as i mentioned in comments to jaime’s post, i tried to post an overlong comment and lost it. see, with many sites, if you run too long you can go back and trim. the nonist’s software wipes the cache if you go back. poof! so what was i running on about? an old coot’s tales of the counterculture, of course! see, i never heard of the topic of jaime’s post, but i only moved to boston in 1979 and there was a lot of kraziness to keep track of. i ended up living in a house on broadway in cambridge (about a block from where dubya lived five years before! oh, for a time machine and a flame thrower!) in this house (which looks no different today) lived a fluctuating tribe of twelve to twenty lefty rad fems, granola eaters, college kids, hell, seems like we had one of everything…

i suppose i saw enough stuff there in two-and-a-half years (fall 1979 to spring 1982)  to write a book; but apropos of jaime’s post on the odd nexus of new-age lunacy and warrior berserkergang, i can recall my own ever-so-brief traverse of that very nexus. it all revolves around a nuclear power plant, and ends with me getting captured by the national guard.

seabrook, new hampshire: forty miles north of boston. on a salt marsh, close to the ocean, along new hampshire’s very small coast, stands the seabrook nuclear power plant. if it melted down, the plume would reach boston, and that’s a bad thing. in central square, cambridge, halfway between harvard and mit, the antinuke group called clamshell alliance had its headquarters. i worked briefly as a door-to-door canvasser for another group using the same space, and when i got a ‘real’ job i hung on as a volunteer, just for the company, for i didn’t have any other friends there. i hung around and retyped their mailing list an so forth. these contacts led me, indirectly, to move out of the beacon chambers $50 a week flophouse (home to old pensioners, young gays, and me) and into an empty space in allston, and then to broadway. at this time clamshell alliance had organized one or two occupations of the seabrook site, which lasted a weekend or so and drew about 3000 protesters. that’s pitiful compared to the 1/4 million who swarmed nuke sites in europe and established long-term settlements; but by today’s catatonic standards it was a pretty darn impressive. the alliance did a major protest in warm weather each year for a while. i went to two, in 1980 and ‘81; they blur together a bit in my mind, but as i recall, my tale involves the second. to the best of my recollection, all that i write here is accurate.

protests under the clamshell umbrella were organized as a loose confederation of affinity groups. an affinity group consists of about six to twelve friends with a shared interest or a project they wish to carry out. on the appointed date the protesters would converge on seabrook and set themselves up in a wooded camping area a mile or so from the plant, and then go over and do whatever it was they came to do. nominally, my house’s affinity group was called kyshtym after a russian nuclear accident.  there was an affinity group that handed out gazillions of sprout-and-peanut-butter sandwiches. there were affinity groups that wanted to pull down the fence with grappling hooks or sneak into the plant grounds. there were drummers and there were clowns (i’m getting to that). there was an affinity group called the red clams; communists, i guess. they were infamous. “watch out for the red clams,” people would say. “They’re crazy!” crazy people thought the red clams were crazy. i didn’t know them; in the campground at the first protest i attended (if i recall correctly) a small group of guys went marching by in single file, dressed in white jumpsuits and red construction helmets, chanting that chant from the wizard of oz: “oh wee oh, we oh oh! oh wee oh, we oh oh!” “Who the fuck was that?” i asked somebody. “Oh, those were the red clams.” i love the red clams. like i said, i was nominally with the kyshtym lot, but i was a drifter, and moved between three groups at the second protest. i started with the monks.

brother marmoru kato was a buddhist monk from japan, and what a cool guy. whatever became of him? i googled him and got nothing. here’s what brother kato was doing in those days: he marched for peace. not once a year; not half a mile. all the time. he would walk twenty miles in a day, in saffron robes and his shaved head, beating a flat drum with a handle, the size and shape of a frying pan, with a drumstick, chanting “na mu myo ho ren ge kyo” which i was told didn’t translate well into english; however, “I respect and revere all life in the universe” is close enough. a monk of kato’s order says this phrase constantly. mealtime. na mu myo ho ren ge kyo. meeting a friend (brother kato knew people everywhere, it seemed). hands together, bow, smile, na mu myo ho ren ge kyo. shooing off a spider instead of crushing it. na mu myo ho ren ge kyo.
other monks would pass through town and march with him, and anyone else was welcome to do so. kato’s regular walk, which he did at least a couple times a week as i recall, began in concord at the bridge where the revolutionary war began, and followed through woods and down roads the same path general gage’s regulars took on that sanguinary april 19 so long ago, past the still-standing stone walls from which massachusetts men shot at the regulars and the home sites of the farmers the regulars killed, all the way back to cambridge. even in massachusetts the locals tended to think kato was some kind of freaky cultist, but back in japan monks in saffron are as common and mainstream as father mulcahy, and marching for peace (and against nuclear power)  is as natural as breathing when you’re from the only nation that ever got atom bombs dropped on it (yet?)  i did this walk a few times with him and others (the most dedicated non-monk was a young lady named clare); once, with a terrible sunburn, in the other direction, ending at walden pond, also in concord.  i was lucky enough to get a spare drum sometimes, which really adds to the trance of the walking; you can’t just run out to the music store for these drums. after a couple hours you really get into it. since i was a bit of a regular on these marches, i opted to walk the forty miles to seabrook with the monks.
that’s a two-day walk, so the plan was to go halfway (to lynn) then take the commuter train back to cambridge, take the train to lynn in the morning and walk the rest of the way to seabrook, arriving at roughly the same time as everybody else. then i might hook up with kyshtym folks, go with the flow. i arranged for my duffel bag to ride up in somebody’s van (with way too much unnecessary crap in it: i’ve learned since then to pack lighter). i seem to recall i was temping at kelly then, which made for very little cash, and all the time off i wanted. it was acceptable, since you could live very, very cheaply then; nevertheless i only had three or four bucks on me. atm’s were still in the future, and i may not have had anything in the bank anyway; basically, i had the price of the train ticket, and a buck or two besides; only enough for cheap eats. i think there were three monks and maybe four or five others, and the weather was warm and sunny. it was a beautiful day to walk twenty miles.
morning became noon, and we kept going. the lunch hour passed. as the afternoon wore on i got less spiritual-minded and more hungry. i couldn’t afford a massive meal, i had to keep my cash. we just kept going and going. grrrr…  but i kept my mouth shut, because i knew that things always worked out okay if kato was in the mix. around let’s say 4 p.m., as we got to the outskirts of lynn, a car pulled up next to us. a japanese guy at the wheel chatted happily with brother kato, in japanese, which i can’t understand at all. he drove off and we kept walking. oh, the hunger. someone said, that guy told us about a japanese restaurant. we’re going there, i guess. agony! what did i know about japanese food? that it cost more than three bucks, that’s what i knew. grrrrrrr. finally we arrived, and i had to whisper that i only had train fare. no problem, we’re all eating for free. we all sat around one of those tables with the grill in the middle and ate a mountain of fried noodles. heaven! then it was off to the commuter rail and back to cambridge.

the second day we did the rest of the distance, and arrived toward evening. i can’t recall if we went to the gate that evening, or the next morning; nor can i recall if i spent one night at the camp or two (if i had my life over, i’d keep a diary) but i think it was one night. i spent some time with the monks at the gate, and things were a bit tense; nearby protesters had ropes on the link fence, trying to pull it down (it held up reasonably well, and if they were serious i suppose they would have used cable and a pickup truck). the forbearance of the police was remarkable when compared with the way they would react now. if 3,000 people did today what we did then, we’d all get arrested, gassed, tasered, stress-positioned, you name it. in 1980 you really had to try to get arrested. following kato’s lead we sat as close as possible, chanting na mu myo ho ren ge kyo, being unfailingly polite yet not moving an inch farther away than we had to. i guess i did this with him for a couple of hours, then hung out with the kyshtym crowd at the campsite about a mile from the plant.

the next day, the main event, i and most others would spend the day protesting, then go home. the weather was still gorgeous.  there was a barnum clown about my age named eddie, and his little group was going to ‘lighten up the vibes’ at the gate by doing this clown thing. that sounded as good as anything else to me (i wasn’t the confrontational type) so he made me up as Emmett Kelly (the sad-faced bum). for me, back then, not much of a stretch. you have to be in a certain exhibitionistic mood, however, to clown around, and i was too shy to seriously represent, the way a clown gotta do. while the other half-dozen clowns engaged in their shenanigans i wandered around a lot. in the afternoon i ended up back at the camp with eddie. we both had to be back in boston for the next day, and there we were in a tent packing our crap when someone stuck their head in and said “did you hear? the national guard are surrounding the camp!”

oh. shit.

neither eddie nor i planned on going to jail, and we decided it might be possible to sneak out through the woods if we hurried. we packed hastily and shouldered our bags; i think eddie still had all his face paint on, and i did for sure. we walked about half a mile from the camp, discussing which way to go, and found a hole in the ground about six feet on a side, about three feet deep, and with a piece of sheet metal lying nearby. sorta like a foxhole. and we heard voices not far away, so we slunk down into it, hoping not to be noticed. didn’t work. a minute or two later, a couple of young dudes in green, with guns, ordered us out of the hole. that’s right, i was captured by national guardsmen dressed as a clown. i wish i had photographic evidence of this; it would be one of my most prized possessions. take a moment to savor the fine absurdity. vladimir and estragon’s luck runs out!


The rest, i suppose i’m happy to say, is anticlimax. the guardsmen walked us back to the camp and returned to the woods. they were only there to prevent infiltrators from reaching the plant via the woods, a feat of strategery which eddie and i were about to accomplish by mistake and out of complete stupidity. ho ho ! before long, eddie got a ride back to boston, and i rode back with someone else, and i never saw eddie the p.t. barnum clown again.

update: my google-fu must have kicked it up a notch: brother kato and sister clare are still around! i should look them up…sr. clare on pbs