"'Dont say stop plunging into the forest,' Kesey says. 'Dont say stop being a pioneer and come back here and help these people through the door. If Leary wants to do that, that's good, its a good thing and somebody should do it. But somebody has to be the pioneer and leave the marks for others to follow.'" (27) "The main figures on Perry Lane were two novelists, Robin White, who had just written the Harper Prize novel, 'Elephant Hill,' and Gwen Davis, a kind of West Coast Dawn Powell. In any case, all the establshed Perry Laners could hee Kesey coming a mile away. He had Jack London Martin Eden Searching Hike, the hick with intellectual yearnings, written all over him. He was from Oregon- who the hell was ever from Oregon?- and he had an Oregon country drawl and too many muscles and callouses on his hands and his brow furrowed when he was thinking hard, and it was perfect." (31) "Somehow the Perry Lane set got the idea that his family were Okies, coming out of the Dust Bowl during the Depression, and then up to Oregon, wild, sodden Oregon, where they had fought the land and shot bears and the rivers were swift and the salmon leaped silver in the spring big two hearted rivers. [...] Beautiful!... the current fantasy...but how to tell them? [...] - when they had such a nice clear picture of him as the horny-nailed son of the Western sod, fresh from Springfield, Oregon. It was true that his father, Fred Kesey, had started him and his younger brother, Joe, shooting and fishing and swimming as early as they could in any way manage it, also boxing, running, wrestling, plunging down on the rapids of the Willamette and the McKenzie Rivers on inner-tube rafts, with a lot of rocks and water and sartin' death foamin' down below. Bu it was not so they could tame animals, forests, rivers, wild upturned convulsed Oregon. It was more to condition them to do more of what his father had already done a pretty good job of- claim whatever he can rightly get by being man enough to take it, and not on the frontier, either... Kesey Sr. had been part of the 1940s migration from the Southwest- not of 'Okies' but of Protestant entrepreeurs who looked to the West Coast as a land of business opportunity. He started out in the Wilammette Valley with next to nothing and founded a marketing cooperative for dairy farmers, the Eugene Farmers Cooperative, and built it into the biggest dairy operation in the area, retailing under the name of Darigold. He was one of the big postwar success stories in the Valley- and ended up not in an old homestead with wood sidings and lightning rods but in a modern home in the suburbs, lowslung and pastel, on a street called Debra Lane. The incredible postwar American electro-pastel surge into the suburbs! it was sweeping the Valley, with superhighways, dreamboat cars, shopping centers, soaring thirty-foot Federal Sign & Signal Company electric suerscultures- Eight new Plexiglas Display Features!- a surge of freedom and mobility, of cars and the money to pay for them and the time to enjoy them and a home where you can laze in a rich pool of pale wall-to-wall or roar through the technological wonderworld in motor launches and, in the case of men like his father, private plans- The things he would somehow suddenly remember about the old home town- [...]" (32-33) "Kesey starts talking in the old soft Oregon drawl and everybody is quiet. (65) "HE comes on soft, with the Oregon drawl[...]" "But Kesey doesnt even blink and his voice doesnt even change one half tone, just the old Oregon drawl[...]" "[...]then he says softly, in the Oregon drawl[...]" "[...] the way it sounded in Kesey's certain Oregon drawl[...]" (200ish, 170?)
snowghoul
titsay
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
2087
gummygunk
romaincrisis