Flying Inside The Cuckoo's Nest
Beats The Heart Of A Warrior Princess

Tonight, 1220 Center street, Salem, Oregon. I am nearly 2,000 miles from my home base, a small farm in the Dakotas, and 1,700 miles from Fargo. One more night alone up in this pink-wafted apartment, with the green carpet, and its black cigarette butt holes. One more night to feel crazy about trying to pick up the pieces of my locked up sister, who is stranded a mile away from here in the Oregon State Hospital. One more night to listen to the trains shatter the airways of this neighborhood from a half a block away.

I am particularly troubled tonight, my sister gives me no real reason for hope. All I have is hope for hope's sake - hope because everything changes - hope because tomorrow is not yet for sure. This hope is little to balance Mick’s heavy bogginess with, and I am no longer sure how sane I am. I am blitzed. She tells me her spirit is broken, shattered, gone, forgotten; that there is no hope; that I do not understand; that she will forever be a discard up on her hospital ward. She says it, not just with words, but with eyes gone clammy, with skin that sags from having no expression for four months; no tears, no laughter; no unnecessary movement; no real sleep, or real time awake. Mick has been living in a hollow, in-between vastness that eats up time, consumes food, and drains liquids; that takes pills and says nothing.
This is so strange for me - for years now she has been my friend and ally against the combine. We have danced in beer halls, hidden away in the Oregon mountains; with total exhilaration we have climbed up the sides of streams in Idaho, planting trees and singing; we've hitched through Montana watching the first glaze of pink break into early dawn over the ragged skyline of Missoula.

And it was a bit crazy, yes, but not like this. Now, when I go to pick up Mick and take her for a walk, it seems like the sight of me almost brings her to cry, but she can not - has not - does not. My presence makes her more tense, more nervous. I fear I do her harm. She refuses to listen, to care, to believe, to attempt to live. She says, "Don't expect much of me - better yet, leave; it's not your problem." But I cannot face having to remember that her face is locked in this mental prison. I cannot tell her goodbye, believing she shall not smile or laugh or cry again. I will not accept this, not now, not ever, not when I remember how two short years ago she, pregnant with Mia, stood between me and a drunk with a deadly loaded pistol, daring him to fire. No! A thousand times NO! And what possible meaning could anything like the farm have. ( ... But then there is this beautiful girl I almost met this afternoon. She was working as a clerk at the St. Vincent DeP&ul store, and I fell in love with her. It is true, in some fantasy dimension that must exist, because she is my sanity tonight. Her bright face - soft smile is how I remember I am sane; and it is spring; and Oregon is still Oregon; and the land is beautiful with green trees and budding flowers; and, yes, there is still hope

Tonight both their faces haunt me, one placed upon the other, like a rose on a fallen soldier . There are not a lot of things I care to do in a foreign town at night when I know no one. Maybe it's my karma, or maybe it's my budget, but tonight I hear an old voice in me say to write a book. What would I write? - I'm no author, and besides, books are tremendous labor.

How would I start? What would I say? Would any one read it? I write a lot of poetry that nobody reads. Does it matter? I could write a book for my neighbors across the street - "Let's be friends" the Safeways. I'd tell them about the pitfalls, dangers, quarrels, inequities, breakdowns, fallout, frustrations, sorrows, panic, jealousy, suspicion, rivalry, bitterness, threatening bankruptcies, and desperation suicidal tendencies I've met among the do-it-yourself farming, communal brotherhood, and free life movements.

I'm Irritated, I've heard too much hippie trenchcoat "This is where its at - clear Godhead" jive crap. I've got a sister in the Oregon State Hospital who claimed to have found paradise on earth a half year ago, I've got ulcers gnawing at my gut; I'm lethargic; and after three years of work on an uncle's organic farm - I don't know where I belong, if anything is mine, or if I dare call collect and explain that this freaked out sister of mine may need to be with me again on the farm. That same farm she came to, two years ago, too pregnant, too needy, and too soon told to leave.

Perhaps for the farm's sake that was best. She seemed so oblivious to the reality that the farm itself was demanded everything from all of us that spring. A driving, mud-splattering, wheel-spinning haste that rode over the needs of a wayward pregnant woman -Irritable? demanding? Well yes, pregnant. But those are harsh words, and I must not forget where she is tonight, nor the special light that is also hers. The care, the love, the companionship she offered my aging grandfather there on the farm that spring, Advising, helping, and yes, also needing care, companionship... Such was the farm, a 490 acre plot of the Dakotas, into which I have stuck a large part of the last few years of my life. Something other than money draws me there, because the farm rarely pays wages. I put my life where my mouth was. I have a tendency to do that. I believed something important was happening, but maybe I needed something to believe in for the sake of something to believe in. Do I believe this? Not really, it's that tonight I feel lost, wayward, crazed. I'm not complaining, I'm bitching at the incongruities that surround me.

I've got a friend, Allen, who I love-hate, because he's desperately trying to take care of his son, Mia , my sister's child, my nephew; because Allen has custody papers concerning Mia he wants me to serve on my sister for him, and I can't do it, and I wish he'd tear them up, even if my sister wants them; because she shouldn't be allowed to give into him, to life, to the combine, to her bed all day - forgetting she is a mother with a child who needs a mother, forgetting that she can't quit being a mother -- regardless of what happens, or what she wants; because, perhaps I am failing apart and his custody papers, and the legal hassles that will ensue, if and when Mick wants her boy back, if and when she gets out of the hospital, if and when... Because I'd like to take a hammer and nail Allen's throat to the wall where he can't come after me with his assurances and mantras, because then I'd like to snatch the kid, snatch Mick out of the hospital, retreat to the mountains and forget it all happened; and because I'm scared.

(And) it all ties into that big question a lot of us are left asking: "What happened to the mystical sixties?" How easy idealism switched around to cynicism, Krishna Consciousness collided with Honda Civics, and the search for the Holy Grail led to Construction jobs. Mercenaries! The hip look of the bourgeoisie man getting older, snorting coke: The sound of the petty thief who claims to be liberating what he rips off: The "back to nature" classy ads of EXXON.

Yes, I admit, there are still ashrams that continue to exist and open up (even Allen belongs to one). There are also co-op food stores across this country. I have belonged to many on occasion. I still visit friends who live in converted shacks and self-made cabins. Some even manage some stability and live "the natural life." I have "my" own cabin back in Dakota which functions as my, admittedly shaky, spiritual center. There is more organic food grown in this country now than there has been for years. Perhaps there is even more of them, or us, or whatever than ever; more farmers treating their soil as if it were alive and receptive to care; more people switching to natural foods; more vegetarians, more meditators; more pot smokers and plant growers; and more bicyclers. All that has to be done to verify this is to notice all the new "Adell Davises" that sprang up to replace the old one that died of cancer; to picture me dragging on my cigarette butts as I type up this paper at 5 A.M.; or to envision the disaster plot on our organic farm that yielded four bushels to the acre. OK it was alkaloid land, yes, it was a drought burnt season, crappy ground, not quite rehabilitated, but...

Down on the farm, tractors still blow up in my face or fall apart under me-, force me to breathe diesel fumes all day and then run out of gas in the middle of the field, just before I should finish. They whine and rumble all day in a constant roar that makes a mockery of the agrarian gentleman. At night I still read Black Elk expound "that every step upon the earth should be a prayer," and then in the morning I mount the colossal charade of steel and go plow the soil with the incredible mechanized powers of technology - and damn the earth if it won't give. I become what is plowed up and run over, and I am pissed about it tonight.

The day the farm gets through September's work, about the middle of November, I'm left a mental and physical wreck. After the third hour of puking my guts out in the worst dry heaves of my life, the phone rings and Allen’ s frail voice trails in from Eugene, Oregon with some crazed absurdity that my wild food flower eating sister of the Oregon mountains, who speaks of peace and magic and god consciousness, has just disintegrated in a psychotic bust and that I'd better get my ass half way across this country tomorrow because Allen says he can't handle it alone.

That was four months ago, and I'm left wondering if things ever come together, or if they just fall apart in patterns. I look around me and I begin to appreciate how this cuckoo's nest operates. Money, laws, machines, highways, computers, all of Miss Ratchet's wiry fingers slowly controlling each spark of spontaneity, She wins us over one at a time, She makes one artist a computer programmer, sweeps one musician into a night janitor – one misfit into a mental patient at the Oregon State Hospital grounds... grounds... coffee grounds. We’re all in their somewhere, in that Salem Hospital Kesey used as a setting for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s nest, where parts of the movie were filmed. We’re movie stars you see, my sister and I, stranded under the watchful eye of Miss Ratchet tonight. Come, join us for a cup of tea. Meet The Man next to me. He claims he's Jesus, here to resurrect our sanity; or take this woman I'm playing pool with, now she's no fool, She's the Presidentress of Italy, Michaelangelo's great, great niece, here to reinstate the art's in their rightful place, and, oh yes, just how do you like your tea, sugar coated, creamy, or black as the night I find myself lost in, all alone?

Gary Lange © copyright