Calling Ken Kesey

Krista promptly delivers him to the police, who drive him to King Salmon, the next town over, where they have a jail cell. Angry at being reined in, Ethan smashes the full weight of his body against the cell's door in an attempt to get out, which to the police looks like a misguided suicide attempt. But to my brother it's a plea for help from a higher authority.

"Well, first I started punching the light," Ethan tells me, remembering the night. "The overhead light had Plexiglas on it. It was actually in the corner, I was standing on the bunk, and I wrapped my shirt up in my fist and I punched, real hard. I liked the noise so I punched some more. Then out came Allen, the police chief, who looked like Ken Kesey. And when he came out I said, 'Ken Kesey, I need a jailbreak,' and he said, 'Well, OK, here I am.'

"He came out, and he unlocked me and let me out and then they were, like, 'Well, what do we do with him?'

"I kinda heard these voices but there was a couple minutes gap there. Then I see there are people marching by outside and I envisioned that there was a huge crowd of people there to see me. So whatever the police guy said, it really made me think, Oh, right, this is Ken Kesey. I figured it out. All the people came to Alaska for the fishing season. You know, it's a crazy place and here I am."

The next day, the authorities fly Ethan to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute in Anchorage, and he's convinced that all this is still part of the movie, the movie he's in with Ken Kesey. On the phone he tells my parents that it's very undercover, although a couple of Hollywood people are in on it, but it's a documentary so we can't spoil the cover. My mother and father fly to Alaska -- together for the first time in five years -- to be at Ethan's bedside. They want him home: He wants to fish. The doctors give him anti-psychotics to slow down the speeding dopamine in his synapses and make him sleep. In the meantime they work on the hard part: getting him to want to come home. Yes, he wants to go home, he says, but his real, "spiritual" home is Bristol Bay, Alaska. It's beautiful and quiet there, not like the hospital, and he has to go back because he's the only white person the Anuk Indians can trust, and there may be a scientific paper in it for him. Plus he's worried Kesey will be disappointed in him, since he was the first draft pick for the film and all.

No one ever came up with an official explanation for my brother's breakdown, but hard labor, no sleep and little food can cause all kinds of delusions.

Perhaps it's unfair to attach all this significance to a novelist who just happened to be one of the first people to drop acid. But still: The Prankster's bus was called Furthur. As is the way of fathers and sons, my brother took my father's admiration of Kesey further than Dad ever did, further than he should have gone. The words -- recounted in years of bedtime stories -- took on a life entirely separate from Kesey the man. An offhand piece of advice to my father became a lifetime motto for my brother, perfect in its vagueness. Adventure without responsibility, call of the wild, an overdose of testosterone. But the motto didn't have the same effect on me; while talking with my parents on conference calls from the psychiatric ward in Anchorage, I desperately hoped whatever had snapped in my brother could be mended if I just sat still.

I wonder whether Kesey, if he had the chance, would have told my brother the same thing he told my dad on that long ago phone call. I think that he might have done what my dad did, reach out to Ethan and silently hold him close.

Today, Ethan is doing perfectly well two years after his time in the cuckoo's nest. He's at school and not planning on going back to Alaska anytime soon. But he hasn't stopped moving: He's spent the past year working on boats in Trinidad and teaching English in Central Asia. And he's helped my family see all the dimensions of Kesey's simple direction.

"Keep moving" means to keep pushing the edges of your experience. But it also requires the strength and wisdom to pull yourself back. I like to think my family has satisfied Kesey's advice. It is that strength and calm sense of adventure that his words taught us. So, as a blessing for a man I never met, I'd like to say: Thank you, for keeping us moving, and for bringing us back. I hope the end of your journey was a peaceful one, not even an end really, just moving further down the road.

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