But, oh no, I started fishing down into there. It was tropical in the tunnels and I was catching trout where the tunnels flowed into the big swampy pools. Then I’d have to wade around the pools through deep warm mud.

I lost a trout that went about thirteen inches long and that really got my excitement up, so I continued fishing down further and further until I was six swampy pools past the wooden angel bridge when suddenly, out of nowhere, the light just dropped away within a few moments, falling into total night and there I was halfway around the sixth swampy pool in the dark, and in front of me there was nothing but darkness and water, and behind me was nothing but darkness and water.

The strangest God-damn feeling of fear shook through me. It was just like a crystal chandelier made out of adrenalin swaying wildly in an earthquake, and I turned around and fled up the river, splashing like an alligator around the big swampy pools and running like a dog up the shallow tunnels.

Every horror in the world was at my back, at my sides and directly in front of me and they were all without names and had no shape but perception itself.

When at last I ran out of the final tunnel and saw the dim white outline of the bridge standing out against the night, my soul was born again through a vision of rescue and sanctuary.

As I got closer and closer, the bridge bloomed like a white wooden angel in my eyes until I was sitting on the bridge, resting and soaking wet but not at all cold in the constant rain of the mountain evening.

I hope that Richard Brautigan will forgive me for writing this story.

American Flag Decal

This story begins with an American flag decal on the rear window of a pickup truck, but you can barely see it because the truck is far away and then it turns off the highway on to a side road and it’s gone, but somehow we have started again.

It’s good to be back in California after a very unhappy month in the East: New York, etc … with too much drunkenness, days and days of cold autumn rain and love affairs that were breathing mirrors of my unhappiness.

Now out here driving through the California countryside with a friend all we have to do is find somebody to repair his broken cesspool. It’s a mess. We need somebody right now whose living is made from the knowing and handling of cesspools.

We drive down one road and then another, looking for a particular cesspool man. We stop at a place where we think he lives, but we are very wrong by about a million miles. It’s a place that sells honey.