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127 C H A P T E R 8 As Close as It Gets to a School not long after Kermit and Kemper arrived, they were joined by their good friend, a woman who came to occupy a unique place in the Fine Arts. Manche Langley, twenty-six years old and single, came from Portland, where her father had been a district attorney and her aunt one of the city’s first female lawyers.1 Surrounded by academics and intellectuals , Manche developed a curiosity and confidence that sometimes took her beyond the accepted norms for a young woman in 1930s mainstream society, reading George Bernard Shaw and deciding to start a pacifist club at her Catholic school. “I was totally unfearful,” she remembered, “most unusually so.” After high school, she hit the road (more literally, the water), spending time in Hawaii and then San Francisco, where she lived among the artists and radicals in the jazz clubs and “crash pads” of that city’s North Beach neighborhood. From a communal apartment on Telegraph Hill, they’d walk down to places like the Black Cat, a popular bohemian hangout sometimes visited by authors William Saroyan and John Steinbeck. “The only career I wanted was to get on a tramp steamer and go around the world,” she said.2 When Pearl Harbor hit, she was in Los Angeles, working as an office proofreader. Up until this time, the antiwar mood in America was still strong, she recalled, but after the attack even the peace advocates supported calls for war. The military bases went on high alert, and the planes swooping low over the city made her sick, she said. “I was born a pacifist; I can’t stand conflict.” She headed back to Portland, but found generally the same attitudes there. “There was no one in Portland that felt the way I did,” she remembered. “No friends, no family, no anybody.”3 In spring 1942 she took a job with a railroad company, walking the yards and inspecting the cars. Talking at lunch one day with another young woman, she learned about a conscientious objectors’ camp up the Columbia River at Cascade Locks, and jumped at the invitation to attend a barn dance there. She met Kermit and Kemper and other creative people from the camp, people who felt the same way she did, who shared the 128 here on the edge same values and convictions about peace and war and art and life, people who were outsiders just like her. “It was like coming home,” she said.4 She regularly visited the main camp and side camps in the region, sometimes staying over and helping out wherever she could. When Kermit and Kemper transferred to Waldport and suggested she come assist with the Fine Arts, she said she liked the idea, but they’d better have some real work for her to do. “I don’t want to just languish down there,” she wrote. “It drives me buggy and I start feeling horribly useless.”5 Shortly thereafter, she quit her job in Portland and made a final visit to Cascade Locks, writing an account of her weekend that reads like an episode from the frantic adventures of the Beat Generation wanderers, who were yet a decade away from the national spotlight. She kayaked across the Columbia River one night; the next evening she was at a side camp in the tiny mountain town of Zigzag, watching a movie with the COs, who were on forest-fire alert: It was all mad—among other things—in the midst of the movie, a fire was announced—everyone rushed out. I went to the highway to hitch-hike back home. [Two camp members] came by on their way to the fire—I got in. Everyone returned from the fire—which wasn’t—more movie. And then 12 of us and luggage layered ourselves into the camp car and headed [to Cascade Locks]. I got out at Gresham [southeast of Portland] at about 12 and rapidly found there was no bus for 1 hour. As I moaned and groaned on the street corner, a novel creature in an ancient Model A churned along, asked if I’d like a ride to Portland and I jumped in, but quick. He soon resolved himself into a wonderful character—used to break horses in Southern Utah. AND he worked just a skip and a jump from 1505 [her home], so I got a ride to the door. If...

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