For about three or four years I lived in the woods not far from here in a place that we called, simply Moonstone. It was the early Seventies and I was looking for a place I’d read about in #RichardBrautigan’s book, #inwatermelonsugar. He spoke of a place called “iDeath,” and I thought I’d found it, without knowing what it was. I lived in a little trailer parked permanently behind a little house. I would go to work and to college during most days and come home to Moonstone, often when the sun was going down, and we had parties in the woods where we played drums and guitars, my neighbor Mel Fleming would bring out his #washtubbass and we’d drink from jugs of Red Mountain wine and Buckhorn beer that we bought at Pee Wee’s Market through the woods. Others lived in tee pees and RVs or in one case a burnt out stump that was made into a three story treehouse, where someone had placed an old claw foot steel bathtub that was heated by a fire underneath. Our water came from a spring nearby in a makeshift gravity feed system that sometimes failed and we’d have to put a crew together and dig out the mud. My heating came mostly from a little wood stove, where I burned wood I’d pick up with a wheelbarrow in the woods were it was left behind by loggers who had harvested the trees long ago. It kept me warm on cold nights. I had found what I was looking for. The ending came later. Maybe I’ll write more about the end another day… Braughtigan’s book ends with a party. “Their Instruments Playing People from the town began arriving for the dance about half an hour before sundown… Everybody seemed to be in fairly good spirits. The musicians took out their instruments and waited for the sun to go down… They were poised with their instruments. They were ready to go. It would only be a few seconds now, [Richard] wrote…” There’s more to the story, but that’s all he wrote and that’s all for me to write now… (at Moonstone, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeB25JgJtVW/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
