Forty years ago this spring I was living in and around Santa Cruz in a converted step van with a crazy redhead, her two kids, and a three legged dog.  The redhead, “Janice”, and I were in the Whaler bar in Davenport when Ed Walkinstik came in looking for us.  Ed was a self styled medicine man who drove a rig called the Solar Chariot, which was a solar powered cabin built on the bed of a 1949 one ton flat bed.  Ed had come to deliver an urgent message to us.  Seems Ed had been in consultation with a local shaman and she had warned him of a massive earthquake to hit the region soon.  He urged us to flee the area and seek safety.

It happened at the time that Janice had friends who had just bought some land in south central Washington state near Chehalis and had invited her to move up there.  Ed’s warning had been most forceful and to be honest we had little reason to stay in California.  The late seventies was a difficult time economically and I had been struggling to find work.  Meanwhile Janice had pretty much worn out her welcome in town so it seemed like a good time to make a change.

As money was tight the journey would take some time.  Leaving Davenport we headed for my folks place in Stockton where we parked my pickup for future retrieval.  Down to one vehicle we headed north, with stops at Lake Shasta and Eugene.  As we set out on the last leg of the journey we found ourselves beset by a blinding rainstorm.  The old vacuum wipers on the step van were no match for the deluge, so as I drove in the slow lane at snail’s pace Janice sat in the passenger wheel well and watched the white line on the shoulder.  A couple of times this led us down the off ramp and we would have to re-enter the freeway.  Finally late that night we arrived at her friends property.

The property was a 10 acre parcel outside of Onalaska, which back then was little more than a post office. Any supplies required a trip to Chehalis.  The land was wooded with two clearings, one where her friends, “Bob” and “Ornina” were building a makeshift cabin and one further back from the road where we set up camp. Bob and Ornina were Santa Cruz brown rice hippies with a toddler and another on the way who had fled California to get back to nature and live the simple life, and you couldn’t get much simpler.  Water and electricity were run with a hose and an extension cord from the front of the property.  A crude shower was rigged and a tarp awning to shelter against the incessant rain.  At one point I went back to Stockton to retrieve the pickup…a story for another time…and the camper which served both as transportation and master bedroom.

Jobs in the area were scarce unless you wanted to work for Weyerhaeuser, who was busy clear cutting as much of the local landscape as they could get they’re hands on.  Bob and I managed to find work at a nearby state park as park aids. The jobs were part of the CETA program designed to create minority employment, but since there were no minorities in the county at the time they gave them two the only two hippies in the area. So we spent the summer cleaning restrooms and hauling garbage at sub-minimum wage.

Over the summer I found little to like about the new reality.  Not only I was stuck in a dreary low wage job but I found I had little in common with the locals, who seemed quite happy to exist in this rural backwater.  They would gush about how green everything was.  Did I mention the incessant rain?  It rained on Memorial Day, the 4th of July, Labor Day and every other day in between that summer.  The days it didn’t rain were almost worse because the combination of heat and humidity was a recipe for a low grade migraine that would last all day.

The home life was just as bleak as my relationship with Janice had been deteriorating since before we left California.  Janice was a career welfare mom who held as a core belief that as long as she kept popping out babies that the government would provide her a steady income. That I refused to contribute to this scheme created no small amount of tension in our relationship.  In addition she had over time developed a jealous streak to the point where she would have dreams about me with other women and wake up and start pounding on me in the middle of the night. The close quarters only made things worse and the lack of privacy would drive me to distraction.

The final straw was when I asked one of the locals what the winters were like.  “Not bad,” he replied, “It rains every day, but you expect it to.”  That was all I had to hear.  I went home and announced that I was headed back to California asap.  Much to my chagrin Janice decided she would come along and so we started packing for the trip back south.  When I told people I was leaving their response was unanimous that I was crazy to do that.  There was going to be a big earthquake in California and that I should stay up there where it was safe.  My thought upon hearing this was that I would rather die in California than live in Washington.  And so we made our way south. Predictably soon after returning to California the relationship with Janice became untenable and we went our separate ways. I embarked on new adventures and didn’t give much thought to my time up north until about six month later when I picked up a newspaper and read that the mountain in the back yard had blown up.