Peace Camp Here For Good

I like to lay in my bed, midafternoon, alone and smoke a joint. I just went through every single baggie in my house - shaking crumbs and picking homegrown leaf from the bottoms of drying baskets. I packed it all into the cradle of my rolling tool and picked it up to commence rolling. Unfortunatly a small, invisable, demon-faery made the tool malfunction and explode. Sending marijuana dust flying to settle with the ashes, dust, and dog hair on the floor.

Overcoming this tragedy, I managed to rescrounge and reshake a new joint - really the last of the last this time. Then up to my bed I journeyed to lay and smoke.

Noon, rainy, cool, breezes blowing through the cracks in my wall. I look up through the missing corner of the celing - the space I left open for the hypothetical stovepipe of a future woodstove. Amazingly, it does not rain through this hole, it rains through the walls instead. So refreshing. The rain falling on the uninsulated tin roof strikes up a percussion rythem of pure chaos. Yes, the rythem of chaos. If I was intelligent enough I could understand. Maybe some mushrooms would help me comprehend.

The crows are calling from the maples and the woodstove hums with a warm bass roar.

I was in the process of building this room when we disassembled Peace Camp last summer; I scavenged for supplies. I brought home three wooden posts and a plywood sign. The posts became the main frame of the structure and the sign kicked about for the summer - being first one thing and then another. Unsure of its purpose, but still useful.

The sign says Peace Camp Here For Good on one side and Camp Rachel on the other. It was the main sign of the camp out / protest that took place on the capitol campus last spring in protest of Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL). The Camp was dubbed Camp Rachel in honor of Rachel Corrie, an Olympia girl who was killed in Palestine just before the war started.

The sign eventually became an interior wall in my bedroom. My headboard. So I get stoned up here and think about Rachel Corrie a lot. A song that Elizabeth Hummel wrote goes through my head, mostly like a chant of Rachel's name over and over. Sometimes, like any song that gets stuck in your head, it gets annoying.

I did not know Rachel, had nothing to do with her, but my headboard has her name on it in enormous green letters. I can only think of it as some sort of cozmic eulogy. A head stone for a headboard. Go to Palestine, get run over by a bulldozer while protesting, get your name painted on a sign that winds up being an interior wall in some shack at The Bog. Fame comes in many flavors.

The other side of this sign says Peace Camp Here for Good. But you can't read it becasue it is inside the wall. While I was building the structure, I debated about which side to have out - Camp Rachel or Peace Camp. I hung the board when summer turned to fall and I was just trying to close the room in and I was alone and frustrated and so it wound up with the Camp Rachel side facing into the room, but upside down.

This summer I have to pull the board off so I can insulate the wall behind it, so maybe I'll flip it. Actually I know I will flip it. It will be fun to have a Peace Camp sign over my bed. This place is Peace Camp. Quiet and easy to live in and not much to do but get stoned listen to the rain and ponder. I just wish I could get this song out of my head.

Posted by bogsters at March 4, 2004 12:58 PM