PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

28. High above Toronto

        I noticed a girl in the shower with me. She seemed to be luxuriating as much at I was in the hot pouring water. The shower room had been packed moments ago but now the other young men and women had left or were in the hurried process of leaving, putting on their clothes, going their myriad ways out into the morning world. She alone remained, lathering herself sensuously with soap and shampoo. Her hair hung below her slender waist, her dark pubes glistened with water droplets, her golden bosom gleamed, pert nipples erect. She looked to be nineteen years old. I lathered again too -- not that I expected to get myself any cleaner -- I’d already been in there for haalf an hour. In fact, I’d been about ready to finally get out when I’d noticed her. I just wanted to stay longer, to try to meet her. It was a feeling, an intuition.. There was something about her bearing, not merely the fact that she was beautiful, but something more: a glow of exuberant free spirit radiated from her, an openness. So I lathered up and went through fresh ablutions.

        The tiled room held a dozen shower heads. She stood ten feet away. I hummed some inane song and she noticed and smiled at me. I responded and bid her “Good Morning”. She trilled a “Good morning:” back, laughing merrily. Our voices resonated amidst the slippery, steamy walls. A couple minutes passed in silence. Moments later we were scrubbing each other’s backs and laughing.

        Most people rarely get enough massage. People tend to be so private about themselves; their aches and pains are unreachable. When a magical massage comes their way and it’s really good the tender loving touch of another’s hands may cause a person to melt into the much needed healing. Sometimes people really want to be held and needed—and kneaded—and they just don’t happen to know anyone who considers those things important, and so they go without, and their bodies feel like crap and their self esteem is rock bottom. My intuition told me from the moment I laid eyes on her that this young woman was wishing deeply that she knew someone who could give all her body’s muscles and nerves the ultimate treat she’d done without for way too long.

        Our mutual back-washings became prolonged and evolved into slow sensuous massages that covered every inch of our bodies. Then we had one of those soul-merging five minute hugs and then: first kiss, the real test. Her sensitive hot firm lips met mine anxiously—hot like the water, wet. Her tongue entangled mine. We were million year old acquatic creatures, wild and free.

        My lips began to explore her arms and hands, delicate, slow, sucking tasting, continuing on to her neck, her breasts, her nipples. I dropped to my knees and my tongue found her belly, the featherlike hairs.

She straddled my face, her soft folds parted to my impetuous tongue like secret gates of holy-sister-Elysium and I tasted the delicious acid of the center of universes. The rivulets of water, Mother Earth’s eternal essence merged with this sister’s own sweet juices and my mouth celebrated the joy of life. Liquid thunder poured upon us, a thousand fast rivulets rushing along celestial plateaus of skin. And beneath our skin muscles evolving since the dawn of time enabled us to appreciate every combination of millions of infinitesimal nerve reactions to this passion. I arose to my feet and she descended to her knees and responded to me in kind. And then she stood up, her lips flying to my lips.

        She cut the kiss short, her brown eyes peered curiously up into my blues, and she told me she thought we should probably continue this in her room. I agreed. We left the showers quickly, barely stopping to grab our towels and clothes, running down the hall holding hands. We laughed when we startled some people. We flitted, through her door, leapt into her bed and made hot love for three hours.

        I wondered briefly if she was the one I was looking for, hoped she was. But it was just a fling, albeit a wonderful one. When we finally took some moments away from precious love-making to find out a little bit about each other she was somewhat surprised to learn that I wasn’t a student or even a building resident, but rather that I was a homeless traveler passing through from the states and bound for who knows where...

        I remember well her beauty but I have forgotten her name if I ever learned it. Such was life In the Rochdale College building on Bloor street In Toronto, Canada. I’d been there for only a couple days and I was already leaving, reluctantly. I always found it hard to leave that hippy highrise. So many magical things happened there... A seventeen story tall sky scraper with nude coed showers on each floor! Wow! How is it that Canada always has so much more natural enlightenment than the states? Why is it a seventeen story highrise college like that, with nude co-ed showers,  could only exist in Toronto, Canada and not in San Francisco or Boulder or Madison or Tucson or Huntington Beach?

        But in Toronto I also met people who had never given heart-liberation much thought who curtly reminded me the sixties were over. They said those dreams were dead: suggested I find myself some new ones: get a job, a roof and a bar of soap. The magical liberated spirit that had tumbled us all in blissful inner-space and bonded our hearts together like super-glue in 1969 was getting hard to find in 1975. Everywhere I went it was the same, and now even Toronto people generally were glum, hopeless, uninspired. There were rumors that the Rochdale building was going under soon, too. People weren’t paying rent. Motorcycle gangs were running rampant. I could not stay there and watch such noble dreams die.

        I had passed the border only a few days before and gone straight to the Rochdale in Toronto. I had come to Canada in search of a woman who would be more than another fling to me: someone who would give meaning to my life. Someone who would share my life with me forever. I hitchhiked out of Toronto heading east to search for a certain someone who I hadn’t seen in five years, a half-Indian girl named Windy.

        In 1969 Windy had been my traveling partner. We’d passed thousands or miles together crossing Canada and the states. Sometimes my soul brims full with Windy. Six years had passed. But maybe she would be ready this time, maybe she would finally forgive me for leaving her all those months in Big Bear while I played in Boulder.

        I went to her hometown near Toronto-Trenton. Ontario where she’d once lived with her twin sister and her parents.  But I learned they’d moved away and I could not discover where they had gone. So Windy stayed lost. I could not resurrect her.

        There was still one other young Canadian woman who had meant quite a lot to me: Diane Watson. During my stay in prison we had written arduously, declaring forever love to each other. But when I was released I hadn’t gone to see her. I hadn’t even written her. I’d just sort of forgotten her. I was two years late in going to her now. Perhaps that wouldn’t matter. Perhaps she still waited. Diane lived three-thousand miles west of Toronto in Vancouver, British Columbia.  There’s nothing like a cross-Canada hitchhike in April to get my blood percolating. But when I arrived and went to the last address I had for her she didn’t live there anymore.. I had waited too long. I was years too late for the Rochdale, and for Wendy and for Diane Watson and I felt like an anachronism or fate lost in time, far from the era that I loved and disconnected from anyone else who might restore it and share it with me.

        Once when I was a boy in Minnesota a strong wind tore loose my kite and I chased it across autumn fields. The string decending to earth entangled itself with thousands of blades of sere grass. I brought the glop of string and grass home and spent the entire winter trying to untangle that mess and never succeeded. So it was that in April of 1975 I realized that once again I had spent a long time trying to untangle my life.

        No, I should not have thought Diane would still be waiting. She must have wondered why I did not come to her those first weeks after my release from prison. She must have gone on with her life. I wonder if she thought badly of me for not fulfilling the promises I had made to her in the letters from my cell? I think it didn’t matter all that much to her.  Perhaps she saw herself as a nurse taking a little time to ease the pain of a brother in prison for conscientious objection to another stupid American war. Being a Canadian, she figured she had some objective insight to share with me. Being an earth-sister who had been my lover she was able to speak directly to my heart. Being a woman she could accept the strange young man that I was and knead the flesh of my chaos, help to knit my broken dreams. Patients come and go for such people as Diane.

        So it was that I found myself alone in Vancouver. British Columbia, looking for the free food kitchens, spare-changing for meals, drinking coffee in quaint coffee shops, looking at the stay-at-home Vancouver hippies, most of whom had never ventured so much as fifty miles from their doorsteps. I was an odd one. I could feel that in every fiber of my being. A road gypsy. Birds have nests and foxes have holes but I had nowhere to sleep: the haunting recurring Christian image, haunting like Sioux Indian flute music. But I’m not Sioux. And I’m not a Gypsy. And a person would have to be way out there to consider me Christian. But I know that what it is that I am is directly related to what they are. We are the same in a oneness that only people wandering beneath eternal heavens may understand.

        Good dreams shouldn’t have to die. They should be renewed, reborn. There is a source... Like a spring that bubbles from Creation’s center. Those who find this spring will keep their dreams.