Loose Movement Part 1

By Steve Wheeler

Loose Movement Part 1 by Steve Wheeler is a collection of short pieces of travel writing, film and music reviews and short stories.
A time capsule of sorts, Loose Movement Part 1 is a record of Steve Wheeler's living and travelling in North America, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Nepal and India.
Most of this collection have been published online. There are a few which have never been seen before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Wheeler
• Release date: Sep 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476380582

Steve Wheeler

Steve Wheeler was born in 1957 in NZ. He was given the option at age 18 of becoming a Catholic priest or a policeman - he chose the latter. He has served in the military, and since 1987 has worked as a bronze sculptor, knifesmith and swordsmith. He lives with his wife and children in Hawkes Bay.

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Part 1

ME ‘N YOU AND A DOG NAMED BOO

The dog’s name was Rocky. He was a Malemute pup who spent his first few months on earth travelling through the States with us, in the back of an old pickup.

We left Vancouver early one morning and drove to Doug’s parents’ farm in the mountains of Washington.

They said goodbye over the weekend before we headed south through the mists and seascapes of Oregon.

I didn’t know it when we left, but Doug had stolen some plates in Vancouver and had a credit card in someone else’s name with a fifty five gallon drum for fuel in the back of our pickup.

When we needed gas, Doug stopped up the road, we changed plates, sometimes filled the fifty five gallon drum, refuelled, stocked up on snacks and beer.

He had the guy’s signature down pat.

We were good at shoplifting, spent some satisfying nights by the campfire, frying stolen steaks, purchased mushrooms.

We slept in our sleeping bags, camping beside the pickup, drinking black coffee, rolling our own Bugler’s.

Siphoning fuel from the drum to the gas tank became a fine art after a few mouthfuls of gas.

As a kid, Doug had earned money guiding elk hunters in the mountains. He simply changed the sites of his camps to urban or highway settings.

I learned the tricks of living on the road along with Rocky while our tape deck blared Mountain and the Stones.

We met some people as we travelled south who invited us to a party in LA where some of the company were offended at our looks and attitude. One guy called us common criminals

We were attracted to the women, but when the crowd headed for the swimming pool to get naked, we couldn’t do it. There was something in us which stopped us.

Were we really so free when we couldn’t be free like these people?

It was a negative thought, not worth worrying about. We knew these people couldn’t live as we were.

We landed in Imperial Beach; road weary, dirty, ready for a good rest.

Imperial Beach, the furthest beach south, next to the Mexican border. In those days there was just a chain link fence topped with barbed wire over which Mexicans and Americans lofted packets of marijuana to someone else or to themselves, to be picked up later.

We had come to see Danny and Jan. They were from Doug’s small town in Washington.

Doug and Danny were celebrities, each in his own way.

Doug because he did time in Walla Walla State Penitentiary for blowing up his principal’s house when he was a teenager. They said it was really only a cherry bomb thrown at the front door, but the cops wanted to stop Doug’s wild behaviour.

Danny was famous in their town because he had successfully convinced the US military that he was a conscientious objector, unfit for duty in Viet Nam. Few fought the authorities through interviews and writing, to gain ‘conscientious objector’ classification.

Jan was a tall, slim, blonde nurse. Danny was a balding in the front, long hair in the back, ex male nurse who played a mean guitar along with his version of Greenback Dollar.

They had a comfortable, little apartment on the ocean.

Danny had his weekly ounce of good weed delivered on a certain day. That day he’d heat up sake to drink while he sorted the weed in a shoebox. When he tilted the box, the seeds rolled to the bottom. The sake changed flavours as it changed temperatures.

The only thing I remember from the trip to Tijuana with Doug and Danny, the three of us stuffed into cab of the pickup, is standing at a bar trying to match them with shots of tequila. Between each shot they would pluck a whole hot pepper from a glass of water in front of us, chew it with gusto.

They’d see who could eat the hottest, stand the most pain.

I couldn’t even compete.

Doug won but had mucho trouble later because of his haemorrhoids.

Years later I visited Danny and Jan in Washington. They had moved to an isolated farm with their three kids.

Jan had gained a lot of weight and lost her feminine attractiveness. Danny, who had grown a long beard, wore only overalls, boots and a battered, old hat, had gotten even more radical and disgusted with the system.

There were a lot of ‘Government Agents Not Welcome, Keep Out’ signs posted on properties in the mountains of that area. Lots of weapons.

The people I was with, already disgusted by the dirty appearance of the farm, the kids, Jan and Danny, were horrified when Danny walked us to the car. As we stood saying our goodbyes, admiring the horses in the field behind the house, our host confided that the meal we had just eaten was made, primarily, of past horses which he slaughtered and canned himself.

When I read Joseph Wambaugh’s book years later, I realized that we had worked in the very onion fields which the book is named after. We ended up there on our way east from Danny and Jan’s.

In the Imperial Valley, the vegetable producer extraordinaire of central California, they were hiring labourers by the day.

After spending what we had on fuel, eating meals left on neighbouring tables in freeway Macdonald’s, we picked onions there, gladly, for days.

The gangs of Chavez pickers, who were doing most of the work, laboured in fields beside us. They were just smudges of colour in the shimmering heat.

We were left alone in a gigantic field of shallots. We were so hungry by the end of the first day that we wiped off the dirt and ate the onions as we picked.

At the eastern border of California, on the Arizona side, we discovered a reconstructed English village in Lake Havasu City. As we partied through the days and nights of Cinquo de Maio there, only a few were killed waterskiing on Lake Havasu and the Colorado River which divides the states. We were told that there were usually larger numbers of deaths of drunken boaters and skiers on this annual celebration.

The Grand Canyon provided a Colorado Rocky Mountain high as we chugged up highways in the thin air and bright sunshine.

The pair of girls who quit their jobs at the tourist restaurant overlooking the canyon to hitch a ride with us, left us to go home to Utah as we moved east.

The kindly stranger who gave us peyote buttons in Arizona was fondly remembered that night at our desert campfire.

It was probably a blessing that we couldn’t afford to try for the five pounds of steak and fixings which was offered for free if you could eat it all, at a truck stop, in the Texas panhandle. Who knew how our stomachs would react to that much food after the way we’d been living?

Our long hair and old pickup drew unfriendly stares as we filled up.

The period between leaving Texas and arriving in New Orleans is hazy.

Doug ran out of the medication he took for epilepsy. Combined with our drugs and alcohol consumption, the heat, living in the truck and surviving on highway junk food, the pace proved too much for him.

He completely freaked driving down the road, sheared off at least ten maiboxes, screamed insults at anyone we passed, black or white, until I forced him to stop, take a break, trade places, let me drive.

We stayed with a friend of a friend in New Orleans. He happened to be confined to a wheel chair, paralysed in a car accident a few years before.

The moss on the magnificent bowing trees. The music everywhere in the French Quarter. The smell of chicory, fish and perfume in the air.

We refused to cut our beards and hair or we would have got a bit part in a Terrence Stamp western which was being filmed there. The bars were filled with beautiful dancing girls who turned out to be men.

A bad experience, actually, a dumb, rube mistake with a transsexual and discovering Rocky at home, one drunken night, with our host’s full colostomy bags torn up all over the kitchen, got us on the road north.

By this time we needed to stop for rest and work. Since we were on the East coast anyway, we headed for Ottawa, my home.

Tuscaloosa, Alabama was where the old pickup gave up the ghost. When Doug stopped to fill her up beneath the canopy of a service station, some pieces of metal fell out of the transmission right there on the asphalt.

There was no possibility of affording repairs so we sold everything we couldn’t carry to a kid at the station.

We hitched north, consulting a worn map, singing Beatles songs, throwing stones on the side of the road.

The image which is implanted in my mind is that of Doug, his cowboy boots, jeans and long hair dusty, pulling Rocky on a leash behind him, up another on ramp as I followed with my sleeping bag slung over one shoulder, the sounds of rock ‘n roll coming from our boombox slung over the other.

In Georgia, a man picked us up in a new, air conditioned Cadillac. He said he had done some travelling in his youth, showed us the Bowie knife he kept beside him in the front seat.

He pulled over, led us back to the trunk which contained a cooler of beer and the handgun he always carried. The message was clear as we sipped the cold drinks.

He took us home where his wife washed our clothes, cooked us steaks and fussed over Rocky.

We resumed our journey north with renewed faith in humanity and rednecks.

In Tennessee we soon found out that hitchhiking is illegal. We were dropped off, had no way to proceed north without hitching.

Doug found the credit card which we had used with the truck, in his pocket. He buried it and some other papers by the side of the road, just as a state trooper pulled up.

He listened to our story, thought for a moment, looked at Rocky, gave us a lift to the border.

His gesture seemed to lead us to the party with the marines in Camp LeJeune, North Carolina. We attended a party in a barracks full of stubble headed Marine recruits where Doug found fanatic Leslie West fans and the best weed we had encountered since the West coast.

The last stretch seemed to take forever. An endless series of highways, freeways, taking turns talking to the driver while the others slept. A desperate scramble for the finish.

When we had installed ourselves at my mother’s house in Ottawa, we discovered that Rocky, Doug and I had ticks. They’re like crabs, under the skin. Probably from sleeping in ditches on nights when we had given up hope of getting a lift.

We had to undergo a rigorous treatment supervised by my disgusted mother, observed by my laughing sister.

Doug and I had, understandably, gotten sick of each other’s company. He had a grand mal seizure at my mother’s breakfast table, broke his jaw.

I said goodbye to Rocky, escaped, hitched solo back to Vancouver when I realized that Doug and my sister had fallen in love.