THE HISTORY OF THE BICYCLE BUS

In the spring of 1988 KING TV of Seattle did a three minute human interest news story about us on the Quinault Reservation at La Push, Washington that won for the station a four-state Emmy. As a result the piece was shown on NBC affiliates all over the country.

By 1988 we had really developed a liking for all the creature comforts of a modern home. But our 20 foot long International was really cramped inside. We never had any bicycles inside the living quarters, but we were packed full of other stuff. In fact our bathroom became unusable because we needed storage so bad that we had filled it floor to ceiling with stuff. We met a minister of a church who wanted us to have their old 40 foot long Bluebird church bus. The power steering had been out on one side, but he assured us it was repaired and would start functioning as it should after we drove it a couple hundred miles as it had to bleed. So we got it and built a coral on top and bolted half a VW van on top as our bedroom and cut a hole in the roof for access. We switched the bikes over and stored the International --and set off down the road. But after all that work the power steering never did start to work as the minister had promised it would. We telephoned him and he told us it was our problem now. It was still drivable --but I really had to muscle it on the left side. In every town we passed through I asked mechanic after mechanic if they knew how to fix it. No one knew a thing about it.

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We were on the Olympic Penninsula on highway 101, heading for the Makah Indian reservation on the long winding coastal road. We'd just awoke. Ellie got out of bed and came downstairs and sat in the rocking chair. I got out and took this photograph and then we continued our drive. Five minutes later the right front wheel of the big bus went a couple inches off the road in a long turn -- and sunk into the fresh soft mud and would not come back up on the roadway! And as if in slow motion our huge "new" Bicycle Bus tipped over and rolled sideways down a cliff. We survived.

The Bluebird Bicycle Bus rolled over one complete revolution and landed on its wheels in a ravine. We dropped something like seventy feet I guess. While we were rolling everything inside the bus was flying through the air. There was a cast iron woodstove in the back where Ellie was sitting. Beneath the stove were one hundred red bricks. All of that was flying through the air, rolling with Ellie. She came out of it with a black eye. I was rolling with our large Honda generator. It smashed into my knee like a sledge hammer. A large grinder was in the air with me too. I had no broken bones -- But every muscle in my body ached excruciatingly. The bikes had all been squashed. Some had survived, due to the soft wet soil. Many were ruined. Providence had gotten Ellie out of bed that morning. The VW on top where she had been sleeping was flat as a pancake. We slept in the ruined bus the night after the wreck. Ellie, my darling, stayed up all night long, rubbing my aching muscles. All night long. I mean it. All night long.

We salvaged what we could, with some help from a kind neighbor who managed a nearby treefarm. He gave us a cabin to live in for a couple weeks while we sorted everything out. One sad loss was the Peugeot I had bought new in 1980 ridden across Canada. I buried it like it was a person. Ellie's Peugeot came through the wreck like a trooper. Oh the wheels were ruined. Eventually I built her new aluminum wheels and new paint. The Bluebird was towed out by three large towtrucks and sold at auction for the bill. We carried a Honda 750 motorcycle on the back bumper of the old Bicycle Bus. The new Bluebird didn't have a sufficient rear bumper for that purpose but we were towing a trailer I'd made, full of bikes and bike parts, and the motorcycle was on that. The trailer had rolled too, but I guess all the bicycles and wheels cushioned it from receiving any harm.

We rode our Honda motorcycle to Oregon and got the old Bike Bus out of storage and brought it up to Washington and loaded all the bikes that were salvagable back on board. That was that. It looked like we had better get used to rolling down life's highways in the old 1941 International and just plain count our blessings... At least we were alive, which is exactly what I told the TV news crew that came out to interview us the morning after the wreck. We were so well known in the northwest that all the news stations talked about it. We later met a sailor who told us he had been aboard an aircraft carrier out in the Pacific listening to the ship-board radio station when all of a sudden the music stopped and the DJ broke in and exclaimed "Hey guys! You all remember seeing that bus covered with bicycles that wanders all over the place, don't cha? Well, listen up! It just rolled over a cliff!!!!!" -- And the whole aircraft carrier broke out in cheers. Oh well, I'm glad someone saw some humor in it. The hat I am wearing in the picture on the right has two otter pelts on the brim given to me by Indian friends. I tried to be a vegetarian -- but I accepted things that came from Indian lifestyles and tried to use them holistically.

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In the summer of 1988 we took two young boys along with us on our travels. They were brothers, one of them being our good friend Michael Eagle's son. The rascals were with us for two months. I taught the young one to swim and introduced them both to lots of Indian folk, as well as teaching them bike repair.

They slept outside the bus under the stars, cooked meals over campfires, rode bmx bikes over rugged indian trails with hearty Indian kids their age. I would let them out of the Bike Bus on the highway at the top of long steep winding grades and let them ride their bikes down to the bottom, sometimes four or five exhilarating miles downhill. Ellie would ride with them. So, Ellie who had had her motherhood stolen from her by base thieves had an opportunity to unfurl her mother-wings and look after these fellows, and they did establish quite a bond. They tried our patience, indeed. They had long hippy-style hair when they came aboard, but just a couple days into the trip the older one took a can of spray paint and painted the hair and head of the younger one. There was no way to get the paint out. So they both got crew cuts in a nearby barbershop. I forget all the other mischief they got into, but there was sure a lot of it. It was worth it though. It is not easy being parents. We learned a lot by having them with us. All in all, the summer of 1988 was one of our more enjoyable and memorable summers, much thanks to them.

The little black cat was born in our bus, the only kitten out of the litter to survive. All she knew as home was our bus on wheels. What a wonderful buskitty she turned out to be. She could be wandering around fifty feet from the bus or a hundred and if she heard the engine of the bus start up she was suddenly a bolt of lightning heading straight for the bus. It happened occasionally that we would think she was inside when she was in fact outside. We would start the engine to leave and there she'd come, flying, and leap onto the bus, even if it was moving, her claws would catch a spoke or a rope, and she would scramble aboard and climb way up on top. The bus was her home, and there was no way it was leaving without her. Funny how we lost her. Some crazy woman in Eugene stole her from us one day. She sent a friend by to tell us she did it "because she loved cats and all animals and could not stand to see them mistreated, and it isn't right for a cat to live in a vehicle because cats need a regular home." The friend would not tell us where she lived. Isn't it sad how presumptuous some people can be, thinking they know so much? Believing it gives them the right to take away the love from our hearts?

Don't you wish sometimes you could just scream into their ears until they got wise to what they really are? We see it way too often. For instance, the same sort of numbskulls sometimes see Ellie and think they understand her. Some of them presume I have abused her. She is quiet. She talks to herself... Ever since they took Sandy Laughing-River away from her. Often she just doesn't make sense anymore when she talks. Unless you really know her. Many people just "don't have the time" to do that. People often seem to prefer a superficial world. They really don't see any necessity in digging down deep to get to know anyone. They don't know their neighbors. They don't know the people they work with -- so content to just guess and assume what is what.

Winters could be rough for us. We usually tried to find some place to hole up all winter long, some place where people rode bikes all winter. Eugene Oregon was such a place. If we stayed in one place we wouldn't need to buy much gas for our bus. There were areas in Eugene where we could park on the side of the street and sleep as long as we got up and left early in the morning. Some towns didn't allow it at all. Some looked the other way. Eugene was fairly good about it back then. In later years there was a big rucus though that is still going on. But there weren't a lot of alternatives. Very few regular trailer courts would take an RV as old and weird as the Bicycle Bus -- and if we moved into an apartment what would we do with the Bike Bus? How would we keep thieves from stripping it bare? No. We just had to find ways to wait out the winters. Usually we parked in one place and worked on projects. I had been working with deerskin for years, making pouches and such. Odd thing for a vegetarian to do I know -- but such is life. One interesting thing I frequently made was deerskin bikinis. I would sell these, or barter them, or just make them to give to friends.

In June of '89 we headed to Robinson's Hole, Nevada. The National Rainbow Gathering was going to be held there. We had a real great time and stayed for about three weeks. The picture on the left is a sunset over bus village. The sunsets in the desert were incredible.On the way home we caravanned with other bus friends -- talking on our CB radios as we headed west. Rainbow Gatherings give people such a feeling of community -- indeed of brother and sisterhood -- that when the Gathering is over it is very difficult to let go. So we decided to all go on together for a ways, especially since we were heading in approximately the same direction. Papillion was in his big green bus. Pappy is a French Canadian like my wife Ellie. I often feel I have not provided her with enough access to her own French Canadian culture so it is always nice when we can have another French Canadian around for awhile -- and Pappy is a great guy. Pappy had a lovely Italian woman named Beatte with him.

There was a beautifully painted bus owned by a woman with white hair. I have forgotten her name unfortunately. Maybe she will write me and remind me. Her bus was fastidious and perfect inside and out. Wonderful aromas of fresh-baked breads and pies wafted from her windows. Then there was one-armed Mike and his friend Carolyn. Mike is a Rainbow Gathering old-timer. Everyone knew him and his little dog, his best friend. Darn it, I have forgotten the dog's name too in the twelve years that have passed... Mike had one of the most beautiful buses in the Rainbow, beautifully painted on the outside, and very nice woodwork cabinetry and tapestries on the inside. I actually met Mike first in 1982 when Ellie and I finished our bike trip north and ended up sitting in Idaho hotsprings. Mike was camped at the old Goldforks hotsprings. So our four buses rolled along on the secondary roads heading west. There was a brother named Bob who came along in his bus too, five buses in all.

A Rainbow Gathering in Nevada is a dusty experience. There was actually a small hotsprings in the bottom of Robinson's hole, but it was only big enough for two people at a time and the line was humongously long. The local ranchers had asked us not to swim in the small stream at the bottom of the canyon so most of us had gotten pretty gritty and dirty and at the end of the gathering one thing on our minds was wouldn't it be nice if we knew of a hotsprings along the way home where we could all stop at for a few days? Well I knew of one. Owyhee. None of them had been there but all wanted to go. So it was agreed that Owyhee hotsprings would be our next stop.

We stayed a couple days. Surely the places on this earth as beautiful as Owyhee hotsprings are getting scarcer and scarcer. The hot water comes up right at the edge of a cold stream. Bathers have built a retaining wall of large and small rocks which keeps the cold riverwater out and the hot hotsprings water in. The currents constantly take their toll and everyone must do some rebuilding if they want to enjoy the pools. Ellie and I have been there in both summer and winter. Winter time bathing can be coolish surrounded by snow and ice. But an hour or two of work resetting the rocks and patching all the leaks will make the pools plenty hot. Everyone left to go their separate ways. What a nice ending Owyhee was to our Rainbow Gathering experience. Needless to say the remainder of 1989 sort of paled in comparison.

This is Mike here on the right, and his faithful old dog is the picture on the left, I guess he is well over ten years old in the picture. A couple years later I met Mike at the Colorado Rainbow and he told me that one day his best friend had walked into some bushes and just disappeared. Mike searched and searched, called and called, but the dog seemed to have disappeared into thin air and was never seen again. A very very sad thing... He knew I had a picture of the dog but I could not get it to him at the time. So, Mike, here is your photo of your good good friend. May it serve you well brother. Drop me a line if you get a chance.