Mischa Berlinski - Fieldwork

Rabbit told a typical Deadhead story: on the road first in 1975 at the age of eighteen, when the Dead first blew his mind wide open; off the road finally in 1997, when a bad case of trucker's back and a profound distaste for Phish convinced Rabbit that Boulder was a nice-enough town, if you had to live somewhere; and in the middle, largely continual traveling. Rabbit was an American nomad who from the comfort of his Caravan, at once cozy and mobile, like a Mongol in his yurt, roamed across endless scorching deserts and over white-crested mountains, down lonely highways bordered by fields of corn and wheat and cotton, on the soles of his Birkenstocks always a few stray grains of sand from the shores of one great ocean, to be washed away only when Rabbit swam in the waters of the other. And through all that wandering, there was only one place where Rabbit was at home, free from the withering glances of the highway patrolmen who pulled him over, called him a vagrant with no fixed address, looked at him from behind mirrored shades, and suggested that he best be heading upstate soon, adding a maddening, sneering,

*Nevertheless, his collection is not complete, and if there's anybody out there who would like to trade tapes with Rabbit, he said they should feel free to find him at his Web site, www.mymagicneverends.com. He is particularly looking for tapes or MP3s from Jerry's band, 1985–1987, because some creep broke into his VW Caravan and took his tape box, including also two Led Zeppelin rehearsal tapes which are extremely rare and he'd like back.

condescending " son "; only one place where he was free from the suspicious eyes of disapproving Pakistani AM/PM clerks, who, taking in his straggly beard, long hair, and tie-dyed T-shirt, assumed that Rabbit was trying to steal those Pringles, although Rabbit supported himself perfectly well making and selling the best damn devil sticks on the lot, thank you very much, best damn devil sticks there is .* That place where every eye was friendly and every mouth was grinning was the Lot. No matter where Rabbit had roamed or how long it'd been since he'd seen a show, Rabbit came home when he pulled over into the parking lots outside the coliseums, amphitheaters, and fairgrounds where the Grateful Dead were playing; when he smelled the incense and saw the rows of yellow school buses, VW vans, trailers, pickup trucks, brightly painted RVs, campers, and tents; when he heard more people banging on their drums than all the rain chiefs in Africa invoking the water devils in a drought. Home is the sailor in from the sea, home is the hunter down from the hills. That's what people even said, the Deadheads on the Lot, when they saw that their friend had made it down safely from Santa Fe to Austin, one more leg of their unending trip completed: Hey now, Rabbit. Welcome home .

Rabbit first met David sometime in 1981. This was the best that Rabbit could do, specificity-wise, and he knew it was 1981 for sure because he had just gotten back on Tour after taking 1980 off on account of his failed experiment in domesticity. Somewhere in his wanderings, Rabbit had gone to the Show single and come back to the van married. Everything in between was a blur. His bride was a fellow Deadhead, a pretty little earth goddess who wore flowing faded paisley skirts and homemade macramé tank tops, who spent two years in the Rabbit

* Devil sticks : This was certainly a phrase which confirmed some awful fears back home in Chiang Mai when included in one of David's not-so-frequent letters. In truth, a reasonably innocuous object: two short balsa wood sticks of equal length, wrapped tightly in pleather; one much longer, betasseled stick, slightly heavier, also wrapped in pleather. The object of the art was to balance and bounce the long stick between the two smaller ones, an occupation not entirely unlike juggling in its demands for coordination, balance, and grace, and a wonderful thing to do when jittery on account of being just a little too stoned. Rabbit and David made money by buying two dollars' worth of balsa wood, colorful pleather, and duct tape, and with forty minutes of careful cutting and wrapping produced an object which was sold on the Lot to yuppies and high school kids for ten dollars apiece, thus in three sales realizing a ticket for the Show. Oddly enough, devil sticks are now sold to tourists in the Chiang Mai night market, billed as an authentic Dyalo tribal art. David Walker, it is reasonable to presume, was the vector of transmission.

mobile before telling Rabbit that either they got themselves a den or Rabbit would be wandering alone. Rabbit loved his little Sugar Magnolia and tried out life in Babylon, as the followers of the Dead called the sober stationary world, but the sight of his parked Caravan sitting out front every day got to be too much, and Rabbit bolted, never looking back. He got back on Tour in 1981, and in the way that Dead Tour tends to bring you together with all different types, from policemen to Wall Street bankers to farm kids to hippies, he got to talking with this really nice kid with an incredible story—"the most polite kid you ever met," Rabbit said — just outside Indianapolis, who was looking for a ride to the show in Buffalo.

That kid, of course, was David Walker.

Dead Tour! It just seemed so right . Where else in America, Rabbit asked, could a kid like David announce that he grew up in a near — Stone Age village in northern Burma with a tiger cub for a pet preaching the Gospel to illiterate tribesmen who hunted with poison-tipped arrows— and have folks just look at you, say "Cool," and remind you not to bogart that joint? On Dead Tour, David was hardly even considered odd, not compared with Mean Jim, say, who'd followed the Dead since being discharged from three tours in Nam, slept with a foot-long hunting knife under his pillow, and worshipped Phil Lesh, the bassist, in the most literal sense of the word, right down to the shrine, the candles, and, rumor had it, the occasional sacrifice.

David had a bumper sticker right on the back of his big green backpack: "Life Is Better When You're Dead," and David put it there because it was so true. The Walkers don't like to admit it; they talk about it as David's time of soul-searching , when he was lost , the lonely time before David got right with God . But don't believe a word of it. Just talk to Rabbit. David loved Dead Tour. He woke up every morning, and that kid who had been told all his life that God put him on this Earth to save the Dyalo from the bondage of demons, he was surrounded by ten thousand of his closest friends who couldn't have said whether a Dyalo was a primitive tribe in the Tibeto-Burman hills or one of those spiffy new Japanese imports with the great mileage. The only demon on tour was the narc. And that kid who had been told that Star Wars was a sin, the only time on Dead Tour he heard the word "sin" was in connection with spilled bong water.

I asked Rabbit what it was about life on the road, and he just sighed, a soft, lilting sigh, not entirely dissimilar to Thomas's much later when I finally summoned up the courage and asked about Jesus. David couldn't believe how big the country was, just couldn't believe it. He had seen Nevada when the Dead played Vegas, but he had never seen New Mexico. Never saw Alabama. Never saw Idaho — and folks said it was beautiful . But they were there and waiting for him. He had time. Sometimes, he'd wake up at three in the morning unable to sleep, and he'd decide to go right now , without waiting for dawn, just to see what was between here and Austin, where in two days' time the Dead were playing a four-show set.

Dead Tour was David Walker's Yale College and his Harvard: David met people on Tour he never knew existed — and this was a kid who'd met witch doctors and Burmese generals; but he'd never met someone like the slender young woman who spent almost six years in the company of the New York City Ballet before she broke her leg. She told David that she knew she was done dancing ballet from the moment when she was lying in a hospital bed, her leg in a cast, and realized that the best time dancing she'd had in the past six years was when she went on a date with a guy who took her to see the Dead play Madison Square Garden. David never forgot a face: he remembered everyone he met and he greeted them by name, often wrapping his long limbs around them in a spontaneous bear hug. Hey now, Moishe , the former professor of political science at Northwestern, who'd been on Tour almost five years. The former Green Beret. Hey now . The son of the senior senator from Indiana. Pretty girls from every county in the country, girls who spoke with twangs and lisps, harsh nasal northeastern vowels, soft southern whispers. For the first time in ten years, David could tell the story of Elijah Cat and expect big, big eyes. Hey now . People who were obsessed with making sure that every note that Jerry played was recorded on tape. "It's a responsibility, man. In a hundred years — the people won't have Jerry anymore. This is what they'll have."