I think, was that