Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

I’d prepared for the river trip by inventing a new way to do it. (My instincts have always been to invent things that can’t be patented when I need money.) I invented a way to connect two canoes together with a platform upon which a tent could be pitched. I made the platform of thin strips of cypress held together with cord woven through the slats. I made it in two sections, each four by eight feet, so they could be rolled up and carried when we had to portage around the shoals at White Springs. Unrolled, tied together, and clamped to the canoe gunwales, we had an eight-foot-square platform sitting across two canoes—something like a catamaran—that allowed us to make the trip comfortably. One of the big problems of long trips down the Suwannee, or any river, is that you’re never sure when to stop and pitch a camp unless you know the river. At sunset, you might be next to private property or a swamp; so you start looking for a place early in the day to be sure you have a campsite before dark. With Mason’s Unpatented Canoe Raft, that was a worry of the past. Sunset? Not to worry, just keep drifting. We lighted the fire in our hibachi and cooked dinner at sunset. When we got sleepy, and when we fucking well wanted to, we’d just snatch a low branch and tie up for the night. Sometimes beavers would slap water on our tent, letting us know we were trespassers, but most of the time things worked out fine.

Floating down a river is one kind of adventure; it is another adventure to be confined with a childhood friend you haven’t seen for almost twenty years while you’re doing it. Except for the eclipse, Elliott and I had last been together when we went to California back in 1962. We had fun then, both young, wild, and unattached. He was dating Patience at that time, but she was in Philadelphia. We stayed in California for a year and drove my Chevy panel truck to New Orleans, where we parted company. In the intervening years, I’d gotten married, become a father, spent a year in combat, been a businessman, and was now, at thirty-eight, trying to get my midlife crisis together. Elliott, on the other hand, had lived in Haight-Ashbury and been a genuine hippie flower child until his father died. He’d been married and divorced, had a child, too. Now he was a rancher. He was a rancher like I was a writer: by proclamation. He had a lot of property and maybe a hundred head of cattle. He wore a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and talked with a drawl like they were filming him in some goddamn movie. I liked this guy, but at the time, on that raft, me broke and him rich, Elliott was tough to deal with. We talked about everything, explored every avenue of mutual interest, only to find we didn’t have any mutual interests. Time and experience had changed us too much. We had a commonality of youthful experiences, but it would take more than a river trip to bring us up to date as men.

I have to say that we made that trip in a record-setting nine days. That’s one hundred seventy-five miles of winding river in nine days in a floating tent. As far as I know, no one, in a floating tent, has beaten that. When we got out at a town called Suwannee at the end of the river, Elliott and I were barely speaking. I called Patience to pick us up. Elliott and I had a quiet lunch.

He left a few days later, and it’s taken until recently for us to talk. We’re still working at being friends.

CHAPTER 11

June 1980—Patience was delivering newspapers in a new Volkswagen Rabbit we’d bought with help from her mother—an outright cash grant for a down payment is what it was. Patience left every morning at two and delivered a hundred and twenty papers along a hundred-mile country road, a routine that tortured cars until they broke, and numbed people senseless. She got home at seven or eight, tired, and slept until early afternoon. This went on seven days a week. It was a job for desperate people who couldn’t think clearly enough to apply their other talents.

I tried to ignore our situation. I worked on my robot book and worried about my Vietnam book. Knox had sent me a total of five rejection letters from houses like Putnam and Simon & Schuster. They all liked the writing, they said, but none of them thought people wanted to read about Vietnam. That the war was so useless that nobody even wanted to read about it. Then, of course, maybe these editors were just brushing me off because I couldn’t really write well enough.

I began to lose faith in myself. Until somebody bought something I wrote, I was just dreaming about being a writer. Patience was doing something to make money for us and I was doing nothing. In October I said, all right, fine, I’ll deliver newspapers, too.