Respite in the cottonwoods

April 24, 2008 at 9:07 pm (caravan)
Tags: caravan, Rawlins, Wyoming

Though several of the buses needed to stay behind in Rawlins, the rest of us were free to find our own spots to wait out the repairs to Stephen’s bus. Given that all of the disabled buses were 15 to 30 years old, finding replacement gearboxes and differentials would take some time.

We drove a few miles beyond Rawlins, surrendering some elevation to gain warmer weather, and found a nice deserted park near the North Platte River, close enough to the highway that we’d be sure to notice when the Caravan drove by. I’d bought a roll of masking tape to lay out a straight edge along the fuzzy trim job that I’d painted. With nothing else to do for a while, we spent time entertaining the girls, and laundering and airing out the blankets, sleeping bags and sheets while learning more about one another.

Over the several weeks of this leg of the Caravan we’d gotten to know a few other four marriages, all identified by the names of the male members. Besides Peter and Gerald there was John and William, Peter and Thomas, David and Richard, Phillip and Warren, Richard and Michael and others. We’d also become familiar with most of the named buses, some of them called by the town where the bus had been bought and some by a feature of the bus itself. There was the Stockton Bus, the Santa Rosa Bus and the Manteca Bus. Then there were the Screen Door Bus, the Pear Bus, the Loft Bus and the Raised Roof Bus. Mixed in with the full sized buses were a few shorty buses, bread trucks, delivery vans, VW microbuses and one creative rolling object called the Cadillac Camper, which fused a cab-over camper meant to sit in the bed of a pickup truck with the front end of a late-50s Caddy.

Shades of Blue was a relatively new and well maintained vehicle with a strong engine that allowed it to pull uphill grades faster than most of the others. It was fast enough that it almost got me in trouble once as I pulled into the passing lane on a long climb and began advancing beyond the magic place in line beyond which only Stephen and the four marriage buses were supposed to be. Rudolph calmly called that fact to my attention and I pulled my foot off the gas until I could pull back into line at a proper place.

If you were heavy enough to be in a four marriage, you were demonstrating what Rudolph referred to as “thunder yogi” commitment. It was one thing to suppress your own ego. It was a higher commitment to marry someone and give over to that person. But to make a marital commitment between two couples represented a level of surrender that earned you at least a position near the front of the Caravan. I suspected that it also gained you a certain level of trust with Stephen since you were following his example, not just his teachings. Rudolph had been around Stephen longer than the rest of us, but he couldn’t explain the phenomenon of four marriage.

Not understanding that mystery was fine with me. At least we could talk about the principles that Stephen taught and how they applied to real life, because that’s what it was all about. In essence, what I’d joined was a community that believed in telepathy, or at least a community that assumed that it shared some telepathic connections. And by that, I understood that Stephen taught a blend of spiritual stuff and advanced physics, which together defined individual humans as electrical beings generating fields that intermingled. When we referred to vibrations, which we did quite frequently, we were talking about our sensitivity to those electrical fields. Bad vibes, good vibes, happiness and grief – you didn’t have to say anything or be looking into each other’s eyes to communicate them. You could feel them and react to them, sometimes without knowing their origin.

But words, too, carried more than their literal meaning. Truth – absolute truth – was supposed to be the minimum standard for our verbal exchange. Untruths became all too visible in Caravan conversation. All those little white lies that I’d assumed were OK because, well, everyone else relied on them, too – they didn’t pass the test on the Caravan. This old habit could make me uncomfortable s when talking with Rudolph or visiting veteran students on other buses. I had to recalibrate “my zero” to be meticulously honest about my feelings, my history, my attitudes. It wasn’t so nerve wracking on Shades of Blue where Kristin was pretty loose about things and Rudolph was naturally gentle about telling me that I was taking liberties “on the subtle plane.” But some folks – especially, I noticed, some of the single males from the bus families – would call me on stuff I wasn’t even aware was happening.

On my first day on the Caravan I was busted for sarcasm. My attempts to bring humor and levity to conversations often stirred remarks about “subtle plane anger” or uptight or “clenching up the vibes.” And my becoming more self conscious wouldn’t make things any better, bringing accusations of “looking in my rear view mirror” or being “self-other.”

With experience, I became more familiar with the players and which ones were considered to be the “astral conservatives” of the community – the ones who most carefully watched behaviors for violations of Stephen’s teachings. I gravitated toward the “astral liberals” who – it was said – tended also to be more conservative or meticulous on the “material plane.” Were people actually neater if they allowed others to get away with sloppy spiritual practice? I couldn’t tell. Caravan life was not for neatniks.

There was a lot to figure out in those rare minutes when we’d get to hang out with people during our overnights in the rest areas. Our extended stay alone in the cottonwoods by the river allowed me to tap into Rudolph’s experience about the social dynamics of Stephen’s flock. It had been less than a year since I’d earned my bachelor’s in psychology, but I could not, for the life of me, map Stephen’s social system using the tools, theories and practices I’d learned.

“You’ve got to get into Buddhism,” Rudolph suggested. “Stephen’s into Suzuki Roshi, who founded the Zen Center in San Francisco. He cops to him as his teacher and a lot of what he talks about comes out of that, along with psychedelics. You gotta dump your ego to understand it. If you do, you won’t care so much what people tell you and you probably won’t be so self-conscious about what you say.”

I’d never felt like I had that much of an ego. My friends and I were all about self-effacement – making light of the flaws in our own personalities and presumptions. Was I supposed to think even less of myself? Was I supposed to not have a viewpoint?

“Suzuki says you should just sit. That’s the Zen way. You’re probably thinking too much about it. I’d just cut loose and read your mail.”

Read my mail?

“Yeah. Pay attention to what other people and the Universe are telling you. That’s your mail.”

One morning – we’d lost track of what day it was – Krissy called out, “The Caravan! There goes the Caravan!” Through the trees we glimpsed the signature white shape of Stephen’s bus rushing by with its trail of colored blurs. We packed swiftly, then pulled onto the pavement with the accelerator mashed to the floor. The governor didn’t allow us go exceed 55 mph, but we kept the speedometer pegged there for over an hour before we caught up with the slowest bus in line.

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