EEL RIVER
"What a long, strange trip it’s been."
-Jerry Garcia
CHAPTER 1
Summer 1973
Once upon a time there was a Princess who lived in a little house in the deep dark woods. Her parents had moved to the little house in the deep dark woods after her father quit his job as an insurance salesman in the big city, started smoking pot, and became a hippie. The Princess’s mother became a hippie too. She took off her bra, and started sewing patchwork clothes and baking whole wheat bread from scratch. The parents moved to the country with all their cats, the Princess, and the Apricot Boy.
The deep dark woods, which all the grownups called the Land, might have seemed like a strange place for a Princess to live, but the Princess knew it was all right. Princesses had been living in deep dark woods since the beginning of time. Princesses had been kidnapped, hidden away, locked in closets, given as prizes in competitions, threatened by evil stepmothers, fed poisoned apples, trapped in tall towers with nothing to do but grow their hair, and otherwise challenged on their paths to achieving true glorious Princesshood. It was all part of the plan.
The Princess sat in the front meadow, cross-legged in the tall grass. Ants and earwigs and small grasshoppers and the occasional fuzzy caterpillar meandered across the ground, crawling up onto her toes, tickling them. She tried to see how long she could stand to let an ant walk across the top of her foot. Not very long.
Soon she stretched her legs out and lay back in the grass, staring up at the sky, being careful not to look directly into the sun. She had been playing her little-village game here in the front meadow earlier, but now she was tired of the game. She had finished reading all her library books, and her mom had said they might go into town later, or maybe tomorrow, and then she could get some more. The Princess had long since read, reread, and re-reread the few books she owned, which she kept tucked away in the small niche upstairs that she called her room, at the corner of the loft. It was not a room at all, for there’s no such thing as separate rooms in a one-room house with a loft. The Princess’s nest, where she slept in a pile of blankets, was a funny little space carved out over what would be the bathroom if the A-frame had such a thing. But it didn’t. Instead, the downstairs portion of what was the Princess’s “room” served as the sauna, with a specially built wood-burning stove upon which her parents had placed river rocks. The adults lit the fire, then sat in the sauna on one of the built-in redwood benches. When it got too hot, they ladled water over the river rocks, which made steam. The steam was good for the lungs, and cooled the room down just a bit, so the adults could stay in there longer, and open their pores, or cleanse their chakras, or whatever it was that saunas were supposed to do.
The Princess didn’t like to go in the sauna. The Princess didn’t like to play in snow. The Princess only swam in the fine swimming hole down at the Eel River in the dead of summer, when the water was blood-warm and barely moving, and the sand was almost too hot for bare feet. The Princess didn’t like to be particularly hot or particularly cold. Or dirty, or wet, or otherwise out of sorts.
At the sound of a car engine, far down the highway, the Princess sat back up and turned around so that she could watch the curve of the driveway, where it emerged from the trees that lined the road. Maybe the Dad was coming back from his trip into town. That would be good. If he brought the car back this early, and if he had forgotten something that the Mom had wanted him to get, then maybe she would drive into town after all, and take the Princess, and they could go to the library.
The small county library didn’t have many books either. But you never knew. The Princess would often think she had read everything that the library had to offer in the children’s section. And the adult section, of course, was way too boring. But then she would be poking about anyway and would find something new. She had found Harriet the Spy that way. Only the greatest book ever written since the beginning of time! The Princess had snatched the book up from the wire display rack, taken it home, and devoured it in a day.
Now the sound of the approaching car grew louder. Probably it was going to continue on right past the driveway, heading to the Morgan ranch next door—“next door” in a manner of speaking, three country miles down the road. Don Morgan, the old rancher, drove past a few times a day, going into the big town or the little town, bumping his beat-up pickup truck over the cattle guard that separated the Land from his ranch. The rancher always gave a sort of dead-man’s wave whenever he passed anyone on the road, opening his left hand slowly, then closing it again, his elbow never budging from where it was propped on the open truck window. He’d even wave at the hippies, who nobody else would acknowledge. “Nobody else” being the couple who owned the property on the other side of the Land, who were only up on weekends, their driveway a mile and a half before the Land’s driveway, nearly obscured by trees; and the family on the far side of them, with all the foster kids who swam in the river all summer, at their lousy, rocky swimming hole. It might have been nice for the Princess to get to know some other nearby kids, but the foster kids came and went, they didn’t go to the Princess’s school in the little town, and anyway, since everyone ignored the hippies, it was a moot point.
The Princess leaned forward, holding her bony ankles in her hands, listening to the car. Pickup truck, or Dodge Dart? Whatever it was, it was laboring slowly along the road. Was it turning? Was it?
Yes! It was coming up the driveway! Dad was home!
The Dad was cruising back from town, where he had picked up his unemployment check, gone to the co-op for the Mom’s shopping list (organic peanut butter, fresh-ground in the noisy machine; safflower oil; baking powder; sesame seeds, raw and unsalted), and hung out for a while at the Electric Brothers Foreign and Domestic Auto Repair Shop and Country Market, where the county’s freaks tended to gather. There hadn’t been anybody there, so the Dad had eventually split. As he drove, he turned up the local AM radio station, which was crap, but it was all there was. He took the highway out of the big town and headed north for fifteen miles. He took the turnoff, crossed the Russian River, and went through the little town. He was about to take the next turnoff to go over the last hill before the Eel River ford and the Land when he spotted a bearded dude standing by the side of the road. Bearded dudes always merited a second look, and this one was no exception. The bearded dude noticed the bearded Dad in the battered blue Dart slowing down and checking him out, and raised an arm laxly, thumb pointed upward: hitchhiker. The Dad pulled over at once, leaned across the wide front seat, and opened the door.
“Come on in.”
The bearded dude—an older guy, kind of scrawny, the Dad noticed, looking the man over as he shoved aside the groceries, making room—slid into the seat, dropped a ratty backpack onto the floor, and said, “Thanks, man.” He took a long drag on a hand-rolled cigarette, and didn’t offer it.
The Dad pulled the Dart back onto the country road as the strong odor of tobacco filled the car. Which was a surprise, but it also answered the question as to why the dude hadn’t passed the joint over: it wasn’t a joint. Fair enough.
“Where you headed?”
The grey-haired bearded dude glanced over at the Dad, then shrugged. “Wherever. I got my woman and kid back in town. I’m supposed to be looking for a place to crash for a few days. Quiet place.”
“Cool,” the Dad said. “You can crash with us. We got a place a few miles off, on the river.”
“Far out.”
The Dart ambled along through the valley, heading towards the hill. It passed tidy little farms, blackberry bushes by the side of the road, picturesque tumbledown barns. The valley was very green, which made a nice contrast to the hills, which weren’t irrigated and had already turned a golden yellow in the August heat. The two men traveled along silently for a while, then the Dad asked, “What’s your name?”
The bearded dude took another long drag on his lumpy cigarette, then stubbed it out on the filthy knee of his blue jeans. He opened a small blue bag with “Bugler” emblazoned across the front and carefully unrolled the butt, emptying the filaments of tobacco into the bag. “Bill,” he said, after he had rolled the Bugler bag back up and tucked it into one of the pockets in his tattered shirt.
“Bill,” the Dad echoed.
“Billy Goat, the woman calls me,” he added, and gave a low snicker.
Now that the cigarette was extinguished, the Dad smelled something new floating about the person of Bill. An earthy, animal smell. He nodded. “Billy Goat. I see.”
Bill laughed again, this time more of a guffaw. The Dad laughed with him. After that, they continued the drive in a companionable silence.