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heavy routine of their daily Digger activities. Also, the "Digger phenomena," as it was called in the media, had begun to sprout up in other areas of North America in all sorts of shades, shapes and sizes. Emmett thought it was about time something was revealed to separate the heavyweight life-style of the San Francisco Digger family from the lightweight dilettantism of the credit-card-carryingChristian-do-gooders in Los Angeles, the do-nothing, ideologically rhetorical "digger Provos" in Berkeley, the hip-social workers of Toronto--and above all the New York diggers, who were publicly led around by Abbot Hoffman and his publicity-seeking cronies.

Emmett didn't like all of that nonsense very much and neither did the rest of the San Francisco Digger people, who felt put down by all the vaudeville clowning that was being carried on in their name, while they themselves actually were overburdened with real, unfunny slave labor, trying to begin the construction of a world where you didn't haz~e to laugh anymore! So that Thursday morning the four of them climbed into the Hertz car rented with a finderskeepers-losers-weepers credit card and began their long drive to Michigan with intent, as well as with jugs of whiskey and wine, cans of beer, and plenty of amphetamines to get them there nonstop the next afternoon.

It was one hell of a run with the four men taking turns behind the wheel to maintain an average speed in excess of ninety miles an hour, and the tires blowing out one, two, three, four, five, six times on the salt-hot, flat stretches of highway from Nevada to Nebraska --where in the town of North Platte the local, fat-bellied sheriff pointed out Buffalo Bill's house as he escorted them out of his limits with a "Be on yer way an' don't you never think 'bout comin' back this town again, specially after the sun go down. You understan' my meanin' or do I have to spell it out more plain for you freaky fellas, huh?" And on into Kalamazoo, Michigan, the next day at about five in the evening where a giant, lime-colored, neon sign was screaming Insulin! Insulin! Insulin! in the front window of a country drugstore, flooding the dim dusk of the main street with its loud green message and advising them to pull over 'cause it was time to sponge up the two days' booze with a hot supper before continuing on to Denton and the conference.

They pulled into a space along the empty curb in front of a barrestaurant-grill that looked small-time hokey-light from the outside, but was huge, bigtime, country-heavy on the inside, which they discovered on entering the place and walking right smack into the [end page 386]