Chapter 1

When the tractor-trailer rig started passing our 1968 VW Micro Bus I’d already turned on my blinker and started turning left. Time slowed to a crawl. Every detail I saw was in 3D, Cinemascope clarity. The tractor’s right mud flap support jammed into the front wheel well of the Bus and the whole camper swung toward the big truck. We hit hard. The face of my “forever in blue jeans” old lady, Sunshine, reflected in the rearview mirror showed that she was sleeping peacefully on the fold-out bed I’d built in the back of the bus.

I could see blue-white smoke from the truck tires and smell the burning rubber, as the driver slammed on his air brakes. The world narrowed down to horrible noises; metal tearing, glass smashing, my own voice yelling, “OH SHIT!” The Micro Bus broke loose from the mud flap support and was launched over the guard rail. There was a sickening feeling of weightlessness as the VW Kombi flew through the air. The tops of pine trees smashed out the windshield and the windows. Suddenly I weighed entirely too much. A big Douglas Fir stopped our flight. The bus slid down the trunk of the huge tree, breaking off branches as we fell. The VW landed upside down on a slope of about forty-five degrees. I was hanging from my seat belt.

“Buckle up for safety, buckle up

Buckle up for safety, always buckle up

Make your seat-belt snug, give an extra tug

Buckle up for safety, everybody buckle up!”

The TV PSA jingle played in my head, and I realized the only reason I was alive was the nylon webbing holding me in my seat. I had installed the belts myself. The TV jingle and the multiple articles in “My Weekly Reader” when I was a kid had convinced me to shell out $35 for the kit to put belts on the two front seats. Of course, the lap belt didn’t stop my head from smashing into the steering wheel. I knew I was bleeding from what was probably a scalp wound. The blood was dripping down, so it wasn’t in my eyes. Hanging upside down isn’t fun. It makes you feel really panicked, so I unbuckled my seat belt without thinking about gravity. I found myself on the roof of the bus, dumped on my head. I ripped down some of tie-dyed material I’d put up for window curtains and made a make-shift bandage to stop the bleeding and keep the blood out of my eyes.

Sunshine was crumpled up where the impact had thrown her. She was sleeping on the bed in the back, so she didn’t have a seat-belt to hold her in place. She was breathing, slow, shallow breaths. She was unconscious. I didn’t see any wounds or blood, but there was a big bump swelling up on her head where it had collided with the kitchen cabinet.

Sunshine was a pretty typical hippie girl. She was a runaway from over-strict, over-churchy parents in Kansas someplace. I’d taken her under my wing when she was fourteen, and she’d been my old lady since I kind of rescued her from a predatory type. I was eighteen at the time. She decided that since I was willing to fight to protect her, she would hang around. Since she was underage, we did a lot of camping out and laying low to avoid the notice of “the man,” to keep me from going to jail.

We spent some time at a couple communes, but it was just like in “Animal Farm,” the hardest workers got exploited. We made sure the bus always had gas and was parked on a hill so we could get out of Dodge if things got too tense, even if the battery was dead.

Sunshine and I weren’t married. We had a typical hippie agreement, and she was free to screw anyone she wanted and so was I. Sunshine was monumentally fucked up about sex. Sometimes she would get hormonal and screw me until I couldn’t walk, because my balls were so sore. Most of the time she wasn’t that interested in sex though. She slept with the head guy at one of the communes once, but that was the only other guy she fucked. The next day, she told me sex wasn’t any better with him, and I should just think of it as her being screwed up by her up-tight parents rather than there being something wrong with me. I knew she was kind of fragile, so I didn’t screw every chick I could have. A couple of times she was off doing some workshop and a girl threw herself at me so hard, I just had to catch her, but mostly I figured if Sunshine wasn’t fucking other guys, it wouldn’t be fair for me to fuck every girl who smiled at me.

Sunshine was a skinny little thing. She was five feet tall, weighed eighty-five pounds, and had itty-bitty titties. She had natural straw-blonde hair down to her butt. The thing is, she seemed sexy as hell to me and I would have done her three times a day, every day of the year if she’d been willing. When she wore white short shorts, it always gave me a woodie that threatened to put a hole in my jeans.

During the four years she’d been my old lady, we fucked off an on, and never used any kind of birth control. When Sunshine turned eighteen, she wanted a baby really badly, so we went to the Free Clinic in the Haight and they tried a couple of things that didn’t work. Finally, they tried something that did, and Sunshine was gloriously pregnant. I was pretty happy about it because her pregnancy hormones made her want to screw every day. That was great news for me. I suppose I could have left her any time when I realized she wasn’t as free and breezy as she wanted me to think she was, but there was something about her that made me want to take care of her and protect her. On top of that, she was about as cute a hippie girl as you’d ever find. After we’d been together a while, if I was bad off and she wasn’t in the mood, she’d let me put massage oil on her butt and rub my hardon over the crack of her tight little ass until I spunked. It wasn’t perfect, but at least she tried. I figured I owed her better than running out on her.

I was able to get the back hatch open and I put Sunshine on a blanket and dragged her out of the VW. I got her away from the bus in case it caught fire. I found a fairly level spot and I kind of wrapped her up in another blanket. I pulled everything I could out of the Bus. I had some backpacking food, a tent, a couple sleeping bags, and my first-aide kit in a military surplus, waterproof metal ammunition box. In the kit I had some expired “Jungle Penetrator” flares I got from a buddy who got caught in the draft and shipped off to Nam. I had a Coleman gallon jug that had survived. I wished it wasn’t lemonade, but you do the best you can with what you are given.

I was hoping the truck driver lived through the crash and maybe was coherent and might send someone to look for us. I knew I was hurt bad enough that I wasn’t going to climb that steep slope up to the highway. I sure wasn’t going to be able to drag Sunshine up there by myself. I put my back up against a tree and settled down to wait. After it got dark, I could see some flashing red lights up on the highway, to I screwed one of the pen-gun flares into the launcher, drew back the spring, and let the firing pin go. It hit the bottom of the flare and sent a tiny rocket up through the trees. It got up higher than the road, and it burst in a red star shell kind of thing.

I waited about five minutes and then sent another flare as straight up as I could get it. Somebody up there got on a bullhorn and asked for another flare so they could get our location better. I sent up a third flare. I only had three left because they came in a strip of six.

They only needed one more flare, and they sent someone in a mountain climbing harness down. They found me, called for a stretcher for Sunshine, and they pulled her up out of there first. When they got me up out of there, the ambulance had already taken Sunshine off to the hospital.

I got a ride to the hospital. They put some stitches in my scalp just to be safe, gave me a tetanus shot, and then let me go check on my old lady. They tried to give me a raft of shit because we weren’t legally married, but hippie guys are apparently scary to the squares, so they finally let me see her. She was in a regular hospital room with oxygen and IVs connected up. She was cleaned up and in a hospital gown. There were no bandages or blood I could see. The bump on her head was about goose-egg size and kind of sickly green-purple color. As I said, with her skinny little body, her belly made her look gloriously knocked up. She was right around eight and a half months pregnant, as best the Free Clinic doctor could estimate it.

A staff doctor came in and told me that Sunshine was in a coma and might not ever wake up. They recommended that I keep her in the hospital and have an obstetrician look at her and see what they thought about the baby. He said it usually was best to just let the baby alone until the due date and then if Sunshine hadn’t come out of the coma, they could do a Caesarion to deliver the baby. I agreed with the doctor and they put in a request for an OB check in the morning.

Now a lot of remote places in California had for shit hospitals, but mining and logging companies had convinced Kaiser to put a hospital out there, so I knew the care would be pretty good and the doctors wouldn’t suck. I slept in the waiting room. The next day the trauma doctor told me that there was pressure on Sunshine’s brain, so they drilled a hole to relieve pressure and look for bleeding. Everything was negative. The hole in her skull didn’t make Sunshine wake up.

The OB doctor came to see me and told me the babies were fine. “What do you mean, babies?” I asked.

“Well you’ve got three little girls as close as I can tell. They all seem healthy and about the right size for their estimated age. I think we just wait and hope your wife wakes up. If there are no signs of brain activity in two or three weeks, we should probably go in and take the babies. We can see how your wife responds after the surgery and decide what to do next,” He said.

I got a cheap motel that loggers used sometimes. I visited Sunshine as long as they let me, every day. Back when being a hippie was shiny and new, we would have insisted that people not assume we were married. Now, I just let people at the hospital think that because it made life so much easier on me. I knew Sunshine wouldn’t want the hospital searching for her parents because they would have pushed me right out of the picture. Sunny didn’t want her parents to even visit our kids, EVER, so I knew she’d haunt me for life if her parents took our girls away and messed up their brains too.

I had been making my living by making and selling tie-dyed shirts. I knew I had to get to work or I would run out of bread really quickly.

My VW Kombi was totaled. I had insurance, and they paid me off with a lump sum payment for the Blue Book price of a 1968. I went to the junk yard and found an extra-long school bus with good paint and windows, but no engine. I got them to tow it out to the junction of a couple state highways through the mountains that tourists used. I got permission from the highway department to park my bus on a triangle of green grass between the two highways. I bought some big industrial size cooking kettles and a couple propane burners. I setup my dye shop in the back of the bus, then my kitchen, then my bed. I had shelves for folded, finished shirts, maybe ten feet long, floor to ceiling. In the very front I had a little display area with hanging rods so I could display one of each style of shirt and still sell on rainy days.

I always liked to get the best tee shirts I could. People liked that they had some weight and thickness to them. I also had a good source for my dyes. I got a reputation for the best shirts in Northern California pretty quickly. I had hanging racks along both sides of the bus so tourists could see examples of my work. There was a safe place for them to pull off, and I did a pretty steady business, so I could buy food and make payments to the hospital. The good thing about Kaiser in those days was that the doctors were hospital employees, so their fees weren’t ridiculous. That meant you only got a bill from the hospital, so there was never any confusion about what you owed. After Sunny was in there for a month, the hospital social worker got her certified for Medi-Cal, and that helped a lot.

I made friends with the DOT guys who worked out of the shop near the junction. They had a supply dump there, and I was sort of their burglar alarm. I tried to keep people from stealing their supplies at night. I bought me a wolf dog, which was a Malamute that had been bred back to a wolf. I always liked the Sgt. Preston of the Yukon show when I was a kid, so I called my dog King. He was big and for me, a teddy bear, but for anyone else, scary as hell. The DOT guys set me up so I could tap off their well and dump into their septic tank. I was able to put a small bathroom in the bus, complete with a propane water heater so I could have hot showers. That made life a lot more pleasant for me, and less stinky for my customers.

I tie-dyed up a bunch of diapers and read up on how to fold them for different size babies. I got gifted a few diapers by the local diaper service. I went out and bought a used washer and dryer to use for diapers. The OB doctor told me there was no reason to think the babies wouldn’t be healthy, even though they would be small when they were born.

Sunshine showed no signs of improvement. They did an EEG and didn’t see any sign of brain activity.

When the due date came, the OB doctor asked me to wait another week to give my girls a chance to get bigger. I agreed. Finally, they started to see signs that Sunshine’s body wasn’t going to stay healthy much longer. They went in and got the babies. My old lady died on the operating table.

I felt like a dumb fuck because I didn’t have names picked out for my babies. The whole hippie thing was dying, so I didn’t give them names like “Rainbow.” The first girl out, I called Janis, the next one was Linda, and the last was Grace. I didn’t give them middle names. Of course, Janis was for Janis Joplin, Linda was for Linda Ronstadt, and Grace was for Grace Slick.

I bought an old VW bug that was pained up psychedelic style, put three car seats in the back seat, and went to pick up my babies from the hospital.

We lived in the bus at the junction until the girls were six. Now I did a good business, and word of mouth brought lots of tourists my way, so I was able to save up a nice nest egg. I sold the bus and tie-dye business to a young guy from one of the little towns nearby, who thought it would be a better life than being a miner. I bought a California standards school bus that for some reason hadn’t got a lot of miles on it when it was time to renew the contract and replace all the buses. I got a permit from the Forest Service to park my bus in the literal middle of nowhere and to farm the land around the parking spot. In exchange I provided fire lookout for the area. I was tied in to the Forest Service fire communications phone lines.