night of the drive I had set up my tent in a county park I liked outside Grants Pass, Oregon; the second, the night before, I had camped at Colusa in a state park on the banks of the Sacramento River about ten miles off I-5. Both nights I was broiling while I hammered pegs into the campsite’s tent pad and coaxed the big old canvas umbrella more or less vertical. Then I scummaged together a dinner out of the soggy mess in the cooler — last night, spaghetti. The best moment car camping was when I had the dishwater heating on the hissing Coleman stove. I could officially mark the end of the long day’s run by sitting at the picnic table savouring a cup of coffee out of the instant jar, idly checking the map to review the ground I’d covered and anticipate what tomorrow would bring. Eventually, though, I had to put the coffee aside, wash up, and pack the cooking gear back into the still-heated rear seat and trunk. Once I’d huffed and puffed up my air mattress, I tied down the tent flap from inside. The interior was an oven.
Both nights I read by flashlight for a half-hour, even though it wasn’t completely dark out. I was finishing a book of short stories by Régis Debray, the guy who had argued that Fidel Castro’s guerrilla model for revolution was the path to the future in Latin America. When I stopped reading, I lay naked and sweating on top of my sleeping bag for quite a while, listening to the dim sounds of somebody else arriving at the campground, and the evening bird calls, until I woke in the pitch-black, a little chilled. I crawled into the fart sack, and next I knew it was morning.
When I pulled out of the Colusa campsite and gassed up in Williams, back at I-5, both the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner in their coin boxes had screamers about Ho Chi Minh dying the day before. Heart attack at seventy-nine: I knew Ho was old but was surprised he was that ancient. After I drained the cooler and bought fresh ice, I picked up an Examiner full of speculation about what his death might mean for the war.
As I steered past huge fields and orchards of olive trees, I thought a lot about old Ho. Last year I’d bought a poster of him that displayed, underneath a photo of his head and shoulders, the quote from JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” I recalled a poem of Ho’s I’d seen reprinted about fifteen times in various Movement newspapers and pamphlets:
The wheel of the law turns
without pause.
After the rain, good weather.
In the wink of an eye
the universe throws off
its muddy clothes.
For ten thousand miles
the landscape
spreads out like a beautiful brocade.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers.
High in the trees, amongst
the sparkling leaves
all the birds sing at once.
Men and animals rise up reborn.
What could be more natural?
After sorrow, comes joy.
Actually, I would have welcomed rain, anything to beat the heat as I powered along, all twelve hundred cc’s of the Volksie’s pistons flawlessly performing despite being air-cooled and with only blistering air available. By Sacramento, sweat was dripping off my eyebrows onto my glasses. I tugged out my handkerchief and kept it on the seat beside me to mop my forehead occasionally so the drops wouldn’t interfere with my vision. I knew the heat would moderate once the mighty Bug and I at last were up and over Tejon Pass and down by the Gold Coast’s bright blue sea.
I kept mulling Ho’s death. To go like that in the middle of the war. Lots of people had died in the war, of course, but it would have been great if he had lived to see the outcome. I started to sing, accompanied by the thrum of the tires and the pulse of the engine, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” I followed that ballad of mournful resignation with a couple of Joan Baez tunes — “Gospel Ship” and “Matty Groves.” Then I serenaded the car’s cabin with Ian & Sylvia’s “You Were on My Mind.” I didn’t have much of a musical voice, but since there was nobody in the vehicle but me, who cared? It was either sing or fiddle with the radio dial to find a station with a signal strong enough to last more than ten minutes as I rocketed by. And singing helped the miles disappear.
My thoughts kept returning to how Ho would never learn how the war ended. Last March, a little more than a year after the first big Tet Offensive, the National Liberation Front had again come close to taking Saigon. In mid-June, Richard Nixon had declared he would pull a hundred thousand U.S. troops out of Nam by the end of the year, since, he claimed, the South Vietnamese army was doing such a fine job. Everybody was aware Nixon’s announcement was a shuck: probably he was calling the standard troop rotations a withdrawal. A hundred thousand out, you bet, but a hundred and fifty thousand in. More than half a million were now on the ground, and there was no sign of any de-escalation of the fighting and bombing. I sang as much as I could remember of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”:
There’s battle lines being drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds,
Gettin’ so much resistance from behind.
It’s time we stop, children,
What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.
What a field day for the heat.
A thousand people in the street,
Singin’ songs and carryin’ signs.
Mostly saying, “Hooray for our side.”
It’s time we stop, children,
What’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.
I swung around a tanker truck carrying milk, to judge from the exhortations painted on its side urging everyone to drink more moo. I remembered the article in the Los Angeles Times in June, the week after Nixon swore again he was scaling down the war. I’d just gotten back from Chicago and was about to return to the Frozen North for the summer. An L.A.-area dairy had won a huge contract to supply the U.S. forces in South Vietnam. Like we chanted at demonstrations: “War is good business. Invest your son.”
All morning as I drove, Ho’s death surfaced and receded in my thoughts. Naturally, I was also wondering what the fall would bring in the way of actions I’d be involved in to oppose the war. Despite the heavy factional dispute at the Students for a Democratic Society national convention, in the din of that giant hall in Chicago, I was confident we had now cleared the air internally. The organization would be able to confront the causes of the war more effectively than ever. Still, I couldn’t wait to rap with Emma and Bruce and Kathy and the rest to figure out how our SDS chapter should deal with the big changes arising from the June convention.
I spent quite a few miles, too, speculating as well on what the fall term would hold for me academically. I had to complete the M.A. by spring. My degree originally was supposed to be a two-year deal, and what with various distractions and makeup courses, I was about to start my fourth year. I had finished additional pages of the thesis during the summer, but not nearly as many as I had hoped. My job the past two months had been three
