The project is very important, and good people are trying to make it happen. But right now this moment the street people I have been talking about are out there hustling and tripped out and stoned out of their minds every time they get near any dope, and they will never be rehabilitated away by the Divinity School students.

There is a fourteen-year-old boy who has been tripping all night, and he has the I Ching clutched in his hands. And there's another boy not much older, an acid dealer, who is tripping and trying to hide his dope before it gets too light. And a little girl named Roberta with a crumpled velvet dress and great big eyes. And a guy named Rufus who has left his wife and child in Maine and wants to go to New Mexico to look for Don Juan, who was the peyote man in a look. Rufus wants to be a crow. To fly with mescalito. I had forgotten how sensible the vision was. And the private language that it is all woven in.

I ask Rufus what he would say if he were to write about street people, and he tells me: "We are all searching. Sometimes we are allowed to forget that. We fill our lives with objects. Some of the objects were people once, like my wife and child. In the streets you know that there is something like a river, and that all along you have been trying to fight your way upstream. In the streets, you flow downstream, and are aware of the energy that moves you. But that doesn't mean that it's easy.

I would talk about people. In the streets you know people really exist, no matter how tripped out you are. You never really have to worry about anything. You can always eat. You can always sleep. But you know that your life involves people first of all and they are always there to share your life."

LOOK OUT the window. It is a children's Crusade.