“You know, we serve ourselves and you get a certain amount of comfort and self-calming from that. But the real joy in life, I’ve noticed that my extremely joyful times in life were when I was involved in a group activity serving other people instead of me.”
–Ed Boast
An Excerpt from the Interview
NCSCC: How old were you during the 60’s?
Ed Boast: Well, the 60’s were real impactful for me, like ’66, ’67, ’68, that was like 16, 17, 18, 19. I think I was 21 in ’69. So that covered the hippie scene pretty good and went down to the Haight and we went and had our own acid parties in the park and finger-painted the garbage cans. I went through all that funny business. I won’t go into some of the more impetuous stuff we did, but yeah, we got pretty wild there for a while. Then everything slowed down and…
NCSCC: Why do you think that was? Because people started having families and just making time for that instead of protesting?
Ed Boast: No, because we got busted. But we aren’t going to get into that one. Maybe I’ll write my book someday. I started it, if I ever finish it. It was wild times for sure and yeah, into the ‘70s I went back to school and then I got into Gurdjieff and mysticism when I was about 25 and started meditating and doing yoga and doing all the good stuff that somehow mostly slipped away over the years. But yeah, then that was a real change in my life, kind of realized I wanted to go pursue some of the secrets of life and I did for a while. I didn’t find any of them.
NCSCC: No?
Ed Boast: Well, none that I could see was a real secret. It seemed like everybody was already up on it. It was just me that was missing the boat. I tried various awareness training techniques and things like that. Things you wake up to and how did I miss that so long? What happened with that?
NCSCC: So, you had an epiphany?
Ed Boast: Oh, yeah. Then I actually mellowed out pretty good from that. I started a big construction company, got in on the Alaska pipeline, did that for a while in Seattle until I started dreaming about the company. Then I said that’s it and put a backpack on my back and headed for California. Then, when I got here I fell in love with the sunshine first. Like Seattle wasn’t bad, but it ain’t nothing like California. I hadn’t been here before. Well, then of course I fell in love with Beate and didn’t want to go back up there either. Yeah, I guess that keeps a lot of people here to Ridge. They come to visit and fall in love with somebody, and then they’ve got to stay.
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Ed Boast: Good luck with your historical project here. Historical, hysterical project. You’ve got to keep some funny stuff in there, some light stuff. Yeah, I should’ve told you my white rabbit story.
NCSCC: It’s not too late.
Ed Boast: No, I guess it’s not. That’s a good animal story. My neighbor had this huge white rabbit. Well, my neighbors, because there were two kids and a dad. They really belonged to this rabbit because it would wrestle them out in the yard. We’d peek through the fence sometimes and see him doing it. But it was long. Man, it was a big rabbit. Well one day I come home and my dog had that rabbit by the neck and was flipping it in the air and it’d flip around and go plop like a wet rag on the ground. I thought, “Oh, my God, that guy’s going to blame us forever.” My dog killed his rabbit. My other brother was with me, so we decided to clean it up and we washed it up and got the hair dryer out and hair blowed it and brushed it and fluffed it up and snuck back over there real quick before they got home and put the rabbit back in the cage. We laid it in there so it looked like it was taking a nap and it just had a heart attack and he wouldn’t find any of the bite holes in it, you know? And just think it passed with natural causes. That’s what we were hoping for.
So anyway, we laid out there by the hedge watching for the longest time and nobody came home. So we finally got bored and went in the house, and we weren’t in the house more than 10 or 15 minutes and we heard this blood curdling scream.
So we ran back out there and peeked through the hedge and here the woman was standing there. The kids looked like… the two kids looked like they were in shock. They were kind of whimpering over by the mother. But she was screaming. She screamed five or six times, I couldn’t believe it. Then the guy came outside and he came walking around the corner and hit the brakes and stuck his hand out, pointing at the rabbit cage. He says: “The rabbit! The rabbit! The rabbit! The rabbit!” He kept saying it over and over again. Man, this is too weird so we left, you know? It was too freaky. Come to find out later, the rabbit had died and they gave it a funeral. My dog had found that rabbit and just decided to play with it. So we cleaned it up and put it back in the cage. Nobody ever said anything to him. They moved two weeks later. They were gone and the house was empty. They were gone. So they’re probably still talking about that. A pet cemetery in their own back yard.
NCSCC: Well, that’s a good parable about how we create stories based on our particular perception.
Ed Boast: Yeah, that’s right. Well that would be a weird perception. It would blow my mind, you bury Fido and then he’s up there the next day looking like he’s sleeping next to his dog dish. It’d be too tough.
NCSCC: That’s funny. Thanks, Ed.
Ed Boast: Yeah. I’m going to head on home.