Drop City

the bliss she needed and deserved and wanted because that was what this life was all about, wasn't it? Norm went on and on, ranting about the county, about Mr. Jones and the plastic society that spawned him, about conformity and hate and love and the _I Ching.__ He must have talked nonstop for half an hour, his voice dipping and raging and looping back on itself until it was a kind of white noise and the words couldn't touch her--she'd had enough bad vibes and negativity for one day. Enough. Enough, already. And she was about to get to her feet and say just that--_Enough, and let's sleep on it and see what the morning brings__--when the room fell silent.
    She looked round her, and it was as if she'd just awakened.
    Norm was still up there on the table, the artificial light bleeding from his face. He'd just delivered the good news, the promise that was going to redeem them all and resurrect Drop City, and it came in three interconnected syllables that didn't sound like a promise at all--it was more like a joke, or maybe a dream. She couldn't even be sure she'd heard him right, and before she knew what she was doing, she was raising her hand, raising her hand and flapping it at the end of her wrist as if she were wedged behind a tiny shellacked desk back in elementary school. “Norm, Norm!” she cried amidst a tumult of voices, everybody talking at once, everybody shouting, but she was on her feet now and he was looking right at her through the clear hard lenses of his taped-up glasses as if she were the only one in the room. “Norm, did you say _Alaska?__”
    Yes. That was what he'd said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than _Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,__ and the Yukon wasn't even in Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru and though he'd never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe, and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. “No rules,” he shouted, “no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go right ahead and do it and you don't have to go groveling for anybody's permission because there's no-fucking-body there--do you hear me, people? Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers--off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I'm telling you?”
    Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing--what?--king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be.
    “Are you fucking crazy?” Star turned her head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Alaska? It's like sixty below up there. What are we going to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal blubber?”
    “Longest day, man,” Norm said. “The sun won't set up there tonight. I've seen it. For three years I saw it. And you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and _live__ in. And this”--he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and-blue-striped papers--"this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I mean, get me to the _lumber__ mill, man.
    “My uncle Roy--and I don't know how many of you know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie--he's got a place up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can drive to in the continental U. S., the last place, I'm telling you, the last frontier, and what's the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I'm saying? _Logs!__ I lived there three years after I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I couldn't take the plastic bourgeois capitalist fucking bullshit _brainwashing__