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197 C H A P T E R 11 What Now? “two wonders of god’s creation captured my attention,” Chuck Cooley wrote on a calm July day. “The ocean and the beautiful birds.” That summer, the Oregon coast had exceptionally low tides, opening the beach far beyond normal and offering a bonanza of crabs and clams for residents up and down the coast. The other marvel was the myriad swallows that had built their mud nests beneath the eaves of the camp buildings. After the fledglings spent their month or so of feeding and growing, it was a joy to see them, Cooley said, “joined with their parent-birds to dip and swoop in the brilliant rays of the sun.”1 Cooley had reason to see things in a positive light. While visiting at Orval Etter’s home near the University of Oregon in Eugene, he’d learned how he might finish the final year of his bachelor’s degree in the liberal arts, which he had been working toward at Kent State University in Ohio when he was drafted. He set up an individual study schedule with a sociology professor at the university, in which he attended one-third of the class meetings and borrowed notes from fellow students for the others. He earned a 3.6 grade average for his senior year, and later recalled that to the best of his knowledge he was the only person to earn a college degree while in CPS.2 While his wife Louise sent money from her job at an insurance office back in Ohio, Cooley asked for and got the night watchman position at Camp Angel. He worked extra weekend hours to save up furlough days in which he could attend classes; he hitchhiked to Eugene and back. He even used his experiences in getting rides as college course material, when his anthropology professor asked him to survey the attitudes about CPS from drivers who had picked him up. Cooley said he found that half were interested in learning more about the camp, 20 percent were ready for a civilized debate, and another 20 percent glad to hear that people were questioning the war. At the extremes were 5 percent flatly against the COs and another 5 percent fully supporting them.3 198 here on the edge Not everyone in camp chose such institutional paths. In late June, Adrian took his remaining furlough days, and with Joyce hitchhiked down to San Francisco for a sightseeing vacation. All the romance of the city was theirs, which made parting all the more unpalatable when Joyce boarded a train for New York, her mission to meet one more time with Harvey and finalize their separation. She and Adrian decided that he would hitchhike back to Waldport, wrap up his affairs there, then “walk out”—heading cross-country to Bud Hawkins’s home on the coast of Maine, where he would meet up with Joyce. Up in Washington State, Clayton and Barbara James had already walked out and were now in the world they’d longed for, a life of simple subsistence and art. They joined Morris Graves at his home—the Rock— outside Anacortes, on an island in the heart of Puget Sound. They helped clear land for Graves, and in return he helped them build a house beside the lake down from the Rock, in the lean-to style he had constructed at Waldport. Clayton summed up his feelings succinctly with a painting on the opening page of a letter he sent to Everson. It was reminiscent of the sumi style, with a minimum of watercolor strokes representing what was likely the view from their new home site: water stretching away from the shore, tall evergreen trees framing the scene, and the snow-peaked mountains beyond. Underneath it in Clayton’s large penmanship: “Bill, we are in that land again—of great rest.” In the following pages, he spoke of privacy and freedom, of his plans to quietly paint and garden—taking pleasure in how strange that would seem to the FBI agents who would almost certainly one day come for him. He wrote of the clarity coming to his mind now that he was away from the repression and chaos of CPS. His message was not new in itself, but it was new for him—and an important step in his development as an artist. The key was simplicity, he said, living close to nature and therefore close to oneself...

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