Suddenly then, on the the 5th of April, 1965, as I recall, Deacon and I moved onto a 40-foot sloop moored at anchor in a marina on Portage Bay in Seattle,

while Hugh found himself a houseboat on Lake Union.  Margo joined us, in the foc'sl of the sloop, a few days later.  There were showers and toilets for the general use of the public at the marina, and an enormous heap of trash firewood for galley stoves.  So I began every day, after toilet and shower, chopping wood for the day's coffee and meals--which, indeed, had to be provided for, because we quickly acquired popularity among the young and otherwise hip people, students from the University of Washington for the most part, who hung out on Government Way ("the Av"),  that ended at Portage Bay, as a decidedly cool, and very attractive, spot to hang out and smoke dope and engage in the earnest, new-fledged art of Intellectual Conversation.  I don't think (poor as we were) that we ever bought marijuana, but we were always stoned. That summer I read The Rape of the Lock (4th or 5th time), Paradise Lost (3rd or 4th time), La Princesse de Clèves (2nd time, 1st time through with all the footnotes), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Essays of Aldous Huxley, the Sermons of Meister Eckhardt, the Tibettan Book of the Dead, and one of the medium-late novels of Henry James--The Ambassadors, I think.

We maintained our connection with Bill and Sue in Spokane--though I think that Hugh did not--and added to it Marcus, who actually moved in the fall to Spokane to be near them, and remained there for the rest of their lives, and still in fact lives there.  In September, when I turned twenty-three, I moved into a cheap but spacious apartment on Capitol Hill and got a job as a courrier/documentations clerk, which paid adequately and (the running whereof) kept me fit.  In October I discovered Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, which was my chief point of reference with Bill Weaver for the next several years.  And throughout the next seven months I made a fun ritual of taking the night sleeper train to Spokane on Fridays, and taking the sleeper back to Seattle on Sunday nights. It was fun, having a job, being middle class, doing what the hell I wanted.