If my thought dreams could be seen: May Day 1971 (Part Three)

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IF MY THOUGHT DREAMS COULD BE SEEN: MAY DAY 1971 (PART 2)

IF MY THOUGHT DREAMS COULD BE SEEN: MAY DAY 1971 (PART 1)



We lumbered out of West Lafayette, Indiana for the actions in Washington DC in a huge orange and white U-Haul truck filled with 20 plus people on Friday April 30, 1971. The truck, of course, was entirely enclosed and unless you were in the cab this trip would be taken in utter darkness. Yes, I skipped class that day. I had sort of given up on what many considered the real world anyway. There was so much drama going on, and meeting Ted had brought it to such a boil that I felt I had more important things to do. My thought dreams were simply larger than the world I had come to know. Ted did not come with us and no one expected him to. He had seen enough drama in Vietnam. 

Only a handful of us had attempted anything this ambitious or faced off against troops and police before except for our friend Chook. Chook was the oldest brother of our friends Steve and Doug. He was an intimidating anarchist wild man with round Trotsky-like wire-rimmed glasses and Medusa-like long blond hair. He looked like someone you wouldn't want to fuck with. Chook had briefly attended school in Illinois and got caught up in revolutionary direct action such as street fighting and other things that are best left unmentioned. When we visited some of his friends at the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois a few weeks before May Day, his friends had the impressive, wood-carved Chancellor's Chair in their dining room, having procured it in a raid on the student union one night some weeks before. It was sort of like Animal House only everyone carried the Red Book.

I was pretty much in awe of these people. They had an air of knowing things I did not and they were fully steeped in the anger of feeling betrayed by everything they had once held dear. Some had travelled to Cuba to cut sugar cane with the Venceremos Brigade, a group of young Americans who defied the travel restrictions to Cuba to work for free in support of this thorn in the side of their U.S. government. Most of them were four or five years older than myself and had endured years of assaults on their idealistic notions of what America was or at least should be. They were what was called at the time, "movement heavies" and they were more than a little full of themselves. A couple of women Chook knew from Illinois, Shelley and Mary, were travelling with us in the U-Haul and my half dozen or so closest friends and I were going to meet up with the other movement heavies these people knew and ditch everyone else we'd come with once we got to Washington DC. We wanted to be heavies too, and we thought some of our travelling companions were not heavy enough for us cool kids. We may have been a bit full ourselves as well.

Keep in mind that the demeanor and appearance of demonstrators had changed markedly since the initial actions against the war in the early- and mid-sixties. In the initial stages of the movement men wore sport coats and women nice dresses to underline the fact that ordinary people opposed the war. As failure upon failure mounted and counter-cultural values came to predominate, demonstrators started looking like assault teams of mountain men and women.

The way a person dressed and groomed themselves carried profound symbolic significance. Just as demonstrators in coats and ties signified critical acceptance of society's rules, the counter-culture style signified a near total rejection of the entire fabric of what was taken for granted. Long hair on men and casual, oftentimes ragged clothing on both women and men, signified a refusal to being tamed by a society than no longer made sense or held your allegiance. What good was deferred gratification when you were being led to slaughter or you were slaughtering others on someone else's behalf? My closest friends and I were on the stern but wild and wooly side of this semiotic divide. We all had long hair but we didn't sport flowers. We wore olive drab army surplus coats and boots and red bandanas tied just beneath our left knees. The coats, boots, and bandanas inferred both an ironic rejection of a society that lived through the use of force and a warning that we might feel obliged to act in the same manner if pushed. There was also a lamentable machismo in all this that embarrasses me but which I must admit I found empowering.


But don't take all this dour heaviness too seriously. For all our hubris at the time and my hubris in this recollection, there was an undeniable innocence to this journey. Regardless of our posturing and all my passion, we were happy and optimistic and not terribly aware of what we were getting into. The trip to DC was going to take twelve to fourteen hours if everything went well. And here we were, locked in total darkness in the back of a U-Haul truck, singing, laughing, passing weed, and telling stories, just as if we were going to yet another rock concert. 


The brothers Steve and Doug and Chook, as well as our friends Amos and Joe, had all gone to high school together in West Lafayette where most of their parents were professors. Jerry and I, another close friend, had sort of joined their already existing world. We were as tight as any group of young men could ever be. We never would have used the term, but we loved and cared about each other and would have done anything possible to aid each other. In many respects we were a gang--a "collective" or "affinity group" if you want to get technical--though we were a rather benign gang as gangs go. The other fifteen or so people with us were also friends, just not friends to whom were quite as much attached as we were to each other. We were more political and aspired to a bit more than our friends whom we conceitedly imagined to be mere hippies.


But little over two-and-one half hours after our departure our entire trip appeared to end. The truck slowed down unexpectedly and pulled off on to the side of the Interstate. We started asking each other what was going on and the panic began to build. Between the cracks in the gigantic sliding door at the rear of the U-Haul we could see flashing police lights shining through. A collective gasp rose from us. And when the truck came to a complete stop then rolled backward, crashing into what had to be a police car, we were tossed against each other violently and the sense of panic really set in. We were near Richmond, Indiana at the Indiana/Ohio border and we were such losers that we had not even gotten out of our own state safely. In a few minutes the sliding door was rolled up, we were blinded by the head lights of numerous police cars and their flashing lights, and a cloud of marijuana smoke billowed out into the faces of half a dozen Indiana State troopers.

TO BE CONTINUED