Sometimes I Get a Great Notion

Siletz River, Oregon

We've moved 120 miles North on the Oregon coast.

This spot is one of our favorites. The Siletz River is full of steel head trout, sturgeon and king salmon at this time of the year.

Just down the road is Depoe Bay. Last year I caught bottom fish and watched a whale rooting around for shrimp just outside the harbor.

Sometimes I live in the country

Sometimes I live in the town

Sometimes I get a great notion

To jump into the river an’ drown

-Leadbelly

The "Sometimes a Great Notion" novel by Ken Kesey came out in 1964. The movie was filmed here on the Siletz River. Henry Fonda starred as the patriarch of an Oregon logging family.

The following about Kesey can be found on Wiki:

At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital where he worked as a night aide with Brian Samuels who later became his partner in a trip around California in a Volkswagen.[8] The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people.[4] Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. Kesey's role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at a state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962. The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels by Frank Reynolds.

Kesey's most famous book is "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". However his second novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion" is considered by many critics to be one of the great American novels of the 20th century.

We were living in San Francisco when Kesey faked his own death:

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California,

In 1997 Kesey participated in a rock concert in which he repeatedly asked, "where have all the bozos gone?" You don't want to overdo the LSD.