©1997 San Francisco Examiner SHE NEVER GOT OFF THE BUS The hard life and high times of Carolyn Garcia Cynthia Robins EXAMINER STAFF WRITER PLEASANT HILL, Oregon - "Come on and see The Bus," ordered Mountain Girl over her shoulder as she rushed hell-for-leather down the back steps of Ken Kesey's red barn home. With steely determination, she continued her way across a wide expanse of unmown grass with Kesey's black spaniel Happy yapping at her heels. A buxom, big-boned woman wearing green velvet pull-on pants, a shapeless black wool sweater and a voluminously floppy, long black coat, Mountain Girl is a force of nature - difficult to ignore when she's under sail. The Bus had been abandoned in a muddy, mossy swale behind the Kesey compound for three years. Thirty years ago, in the dawning of psychedelia, Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, that tatterdemalion pre-hippie/post-Beat caravansary of performers, musicians, poets, magicians, gypsies, tramps and fools crammed into their gaily-painted 1939 International-Harvester, and drove their way into the American consciousness on the rollicking prose of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And now, The Bus was retired. Left to moulder in the weeds. And Mountain Girl wasn't sure how she felt about it. Happy the dog, her head splotched with a huge drop of blue paint, flushed a covey of peacocks which rose above the trees and the parked bus, scattering rainbow feathers and squawking bloody murder. The wind blew the cottony clouds around in a brisk Oregon morning and Mountain Girl, oh-so-daintily for her bulk, padded across a slippery board laid to traverse a narrow creek. And there it was. The Bus, with "Furthur" written like a title across the top. The hood was open. The engine had been cannibalized for parts for Furthur II, the "new bus" that Kesey was taking on what fellow Prankster Kenneth Babbs was calling the Grand Furthur Tour to the Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland, Ohio. The riotous paint job was murky and peeling, as if the bus had leprosy. Mountain Girl walked around it, peering in the windows. She tried to get in the door but a tree had grown up and blocked her passage. She uttered a huge sigh. "I always get emotional about the old bus. It was such a special thing," she says. "I felt bad when it was taken down into the woods and abandoned. It hadn't been running for a very long time. There were daisies growing up through the floor boards. Ken (Kesey) could have made yard art out of it. Instead, he decided to hide it. It's sad to see it crumble away. It's a piece of my childhood. We had so much fun on that bus. Getting on it was a liberating feeling." "The bus is the real talisman," said Kesey a few weeks later. "It's the thing that runs through all of this history. It's not a thing anybody owns or controls. No matter how peeved you get with people, the bus always makes your heart jump. Everybody was attached to it." The first time Mountain Girl climbed onto the mythic bus, she was 18. Today, Carolyn Adams Walker Garcia is 51 years old. Her legend leaps off the pages of books, in the annals of the Grateful Dead in her role as Jerry Garcia's consort and then wife for nearly 30 years and in the transcripts of a high profile trial last winter which pitted her against Garcia's widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, in a Marin County courtroom. But who is this woman who attracted Ken Kesey and Jerry Garcia, two of the most powerful influences on the popular culture in the past three decades? "She's a person possessed of spirit and weight, will and energy," says Jon McIntire, the Dead's manager from 1968 to 1990. "She had the ability to meld her energy with the energy of others to do more than what one person could do by themselves. ... She had intelligence, joie de vivre and a directness that is really remarkable. And her beauty. She was amazingly beautiful." "She is an authentic personality," says Dennis McNally, former public relations manager for the Grateful Dead and now publicist for Grateful Dead Productions. "She is the real deal." Even as a teenager dedicated to "experimentation," as Carolyn now puts it, she was a fairly daunting personality. "I suppose I would have been pretty good pickings for a cult," she laughs. "I was definitely a seeker ... I would question every single thing. That was sort of my style, to ask the really tough questions right away." Even back in those pre-women's liberation days, Carolyn Adams was an in-your-face challenge for any male. "She's imposing all right," says David Gans, the proto-Deadhead historian who hosts "Dead to the World" on KPFA-FM radio. "You have to be a pretty big person to hold your own with Kesey and Garcia and their milieu. Those two are the biggest people in every way - big souls, big hearts, big egos, big personalities. They were monumental. It takes a monumental person to be with them." Today, vestiges of the slender, heart-stoppingly beautiful girl-woman who caught Kesey's eye in 1964 remain - the fierce intelligence, the take-control bossy stick, the intellectual acuity, the ability to cut through a morass of pretense to the heart of the matter, the boisterousness, the guilelessness, the curiosity, the laughter. It is to Pleasant Hill that Carolyn Garcia retreated many years ago, during her nearly three decade liaison and marriage to Jerry Garcia - the totemic Captain Trips, guitar-genius/linchpin of the Grateful Dead - when the druggy Deadhead scene got too weird and dangerous. She opted out of the Grateful Dead scene for the sake of her three little girls, Sunshine Kesey, her daughter with Ken Kesey, and Annabelle and Theresa Garcia, her children with Jerry Garcia. And it is in Pleasant Hill, in the bucolic greenness of the Willamette Valley, that she now lives on 16 acres with her new love, Bill Burwell, 49, a huge, shambling, robust ex-logger with a split between his teeth, ruddy cheeks and a long, salt-and-pepper gray pony tail. Their agrarian entourage includes a quartet of donkeys, a dozen sheep, two dogs (Chiquita, an ancient, deaf Border Collie mix and Penny, an apricot standard poodle) and two cats. She has a garden, a greenhouse with a new outdoor shower, a painting/writing studio guest house, a hot tub, an aging BMW convertible and a split-log conservatory Burwell built where she grows redwood trees. For an arduous month in December 1996 and part of January 1997, Carolyn Garcia was living on the Bolinas Lagoon at Stinson Beach with her old friend Caroline "Goldie" Rush and commuting to the Marin County Court House in San Rafael. She was the plaintiff in a court case seeking the balance of the $5 million settlement arrived at in a contract that she and Garcia had drafted as their divorce agreement in 1993. But Jerry had up and died. He left a third of his estate to his wife of three months, Deborah Koons Garcia, but had a herd of creditors in his wake (including Mountain Girl) and the value of his estate in dispute. Before Garcia died of a heart attack in a dry-out facility in Forest Knolls on Aug. 9, 1995, he'd already paid Mountain Girl their agreed-upon $20,883 per month for a period of 18 months. After his death, Koons Garcia stopped the checks. Mountain Girl sued to get the money owned her. The court case turned into a high-profile free-for-all, with Koons Garcia's side claiming that Jerry had stopped loving Carolyn years before, that their marriage on New Year's Eve, 1981, was a sham and had been for tax purposes only and that in circumventing the legal system, their agreement was basically not worth the paper it was written on. "Yes," admits Carolyn Garcia. "We were trying to do an end run on the legal system and get the ball around to the other side of the court without having to engage a whole lot of people in the process. It was something we did amongst ourselves. It was the honorable thing to do and it should be honored. Which is why I went and took it to court. Because Jerry and I honorably tried to do a deal that covered everything, that made me happy." Garcia knew that as Jerry's wife and mother of two of his children, she was entitled to half of his estate under California law. Both felt the $5 million figure was fair, she said. In exchange for the cash, she gave up claim to the fruits of his talent, his real estate holdings and any future earnings. "I knew he could pay it and that he would get total control of his own business and that I wouldn't ever have to know anything about anything. One thing that he did not want was any disclosure. He did not want to share that information or even have to dig into all that information." The trial was "an unexpected development," she says, as she sits in her rural kitchen. "We thought we had everything settled and that I was going to go up to Oregon and raise dahlias ... have some goldfish or something that would keep me happy.