By Carolyn Goldwasser
In 1971, when I was a barefoot hippy, I went to live on Goat Island, in Puget Sound, near La Conner; it was summer, I had been studying Zen Macrobiotics and traveling, talking with people and communing with Nature.
Wes had been camping on Goat Island for a while, with his three-year-old son Randy and their big dog, Snoopy, living mainly on brown rice. “Simplicity is Bliss” was the slogan he had written on the cement wall of the old abandoned army bunker where they were living. Wes invited me to come live with them and teach him how to make chapattis (fried bread), because he wanted some variety in their simple diet.
There was no fresh water on the island, so we carried some over there in plastic jugs. The first time we arrived on this island was by walking over on the top of a dike, at very low tide, with several of his friends.The usual way to get back and forth to the mainland was traveling by rowboat, which we did about once a month, to pick up his unemployment check at the PO – General Delivery.
There was also no electricity on the island, so we built a little campfire every evening and fried up some of the previously cooked brown rice; that was dinner. Swimming every afternoon at the little beach down the hill was how we maintained being clean; going mostly without clothes (on the island) solved the laundry problem. We slept outside under the stars in our sleeping bags.
The bunker had no roof, but it was summer, and no rain, but Wes got it in his head to build a roof. So every day we walked to take some lumber off an old falling down building at the other end of this small island, and we carried it back. There are many such bunkers, up and down the Pacific Coast, which were left by the Army from some previous war, when attack from an enemy over the sea was feared. The back wall of this bunker was built into the side of the hill overlooking the swimming beach.
The building was about 12 feet square, with a door in one wall, and a couple of holes where windows had once been on the other two walls. I could reach the top if the cement wall on the dug in back side, but Randy could not yet. Wes startedbuilding a roof by nailing planks to a wooden beam, which was bolted to the top of the short back wall; first he had sawed them to be the right length to reach onto the other large wooden beam, which spanned across the open center of the building.
About the time half the roof had been completed, Snoopy had a confrontation with a porcupine. Snoopy looked like a mix between a Collie and a German Shepherd; he was a big strong young dog. Wes’s last name was Shepherd, actually, and he was from Idaho; he knew a lot about hunting and wildlife, but he was a hairdresser by trade. Anyway, he carefully pulled out all the porcupine quills from Snoopy’s snout with a pair of pliers. But Snoopy just looked miserable and lay around moping, not eating or playing for several days. So, we decided to give him a “ten days of brown rice macrobiotic cure.” Wes put the dog food bag up on the planks of the completed part of the roof, and I coaxed Snoopy down the hill into the salt water to swim with us every afternoon. Each night Snoopy ate what we were eating.
About eight or ten days into this routine, Snoopy managed to jump up onto the short side of the roof and knock his dog food bag down onto the ground. We laughed with joy. We saw his energy returning. Looking into his dog’s face, Wes saw a tiny bit of a white porcupine quill sticking out (less than one-inch long), from his lower eyelid. He very slowly and carefully pulled it out with his fingers. It was a full three inches long! Wes surmised it must have been stuck far back into his head, maybe into his brain, through the skull, along the pathway of the optic nerve. No wonder he was feeling so miserable! After that we fed him brown rice and/or dog food, his choice, and continued with the saltwater swimming every day. In about a week his playfulness had completely returned, and he seemed healed. But that eye had a bluish cast to it; we wondered if maybe he was partially blind in that eye, but he seemed to be able to see well enough. The next time we went to town, Snoopy decided to stay and live with some friends there; he had had enough of island living for the time being!
Carolyn Goldwasser is a longtime macrobiotic practitioner. She is working on her memoirs about life in the early macrobiotic community.