Chamblee54

Drop City, by T.C. Boyle, is the latest book PG read. DC is the rip-roaring tale of a 1970 California commune. The existential experiment turns to shit, literally. After a disastrous summer solstice celebration, a decision is made to move. Someone has a cabin in Alaska. Why not move the freak show to the frozen north? What could go wrong?
The story is thoroughly entertaining. Mr. Boyle is a prose craftsmen. The quotable sentences are less important than the story. Never mind that the details don’t always add up. Sess Harder has his dogs killed, while he is busy getting married. Pamela, his mail order bride, drags him to a rescue center in Fairbanks, and Sess reluctantly adopts a dog. Fast forward a couple of months, and suddenly Sess has five dogs, and is training them to go trap furs. Did Amazon the Sears catalog deliver mush dogs, 150 miles north of Fairbanks, in 1970?
Maybe the Amazon one star comments will help. Matthew T. “To find this book enjoyable is to admit a lack of morals.” mokshasha “this book MUST have been written by a committee” Will Szal “My guess is that our author, Boyle, is an atheist in the most pessimistic of ways.” watzizname “even tho I am neither hippie nor Afro-American, I am disgusted and offended.”
The term Afro-American had not been coined in 1970. We don’t know what Lester, and the others, called themselves. They arrive at Drop City, CA. Lester stays in a cabin, and does not contribute to the community. After an ugly incident in the cabin, Lester is asked to leave. There is more trouble, as the decision to move to Alaska is announced. Lester is stopped at the border, going into Canada. You might think this is the last we see of him.
The rest of the circus moves on to Boynton, a two saloon town 150 miles north of Fairbanks, AK. Drop City North is a three hour canoe ride upriver. After a few weeks, Lester shows up. We don’t know how this happened. The last we see of Lester, he is panning for gold in a river.
Lester is a side story. The focus of DC are the hippies, a colorful crew of indeterminate number. They are the frozen people. The hippies find people already living in the bush. Some are friendlier than others. Some will come to regret extending a welcome.
The hippies arrive sometime in July. By October, the temperature is -20, presumably fahrenheit. In that time, the hippies have built a collection of log cabins, and squirrled away supplies for the winter. Meanwhile, Sess, and his bride, have worked like crazy to store up enough food to last the winter. Sess was already there, knew what he was doing, and still had to work like crazy. How did a traveling hippie circus do much more, starting from scratch?
Communal life, and bush country existence, are not glamorous. As the winter approaches, things get ickier all the time. When you read a story like DC, you are happy to be able to put the book down, and move on with your own life.
PG is connected to an *intentional community* in Tennessee. This IC has been in place for forty years, with many ups and downs. The nuts and bolts reality of keeping the water line unclogged is not noticed by many of the people who come to gatherings. When PG first went to the IC, there was no water line. You took a bucket to the spring. Someone had to build that line.
One job PG has taken on is the parking. This is where the muggle world interfaces with the magic kingdom, and sometimes the gears need grease. Every afternoon, more cars come in. The parking lot is two ridges over. No, you cannot leave your car here just for tonight. Whose car is that blocking the driveway? While the fantasy flows at the bottom of the hill, somebody has to find a way to stash all the vehicles. Not to mention building roads, and shipping gasoline.
Drop City is a lot more fun to read than it was to live. Fiction is supposed to provide an escape, before you go back to your life of quiet desperation. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.