THE HISTORY OF THE BICYCLE BUS

So -- Faith Farm was Providence. I mean how likely was it? How likely was it that the jerry-rigged repair on the journal of the piston in the engine was going to sufficently carry the mammoth Bicycle Bus with all its load over the mountains through the remainder of Montana, Idaho, and the entire width of Washington to finally give its last breath three miles from the family Christian Community we had met earlier in the year????

But what I didn't know was the amazing thing -- that later in the year the Bicycle Bus engine would blow up in Montana and that I would patch the engine and manage to limp another six hundred miles to shudder to a final stop three miles from their home on 101.

So there we were -- parked safely among friends -- our prayers answered. Providence. It soon became obvious though that repairing our engine would be a gargantuan task. Besides the $2000 pricetag of the parts quoted to us by several autoparts businesses, there was the difficulty of removing the very heavy block to bore the cylinders. The entire front of the bus would have to be dismantled.

The metal around the windshields would not take dismantling without being ruined. If the "face" came off the old bus, we might never be able to reassemble it. It was old and fragile. The block was likewise too big to be removed through the side door. We were stuck. Oh, with sufficient money and a good metal shop anything is possible. But it was not a job amatuers could do in a back yard. The repair was way out of our league. Faith Farm folks towed the Bicycle Bus to the back of their property and set us up amidst some old vacant cabins and allowed us to remain there as part of their community. For transportation we still had the Honda motorcycle, but with winter coming that would not be adequate. I had kept our old 1959 VW Westphalia camper in storage all these years just for such an emergency. Now I went and got it. What a smart move that had been on my part. I had never flinched about the monthly storage fees. I just had a feeling someday we would need that VW again. We sure did. What wonderful families they were! Of course it should be noted that we were not exactly the same "religion".

I mean there was a lot of ways we were very different from them. I didn't hide any of that from them, and they accepted me as I was. There were things about my "culture" that I had to keep tucked away inside my bus. The Faith Farm folks weren't hippies or "Rainbows" or nudeniks or Goddess worshippers. And we weren't exactly orthadox Christians in any way that would be easily understood by many people. But we all believed God is love... So we were pretty much okay as long as we made it a point to keep some aspects of our lives firmly secured inside our bus.

We shared some great meals. We watched a lot or VCR movies together on television. We played volleyball. We cleaned out barns. Melvin and I played a lot of chess. And we went roaring around in an old dunebuggy together. The cross stood high on the hill behind Faith Farm. In winter we slide down the hill on sleds and toboggans. For awhile there were several ponies and horses running there, with wild kids riding them like a so many renegades. Up above on the right is Scot and his daughter on the tractor.

The picture on the left is Diane and her son Ezra. Diane and her husband Merle are a couple of brilliant people and their children will surely take after them. Their kids were home schooled, diligently. Eventually some of them became missionaries in India and China. Diane was one of the first proofreaders for my book COMPORTING ROADWISE.

So we were stuck -- but we were stuck among some pretty nice people. All we needed was a way to make enough money to repair the old Bike Bus engine and then we could be on our way again.

We tried to make a few dollars with the bikes in nearby cities but without the Bikebus rolling around attracting customers we couldn't hardly do a thing. Our first winter at Faith Farm passed nicely. We were snug and warm living in our defunct bus with the nice woodstove and the sweet voices of happy children were constant music to our ears.

The photo on the right shows the Faith Farm kids in an old tree on the property. Notice the faces of Timmy and Brian peeking out from the roots.

Tree.JPG (145230 bytes)

In the spring of '91 we left the old Bikebus parked at Faith Farm and drove the blue VW east to the National Rainbow Gathering which was held in Vermont that year. I hope eventurally to have a link here to a section of photographs from that gathering. After the Vermont Gathering we crossed into Canada and went to the French-Canadian regional Rainbow Gathering which was held at Lac Beau. The gatherings were each about a month long. When we party we party. While we were in Montreal we visited with Ellie's family. That was one of the reasons we made the trip east. Ellie gets to see her family so rarely since she lives with me on the west coast of the United States.

This picture shows Ellie standing up in the back of the VW on a street in Montreal. We carried a canoe and a couple bicycles and a trunk full of spare parts up on top. There is a folding table strapped tot he back. Inside we had our Colman stove to cook and keep warm, warm blankets, twelve volt color tv. It was a really neat compact home. It was one of the oldest vehicles on the streets of Montreal. They salt the roads there in winter and the salt eats away all their vehicles at a young age. So a 1959 VW was unheard of there and seemed to them like a time machine. When we drove down the streets with the sidewalk cafes people would stand up and cheer us on. They called it "La view Bazoo". They loved our car.

We had such a good time in Montreal that we actually overstayed. We were hanging out there camping in the streets partying with our friends all the way up till the end of October. By then the weather was getting cold enough to start snowing. Time for us to go home.

With winter coming we crossed into Vermont and headed back to the west coast. We met a young woman in Burlington who wanted to come along so there were three of us. What a trip that was! We drove through snow most of the way and one engine after another blew up and had to be taken out and repaired. My box of tools was always right there beside the door, and my roll-away jack, and a board to roll it on, which I needed to pull the engine out and repair it and put it back in again.

I pulled that engine in upstate New York, several times in Iowa, several times in Wyoming, and several times in Oregon. I was one greasy guy by the time we got home to Faith Farm. Frazzeled too. By the way, I wrote all the details of this trip in a book I call "BAZOO" -- but, like all my books, it is as yet unpublished.

So we spent the winter of' '91 safely tucked away in Faith Farm again. It was great to be living in the Bicycle Bus again after all those months crammed into the VW camper. I spent the winter painting with oils and writing BAZOO. We still couldn't figure out how to get the engine of the Bike Bus fixed. I began to pin my hopes on publishing my main book COMPORTING ROADWISE. I rewrote it again. I had taken it along with us on our trip to Quebec and had taken it to a couple publisher in Montreal because I really wanted it translated into French. It is after all a story about my French Canadian wife Ellie and her children. I hoped a French publisher would see the merit of the story and finance the book. They kept it to look at. That winter it arrived back at Faith Farm through the mail. I could see the new volume had scarcely been opened. I could not help but feel that they had had sincere doubts that an English-speaking greasemonkey like me could write a book worth their reading.

There were people who believed in my book. There was Marc Madow, my friend in Southern California. He was working hard at trying to find a publisher. If only I could get it published I was sure people would buy it. And then I would have the money to fix the Bike Bus. But who knew when that would happen?The 1992 National Rainbow Gathering would be held in Colorado. We left Faith Farm sometime around April I guess and camped at Cougar hotsprings for a month. From there we headed east to Colorado.

The Colorado Rainbow Gathering was held up on an 11,000 foot high Plateau. It snowed off and on up there through June. People arrived totally unprepared for the cold of a land with summertime snow. Nearly everyone had diarrhea. I tried to tell them three asperins would cure it immediately by getting more oxygen to the cells in their inflamed bowels -- but most of them refused to listen to me. They didn't believe in asperin. They ate raw cloves of garlic to cure it. Lots of it. And of course it did nothing for the diarrhea, at least nothing compared to what the asperin would do.

I met people who still had diarrhea after three days of eating garlic who tried my method and saw it cease in half an hour. I brought a large stash of willow bark tea with me and fixed it up for the asperin haters and cured a bunch of them. Willow bark tea is natural asperin. People can be so silly. But for the most part the Rainbow Gathering was pure spirit as will be seen in the picture above showing a simple circle in Bus Village during the first days of the Gathering.

Once again I see Providence weaving the world upon Her loom. If the Bicycle Bus had been running we could not have driven it to Vermont or Quebec or Colorao. As bad as the ancient brakes were on the old Bicycle Bus it would have been a very scary thing to think of it going up and down the mountain highways of Colorado. But the VW did just fine. If the Bike Bus hadn't been broken down we probably wouldn't have gone to these gatherings...

The fouth of July is always the day of the main Rainbow Gathering celebration. Everyone gathers in a large meadow. There are drums and circles and prayers for peace and dancing to the drums. Little children are running around all over the place, hundreds of them. People of every age are there. Here on the right is a photograph of a long back massage line. The days of snow were past. The weather was pretty warm.

We stayed at the Gathering about a month and headed home. Once again we had a lot of engine trouble. We went through several used engines from junk yards before we finally pulled back into the Faith Farm drive way. If only it was as easy to change the engine of the Bicycle Bus as it was to change the engine in volkswagon buses!

So now begins a complicated writing task. I need to explain some basic beneath-the-surface political clashes which were reaching a crescendo at this time... All having to do with the Bicycle Bus and whether or not it would ever exist again. I guess one place we could start would be by realizing that there were a lot of people who would rather that the Bicycle Bus had never existed at all. They never understood what we were doing. And they never cared. Our Bike Bus was nothing more than a rusty pile of junk as far as they were concerned. The people who thought this way had jobs and wealth sufficient to always own NEW bicycles if they wanted them, and to get them repaired in a proper shop. They looked down their noses at people who bought things second hand. And too, they often saw long-haired people as criminals, and they figured my bicycles were stolen. Or a thousand other equally nasty presumptions. They had not idea that we had a very spiritual outlook on life, and they wouldn't have believed it if someone told them.

We did our best to ignore such detractors. But the fact was they had always been with us, like killer bees in the trees, just waiting for their moment. They had taken away Sandy Laughing-River. They had condemned us as being mentally unfit to be parents as proven by the odd ways we looked at life and the odd things we chose to do with our lives. Killer bees in the trees always hovering, watching us. Always seeing themselves as so god-awful perfect and beyond reproach. Always seeing us a society's outcast radical ne're-do-wells.

Everything about our lives broke the molds. We camped for weeks at a time at nudist hotsprings. We gathered with thousands of other like-minded people in the wilderness and partied and prayed. Sometimes naked. Dancing. Old and young. Very tribal. Something ancient was being reborn from the center of our soul. The earth itself waking up from Her long slumber, and the ancient dances and the ancient songs, and the ancient prayers being heard on the earth again. This was the thing that "other world" wanted to stop. That is why they wanted to stop the Bicycle Bus. Because the Bicycle Bus often seemed to be right in the center of a great healing changing power that was obviously being born into this age. To call it a mere "clash of cultures" is pretty simplistic...

I get the feeling that some people think spirit is something like a little pebble that gets into a shoe and causes a lot of discomfort until they finally get around to taking off their shoe and getting rid of the sharp little stone so they can get back to work draining the world's resources. But spirit is not just a little sharp pebble. It is something alive that grows and grows and never stays the same size and never stays in exactly the same space. It is always on the move, always becoming a part of something new, always adding another dimension to what one previously thought was total. If what I was doing always had remained the same size and never grew "they" might have ignored me. But spirit grows. Crosses boundaries. Flowers in new areas. My Bicycle Bus had been ninety percent of my reality for years and my art had been quite small and secondary. I had loved art since I was a child, always been creating something. Even the Bike Bus itself was an art project. Even stripping down, sanding, painting, and rebuilding an old bike from the landfill was an art project. But I also loved to sculpt, carve, paint, and photograph. The spirit that moved inside the Bicycle Bus now moved into my photography and it began to become equal to or even greater than what had once propelled the Bicycle Bus. In 1993 I did two art shows of my photography -- one in a gallery and the other in one of the area's finest restaurant/bars. I received many compliments and I even sold two pieces. Another thing I had done: I had created very large Rainbow posters out of collages of my Rainbow photography and donated them to Rainbow kitchens.

So my photography was growing into something new and kind of wonderful. I had been a nudist since the nineteen-sixties. It was only natural that my art would sometimes develop along the lines of the classical nude. My role models were Imogene Cunningham, Renoir, Matisse, Maxfield Parish, Rodin, Michaelangelo... I bought all the books about these master's art that I could find and poured over them in rapture. I wanted to create art like this with my camera. Or at least I wanted to TRY. And people were constantly telling me I was succeeding. They saw my work, loved it, believed in it, and in me, and agreed to become a part of it. I never paid models. I didn't have money for that luxury. But I never lacked models. I gave each of them copies of the best photos from the shoot -- which in most cases were probably the best photos they ever had taken of them.

rope_swing_long.JPG (31019 bytes)

I won't be writing here about the people who attacked and attempted to destroy me and Ellie, our Bicycle Bus, and goddessheart photography in one fell swoop in 1994. But I will write a sincere thankyou here from my heart to our loyal Faith Farm friends who stood by us -- and also we owe a great debt of thanks to the true friends pictured here -- Anke and Dave to the left of Ellie and Camille to her right

-- who stuck with us through it all and never failed to help us and cheer us up even in the worst moments. Anke is from Germany. She and Dave were rebuilding a boat when we knew them (Hey guys, if you are out there and see this on the internet, please drop me a line -- I have been trying to find your current address!) Camille lived in a bus and worked in the boatyard. Everyone knew her by her funny little old primered Mercedez. It is one thing to try to create art with people the artist doesn't even know, like art students do in so many universities. It is quite another thing to be creating art with dear friends. The ordeal taught us all that we are strong when we support each other. It's all over and done with now. We survived... And that was Providence too.

Anke_Ellie_Camile_93.JPG (56841 bytes)