When I think of Ken Kesey, I don’t think of burly loggers and NW Wilderness. In the popular imagination he’s that crazy trippy guy from Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. He’s the founder of the Merry Pranskters, whose cross country trek arguably INVENTED ’60s counterculture.

What’s he doing writing a novel about life chopping down trees in the Oregon Coastal range?

Here’s some things you may not know.

Kesey moved to La Jonda California, a sleepy coastal logging town, to do research for a book he had in mind about the Northwest. In Kesey’s world, research included gathering crazy folk from around the world and throwing all night (and sometimes all week) parties in the woods behind his house, where hallucinogenic substances were more readily available than water. In fact, sometimes they were in the water.

He describes that time in his life as a great time, when he could be pounding away at his novel 20 to 30 hours straight. It was work, but it was new work, a way of building a novel that had never been attempted before. That work became Sometimes a Great Notion.

In 1964, Kesey got called to New York to do some business in support of Sometimes a Great Notion, which had just been published.

So he found an International Harvester bus, ripped out the seats and installed couches, painted the entire thing dayglo colors, grabbed some friends and set out across the country, in a legendary trip that created the “Merry Pranksters” and singlehandedly launched what ultimately became the “hippie” movement.

They went to visit Timothy Leary (it didn’t go well) and Jack Kerouac (who was not inspired by the dayglo and the twentyfour hour party scene). They also ripped through towns and cities spreading the gospel of dirty play, becoming poster children for all the things your mother warned you about.And having a hell of a time.

There is a contradiction somewhere in these basic facts of Kesey’s life and work that has been bothering me, sort of tugging at the back of my mind as I’ve gotten to the final chapters of the novel. How can a man so adamantly committed to upending the social order and inventing new ways of thinking and being, the man who invented a lifestyle that was defined by its “rootlessness” and seeming irresponsibility, have written with such passion and conviction about men who lived their entire lives brutally defending one single patch of ground, building a house that sticks so far out into a river that it must be shored up nightly with new support struts, cables tied to trees and a bottomless supply of sheer blind will being required just to keep the house standing in the face of the obvious fact that it was only a matter of time before the river would conquer the house and wash away all their hard work.

Hippies and Loggers don’t go together. Pioneers and revolutionaries are not usually easy drinking companions. Hippies camp out in trees to protect them. Loggers cut them down. In the easy progressive assumptions of my utterly civilized Portland life, the two impulses are opposite. Save the tree. Cut the tree. Right? So which one is Kesey? The tree hugger or the tree splitter?

How could he possibly be both?

And then I found this, in an interview by Robert Faggen (originally published in the Paris Review- you can read the full transcript online here):

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ROBERT FAGGAN: After you wrote Sometimes a Great Notion, you set out on the bus. What did you want to explore?

KEN KESEY: What I explore in all my work: wilderness. Settlers on this continent from the beginning have been seeking wilderness and its wildness. The explorers and pioneers sought that wildness because they could sense that in Europe everything had become locked tight. Things were all owned by the same people, and all of the roads went in the same direction forever. When we got here there was a sense of possibility and new direction, and it had to do with wildness. Throughout the work of James Fenimore Cooper there is what I call the American terror. It’s very important to our literature, and it’s important to who we are: the terror of the Hurons out there, the terror of the bear, the avalanche, the tornado–whatever may be over the next horizon.

As we came to the end of the continent, we manufactured our terror. We put together the bomb. Now we don’t even have the bomb hanging over our heads to terrify us and give us reason to dress up in manly deerskin and go forth to battle it. There’s something we’re afraid of, but it doesn’t have the clarity of the terror of the Hurons or the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War. Now it’s fuzzy, and it’s fuzzy because the people who are in control don’t want you to draw a bead on the real danger, the real terror in this country…
After I had been at Stanford for two years, I got into LSD. I began to see that the books I thought were the true accounting books–my grades, how I’d done in other schools, how I’d performed at jobs, whether I had paid off my car or not–were not at all the true books. There were other books that were being kept, real books. In those books is the real accounting of your life. And the mind says, “Oh, this is titillating.” So you want to take some more LSD and see what else is there. And soon I had the experience that everyone who’s ever dabbled in psychedelics has. A big hand grabs you by the back of the neck, and you hear a voice saying, “You want to see the books? Okay, here are the books.” And it pushes your face right down into all of your cruelties and all of your meanness, all the times that you have been insensitive, intolerant, racist, sexist. It’s all there, and you read it. You can’t take your nose up off the books. You hate them. You hate who you are. You hate the fact that somebody has been keeping track, just as you feared. You hate it, but you can’t move your arms for eight hours. Before you take any acid again you start trying to juggle the books. You start trying to be a little better person. Then you get the surprise. The next thing that happens is that you’re leaning over looking at the books, and you feel the lack of the hand at the back of your neck. The thing that was forcing you to look at the books is no longer there. There’s only a big hollow, the great American wild hollow, which is scarier than hell, scarier than purgatory or Satan. It’s the fact that there isn’t any hell and there isn’t any purgatory, there isn’t any Satan. And all you’ve got is Sartre sitting there with his momma–harsh, bleak, worse than guilt. And if you’ve got courage, you go ahead and examine that hollow.

***

So what does a pioneer do when they run out of frontier? In another interview Kesey describes his Merry Prankster trip as a different kind of Pioneer pilgramage, a push back East in search of a new kind of wildness: a wilderness of the spirit. What he found became “hippie” counterculture, which spawned environmentalism which became sustainability, now mainstreamed into our daily lives. And the fruit of that labor became a philosophy that on the surface is diametrically opposed to the pioneer loggers championed in Kesey’s great novel. But its useful to remember that our current drive to keep wild areas wild, is in its own way a desire to not relinquish some small piece of frontier. As though the pioneering wild-seekers of Oregon’s early history have become today’s fierce conservators of wildness…adamantly defending these last patches of wild ground from being swallowed up by order and civilization- by roads and ‘forest management.’ We stand on a frontier whose boundaries are being blurred by globalization, watching progressive values become second and third generation institutions, and I am struck by the notion that we are like men standing on a dock at midnight, pounding stakes and two by fours into soggy ground, willing the river not to wash the wildness away.

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