magic bus

Jimbo’s girlfriend likes to get into bed at night and read for a while before she goes to sleep. I’ve gotten in the habit of doing the same. Last week I finished re-reading Albert Camus’s book, The Stranger, and I looked through my library to find another book to read. I’ve had Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for years without ever reading it, so I started it the night before last. I understand that Wolfe’s book documents Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters, and what I have read so far seems to confirm that.

Lo and behold, I read this morning that the bus that Kesey navigated across America is being restored. This would definitely fit somewhere between Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

It’s a small world.

It seems that Kesey’s 1939 IHC bus (whose name is Further) has been parked in a swamp for years and Kesey’s family is in the process of spiffing up the old wagon.

Some might say that it is a waste of time to bring this rusting hulk back to it’s status of a rolling junker—after all, the bus was scrap yard material forty years ago. We Americans, however, are defined by our pioneering spirit and Kesey, just like Kerouac, took off to find America.

So I say, fix it up. Make it a monument to American manifest destiny. Just don’t try to drive it anywhere. When they took off in it forty years ago, they weren’t sure if it would make it where they were going, so you know it is not going to be reliable transportation, today.

At least that’s what we think here in Jimbo’s world.