I’m pretty sure this autobiography of the counterculture figure RomTom will wind up next to On the Road as an American classic. It dishes out more truth than can be found in many a newspaper or textbook, yet reads like a novel, with one scary adventure after another, and plenty of sex. RomTom and Owl narrowly escape from floods, gunplay, lightning, wolves, bears, and every variety of human predator, not to mention going over a cliff in their van. They nearly freeze to death. They are escorted to the city limits by squadrons of police. And that’s on a good day.
Comporting Roadwise proves again one of my favorite literary theories: that the best work is done with one Ideal Reader in mind – or, in this case, three ideal readers. RomTom’s main impetus for writing was to explain to three young women how he and their mother lost them, and perhaps even to find them again. Guess what? It worked. Two of their children, long ago hidden by the rules of the fostering and adoption processes, have been in contact.
The format is new to me, and charming. When you put the CD in the computer, it comes onto the screen looking like a book, complete with full color illustrations. There’s actually a cool illusion of the pages turning, or you can set the controls to change them in other ways.
RomTom was never what you’d call mainstream, having lived in a cave for a spell as a teenager. In the late 1960s, with the Vietnam War in full swing, he hit the road. For not keeping the draft board informed of his address, and for advocating pacifism on campuses and wherever else he could draw a crowd, RomTom was sentenced to six years.
As one of the 200-plus war resistors in federal prisons at the time, he was mostly caged alone so the minds of the other inmates wouldn’t be corrupted by his anti-war speeches. He was also beaten and tortured in various ways, including with drugs – not the fun kind. Some of us don’t want to know what goes on in our own country, but we’d better start paying attention, because with things the way they are, this kind of treatment will show up in more of our futures. The story of how RomTom got out, is alone worth reading the book for.
With a motorcycle and a dog, the young man set out to find his soulmate. He met Owl in Canada, which became the source of much later grief when the citizenship discrepancy caused endless problems. In their years together, the two of them were many times bounced back and forth, because neither country would let the spouse come in or stay in. This of course only got worse when the kids came into the picture. But they started life together blissfully in a driftwood hut, selling the occasional craft item and surrounded by like-minded wanderers.
Over the years, both before Owl and in her company, RomTom checked out all the hippie strongholds: nude beaches and hot springs, Rainbow gatherings, an island community, open-door and closed-door communes. At various times he lived at Joshua Tree, in Port Townsend, at The Farm, in Toronto’s Rochedale, and with the Love Family. At one point the couple decided to cross 3,000 miles of Canada on bicycles, with a baby along, and actually made it. Many of their journeys were less ebullient, especially when they were forced to travel under harsh conditions to wage three different custody battles in three widely-separated jurisdictions at the same time.
Life was an ongoing succession of transportation problems, mainly centering around the effort to acquire or keep a truck, van or bus. “Without a vehicle to escape fast and far, road couples are vulnerable as turtles without shells,” RomTom says. “A truck can be a tool to make a living, a way to carry other moneymaking tools, a way to get a job. A truck is a home….and the truck will carry us to places where we may search for a home.”.
RomTom earned what money he could, working with semi-precious gems, and eventually establishing a somewhat steady bike refurbishing business. He also got into serious photography as an art form. Difficult as it is to believe in a porn-drenched country where every conceivable product is sold with sex, one art exhibit drew fire. Unbeknownst to him, a couple of his models had been underage. He ended up in jail and Owl in a mental hospital. For once, legal help was given. The ACLU took the case and they both were released.
This wasn’t the only time Owl had to be rescued from the mental health system. Although a loyal and brave woman, she basically needed to be looked after. Her English was not good, and she had a tendency to talk to herself in public places and to wander off and go missing for hours or days. Young and spacey, Owl attracted the attention of all the wrong kinds of men. Witnessing an injustice, she would thoughtlessly lash out. After her first child was seized by the authorities, her mental state became shaky at the best of times. After the second baby had been taken away, she seems to have suffered from a more or less permanent state of post-traumatic shock. The murder of a woman friend by another street person sent her further into retreat. By the time the third baby was due, and RomTom located people willing to help, his confused wife was hostile and unable to cooperate. Her protective instinct told her that the best way keep from losing this child too, was to deny that she was even pregnant. The responsibility to watch over Owl made it even more difficult for RomTom to find jobs or take care of business.
Although realizing that he “didn’t have any room in [his] life for stupid mistakes,” the author made plenty of them, and plenty of bad choices, and had shortcomings and weaknesses which he never neglects to mention. For any autobiographical writer, the temptation is great – especially on the fifth or sixth edit of the manuscript - to leave out or soften the parts where you come across like a real asshole. Knowing this first-hand, I give RomTom plenty of credit for his rigorous honesty.
And RomTom gives full credit to the good people who helped along the way: the rare public health nurse or social worker on the side of the angels; the Quakers and a few other Christians (as opposed to the majority of Christians, who apparently see misfortune as a sign of God’s disfavor); the state trooper who alerted them to imminent danger and carried them out of it; the Rainbow people; the members of both his and Owl’s families who helped although their patience with perpetual crises eventually wore thin.
RomTom repeatedly tried to settle in Canada so Owl could be near her family – but couldn’t get a job because he wasn’t a legal immigrant, and couldn’t be a legal immigrant because he didn’t have a job. In one commune, the members griped that Owl spent too much time alone in her room with the baby, but complained bitterly when she breast-fed the baby amongst them. Social services demanded a checkup for the baby once a month, to keep her safe and healthy – but the only way to get there was to hitchhike, exposing the child to unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
Mostly it was a Catch-22 life. Caught between a landlord who wouldn’t allow a baby in residence, and bureaucrats who insisted the baby wouldn’t be returned unless they lived indoors. Caught between the need for WIC program foodstuffs, and neighbors who didn’t want any government types coming around. And worst of all, caught between two government agencies insisting that they be in two places at once, or fulfill two mutually exclusive requirements. And poor Owl. As each child was taken away it eroded her stability more, and the worse she got, the less chance there was of ever getting any of the girls back – because their mother was so unstable.
In an area where many Indians lived, RomTom was soul-sickened by what the curse of alcohol had done. It was so bad that, as in plague-ridden medieval Europe, a cart would come around in early morning to pick up the dead. Crusading news reporters eventually exposed what RomTom had known for years: just as in law enforcement, social services careers are based on the number of cases closed. It’s much easier to manipulate the lives of the destitute who can’t fight back with expensive lawyers – and for career-builders, it only makes sense to take the easiest pickings. And, hard as it is to believe that there are people who’d rather dynamite a hot springs than let their fellow humans enjoy nature’s gift, none of this bad news about “society” really comes as a surprise.
The shocking parts of Comporting Roadwise, the parts that wound a leftover Sixties person, are those that reveal the seamy underbelly of the counterculture. For lack of better alternatives, RomTom and Owl spent quite a lot of time in a commune that had previously been a truly good environment, especially for an expectant mother. But it had been taken over by rapacious single men addicted to weapons, alcohol, and violence; fugitives who had done actual bad crimes, not just gotten crossways of the Man by being poor. And forget any romantic notion of honorable desperados. They were snitches who lied to the authorities about their peaceful neighbors, bringing even more trouble into little family’s precarious existence.
No matter what you may think of RomTom as a person, it’s well to remember that all this started because he protested against a war that, by now, almost everyone in America admits was stupid, unnecessary and wrong. He was subjected to treatment brutal enough to send anyone around the bend, and no one who hasn’t walked a mile (or a thousand) in those moccasins is entitled to comment.
The main thing is, RomTom is a voice for the dispossessed who roam America in their millions, refugees in the land of their birth. And badly off as this man was, he had some kind of private income which, though small, seems to have showed up pretty regularly. The cities of America, the byways, the rural settlements, the reservations, are thronged with people who have even less. This country is a mess, and it isn’t the fault of the people, any more than the Great Depression was our fault. Those whose fault it is – and they know who they are – had better start watching their backs.
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