Sometimes a Great Notion Read Free Page A

this stuff. I know better. I seen it. I cut it down an’ its comin’ back up. It’ll always be comin’ back up. It’ll outlast anything skin an’ bone. You need to get in there with some machines an’ tear hell out of it!
    Well, Henry, we did like you said. Now what?
    There’s a guy who was a lot like Kesey. He also was a hellion when young, wrote two famous novels, and then refused to write another one for decades while he pursued other matters. He was a Russian count named Leo Tolstoy. When he was a boy, his older brother told him that there was a green stick buried in the woods of the family estate and, if he could find that stick, he’d learn the secret of life. When Tolstoy finally died as very old man, he asked to be buried near the rumored site of that green stick.
    Kesey, after his legendary bus ride in Furthur, kept the old machine in the woods on his farm, where it has slowly rusted and been devoured by moss. The Smithsonian kept asking him for it as a doodad for its collection. He refused. Now Kesey is dead, the bus still rusts under the Oregon sky, and we’re left with this fat novel called Sometimes a Great Notion . Nobody seems to know what to do with it, any more than they could figure out what to do with Ken Kesey. This book just doesn’t seem to fit our notions of what a proper novel should be or of what America should be. I think this is our green stick buried in our ancestral woods. Get a shovel. You’re likely to break a sweat, but you’ll get to a better place, your own country.
    I suppose I should mention Indian Jenny, but you’ll meet her along the way. Listen to her. She knows the gospel truth.
    You’ll see.

Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range . . . come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River . . .
    The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting . . . forming branches. Then, through bear-berry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce—and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir—the actual river falls five hundred feet . . . and look: opens out upon the fields.
    Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface . . . nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.
    A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.
    The highway follows its northern bank, the ridges follow its southern. No bridges span its first ten miles. And yet, across, on that southern shore, an ancient two-story wood-frame house rests on a structure of tangled steel, of wood and earth and sacks of sand, like a two-story bird with split-shake feathers, sitting fierce in its tangled nest. Look . . .
    Rain drifts about the windows. Rain filters through a haze of yellow smoke issuing from a mossy-stoned chimney into slanting sky. The sky runs gray, the smoke wet-yellow. Behind the house, up in the shaggy hem of mountainside, these colors mix in windy distance, making the hillside itself run a muddy green.
    On the naked bank between the yard and humming river’s edge, a pack of hounds pads back and forth, whimpering with cold and brute frustration,