Bob Welch: Kesey, Oregon are inseparable
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Bob Welch: Kesey, Oregon are inseparable By BOB WELCH
WHAT I LIKED best about Ken Kesey has nothing to do with psychedelic buses or LSD or Merry Pranksters. What I liked best about Kesey was his words. Specifically, the way those words brought to life Oregon, the state he loved and in whose cool, moist soil his body was lowered Wednesday afternoon. The Oregon author, icon and '60s guru died Saturday at age 66 after surgery to remove a tumor on his liver. Kesey loved this land with an odd blend of respect and irreverence that showed up best in his 1964 book, "Sometimes a Great Notion." It's about a bitter strike in a small lumber town near the Oregon Coast and, in particular, the involvement of one family - Henry Stamper's family. Early on, Kesey describes the return of one of the Stamper boys, Leland, to Oregon: "... as the bus - a different bus, rickety and uncomfortable - began the climb from Eugene into the long range of mountains that separates the coast from the Willamette Valley and the rest of the continent, he found himself becoming more alert and excited. He watched the green stand of mountains build before him, the densening of ditch growth, the clear, silver-shrouded clouds moored to the earth by straight and thin strands of autumn smoke, like dirigibles ... " You can't read this book without realizing Kesey was alert and excited about Oregon, not in a jump-up-and-down sense but in a quiet, almost mysterious sense, like someone who knew things others did not. Like someone who understood this place - at least the old, rural, pre-factory outlet version - better than most. Kesey's was no Johnny-come-lately love of the land; he moved to a farm near Springfield in 1943. Nor was it the stuff of Ray Atkeson coffee-table books or tourism brochures whose photographs never show rain. It was more honest and objective and deeply rooted than such varieties. "You must go through a winter to understand," he writes. Is there a better description of trying to comprehend Oregon's rain? Or, for that matter, Oregon itself? It was as if Kesey and Oregon were one, like saltwater and freshwater at a river's mouth, nothing to define where one started and the other ended but clearly part of one another. KESEY HAD to be from Oregon, had to emerge from the primordial valley mud, as if his ilk could survive nowhere else. As you look at the photograph in last Sunday's Register-Guard - Kesey, the moss-draped bus and his farm's dense woods - what strikes you is that all three seem somehow organic, as if alive and part of one another. It's an earth-tone collage of things grown old, memories mulched by time, change as the proverbial constant. Kesey considered both people and place actors on life's stage; to him, Oregon wasn't just a state in the union, it was a living, breathing character all its own. And so, then, were its trees, waters and weather. "She's a brute, she is," says an old-timer in "Notion" about the Wakonda Auga River. "She got my house last winter an' my barn this, by gum. Swallered 'em up." In Kesey's Oregon, nature was alive. He wrote of how "unruly mobs of young clouds gather in the bright blue sky, riotous and surging, full of threat that convinces no one." In Kesey's Oregon, fog couldn't simply be some meteorological term. Instead, "(fog) creeps down the river and winds around the base of the house, eating at the new yellow-grained planks with a soft white mouth." Kesey's Oregon was much like Kesey himself: full of independence, rough-hewn realness and a brooding darkness known to explode, at winter's end, into Day-Glo delight. With his death, Kesey leaves an Oregon far different from the one he found in 1943. The population has more than tripled. The customer in the "Sea Breeze Cafe" is less likely to be a logger in suspenders ordering coffee - "black" - than a mountain-biker in REI shorts ordering a vanilla latte. But for all of Hank Stamper's Never-Give-A-Inch defiance, Kesey understood that nature bats last - even in matters of life and death. Dust to dust. Ultimately, the earth takes us back. "I say there was no permanence," wrote Kesey in a passage that twines life in general with the Oregon he loved. "Even the town was temporary. I say it. All vanity and vexation of the spirit. One generation passeth away, and another cometh: but the earth abideth forever, or as forever as the rain lets it." Related: Fond farewell to the Prankster: Admirers eulogize an irrepressible soul Copyright © 2001 The Register-Guard |
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