It was Good so I Didn’t Mind.

1970: The Year of George and Sarah’s Power Wagon

In the winter of 1970 I spent a lot of time at George and Sarah’s house in the country north of Iowa City. The house was unpainted on the outside and gutted on the inside. They had taken out walls and it made sense in the winter when the only heat was from the cook stove in the kitchen.  After a meal we would all gather in the living room and hang out until one by one we all fell asleep wherever we had been sitting. We were only 20 years old and we could sleep anywhere.

To get to George and Sarah’s house you had to drive down a dirt lane that was impassable in wet weather which was most of winter before it froze or in spring when it rained a lot. George found a truck somewhere that could handle the lane. It was a Dodge Power Wagon 4 wheel drive  with a winch on the front and it was impressive. It was so high up off the ground that you had to climb up into it by grabbing on to whatever handhold you could get. When the motor was in low gear it roared and then the whole truck went slipping and sliding in the deeply rutted mud until we got to the house. Four or five of us would scrunch in together on the seat and George drove and everyone else bounced. We thought we were so cool.

One guy, who we called Baseball, lived for part of the year in a makeshift pile of brush. No one knew why he was called Baseball but no one cared. He was kind of wild and we were either in awe of him or terrified. We heard stories about how he would find mushrooms in the woods and eat them to see what would happen. He never ate one that was bad enough to kill him or put him in the hospital and I don’t know if it was sheer luck or what. Eventually he moved to Hawaii with his wife Abby where Abby was picked up by some unknown person, raped and strangled. They left her in a sugar cane field and Baseball  moved back to the mainland.

In the years before the Hawaii move, Chris and Dan lived in a church south of town. I think they got their inspiration from Alice’s Restaurant.  They had a huge billy goat that stunk to high heaven until a pack of  dogs came and killed it. Then they skinned the billy goat and put the hide on the fence. Nobody missed that goat but it was sad anyway. Inside the church my boyfriend and Dan and the rest of the rock band they were in used the big meeting hall to practice. Chris and Dan got married there, too. All we thought about was ourselves, who wanted to be with whom, eating organically and living off the land.

The church was a good example of why taking out walls was a good idea when all you had was cook stove heat. It was not practical to remove walls in the church so in the winter Chris and Dan shut the doors to the meeting hall and retreated into the kitchen and dining room area which had been the vestibule.  It was freezing in the meeting hall but in the kitchen it was lovely and warm. Outside a blizzard might howl but inside and snug under our quilts we watched as the orange glow of the fire in the stove played out on the walls late into the night.

I normally lived in a two story rooming house on Fairchild Street around the corner from Courier Hall. Courier Hall was a big brick dormitory on the University of Iowa campus. I lived there for a year and while there I had roommate named Debbie who was my complete opposite in personality. For example, her side of the dresser was a pile of detritus and my side was neatly organized. Almost bare. Debbie would go out and in the wee hours of the morning would climb up the fire escape conveniently located outside our window and bang on the window for me to let her in. These were the days of curfew for college age girls. One night she came back with blood dripping off her forehead. She claimed she had been struck by a police officer in a riot after a Vietnam war protest. Remember this was 1970 and stuff was going down everywhere. She claimed she was hit by a billy club but my guess was that she had tripped while running away. She was a great, big, fat liar and a really messed up person. I couldn’t stand living in the same room with her so at my earliest possible opportunity I moved into a room all by myself on the third floor.

However dorm life was really not my cup of tea so when I got a chance to move into the rooming house on Fairchild I jumped at the chance. I really wanted to be in charge of myself.  Randy was our landlord and not much older than any of us. He and his sister Diane had the only full apartment in the house. The rest of us had single rooms. Our kitchen was in the basement where the only shower and toilet was, too. The shower was behind some posts and there wasn’t much privacy. Usually no one was around but if they were they respected you and didn’t look. We ate mung bean stew we made ourselves and Essene bread we got from the Food Co-op. Once I made a great big pot and that’s all I ate for breakfast , lunch and dinner for a week. It was good so I didn’t mind.