South County

1972. A Yankee learns the Ozarks way and lives to tell his tales. Now almost a native, Denny fondly reminisces about the people and places of his adopted home.

Denny Luke is an adventurer. During his years as a Navy man, he built hot rods with money he made with shipboard loansharking. He returned to his native Ohio where he soon tired of the mechanic’s life. Computers had just started to break the surface in 1966, the perfect attraction to a young man with a sharp mind and plenty of ambition.

Hot cars and Enduro motorcycle racing occupied Denny’s next few years as he helped usher in the computer age in Minneapolis. But another adventure awaited when in 1970 he fell in with a bunch of hippies. By 1972, he had found his way to the Ozarks.

An avid photographer and storyteller, Denny shares the adventures of his life as he recalls the outrageous backwoods tales and colorful characters who populate the southern fringe of Washington County in Northwest Arkansas.

Paperback, $9.95 Amazon

Aquarian Revolution

In the late 1990s, I pursued a project that called to me, which was to interview people of the 60s generation who lived in Northwest Arkansas. Many of these were immigrants to the area, the hippies, the drop-outs, the radicals. They came from New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and bought cheap Arkansas land where they could build lives with meaning. Some of the interviewees were locals, also of the Baby Boom generation who saw, rightly, that “the times, they were a changin’.”

What I found in common among those interviewed was a profound understanding that they and the rest of this cohort were responsible for what the future would become. Each acting passionately in his or her own way in arenas of personal interest, these people brought important changes to the region and the world. Whether protecting the environment, furthering the rights of women or racial minorities, or opening their hearts to so many other problems, these were the engines of social changes that are still being fought in our politics.

Often the topic of heated rhetoric and armchair analysis, those who went ‘back to the land’ are rarely heard in their own voice. Now documented in these breathtakingly honest, personal interviews, their stories reveal the guts, glory, and grief of the 1960s social revolution.

Paperback, $12.95, Amazon

His Inner Search

**Furthur** is a 1939 International Harvester school bus purchased by author Ken Kesey in 1964 to carry his “Merry Band of Pranksters” cross-country, filming their counterculture adventures as they went. The bus featured prominently in Tom Wolfe‘s 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test but, due to the chaos of the trip and editing difficulties, footage of the journey was not released as a film until the 2011 documentary Magic Trip.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an exodus from the cities brought hundreds of new settlers to the Arkansas Ozarks. Their personal stories are testaments to an awakening shared by many of the Baby Boom generation, personal and communal. This interview is one of 32 personal stories gathered in 1999-2000, and published in Aquarian Revolution: Back to the Land.

I didn’t like the way I was treated as a kid. I was beaten regularly. I don’t think I’ve cried since I was seven years old, because if I cried, they would beat me with a leather strap until I stopped crying. I had a bleeding ulcer from age twelve until it healed up after I left home right before my eighteenth birthday. I had a shrink and a probation officer trying to get me out of my house legally.

I ran away at thirteen and was involved with a stolen car. I remember when we ditched the car, this other kid I was with, he was fifteen, big kid. We were on our way to pick up some fake plates and police chased us because they recognized him so we dumped the car. We jumped out of the car doing about 45 mph, leaving my guitar case and suitcase with birth certificate, everything telling them who I was, and we ran, picked up a third guy, jumped on a bus to Baltimore, blew all the money we had, started hitchhiking. We were on our way to California. The police picked us up at two a.m. on the highway. I never gave them my name. I was planning on breaking out of jail. I can remember when I was riding that bus, I was thinking about my parents and how much I loved them, but I just couldn’t stand to live with them.

That was about the time I started getting high. A lot of things were about to break then, one way or another. It was either going to come out of me in violence, or… I think I found a channel to do it naturally and just chill out. Just reach in.

They made me see a shrink when I was thirteen because of the stolen car. He said I was afraid to express myself with my dad and that’s why, if anybody crossed me, I’d be right on them. After thirteen, I was getting into a lot of trouble. I was a practical joker who did things I probably shouldn’t have been doing, but I did it with a smile. I had my destructive period. One night three of us smashed a car that was parked alongside the road. We used sticks and rocks and beat it in. Totaled it. Those were heavy years.

I think it was being able to smoke that pulled me out of it. My friends were mostly tough guys, had attitudes. By the time I was seventeen, I had started to drift off with the ones who didn’t. I remember violence on TV, violence was everywhere. It was either protests or Vietnam. At sixteen, if anyone defied me, I would be down their throat in a second. One time a teacher put me in the front seat of the class, wouldn’t let me sleep. I was, man, you won’t let me sleep, what kind of a deal is this? I might have been getting a D at that point, but I didn’t care about that class. He put me in the front seat, banged my shoulder or something, made me wake up and started talking to me, I told him to leave me alone and he did something else to irritate me, and I jumped out of my seat, grabbed him by the lapels, dragged him across his desk, and smashed him into the blackboard in front of the whole class, and said “Leave me the fuck alone.” So of course they threw me out of school instantly.

That was my attitude with anybody. People would come to me from the grade ahead, bigger kids than me, and say hey, this guy’s doing this and that, and I’d go confront him. And I wouldn’t just confront him and intimidate him with anger, I’d put it into words. I’d say something to them that they couldn’t argue with. I didn’t want to argue with anybody, but if you’re going to argue with me, stand back or get out of the way, save yourself. My dad didn’t think I was a man because I wouldn’t be angry with him and fight back. Yet I’d go out and fight and do all this.

Coming out of that, I started being friends with all the teachers I had given trouble. My shrink might have been talking with my parents then. I had two shrinks, one my mother took me to and one that came to my school once a month. I had a probation officer, too. First time I went to the shrink, I sat to talk to him, and he said, ok. Then I went out and he talked to my mom. I come back in and sit down and he looked at me and said, K–, I cannot talk to your mom.

She was so headstrong. You did as she said or whack, or twist your ear. Most of my physical abuse was from my mom. It reached a point with my mom that I was more verbal. By the time I was ten or so, my mom didn’t scare me.

I ended up getting married my senior year. I was moving out. I’d run away another time, it was the third time. It wasn’t like running away. I was walking back and forth with my clothes, patting my mom on the back, saying it’s ok Mrs. C–, it’s ok. I was outta there. My wife’s parents took me in. The probation people were trying to get me out of my house before I was eighteen, if I could find somebody. They knew that anything was better than where I was. As hard as I might have been trying, chilling out, it was hard pretty much to the end.

Finally, I argued back with my dad and that was it. I made a quick exit because he just wanted to knock my block off. I think that changed him. He kind of stopped by the time I was seventeen, eighteen, when I was working for his business doing electrical. …

~~~

Now retired from a successful self-employed career, the subject of this interview moved to Hawaii where he has opened a meditation retreat. Read the rest of his compelling story, available for only $4.99 (ebook) or $11.32 (paperback), at Amazon

South County

1972. A Yankee learns the Ozarks way and lives to tell his tales. Now almost a native, Denny fondly reminisces about the people and places of his adopted home.

Hot cars and Enduro racing occupied Denny’s next few years as he helped usher in the computer age in Minneapolis. But another adventure awaited when in 1970 he fell in with a bunch of hippies. By 1972, he had found his way to the Ozarks.

Amazon buy link

His Fight, Our Fight

According to the brief description that accompanied this photo that crossed my Facebook timeline the other day, the funeral of Pretty Boy Floyd drew the largest attendance of any such event in Oklahoma history. The image gives me goosebumps, almost puts a lump in my throat. It’s not the coffin—I can’t even discern where it is. It’s the people, backs straight, their attention focused entirely on the dead man.

On what he represented.

My dad sometimes talked about Pretty Boy Floyd although at the time of Floyd’s death, my dad was only seventeen. For him, like so many, Floyd stood as a heroic symbol to survival in their times. Dust bowl, economic depression, most of all the shift of worlds. From the independent farmer working alongside his wife and children to wrest of living from the land to the new reality of the need for money and consequently, jobs in town.

Giving up the farm and its creeks and horses and the smell of fresh cut hay. Learning to work for someone else. Breathing exhaust. Street lights burning the dark. Rigid hours to serve someone else’s profit. Dependent on the dollar instead of the land.

There were men who couldn’t make the change. Men who rebelled, who clung to the old ways. Men who’d rather die than portion out his life in the 9 to 5. They didn’t willingly give up the tradition of their fathers, but rather borrowed money on the hope of better times, more rain, abundant crops. The loans came due before better times arrived.

According to his biography in Wikipedia, “[Charles Arthur] Floyd was viewed positively by the general public. When he robbed banks he allegedly destroyed mortgage documents, but this has never been confirmed and may be myth. He was often protected by locals of Oklahoma, who referred to him as ‘Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills.’” He was thirty when he died.

Floyd’s robberies of banks made him a target for the fledgling FBI and the true manner of his death became one of the agency’s earliest cover-ups. After he was downed by rifle shot, another agent shot him with an automatic weapon at point blank range. Not widely known at the time, the unfairness of his killing nevertheless was understood at a visceral level by the common man.

Woody Guthrie, a native of Oklahoma, penned a song about it in 1939, five years after Floyd’s death. Called “The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd,” the song has the form of a Broadside “come-all-ye” ballad opening with the lines:

If you’ll gather ’round me, children, a story I will tell ‘Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an Outlaw, Oklahoma knew him well.

The lyrics recount Floyd’s supposed generosity to the poor and contain the famous lines comparing foreclosing bankers to outlaws:

As through this world you travel, you’ll meet some funny men; Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. And as through your life you travel, yes, as through your life you roam, You won’t never see an outlaw drive a family from their home.

Many other artists have recorded this song, among them Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and James Taylor as another generation’s anthem to the tragedy of corporate takeover.

It’s easy to see Floyd as a martyr. In his short life, he did what so many others wanted to do. Like the young Chinese man who dared to stand in the path of an oncoming tank, Floyd like similar ‘criminals’ of the early 20^th century defied the banks and credit systems that threatened everything that mattered in rural American lives. They instinctively understood they were being swept into a capitalist system that had no sense of morality, no obligation to human circumstance. They fought back the only way they knew how.

The battle that cost Charles Floyd his life has not ended.

~~~

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Boy_Floyd

Gift of the Season Day 6 — Price Markdown

They were the hippies, the drop-outs, the radicals. They came from New York, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and bought cheap Arkansas land where they could build lives with meaning. Often the topic of heated rhetoric and armchair analysis, those who went ‘back to the land’ rarely speak in their own voice. Now documented in these personal interviews, their stories reveal the guts, glory, and grief of the 1960s social revolution.

Previously listed at $15.95, now for a limited time the paperback is available for $11.95. A lasting gift! Amazon buy link

“Denele Campbell’s informative ‘Aquarian Revolution: Back to the Land’ fills a much-needed niche in the history of the Counter-Culture movement. Unlike in more crowded Europe, America’s rural expanse offered an escape, a new beginning in the 1960s, from a social cancer spreading through the dominant culture. The dream of finding land to till and an alternative life style had been an American dream since its founding. America’s cities, mired in racism, sexism, poverty, and riots, seemed doomed. The ‘baby boomers’ sought escape by going to the land, many for the first time. Denele Campbell has carefully chronicled the personal stories of thirty-two pioneers who opted to create their utopian vision in the Ozarks. As such, their quest is at times fascinating, amusing, and often painful. Yet, it is a good read for those who lived through this era as well as today’s young.” —-T. Zane Reeves, Regents’ Professor Emeritus, University of New Mexico and author of Shoes along the Danube.

Jars

If I had considered the question in advance, I would have known that cleaning out the barn would precipitate a crisis. Memories long stored away for some magical future moment when that child’s toy, that handsaw, would again be needed—did I keep them simply for the memory? Furniture—small tables, wooden chairs, an ottoman frame, an old piano bench well made of oak and in need of a few repairs—would I someday find time and reason to fix them and return them to my house?

Too good to throw away. Largely irrelevant to my current life.

Becoming relevant at some future point? Probably not.

Determination to survive in a world lost to chaos drove the accumulation of this minor hoard. It was 1975. We had small children who would need to eat and thrive even if the bomb fell. We labored to renew skills our grandparents knew by heart, certain that within our lifetimes we would have to hide in our house until the fallout settled then emerge to plow, plant, and harvest our food, breed our pigs, chickens, and goats for future generations of meat and milk. We gathered meat saws and grinders, steel axes and shovels, nails and wire.

Time marched on. The Cold War ended and fingers moved away from the annihilation button. The children are no longer dependent babies who might benefit from a collection of books on history, science, math. The goats departed in the late 80s, the garden in the early 90s, and the last of the chickens about ten years ago. The children have gone off like grown children do to find their own visions of the future.

Why do I need eight hand saws, ten hammers (of various sizes), buckets of random nails, screws, washers, bolts, and nuts? Feed scoops and cheesecloth, empty egg cartons, milk pails. What possible purpose could be met by random pieces of plywood or sheetrock, insulation, screen, tile? Why do I think that at some point I’ll make use of a decrepit power saw, drill, or grinder when, for the last twenty-five years, I have not?

I have created two piles. One is for the junkman to haul away. The other is for craigslist ads and friends who operate flea market booths. I am mildly optimistic that someone might buy the old wooden toolbox, child’s desk, or the sturdy small tables, the ten gallon pickling crock or the T-post driver. Never mind that for what I’d receive in dollars, I could restore only a fraction of this hoard.

In truth, what our energy and money bought in those early days was peace of mind. With our collection of tools, books, supplies, and know-how, we’d have a chance. Our kids would have a chance.

It served its purpose. The purpose no longer exists.

Sounds good. But what I haven’t put in either pile is the pressure canner. And the jars. Dozens and dozens of canning jars—quarts, pints, jelly jars. It’s the jars that have brought me to crisis.

When my firstborn child was two, my grandmother died. My dad’s mom, Nora. Always a country girl, Nora knew how to make soap, kill a chicken with a swing and stiff pop of its neck, and would can just about anything edible. She had jars. When they started clearing her property for the auction, I went down to Cane Hill and helped clean out her cellar. I hauled back cases of canned goods.

She had declined for a decade until her death at age 86. I wouldn’t dare eat any of the food in those jars. We had hogs and chickens at the time which allowed me to make use of Grandma’s labors. Each day I’d go out to the barn and pens and open more jars. Applesauce, whole plums, peaches, pears. Grapes and elderberries. Green beans, tomatoes, cabbage, mixed vegetables. Tallow. Jelly, jam, preserves. Juice. The critters were well fed that year.

We grew a huge garden. Neighbors had pear trees. We visited orchards and vineyards. Even with all of Grandma Nora’s jars, I sometimes ran short. My mother gave me jars. I bought jars.

In those heady days, each fall I stood in the storage closet and stared at my larder. The sight of all those jars filled me with the greatest pleasure that once again, by the labor of my hands, I had set aside enough green beans, tomatoes and sauce, peas, corn, and kraut to last a year. The jars lined up in colorful rows, golden tomato seeds swimming in crimson broth, finely shredded green cabbage fermented into tangy white kraut, wild plum jelly glowing fuscia in the dark.

Producing and preserving food challenged me like nothing I’d ever done. Even with a tractor and rototiller, even with liberal applications of goat manure and mulch, plants struggled to survive against drought, bugs, and predation. How many hours did I spend hoeing weeds or picking off potato bugs? How many hours peeling and chopping, sterilizing and packing, standing over the pressure gauge to ensure the right amount of intense heat and adequate time to prevent spoilage.

There’s a sound as jars cool, the snap of the canning lid sucking down, sealing the contents safely into the future—I loved that sound. Then it was time to use the grease pencil to write on the lid—July 1981.

Now I have all these jars. The cardboard boxes have suffered over the years. Faded brown paper hangs in shreds, the sides bow and buckle. Even if I keep the jars, I have to plow through generations of dead spiders and a healthy population of live ones to retrieve the jars from box wreckage. Why would I go to the trouble to re-package all these jars knowing that twenty years from now, it would all be to do over again? Would I be any more willing to let go of them then?

My children have no interest and no place to store jars. I wouldn’t mind storing them if my kids wanted them. But there’s no longer a tractor or rototiller. The half-acre garden has grown up in saplings and pasture grass. There are no goats to produce manure. Everything is different.

But here’s the argument. Certain things haven’t changed. We have to eat. We have the ability to grow food. With jars and a pressure canner, we could store food. Isn’t that incentive enough to save the jars?

What is my responsibility? For countless generations, as far back at least as civilization, my ancestors have planted, cultivated, harvested, and stored food. These are skills we’ve learned—how to measure the right time to plant onions or corn, what seeds to soak before pressing them into the dark earth, how to dig potatoes without piercing them. We raised our kids to know these things.

Do I simply walk away?

Why not? There are books. There are others still farming, still canning—the knowledge won’t fade simply because I relinquish my jars.

Even with the best of hoards, with all the tools and seeds saved and an endless supply of jars, at the end of the day, survival in a world gone mad would be a tenuous venture. What about grain? No bread, no pasta, no crackers. What about oil, salt, soda, sugar? We’d be dependent on venison and that requires guns and ammunition. My .22 rifle won’t bring down a deer.

At some point, even the most vehement survivalist will face what I face. How many times in your life do you restock your rations and water? How much is enough ammunition? Who are you prepared to kill to protect your hard won ark?

I’m working on a compromise with myself. Today I think I will keep a few jars as mementos of my grandmother, the tall green half gallon jars and a few of the older square-shoulder quarts. I will wash them periodically and keep them up on a shelf, decoration that tugs my heartstrings when I look up from my daily tasks. I will acknowledge the hard work and dedication that touched these jars, my hands, my mother’s hands, my grandmother’s hands.

All the grandmothers. All the jars. All the tomatoes and fine plum jam will not save the world.

Bunyard Road and the Personal Adventures of Denny Luke

den w gov — Denny Luke, far right, next to Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe on one of his whistlestop tours of the state. 2006. On left, Ron Johns and in center, Dan Kerlin. At Dan’s store in Winslow.

1972. A Yankee moves to the Ozarks and lives to tell his tales. Now captured in a tidy little book along with plenty of photographs, these stories track Denny Luke’s life experiences from childhood in Ohio to the backwoods hills of Arkansas.

This man is an adventurer. During his years in the Navy, he built hot rods with money he made with shipboard loansharking. He returned to his native Ohio where he soon tired of the mechanic’s life. Computers had just started to break the surface in 1966, the perfect attraction to a young man with a sharp mind and plenty of ambition.

vette w mom — Denny with his mom in his Corvette. This photo not included in the book.

Money rolled in as he built databases, a brand new idea in the mid-Sixties. A ‘63 Corvette and soon after a new Triumph dirt bike put him in the fast lane for weekend jaunts to the Playboy Club in Chicago and Enduro racing in Wisconsin’s back country.

Then, like so many of his generation, he stepped out of the fast lane and moved to a primitive life in the country. Among his most important first acquaintances was Ray Brown.

11813401_10206126388336787_3165076067443300852_n — Ray Brown teaching hog killin’ to Denny. This photo not in the book.

“We rented a little cabin near Devil’s Den from Ray Brown. He was a genuine hillbilly. His family lived in a little old log cabin. He raised a few cows, cut posts, whatever he could do to make a living. He was smart, smartest man I ever knew, had lots of common sense. His cabin had a big old fireplace that barely kept the place warm. He sat in this big chair over in one corner, and he could reach around behind his chair and grab a big handful of snow—that much would blow in through the cracks.”

Denny and his buddy Butch scouted cheap land all over Northwest Arkansas and ended up with an old log cabin on Bunyard Road. They also learned to be stone masons in order to earn their way.

denny at stove — Denny rustling up some grub at the Bunyard cabin December 1974. This amazing stove had a gas burning side and a wood burning side. Hauled from Wisconsin to the Ozarks.

“There are two or three families out on Bunyard that are cliquish. I wasn’t accepted out there. I was from the north, and I didn’t go to church. The first thing they wanted me to do was go to church. Plus I wasn’t born there. And I owned the old Omie Wood home place and they might have resented that some.”

An avid photographer and storyteller, Denny shares the adventures of his life with Author Denele Campbell as he recalls the outrageous backwoods tales and colorful characters who populate this neck of the woods.

Join us Sunday September 13 in the Connie Wright Gallery of Ozark Folkways at Winslow for live music, refreshments, Author Denele Campbell’s comments on this collaboration, and Denny’s readings from the book. Autographed copies will be available for sale.

Can’t make the event? The book is available at Amazon.com or at your favorite bookstore.

Domes

zome is stretched dome — A ‘zome,’ a stretched dome. One of several domes constructed in South Washington County Arkansas at a rural intentional community.

In the 1960s and into the early 1970s, geodesic dome structures cropped up around the world, including in Northwest Arkansas. Some lasted, many did not.

Based on the idea that what we see externally informs how we understand ourselves internally, domes epitomized a philosophical approach to human habitation.

Traditional architecture with its multiple separate rooms leads to a segmented self view, according to this argument. Rounded open space such as provided in a dome fosters a more holistic view of self and the world in general.

The dome concept was developed by Buckminster Fuller. Fuller discovered that if a spherical structure was created from triangles, it would have unparalleled strength.

In 1928, he wrote:

“These new homes are structured after the natural system of humans and trees with a central stem or backbone, from which all else is independently hung, utilizing gravity instead of opposing it. This results in a construction similar to an airplane, light, taut, and profoundly strong.”

looks like a zome — None of the eleven or more domes built at the intentional community have survived.

The sphere uses the “doing more with less” principle in that it encloses the largest volume of interior space with the least amount of surface area thus saving on materials and cost. Fuller reintroduced the idea that when the sphere’s diameter is doubled it will quadruple its square footage and produce eight times the volume.

Fuller worked towards the development of a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science which he defined as, “the effective application of the principles of science to the conscious design of our total environment in order to help make the Earth’s finite resources meet the needs of all humanity without disrupting the ecological processes of the planet.”[i]

eye doc dome — Optometrist office in Fayetteville, newly built in 1970s.

Domes were built not only by idealistic hippies pursuing an improved state of consciousness but also ended up in use at commercial locations. A enhanced dome built to house an optometry practice in Fayetteville, Arkansas remains in good condition.

One of the surviving residential domes in the area includes bump-outs and other additions that make for a more family-friendly features. This one includes a basement and a rear deck.

Other commercial uses included the Southern Energy Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) built in south Washington County near Stricker. SEFOR operated from 1969 to 1972, when the original program was completed as planned. It was privately operated by General Electric and funded by the United States government through the Southwest Atomic Energy Associates, a nonprofit consortium formed by 17 power companies of the Southwest Power Pool and European nuclear agencies.

The facility was then acquired by the University of Arkansas in hopes that it could be used as a research facility. However that never happened and the university has been paying $50,000 in maintenance fees yearly since. SEFOR is still considered contaminated and the University continues to seek federal funds to clean up the site.

Another example of dome construction in commercial application is the St. Louis Climatron, part of the Missouri Botanical Gardens built in 1960. Controlled environment in this large dome re-creates a lowland rain forest.

Due to limitations of materials and use requirements, domes today are built for only a few applications, most notably sports arenas and as a complement to other structures such as churches where a separate dome feature may add another dimension to sacred space.

Photographs courtesy of Denny Luke, a longtime resident of the area.

[i] http://bfi.org/design-science/primer/environmental-design-science-primer

More Bits from Aquarian Revolution

“We thought we were going to buy eighty acres—it was $75 an acre—but after we moved in, we found out that the front forty acres had already been sold, so we had no road access. We had to walk through the woods to get to it. We dragged lumber, built platforms for tents, we lived in tents, we dragged beds. In the rain.” Chapter 7

“We were tearing the shit out of that country, bulldozing over a million acres of trees, spraying defoliant over more area. Once you got over the ohhh, shit, here we are in this war zone and realized that well, about as many people have died here in the last five years as are killed yearly on the American highways, you kind of adapted to it. I really didn’t like the way most Americans treated the Vietnamese.” Chapter 8

“The Black Fox thing was the beginning of our local Peace and Justice Center. We needed a place to do stuff. We started the center to have a place to meet, a place to work, type a newsletter, fold it, etc. The environmental work was ongoing, although it was getting harder. It became obvious that we weren’t going to be able to close down Arkansas Nuclear I, especially from here, and the group down there was having too many problems.” Chapter 9

“S. G–’s caravan came through. He was a college professor at Berkeley, and he decided to get a bus and travel around the country. He’d been holding these Monday night classes, kind of group gatherings, where they talked about peace and cooperating. He wanted to end the classes and travel around, but everyone said, no, you can’t stop the classes, so he said go get a bus, and before you knew it, about two hundred people had joined him in old school buses, VW vans, and campers.” Chapter 10