CONFESSIONS OF AN UNREPENTANT MAOIST: The March on Washington, fall 1969

BY ED FELIEN

There was a big rally in Minneapolis for people opposed to the war at the Minneapolis Auditorium in October of 1969. I went and got fired up. For the price of the bus ticket I could buy enough gas to drive a carload of my brothers and sisters from Georgeville out to Washington. I hurried back and quickly sold them on the idea. We left that night: Bob and Lisa Stein, Bob Kauten, Alan Jones, Tony Stone and I. We packed a bag full of miso and raw onion sandwiches and talked the rest of the commune into letting us take the second best car. Just to make the trip more interesting we all dropped acid.
I drove all night and reached the Chicago Skyway at rush hour. Driving down the skyway at about 65 mph, coming down from LSD I felt a thud in my left front wheel, and I noticed my tire coming off and falling behind the car.  I steered the car into an abutment, ran back through three lanes of traffic, found the tire at the side of the road, grabbed it and ran back to the car.  By that time some brothers driving a tow truck had pulled up in front of us and had lifted up the car.  They gave us a couple of lug nuts, which we attached to the three posts that hadn’t been sheared off, tightened the nuts, and they let the car down.  We gave the brothers a couple of joints for their trouble, and we were back on the road again.
After about 12 hours we got into Indiana, driving on the highways to avoid paying on the toll ways, and I turned to my passengers and said, “OK, I’m tired.  Who wants to relieve me?” It was then I found out that no one else had a driver’s license. It was going to be a long trip. It was somewhere in the mountains in Virginia that our brakes went out, and finally, about 10 miles outside of Washington, the car blew up. It overheated and something shot out of the engine block. We grabbed our stuff, took off the license plates, threw them in a nearby field and hitchhiked in to the demonstration.
We sat around with 100,000 other demonstrators and listened to speeches and music, and then I got up and told the group that I was going to go look for a chartered bus to Minneapolis and see if we could hitch a ride to get back to the commune. I looked up and down the street adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial but couldn’t find anything. I noticed a rental truck in back of the stage and went over to it to ask if they’d seen a bus with Minneapolis destination marking. There were some people in the cab so I stepped up on the running board and asked this very pretty young woman if she’d seen a bus from Minnesota. She looked annoyed. I was not about to be put off, so I looked over, and next to the other window was another pretty woman, and I was about to ask her the same thing, when I noticed a short guy sitting between the two women. It was Bobby Dylan. At that moment I heard Jimi Hendrix’s incomparable version of the national anthem.  I mumbled, “Sorry,” and stepped down.
I couldn’t find a bus with Minneapolis on it, but I found the next best thing, a bus that said it was going to Chicago.  That was a lot better than nothing, so I went back to the group, and, after listening to Senator George McGovern and some more music, we all went over to the bus.  By that time we had collected a couple of other people, so there were about 10 of us.  We were not going to sit in any of the seats.  We were going to sit in aisles, and we would try not to bother anyone.  When the church group that had rented the bus showed up I explained to them our problem and asked for their cooperation.  One of the women from the church group said, “OK, you can’t sit on the floor in the bus. We’ll buy you all bus tickets home.”  She and I went to the Greyhound office and she bought tickets for everyone.