In The Jury Box: 2023

By David Eide

"Now we divert you with tales of a failed utopia and the people involved. Democracy is created in dreams."

THE FARM ON THE HILL

I was surprised to run into my old friend Michael in a cafe I frequented along the broad thoroughfare known as Shattuck Avenue. I was having my usual plate of lasagna and garlic bread with a glass of beer when I spotted the old friend in a corner, against the window, writing furiously in a notebook. It was, after all, a city of writers. And if a person wasn't writing they were a client of one of several therapists and if they weren't a client they were a therapist and many times the clients became therapists and the therapists became clients. Michael was in the corner with his elbow propped up on the table and one hand lazily rubbing his cheek. It was late afternoon and the people began coming home from work, catching the afternoon bus. There was always the crazy woman, dressed all in heavy black clothes with a man's head and old shawl, condemning the students, telling them that they were evil. Always the poor huddled behind their packages.

I looked for a long time at my friend. The last time I had seen him was during the anti-war days. Michael had decided to avoid the draft by going up into the mountains and hiding out. I had seen him several days before the event was to take place. I was, of course, sympathetic and gave Michael several books to take with him. One was a treatise on anarchism by Prince Kropotkin and the other was Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau. "These will entertain you. You will understand them completely," I told him.

Frankly, I had forgotten about him in the intervening years. The war ended, the south fell, Nixon fell, everything fell as the nation plunged into an unfathomable pessimism, an abyss that had carried me far out into the periphery of things.

I felt a little jolt when I spotted him. There was a kind of reticence as if going up to him would open a can of worms I didn't want to open. There was always the question of my reappraisal of those years. But, then, didn't I feel strong now? Didn't I believe in myself and what I was doing? Certainly. So, I got up off the chair and moved over to the table.

"Well, you made it out of the woods ok," I said.

Michael looked up. He had the expression of enormous sadness. It was not a good expression in a young man but there it was. Then an expression of astonishment. I noticed little flecks of gray in his hair.

"What? You! You're still around this place?"

I laughed and sat down at the table. "I've thought about you over the years." I was lying but it was kind lie, a necessary lie I felt.

Michael grunted a little and then we told each other what we were doing in the world these days. We reminsced until nothing more could be dredged up of those we knew and the experiences we had shared. And those experiences which had marked us off from each other and from the world we despised as young people.

I said to him, "I discovered that you end up despising yourself and the real fight is with yourself not the world so you settle. The world is what it is and lets you be everything you didn't want to be until you make peace and try to do what you wanted to do in the first place."

"Seems true but there are many things you can't know until you take your hated self out into the woods."

I made a dramatic sweep of my arm toward the desultory downtown of the city and said, "my woods, my lonely woods."

"Ha. I understand."

"So, when you left here that Saturday, tell me, what happened?"

Michael waved the question off as if he didn't want to talk about the past. Then he up righted himself in his chair. ' "I went into the mountains and stayed with a group of people.'

"Ah, I want to hear this story." And I settled back in my chair waiting for the tale to be told. Not that I expected anything since a lot of people ran off to the mountains. They went to Canada and Mexico, Morocco, Spain, Netherlands, Australia and dozens of other spots on the globe. The mountains were a place you drove a good car through and rolled down the window so there'd be a crease to let in the frosty air. The good of the mountain was usually inaccessable by road and had to be worked at to get to. Mountains were fabled until you stood on one and saw it for what it was. Well, the scientists assured the modern people that it was this, this and the other thing.

My favorite mountain had local fame. The pioneers came in through the Walker Pass in the early days and were told to keep Mt. Diablo "on your left side" and you'd run into the Sacramento Delta and River and get up on to Sutter's Fort. The Spainards had scoped it out and given its name or made the Native name into a Spanish one. Even today you could find the holes were the good women ground up acorns to make meal. It had provided one of the most pristine views in the world but with all the traffic and industry that view was cut way down.

A friend of mine claimed he had camped up there and heard the wailing of dead Indian ghosts dancing in one of the many meadows it had but I hardly believed him. I wanted to but put it down to a bit of editorializing on his part. People who lived in or near the Rockies scoffed at my mountain. "That's a hill, not a mountain. It doesn't even have a peak." Maybe it didn't have a peak I didn't know but it was mine and when I worked in the area I always made sure I would stop and look out toward it and think about the Spanish and natives. I would think, eventually, of the dinasours like the saber-tooth tiger and wooly mammouth. They stomped around in those parts back in the day. And the weird camel that had been fossilized on a rock near the college. They all jet up and played around in my imagination for awhile, to take away the taste of work. 'You know," I often thought, "those creatures were as much a part of life as the humans I keep running into."

"So you want a tale do you? Everyone wants a story these days. OK, I can tell a story. It might not be a professional story and slicked up but it will be a damn story and you will be interested. I thought about my pals back here in the city many times while I hid up in the hills. Are they living normal lives? How can they considering everything? Are they still mere students or have they taken a stand because life is no longer something to laugh at? Do they even care about me?"

"Oh, don't worry plenty of people cared. I used to get calls from your mother, from your sister, and our mutual friend Ted. They were, at first, sick with worry. Then I tried to convince them that you were well and were on an honorable vacation away from the mess as I called it."

"Yes it was all a mess. We were mesmerized by the mess and it exploded in a lot of vectors out from the center."

"Whatever."

"Well believe me I thought I was going to die, no question about it. I was hoping to get arrested before that happened. I lucked into finding the place I did. I met an old Indian in a bar up along the Sacramento River and the old guy told me about a group of people up this mountain and told me where to go to find it. So I hitched a ride up into this weird town and started a long walk up a half-dirt road to where the Indian said this place was. As you may remember I wasn't much of a nature boy. Every sound startled me and I would stop waiting for a mountain lion or bear to jump out and eat me.

Of course I was young and idealistic in those days. It felt as if the world was going to sink down into a beautfiul nothingness of night, pushed ahead of schedule by the human animals. Ok I said, the Earth will die and all life will end. I had better do something memorable. I had better try and be better than anything that has come along so that there will be pity somewhere, sorrow even, as the dark ascends. I was crazy as most youth is. Crazy youth how I long for thee! Gone now and so I know the bitter fact that the Earth will go on forever and ever and life will mutate beyond anything we can imagine and no matter what I did I would be less than the saber-tooth tiger, a kind of floating ghost of what was. And no one, not five thosuand year ago, not five thousand years in the future would take note. And that five thousand years was approaching fast! That's when I lost my idealism and decided to plunge heavily into the world and get myself buried in it."

I wanted to hear the story but not completely. I didn't want to be reminded what took me a few hazings in hell to get out of. Dumb youth thinks it will outlast its enemies. I was fortunate to live in a city that had taught me to make bond with the enemy but don't become the enemy. I wanted to hear the tale of my old friend, a guy I had spent a lot of time carousing and protesting with, talking and riding stupidly along looking for mates; wildly good mates.

He did look like the steam had vaporized out of him, as if he had settled and had beliefs of some sort. He had been a journalist and wrote for the so-called underground press; stories about crazy taxicab companies painted up in psychedelic colors, draft dodgers, topless dancers in San Francisco, and the endless clubs where Joan Baez or Dylan would play. All gone now for burrito stands and parking lots. Well, things live in the mind as well as places. I had been a bit more conservative and looked askance at a lot of the doings of that time. There were ineluctable beliefs though. There were things shared outside of odd handshakes and beards. In Berkeley I had seen Japanese hippies and German hippies; Estonian hippies and Kenyan hippies. I saw laughter with every type of face. It was good. "When youth is behind you keep it hidden in a safe place and don't let the world in." That's what I was told at some point by someone who I had already forgotten. A work guy. So, I wasn't quite sure I wanted the story but I had time, now, and I was curious. A bond is made. It breaks through circumstances you don't control. And then there it is, ready to connect again with those memories piling up like the bridge commute, car after car, word after word, an effortless flow through a kind of universal resistance.

"Now friend, tell me your story."

* * * * * * * *

It was not a great or specacular mountain like Shasta or Lassen. It was modest and hidden by other mountains. But as you climbed up into it you may as well have been in the largest mountain in the world, swirling as it was in bush and tree and smell and bird and that mountain lonliness you find on every mountain in every world in every era. I will never forget that mountain.

"The house sat in a meadow of yellow flowers with the sound of a mountain stream constantly in the background. After awhile that, the sound, dissolved into the flow of voices. If I listened specifically I could hear the pattern of flow over the rocks, over itself as it cut behind a long row of pine trees and odd ferns.

Someone, somewhere, at some time decided to build a fine house out in the woods as so many had done during the building up of the frontier. It had its flaws I learned about over time but it still seemed as perfect an object as one could imagine. To put so much energy and love into a crude hovel was a mark of something special, something that couldn't be written off by history.

The main house had doors leading up to the attic and down to a ground floor where it got very cold and often a person slept down there on a cot. The windows were small. From the kitchen you could look out on the woodpile and the stump they used to cut their wood. The main room was full of books and blankets with a generous fireplace that provided, for all intents and purposes, the heat for the house. During the summers the heat was so bad everything was left open with hopeless screens to keep the bugs out. Usuaully a cluster of fat bees hung aournd the kitchen and we told not to bother them. "you don't bother them, they won't bother you." And the bees would hover over my plate sometimes.

I learned later that the road was an old horse path that wound through the thicket of pine and manazinta. The first time I apporoached the place I noticed a small tractor being taken out of a shed and heading up past the house.

"They work here," I heard myself think as though I couldn't quite believe it.

I was brought up the road by a strange giant of a man who turned out to be a kindly nut. When we approached the house I saw a group of three people by the side of the road. They were discussing anything imaginable. They often talked in little groups and no one knew what was said but the communicants themselves. They were often jealous of their secrets. Then there was sudden laughter. One young man had thrown his head back and the other two turned away with faint smiles.

You have to picture the setting, brown mountains in the background filled with trees and strange paths made, apparently, by humans. The mountains tapered down into a little valley where the homestead was. There was a gully running past the buildings and then, on the other side of an escarpment was the mountain stream, sometimes jumping with life, other times very passive as if it knew it was only a creek, a slight one, a perpectual one though. And then up the slopes of another mountain. Not a great mountain but a modest one that could be climbed in a few hours. There was the main house, a big block of a thing that had been rebuilt a few times, a barn where some people slept, a large old cabin adjacent to the big block place and behind that was a large ground where they had chickens. I was there when it was hot so everything crinkled up and lay about until the autumn winds started blowing from the east, down off the mountain. There was always activity, always people moving around, carrying things, sometimes not clothed, sometimes bare-chested, cars and trucks firing up all the time yet it never lost this tranquil feeling.

The house was old but solid. There were rusty implements hung from one side. The wood on it looked original. The roof was one of those tin roofs you see up in the mountains so the snow will slide off. It looked like tin to me at any rate and many times the sun refected off whatever it was and hit me in the eye. The house was built on blocks several feet off the ground and I learned later that was because of the proliferation of snakes in the area. One day I knelt down and peered under the house and saw the glint of old, dried snake skins laying askew over themselves.

As I said it was in a meadow and surrounding the meadow were two cultivated fields. Out of one were flourishing corn stalks. Behind all this was a rugged, wooded mountain filled I could imagine with every type of beast indigenous to the Sacramento Valley. The first dreams I remember having there were of strange beasts coming out of the woods and chasing me down by the raging creek. They didn't eat me, just chased me out as though I didn't belong. I would often wake up and go outside and stare at the bulging white stars pulsing down on me and then get settled and go back to bed.

Soon enough two dogs came up and started barking and yapping at me until the big man told them to, "git git" and the dogs scampered wildly around me and then disappeared behind the house. The barking had brought people out and they stood and watched as the man they called Crazy Bear and I made our way up the path toward the entrance to the house. It was at this moment, my friend, that I lost all sense of the mountain beauty, its water and spectral hot sun bleeding through everything. No, I was preparing myself to explain why I was wondering around on their property.

A man emerged who had a look to him that set him apart from the other men of this mountain. He was tall with a full beard that was, already, showing some bits of whiteness. He came out of the group and came up to me. I'll never forget the fierce expression in his eyes; eyes that were hard and penetrating without a hint of craziness that I saw later on among people of the mountain. The man they called Crazy White Bear seemed almost apologetic as he explained how he'd found me wondering around. He called me, "the wayward brother," and his voice got defensive and the tall man put his hand up.

It was silent. I felt the people were not completely suspicious of me but concerned about how my presence was going to disrupt everything. And at that point, had they told me to leave I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I would have turned and rambled down the road and not looked back.

"He says he's escaping the war," Crazy White Bear told the tall man. "Says he has no better idea than to lose himself in the woods where no one will think about looking for him.'

The tall man looked at me. "Is that true? Are you running from the war?"

I made a gesture of little consequence, an acquiescent shrug.

"You are welcome to our community, then. Glad to have you here." And he put out his hand which I took and he pumped the hand defiantly as though I'd been part of the community from the beginning of time.

And I suddenly spurted out, "I'll do anything asked of me!"

"Can you do anything useful?"

"I can always fetch water from the stream."

And when I said that the people broke out in laughter and made me feel like I was part of them.

The landscape was grotesque and stark in places. Manzanita flourished from the creek to the road looking like old dried coral in some empty ocean. The surrounding hills were covered with a thick sea of pines with bare spots I imagined were inhabited by a mountain lion. There was a time, believe it or not, that I felt cloistered. Up the long road from the town I saw lush farmland and pasture with old threshing machines in the middle of a brilliant green. Everything looked asleep and passive as the wind blew over them.

And there was always smoke from various chimneys down the road in the valley and dogs lingering in front of doors or roaming out by a few cows, milk cows, up in the meadown where the waterfall was.

There was one place of subtle energy where I felt utter peace. It was in the shadow of great pine trees, near the sound of the stream, as sun filtered through arching limbs and the air cut through my mind. I would stand in this spot for as long as I could in all other places there was the distortion created by granite, red dirt, and Manzanita. It was as if this place was the exhausted result of a violent fight within nature.

And I was not naive. I had known about communes and the whole movement toward the god-loving earth. In fact my friend Jake, who you might remember went so far to join an Indian tribe in the Sacramento Valley. It was a tribe patched together by an old medicine man who wanted to teach the young whites the ways of the Indian. Jake got busted for growing hemp but I think he made it through ok. At any rate, the purpose of these things, the will behind them, was the will to health. We dissolve and fly apart under the pressure of the artificial so these mountain types had sought out a healthy alternative. And I have to admit, for a long time before my encounter, my impression of communes was of women giving birth to babes in the dry furrows and men sitting around smoking hashish from corn cob pipes, and large feasts of fresh vegetables and ample red wine with laughter and conversation echoing through the valley of the mountain.

Some of that, my friend, is true. But it is also true that they were a common lot of people looking like a band of itenerant farmers. Sometimes they looked as if they had been struck dumb by something.

This commune or farm or whatever it was had been organized five years before by the tall man whose name he had changed to Rasputin. It was starting to collect a history for itself but I had a strong feeling it didn't care for history and wanted to live in a splendid free present. People had come and gone. I later learned who some of the original cast were, the committed one's I used to say to myself. I was curious why the man had renamed himself after the mad monk of Russia because I didn't see too much madness in him. I never brought the subject up but when I think back on it is was his belief that either he or his idea were not very killable and that gave him a lot of confidence.

They put me up in a little cottage that smelled musty and was filled with twenty year old National Geographic magazines. Soon after the tall man named Rasputin called me into his place and offered me a glass of wine. There was activity, no question about that, slow as it was, nearly hidden from view. This Rasputin plied me for information. I told him how I'd grown up here in the Bay Area and was not much into school. That I had fallen in love, well, I said, maybe it wasn't love but we were closer than friends. In fact, I told him my adventure was particularly difficult without her. I felt foolish for saying it, as though I was embarked on a great epic and had sacrificed much for my desire to avoid the dreaded war.

"Well," Rasputin said. And he looked up with his lips closed together. "Sounds reasonable. What did you take in school?"

"Journalism. I was being trained to write for newspapers."

"Ah journalism. We have no need for reporters up here. Did you learn any useful thing? Did you learn business or farming?

"Journalism prepares a guy for many things; a bit of law, a bit of business, a bit of everything."

"Hm, I see."

Rasputin was slipping his eyes all over the place. He stopped and explained that sometimes people would wander and stumble in out of the woods and expect all kinds of things from the farm and end up being parasites rather than any use. So he had started to question every person who came through "this particular part" to make sure they had a background with the sort of fit needed in their community. It was nothing personal but Rasputin claimed he could read an entire life in a few sentences and the way they were spoken. He made it clear he was insuring that the farm wouldn't fold under "parasitism"

"That's why most of us come up here; to get away from it in the first place."

Rasputin then did something unexpected. He began to explain himself in ways that made me uncomfortable. It was growing dusk and I became conscious of the stream running on the otherside of the trees twenty yards or so from the house. I couldn't see anyone. It seemed strange to me since I had been conscious of the movement of people all the time I was up there. Rasputin began to speak.

"I did a lot of things, did a lot of surviving, before I found the light if you know what I mean. That's all past me now. The light remains but the past is dead and that's just fine with me. I'd gone through all the phases. First I was an intellectual demon if you know what I mean. I was the type of guy who got depressed and disillusioned after reading the Confessions of Rosseau. What a jerk that guy was masked by his sweet idealisms. But I had a plan. And the plan was to pull together the best elements of the on-going out of the limits of ideas and put them to work in an academy of some kind. I was going to purchase some land and set it up out in the country where there'd be nothing but art, beauty, ideas freely exchanged without the mundane responsibilities to worry about. People thought of me as a nuisance in school because I'd always get this plan together and try to get others interested but all they wanted to do was to party and think of their careers. Anyway, the idea kind of died in me along the way and for a while I ran with a strange group of people who had devoured a lot of chemical substances and read Castenada and all of that. I call it my getting-to-know-you-phase after the song you know? Well, after awhile I see that the only thing these people had in common was a desire to kill themselves as quickly as possible though they might call it something else. At any rate, I began to preach to them informally about these intellectual ideas that no one knew about but a few professors and these people started to cling to me like I'm the truth. Then I started to teach them in a more formal manner and bring in some of the eastern ideas that had been floating around. But, it's just trying to get these people to open up to one another and to forget their pettiness and forget their nonsense and live from the heart. But sure enough, don't you know, they no longer trust me because I bring them up to a certain point and then can't tell them where to go next so the whole group goes dissolving into the city somewhere and I'm left wondering what happened.

After a time I realized that it was me who didn't know where to go next. I spent a couple of bad years after that. Can't say much about this now except that they are gone from me, those damn, dirty years. But then the idea of a nice, respectable commune without any high flautin' ideas came pretty naked to me one day. Actually it came to me after I'd thought and read about country living for awhile. But to actually get up and try to get one of these things going was hard. I contacted a few people and one thing led to another. A fellow named Roy, who you'll meet, had been up here hunting and he came across this place that looked abandoned enough. But that's a whole different story that I'll tell you later."

I showed interest in his story, tired as I was of the stories of others. I had wanted my own story but it had to, I guess, move through many other stories to get to me.

Looking closer at Rasputin he must have been in his mid or late 30's. Looking into his eyes I could detect a wide range of experience and, if not sadness, great world weariness.

As far as I could make of it the commune had been built out of old ideas and older tools. It wasn't the single-mindedness of Rasputin but ideas seeded from the beginning of time. Thoreau, who Rasputin talked about constantly, headed the list since he had re-taught American men how to withdraw their attention from the inane and porous world and listen in solitude to the intellect of nature; divine, sensuous, eternal nature. He said he read a lot of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Marx, even, because he was convinced that money made for mad men. He was always dismissing one of his old favorite thinkers. "Ah, he was an old crank," or "he's obsolete now, no use talking about him." He admired the Amish and Mormons and mentioned the Shakers and other groups I had read about in college. He said though, "we are not a religious group, we are spiritual rationalists." I wasn't sure what that was and let it be for a bit and continued to listen to him.

I'm not at all convinced that they were trying to create a utopia. I know Rasputin read books, he told me some of them. He may have started with the idea of a utopia but after a few years geared that way down to "a place good people can live in, a better place." Perhaps he wanted to better form of family. I never tried to pin him down. I had accidently run into the place in a state of utter choas. I didn't know what I was doing. I thought I did, at first I did but after a few weeks of hitching rides and camping out in fields and old creepy motels I found this place. I was told to go up the hill, there will be people there who will listen to you. So I went up the hill.

"The genders are allowed to develop freely without any prejudice or judgement. Some of the women have taken over the tractor as their own machine and nurse it like a child." He was smiling. The women seemed confident but as I got further into my stay and talked with them it was obvious they were not certain about anything. "This is a gig," one told me. "After this will be another gig. I want to get filled up with gigs and keep them coming so I don't have to stop and think about things."

I was reminded of the early Christians and no matter what Rasputin had said some of the people told me that they had seen Jesus, had spoken to Him, and were continually inspired in their dreams by His appearance. And what greater example had been created than the simple, egalitarian, truth-seeking community of those early Christians that broke, finally, under the pressure of the will to power?

Many of the men had grown beards and let their hair hang down their back. There was always a woman sitting in the shade nursing her baby at her naked breast. She rarely smiled and looked out into the trees.

Food was collected and stored. Whatever supplies were bought from town became property of all. If anyone had a job in town (and a few were loggers or fire watchers) their wages were put into the commune bank account to buy essentials. Essentials were decided on by The Committee of Ten. The Committee took up the issues of the daily operation and articulated them fully, trying to wring out some conclusion. They would wring and wring it until the question was laying out stark for all to see. Then a resolution was drawn up and all the members voted; one vote per member, majority ruled.

I noticed that there would be various types of discussion. Sometimes they were very rational. And other times they were nearly violent over the smallest detail.

After a couple of weeks I forgot where I was. The silence of the morning was no longer disturbing. There was always a kind of grace in the air. It was utter silence and then a quick puncturing sound of a blue jay. Then the chicks started clucking and I could hear feet outside my window and then a laugh or low conversation. When I opened the door the clouds were hiding the ascending sun. I would think to myself, 'this is no place to work. It's absurd people want to labor in the middle of peace and beauty. For all that I started looking forward to my daily chores.

One day Rasputin confronted me. At first I thought he was angry about something. Instead he told me to take the day off. 'You're doing good work. Go off and meditate by yourself or read or anything you desire to do.' I was mildly shocked and felt uneasy. I went back to my shack and got one of the books you'd given to me. As I heard all the activity around me I knew I had to go somewhere that my conscience wouldn't bother me. I went down to the waterfall to contemplate some things I was mulling over. I thought about how long I would have to stay in the mountains? How long would the conflict last? Was my future ruined because of his decision? Was it an impulsive decision I would learn to regret the rest of my life? Would one day come when I would be confronted by the consequences of my decision? These were not kind thoughts.

I will take a walk, I said to myself. I will walk up the path by the stream and look at things.

I walked past Herbert, the ax-man, who was sharpening his ax on an old grinding wheel. "Fine day today," he said.

And then there was the woman. She was there.

To be continued.....

He sipped and we sat watching the good looking people come and go, drinking our beer. I was taking in the story. He seemed on the verge of exhaustion. He seemed to have practiced these words at some point and was glad to see them rush out of himself like startled birds.

"So did you do anything extraordinary during that time?"

"I thought they were at the time but now, looking back, they seem dumb. My dumbness that I have gotten nostalgic about of late. Our time has slipped behind us friend. There's little we can do."

"You're normal now, is that what you're telling me?"

I laughed loudly. "Tell me what normal is these days?"

"Good question. I mean you are looking down the straight and narrow path now right?"

I can't get off it.

* * * * * * * *

"Well as I started to say, she was wearing old clothes. That is, old dresses that her great aunt may have worn in the 20's or 30's. She had on a pair of sandals and always carried a book under her arm on homeopathic remedies. She would sit against the chicken coop, reading leisurely with bees and horseflies hanging in the air.

The first time she saw me she measured me very carefully with her eyes. "They say you are escaping the war." I nodded my head. "Well, good luck to you."

She told me her name. Mona. And Mona was the offical chicken beheader of the bunch. By her side was a bloody hand ax.

"Are you a good chicken beheader?" I asked.
"I'm damn good. The rascals don't feel a thing."

We could hear the shouts of children down the path, along the water. In the far distance we heard the sound of machines.

"Are you up from the Bay Area?" she asked me.

"Yes."

"That's where I lived for awhile. I lived in San Francisco out by the Great Highway. That's where I met Rasputin."

"Do you miss it?"

The woman made a face of disgust. "One of the reasons that I came up here was to get out of the city."

"It's certainly more peaceful up her. The birds wake me in the morning and the children's voices are what break the silence."

I spent a moment of uncomfortable quiet with her and then left to go to the swimming hole. She returned to reading her book and I left but I knew I would see more of her.

Did I miss women during that time? No. I didn't miss anything.I was just happy to be able to sleep comfortably and have a routine of some sort. The owman thing happened later on. I didn't worry about it. The women were hard my friend. They weren't suburban, they were country. Country and urban, hard as bear claws which told me that somewhere along the way their sensilibity had been bombed out of them by bad relations or an addiction or too wide embrace of the evil world. Most especially I didn't miss the TV and daily newspaper. I became convinced during my time in the mountains that both are driving the world crazy. On TV they showed the bodies. They showed a kind of attitude but they didn't have credibility. So the smell of water filled me with pleasant reveries of the passage of history and my time, my city became the merest fragment between the sharp angles and mad shouts from one end to the other.

And here, in the mountains I was discovering people who had emerged from their own, rightful imagination."

Swimming with the Fishes

"When it got roaring hot I'd take Mona down to the waterfall and if no one was there we'd skinny dip and look for little fishes. "Oh I see one, it is blue!" Like a girl and her breasts would bob on the water like contented pumpkins.

The falls went off a cliff maybe fifteen feet high and two people could dance down where the fall fell. It was very cold. One time I looked up and Rasputin was up on the path with his arms folded and little expression on his face. I was about to wave to him but decided against it. The last thing I wanted was for him to come down and join us.

After all when you are in the woods you are merely another animal, in a pack for survival purposes but an animal nonetheless. Nothing reminds you that artifice is the name of the game as far as our species, like it or not. Oh, once in awhile a jet would venture over thousands of feet above us headed for SF or LA. And there was the truck and a few other artifices to remind even a happy animal that we build things and are usually clothed when we do. I always felt that the young women were wonderful upgrades from the nude statuary of the classical period. There's something more compelling about the movement of flesh on a good woman. And they probably felt the same way about a man. There is something noble about the naked animal, homo sapien.

Among the wrong people nudity inspired a kind of mock seriousness as though the naked body were invisible and they were having conversations about Iran and the financial crisis. But the right sort of people, nude, were a playful group. I admit I stared at Mona for a long time. Her body was real and made me realize why flesh was so much a powerful dread for monks and that type. Flesh moves the mind. And every body had its own personality. Some were chirpy, some were too experienced and wounded, some were boisterous and unconscious. Mona's body said, "If you enter me you will find mysterious treasures you never dreamed of but then to enter me is a very difficult thing to do." And some of the men back at the farm had told me their attempts to enter Mona and her "deflating ways." "It's all the chicken beheading she's done. She just wants to cut it off with a smile."

And I did notice that when I swam towards her in the stark, cold pond she would move away and ignore me. I thought she was playing and would swim after her but she kept dodging me, preventing me from getting close to her. "Oh I get it you don't want me to see those hairs around your belly button." And she splashed water at me, "No silly, I have no hair around my belly button." "Well it's something."

We didn't stay in the water too long. And then Mona made a weird request considering everything. She wanted me to take the towel she had brought and dry her all over. So she stood naked and half shivering, stoically, vertical and I wrapped the towel around her and rubbed and patted every bit of her body until she was dry as a lizard. I thought to myself, she wants me to touch her, especially in those areas that signal a kind of giving in or surrender. The towel was a barrier and yet I felt all the things a man feels when he is entangled like coiled snakes with a nice feeling woman. She then took the towel and did me and I noticed she touched every part of my surface. Such as to announce, "you are almost in but not quite. We have initiated things through the towel. You still need to find a few more keys."

Then we were dressed and headed up to the path. I held her hand for a while and then she let go and grabbed the root of this old tree to pull her up a steep part of the path. We were on it and looked down to the sweetness of the waterfall and pond and laughed a bit. Well, I know I was smiling. Nature was a beautiful danger. And I thought, if there's ever a big fire around here I know where I will go.

Mona painted and had marvelous talent even though it was always private to her. "No need to show these around. I do 'em, I like 'em." She alternated between scenes from the farm and then mystical visionary sort of stuff. She was big on vision and had been in a few mystical cults in her time. Sometimes the dead would visit her she said. And they would say their piece and then leave while she tried to figure out what it was that was said. "But Mona, what is it you really want to do? Have kids? Go travel? Get a home somewhere and settle down?" "Down the road a bit," she would always say. As with many women who I met during those days, in the city and up at the farm, they were trying to prove themselves the equals or even superior to men. I figured it was all biological and absorbed the words of some of these women. I never said it but I always thought to myself, "well go out and prove it, don't tell me."

There was a long, lanky one with marvelously large sad eyes who had come from a good family but had run away from them to prove something to them or herself. Once, we were on the old path that led to the dead mine and she began running. I naturally ran with her. I thought it was a mark of affection. So I ran and laughed, hoping the whole episode would end in a blaze up in the secluded bush. But she ran after we stopped and when I ran after her she yelled back to me, "No! This is about me, not you!" And on she ran until I stopped. I didn't see much of her after that. She was polite but distant. She ran and ran like a crazy fox. A beautiful, intelligent fox.

Mona was different. She was down to earth as they say. She was who she was and didn't care too much what others thought about it. That was part of her charm I think. She just didn't damn care what anyone thought but it was obvious to me that at one time in her life she cared a lot, too much as young people do sometimes.

* * * * * * * *

"To walk alone in the woods with a stream rushing by, is a divine sort of experience. There were no other habitations within miles of the farm. If you started walking toward the top of the mountain no fences would stop you. There were bears and snakes but they weren't necessarily going to harass the humans out on an adventure.

I never walked for pleasure before. I walked because I had to. A walkable city is quite remarkable but to walk in the woods along a drawn out piece of water, is transformative. It dissipates the ugliness a man carries in him and puts it on the back of a dragon fly. It draws down his defenses so he takes in the wide vista of sight and sound and lets it dovetail in delight. Time becomes its own body and never taunts the walker. Nature is the friendly killer. On more than one ocassion I said to myself, "If a tree were to fall and flatten me then something precise and normal ordered it and I'd go down without much fuss." I didn't want a tree to fall but the opportunity was always there.

Of course a dog in the mountains was as necessary as an ax or a garden. The dogs didn't seem to belong to anyone in particular but took to me for some reason. And you know I was not good around dogs. But they brought me sticks and I'd throw them up the path and they'd jump and fetch like troopers. After a while I realized that the dogs were leading me and I had no idea where I was going. And as I got deeper into the path I was wary of rattlers. I knew the further you were away from the water the more likely it was you'd run into a snake. No one had been bitten by a snake but it was a symbol for sudden danger that could be inflicted in a second. The dogs romped through the high grass and around dead logs as if the snake didn't exist. It was as though they were laughing at my fears. "Ah human, you see, there's nothing here that can harm you." I had been poking around with my walking stick and felt my head pounding. "Human!", I could almost hear the dogs say, "There's nothing to fear!" They would look me in the eyes and then leap away into the tall grass, sniffing under the rocks and logs.

Walking is like most lost privileges; it's only revived through disgust of what has replaced it, the new privileges. When I used to walk down a busy street, a street empty of pedestrians but full of cars and bikes on a balmy day I remembered that picture I had in a folder. It showed the eastern line of the transcontinental railroad nearing Promontory Point where it had been intercepted by a wagon train. They took the picture self-consciously knowing that one form of mobility was being replaced by a superior form, at least, a more efficient and safer form or so they thought. The pioneers on that wagon train must of talked about the irony all the way to California.

I found that walking about two miles was enough to clear my head. And at the end of it I realized I had no excuses or bitterness. I returned to one thought, "it's a shame a society as advanced and affluent as this one can't tolerate a contemplation of itself or an honest reckoning of things." Walking taught me that somewhere between passivity and useless, destructive energy was the happy medium.

As the dogs and I went further up the trail I could hear the stream off to the left and got glances of it. It was so wide and majestic for a mountain stream. There had been stories of a flashflood many years before. A log jam had built for decades until it broke one year and the water destroyed some mills. The life on the stream thinned out after that. The water could hypnotize me with its combination of sight and sound. I wanted to throw off my clothes and go wade into the water and laugh like a madman. I didn't but I wanted to. There was something right about water. As it moved it communicated and told everything it touched, "do it well, life is here." The ocean had always been the body of water I loved the most. It swallowed me like a piece of wood and yet emptied me on the otherside of it whole and clean. The ocean was a force where the mountain stream was a decent magician, hypnotizing me for times until I saw and heard what it wanted me to. It was there, a discovery and yet not concerned it got discovered, not at all, being removed from just about all conscious animals who stumbled on her but never really owned her. And it knew it was only one in millions of these streams in mountains around the world no one knew about but which were beautiful worlds with their own speech so to say. It mattered where the rocks were and how big they were. And one fish was millions of fish that had shimmied down the stream from the time it formed.

I walked for as long as I could then headed down to the waterfall where I took several books and propped myself on a piece of granite. The water made the most steadfast, hard, Spartan looking thing, like the mountain, appear to roll or glide up and down against itself. There was nothing fixed about the mountain. All around me things were moving. I forgot myself. I forgot time. It dissolved away. Clock time at any rate. For one of the first times I could remember I stopped guessing what time it was. I learned that day comes, night comes, hunger comes, they all go back and come back again. There was no reason to keep tabs on it. In fact, my great anticipation was watching the emergence of the night sky that put me in some infinite dream state. I would go outside at 2 in the morning and stand under the pulsing stars and know where I came from.

One cold night I went outside. The full moon appeared over a peak of hills and as I watched the rise of the complete moon I sensed the rotation of the Earth and appreciated the millenia's worth of effort men and women put into understanding the universe. That's sometimes what a little walk will do.

Water proved to me that the healthiest things are free and we squander them under foot. The difficulty of free things to appear should never be taken for granted. You learn this lesson in the blessedness of the trees rather than the city. It was no mystery to me why the fine people of the farm had come up to make a go of it. They knew the benefits of the truly free and once you get some density in the population money comes into the picture. The free is auctioned off to the dense population. I suppose it has to be that way. It only makes a bit of sense though if you understand the origins of what costs so much was free and unfettered.

The stream could get wild during the spring snow melt and rush up on the rocks and banks like a great hand sweeping everything before it. I would stand on the path and look down and feel all the dirt of myself rushing down into the splendid water, out of me without a trace.

I would leave the path and walk with a kind of awkward nobility that now I knew my true self was unbreakable, could not be penetrted even by the power of fears. Water, friend. Water running freely in the silent mountains as though, "this is the way things have always worked."

I thought the water pure but talking to some of the people up there they mentioned how many microbes and bateria were in the clear creek and a few of them were deadly. They described one member who had been sick for a long time with a bateria carried in the hypnotic water until it flushed out. "It flushed out but he was half the guy he was before he got it." "Drinking the water?" "Drinking it or splashing it on his mouth, not sure how."

It took only a bit of water to drown a man or make him sick. I thought about this on more than one occassion and came to the conclusion that even the pure has to boil for a while to get the impurities out.

* * * * * * * *

One night it started to storm. And storms, my friend, are different in the mountains. Storms mean something. Storms take themselves seriously. So a guy gets me and we go around and cover the tools before the rains come. In the Quonset hut we found old mildewed tarps and carried as many as we could out to the various implements too large to stash in the barn. There was the plow and the small tractor; the grinding wheel and the wood-- all of which were covered as best we could. By this time rain began to fall steadily.

I understood the problem with rain and how it interfered with the work but I felt good it fell and let it soak my head before going into the main house. Many of the people were lounging near a fire in the fireplace. Rasputin sat in his chair smoking a pipe and talking to one of the women. When he saw me he took the pipe out of his mouth .

"All the things covered that needs it?"

"Yes, that's taken care of."

Rasputin nodded his head. "Good, good. Tonight we will have a good storm! Isn't that right Patricia?"

She nodded without saying anything and then went out of the room.

"Well, just don't stand there man! Come on in and join us. Sit yourself somewhere. One good thing about bad weather is that it brings everyone together."

I sat on the floor next to a man who appeared to be drunk or sleeping. He sat in a cross-legged position and turned his head toward the fire burning brightly and lively behind him. Rasputin had put his pipe back into his mouth and was smoking it very leisurely. For the next few minutes there was nothing but the crackling of the fire. And then Rasputin said abruptly, "Let's tell stories."

There didn't seem to be much enthusiasm for the idea but he persisted.

"Tell stories of the wildest experience we've ever had- in our other lives."

There were some pretty hairy tales told and I listened to them all. It was hard to tell whether the adventures could be measured by light years or by the centimeters that described the frontal lobe of their brains. Some claimed that they had walked on other planets and, even, stars without use of any equipment. Some claimed that they had fallen to the center of the earth and described vast realms of life unsuspected by those living on the surface. Rasputin sat quietly but would occasionally smile knowingly and make a wide gesture of agreement. He, in fact, told of his adventures with a band of strange people through the continent of Europe. They would ingest vast amounts of chemical substances and go listen to loud rock music in order to watch themselves leave their bodies and become spirits of some kind. "Was I scared?" He asked rhetorically. "I was excited by the prospect of creating a new being in myself!" The others applauded this and Rasputin struggled to get to his feet to acknowledge them.

After, wine was served and some of the people cuddled together. I had a feeling they talked to impress the stranger. I thought about an old Norse tale my dad told the family at dinner. There was the great god Thor who had goats to pull his chariot along. He would kill and eat the goats for meal but use his magic hammer to make them spring up alive in the morning. One day he came to a peasant's hut and the peasant welcomed the stranger not knowing he was a god. That night, seeing how there was little food in the hut, Thor told the family he would kill his goats on their behalf. Despite their protests he does just that and they all enjoy a feast. Thor takes all the remains of the goats and piles them in a corner of the hut and warns the family not to touch or otherwise disturb the remains. So everyone goes to sleep except for the young son and daughter. "I bet those goat bones have delicious marrow in them," the boy says. "Oh, it's been so long since I've tasted something so rich, so rare," the sister says. So they wait until everyone is asleep and go to the pile of goat remains, take a bone, break it and suck out the marrow. They go to bed happy children! In the morning Thor waves his magic hammer over the remains and his goats come back to life, good as new. The peasant now realizes that he has been honored with the presense of a god. But then Thor notices one of his goats has a limp. "Who broke the leg of this goat!" And when the two children confess he snatches up both of them and make them his servents leaving the peasant and wife sadder than when he came.

* * * * * * * *

They were, of course, people of strange experience and I reflected on what horrendous forces must have pulled from the center of their minds to produce the stories they told me. When, later, the storm broke in sudden, fracturing lightning storms I made nature a kind of entity that was always ready to say, "don't forget me, I am here always, do not take me for granted!"

* * * * * * * *

"No, no, no." Rasputin emphatically thumped his fist on the small round table. "This was not and never will be a "Utopia". I do not have a conception of that word. There is nothing heavenly about working and sustaining a group of people on the fact of their hands. This place isn't an experiment. It's simply a group of people who have decided to live by common sense."

I can remember Rasputin saying these words as though they were said yesterday. And the ironic thing is that he said them the morning of the first dispute. Everything had been so calm and without tension in the mountains I assumed it was the character of the people never to feel a conflict in their bones.

But that morning the sun was up like a bold face. I was starting to get dressed when I heard noises and shouts so ran outside while putting my shirt on. A little clot of people had gathered around two men who were in the center squaring off. I had seen the men before but had never spoken with them. They were the workers; the dutiful ones.

Apparently they were fighting over a tool that lay in the dust. It looked like an army surplus tool. The hair of both men was slicked over their faces by energy and heat. I wondered if any blows had been delivered yet.

"You're wasting time," one of them said. He picked up the tool and held it out, shaking it in defiance.

"No, I need it to dig in the hard rock. Besides, you can't take a guy's tool when he ain't lookin'."

"It's not yours," and the man's voice vibrated as he shook the tool.

"You knew I was going up to the falls to dig up the old stone. You know I've been trying to get rid of the stone for a long time. And here you wake up and the first thought is, 'I'm going to mess with John and get his tool and make him think about it. Man, you're wasting time!"

"And what are you going to do with the stone when you finish with it?"

And John started talking with the highest degree of sarcasm I had heard in a man for a long time. "Well, Phil, don't you know what we do with stones when we dig them up? Do we have to put you back to school? Do you have to go with the kiddies to the falls and have Lester teach you about stones and what we do when we dig them up?"

By this time Rasputin had made his way out to the scene. He had half a smile on his face. When the two men saw him they stopped but Rasputin kept staring at them as if saying, keep going, this is fun this is what we need here. And so the two men started again, trading insults that had a peculiar flavor to them. I figured they were locals and using objects meaningful to the locals but not to me. Some of the insults made me start to laugh but I suppressed laughter and watched as soon the match became fully verbal, almost transcendent in the bright morning sun as they stripped each other down to the core of their beliefs.

* * * * * * * *

Up the road to one of the mines I found an abandoned shack. It was pretty near a wreck and I decided I would peek in it to see what shape it was in. Inside I spotted a sink and a fireplace, with a mattress shoved against one wall. Spider webs covered everything. A few old cups sat on a table in the center of the room. I tested the floorboards and it seemed safe enough to walk on. I saw a lot of evidence of rodents and decided to leave well enough alone when I spotted a pile of yellowing pieces of paper under one of the cups. I quickly snatched them and then left as fast as I could telling myself never to go back into the place. I walked for awhile and then found a nine piece of granite to sit on and began to read the papers. The first thing I did was search for a date but I couldn't find one. Then I sped read through it, turning it over and trying to get the jist of it right off. I wondered if one of the members had written it or whether it was written long ago. There had been rumors I heard from some of the people about this place being a refuge for mobsters in the 30's. By the time I heard that rumor I realized that people up here liked to tell stories and not to take them seriously. Mona had told me this. "These guys were afraid of nature and later all this toilet paper was fuond in the trees and brush. Apparently the mob guys were afraid they couldn't find their way back out of the woods after they had shit out there and hung toilet paper all around to mark their path back." She laughed. "Don't tell me that's made up!"

A good story was worth any number of facts so I laughed with her and the image of tough guys getting lost in the wood going to the bathroom while watching out for bears or mountain lions was a pleasant one.

I believed it even more when she told me the mobsters operated out of Los Angeles.

I sat on rock and began to read the material:

all movement.....

a l l m o v e m e n t.....
allmovement
into watering shades of blue liquid stone of gray....dots....in pools spreading until they are a sky

in drifts a blue little blue bird....drift in here pretty thing, in and out (all in)

sun shade in leaf past web crossing the fall of space

And wild WILD flowers shaking themselves while water cascades in a mist:

creeeekkkkk creeeeeeeekkkk tooo luuuuuuu brrrrrrrrret
ooooommmmmmpa oooooooooooomkmmpa sizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
sticsticsticsticsitcsitcsitcsitcsitsticsticsticsticstic
all water in the light of darkness

b l i n d i n g light
no see/DARKNESS:

water stone sky bird tree leaf ground web flower SPACE
waterstoneskybirdtreeleafgroundwebflowerspace
all movement.....

a l l m o v e m e n t.....
allmovement

...don't even know if it was a dream. It was something real that I roll round and round in my brain.

Inasmuch as I remember rising between two rocks in the mountains. And walking proudly nude up the thrashing stream with the dogs and owls and snakes until the summer heat was a blur of heavy dreams. And men and women were in my head in the last days of the great planet Earth. And I laughed with them while boiling eggs on an old wood stove above where the gold was found. Black Spring. Finnegan's Wake. The Bible. Tao Te Ching. Kora in Hell. The Ticket that Exploded. The Rhinoceros. A Season in Hell. I Ching. The Secret of the Golden Flower.

Oh, I was chased out. It rose up and expelled me like a fly from a big steak. The animals howled at me and the trees were like mad men who have taken a political point of view. Scary and absurd all at the same time. The fish were swimming upstream and snakes had formed a row through which I had to walk to make my way out. I was sorely displeased what with the warm rocks I had slept on and the hanging fruit on the trees and pleasant dreams that made life round and perfect.

The sky tumbled down its darkness and lit the life of screaming eyes, invisible hoodoo and screeching clatter.

My feet were bitten by the ground as I groped along, not knowing where I was going wishing I had never left the mountain water, never found the road, thinking backward and remembering REMEMBERING the cool rocks I had rested on and the fascination of the sounds....

(Scrawled in the margin of the paper was this green-inked note: TRUE! I WITNESS!)

There had been so many of them- these creatures with their deadly knives. How was I to know if they'd put me in the middle of the meadow and chase me down?

But they were not the force that had driven me from the quiet green. They were merely the first creatures like myself I encountered when out in the open.

Grunts, squeals and shouts rose from the knoll that faced me so I crouched and waited a moment, my eyes tracing the falling sky around. I pounced up the small slope until my head peeked over the rim.

A man wrenched a knife out, then turned the pig over and stuck it once more in the neck. Blood spurted up against the mans leg but, ignoring it, he picked the dead animal up and carried it off, past the others and to the side where he dropped the animal then dropped himself alongside, the blood still bursting out. I was transfixed through the whole thing till every pig had been killed and carried off by the vanquisher. Almost all the men went off into the forest with a pig on their back or under their arm. The few who didn't stuck together in a knot behind the rest, swinging their knives against the tall grass.

What strange creatures I thought to myself. And what strange feelings as I watched them. Several times I had turned my head and yet I watched, was mesmerized when my eyes caught sight of the blood engorging and limp bodies.

They knew me then but didn't harm me. They brought me in and took care of me. Soon I was always with them and felt good.

And then a group was passing around the dream smoke. Soon, I remember thinking, everything will be confusion.

moveme n t.

shadows on wall

melting outline of

pa   s   s   i   n   g 
body the voices become
 s m  o   k   e 

and suddenly their eyes come at me and overwhelm the silence and I shrivel and tremble under the gaze still silent their bodies and faces and voices....

Then an old man was saying, "if I describe a house and a man sitting in it, the description brings with it a set of perceptions that can destroy the essence..."

I said something or did something.

"Oh that boy...he's really come to play... that's the idea. He suddenly blooms forth from the earth; has life experiences pure life unjudged until he learns the play is over, that he is separate from all he sees; that the only contact he can have is through a learned form and when he reaches individualization he destroys the whole town.

Every word is a free symbol....

Every space between the word a significant mystery.

Paragraphs run with the pace of the body.

First things first...anxious for me to meet people...live off property, "into themselves," as one put it. Doom Man and Infinite Guy call them...tell me that both will entertain me if not make me think. "They are crazy but crazy the way we like the crazy to be." "And how is that?" "Harmless but so out of their heads we can almost rest on the same asteroid as they do."

I kept putting it off because I wasn't sure I wanted to know people crazier than the people I was already hitched up with. After all, they provide for me and keep me from the authorities so I am loyal to them if not comfortable around them.

But the day comes as they always do. It comes and with it a peaceful rain, a drizzle really. The trees look sad and old in the rain. It was just good to get out, get away. I didn't appreciate how that small gesture of getting away can play with a guy's mental health. Get away with as little contact with humanity as possible. But in this vast forest there doesn't seem any place free of human beings. They range all over...even if you're taking a piss behind a tree up beyond the stream you come from around the tree and sure enough there's a human being. After awhile I am glad when there was only one other human being. It is easy to go silent on them and make them go away. With a crowd it is quite difficult.

So we climbed into the truck and off we went, down the old road, onto another road, then cutting through this small weird town and driving up this mountain. I call it a moutain but it was anything but. I guess they called them mountains here but they did rise above the valley and half-way up it did have a mountain feel to it.

We wound through a scar in the hillside to the summit, driving the summit whining, pulling going through misted blue pulling back shades blowing through them swirling caught and lifted the body shut down tight and I wonder Jack wonders where we are going what's through this smoky cloud. The light is coming from the mist. Its movement is creating the soft light bounding in front and the crunch crunch underneath.

Yellow utensils, blackened irons and toasters on their sides
like burnt squirrels, paper stacks of hard-bound
dust filling one wall  shoes on wood floor black scarred stove
cooling in corner  stools and chairs   knife on table corkscrew
out  mattress laying perpendicular to the moldy stacks
the air of cooked farts and mold  half empty bottle sink continually
running  dust filters through yellow pane and out out beyond
black and yellow centipedes....


Black and yellow centipedes burnt out empty shells  shells
rolling in dust blank stars  just blank  running to swiftly
the innards intestines and heart bleeding.

* * * * * * * *

Jack introduces us, the old man Janus, and his hand is cold or maybe it's mine and his is nothing no touch "You two get acquainted, while I fetch the wood. Friend Jack leaves and we two look at each other and the old one drinks straight from the half-full bottle and offers me some and I take it and drink the drink and the fluid breath and I begin warming inside and ask him why he lives up here.

"They all want to know that and I tell them. Then they never come back."

Then there is a mountain silence that stirs within me moves me to say nothing to simply look at the old man Janus.

"You see, it's all coming to the end," he said. "It's curtains and exit time for humans, for all life except the mountains and water and solid things, yeah, anytime now. There ain't no hope. ..no hope is one of the solid things that will remain. First were the dinosaurs and they tripped around for millions of years king of all around them. I can see these beasts around these parts millions of years ago moving as they pleased full of king pride. Yep, they had it their way for a long time then one day ol' nature comes in and cut their feet off so to speak... and they leave without a trace 'cept the shark. So nature has to create another plaything like humans gives them a stab at it goes one step further and gives the new beasts imaginations and dreams see what they can do with it.

"And humans go so far as to create their own nature as if a tree could make itself a tree."

Jack says, "They don't have to be saved. Each person's just a little bug some squashing others getting squashed that's just the nature of things something you accept but the fact that we're all bugs makes us all even and too small to be eliminated. Yeah the buildings will fall and the machines will change and everything will change for better or worse but we'll remain bugs and when we accept our bugness we become happy and what could a bug want more than happiness? Just a small collection of other bugs a bug wife and bug children doing bug things everyday to keep alive it's always been that way and always will and when everyone accepts it as that we'll all be happy and bugging all the other bugs and won't have to think we're superior or something thinking we have it over the next bug because we think we think or we think and believe and thought and belief is more than bug thought and belief. We're damn bugs and nothin' in the universe is afraid of a bug."

"HaHa I love that: bughumans. Bugs, that's it Jack; bugs we're bugs and we're going to destroy each other thinking we're not if we only knew. But you're young you have to hold on to a future of some sort even a bug future... I think maybe you'll be up here one day and if you are could you amile every time you pass my grave. Ha-ha-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha."

Then both hahahahahahhahahahahahaheehahahehaehaehahha

Another bottle passed around. Drinking freely warming the insides the words and laughter creating wafting song buried into the wood. Bug talk. Destruction. The end. Empty shelled centipedes blowing in the wind. The dinosaur the shark bugs MEN so strange what is this? Who and what are they destroying? What's the fascination they talk as if some darkness. ..THE DARKNESS, yes, they too must have had the nightmare maybe they do come from the rocks I am one of them. I am.

"I've seen your nightmare, yes yes. I know where it comes from, l know... Jack I know now the background you were there with me."

"What's your friend here jabbin' 'bout Jack?"

"I don't know. He's as crazy as you. No one knows where he's from. 'Nesia you know. A good loon though strange and good like yourself."

"Now fella, what's this talk about the nightmare and all this, huh?"

"The trees chasing and the exploding water and the blue bolts and blackness the CHASE the appearance between the rocks the sudden THERE, you know..."

"Wow, you better have a little more of this or maybe not... what the hell you talkin' 'bout?

Then the old guy, "I'm all for the survival of the unfit-the misfits, culture puts people to sleep and the waking from the sleep MAKES you a misfit. Unfit, out of synch out of step. A dangerous course. What is culture? A man or woman wakes up suddenly and has idea IDEA and following the excitement of that discovery falls into depression because idea alone is as potent, is as valuable as a little dust raised, then, scattered on a vast arid plain. All problems keep expanding in depth and then there ia a crisis; a plague or a war, and the content swirls and dances seemingly out of control if form is gone. But form has just retreated a bit, taken a breather, and it comes back snaps back bringing everything under its demoniac control."

"And from the beginning people have feared. Animals don't fear. What people have observed as fear in animals is their own fear. Man's observing tool, his ego, projects his fear onto the animal world. When two cats square off they are protecting an area or offspring or simply playing and all these things (at least to the cat) are positive values. The cat values his offspring and territory, he doesn't fear their loss. That's a big difference between man violence and animal violence. Animal violence is a positive protection; man violence is a fear of loss. What does he fear to lose? His life? In war there are innumerable instances of life sacrificing events; men throwing themselves on grenades and mines. Men go to war prepared to die and when he has resolved this he becomes a good fighter. No, I think that what men fear most when he wars is loss of his precious ideas. He identifies his Ideas with time itself. To lose these ideas, to have them decimated by struggle; either the struggle of war or struggle in culture is to lose himself to become a nothing, a zit. Culture demands this from the people. A cat doesn't fight for its identity; a cat knows just KNOWS but men don't know they don't know so they develop culture to tell him.

* * * * * * * *

The Doom Man was not entertaining because he desired utter destruction... gleeful... something attractive about it. I can’t say what. The earth blows up and all the problems are solved. Or the earth blows up and we understand the cosmos as it is. "No more BS," shouts humanity has it is hurled from the horizons of earth. Or we are part of a vast board game played by intelligent life that is completely out of our range of senses. I've heard that one many times.

(Musing)I could tolerate this. Life destroyed but the earth intact. Then life going through its old process, mere millions of years, to produce a new form of humanity with the memory of its destruction down in the genes somewhere. You didn't need loco weed to speculate along these lines. It made me jittery sometimes and then I simply came back to the excellent soothe of commonplace things.

The Infinite Guy was a nervous, nutty looking character. His appearance seemed to say, "I might have one idea in me that transform humanity or I might die penniless in the street." And so I glimpsed at a possible motive for him to move into this rural arcadia and speculate about surviving end times. "These boys up here are either dreaming about end times or shooting guns at life more intelligent than they are."

He lived in an uncluttered barn converted into a living space by someone, I never did find out...funny in a serious sort of way, he brought us a few homemade cookies on a plate and some beer.

If took him awhile to get going on his ideas. We did a little chit-chatting, rumor mongering, establishment bashing and then got into his specialty.

"It may seem comical to you, me being in this dump, in this mole hill of a town, but I'll tell you something and I tell you because I can see that you're still naive and will listen. I trust your eyes...go ahead and laugh but I'm ah, looking...no. I'm trying to create..now don't laugh... immortality! If I felt it wasn't possible I would end everything right now."

"What is immortality?"

What? Damn you're naive. LIFE AFTER DEATH!"

"Birth after cessation? Something like that? I dont understand. Please explain."

"Yes, yeah, birth after cessation...no, no more like life, ah, extending itself further into the universe, yeah, something like that... there is a state of delusion created when people are afraid of unknowns and have to create all manners of fantasy to meet the unknown "X". Same place that created the fear created the salvation. It's a vicious cycle that's only been devastated for a short time. But now nobody believes in anything much less life after death..oh, some revert back to the old salve... the unimaginative ones and it works for them.. .prevents them from shoving a gun in their mouth..do you want to hear more?"

"Of course. You are interesting."

"Crazy. ..but the only way to stay alive in this cow town is to be crazy... anyway, ..how can I explain all this? The universe is a subtle movement, that's a good place to start. It has a movement and rhythm that can't be measured, understood (as we allow understanding) ever. In fact, movement and rhythm are a description a billion light years from what IT is. Immortality gives understanding...that is what immortality but I'm getting ahead myself. All of these alleged scientific laws ruling the universe are voodoo. Salve...creations ...that work, by god, they work we can send up freaking rockets and men through gravitational pulls and vacuums...but it's still voodoo, scientists are shaman's. We've made them shamans given them that power for salve on the misery of the unknown 'X'. You see, scientists make creation whatever that creation may be, uh gravity for instance and then people give their collective assent and then gravity comes into being... or maybe I should say gravity comes into focus as gravity. When people used to fall down they ascribed the power that to a god or God...now, they blame gravity. I mean, after all, how do we know that when you throw a ball up in the air and it falls back to the earth, how do we know that the ball doesn't simply WANT to come back to the earth?

What it was back when men and women had looked up at the stars and had truly felt WE ARE? Maybe he did. But somewhere along the way he no longer felt this. He felt separate, alone and frightened. OF EVERYTHING. He banded together but he wasn't ready for it. The mistrust the fear he felt that made him band together was still with him now directed towards his fellows. Destroy everything! Create from anew. There's no need fo destroy the physical because the physical is all idea. Destroy the idea; lose the ego but watch out as is seen today people are trying to destroy their ego's and are being picked out of the air like clay pigeons; they are captured 'by one big IDEA.

Well anyway, I have no real beef with science except when people make a religion out of it...it's just another superstition and like all superstition works as long as there's belief. Science will putrify more and more and reveal its worst nature, a generation or two will rise up and throw it off keeping the convient ideas and saying, "that era had too much self-righteousness, too much hubris and so we act on behalf of, if not God then nature and history." It's fait a'compli strange fellow. They will say in the future "the more they tried to change things the more they stayed the same but amplified the worst while the best started fading out like an old star.

I had to say this because science tends to disbelieve that there is such a thing as immortality. Immortality wouldn't conform to many laws so poof...no immortality. And if you destroy the science that is in you a person is left with a strange power...the power of infinite possibility. Anything is possible including defiance of scientific law. ..including immortality. Men have chosen a very narrow road all through history. It's his beliefs. Belief keeps us away from the infinite possibility. Volumes could be written on this. Anywhere along the way had man cast off his belief totally, well I think we wouldn't need to build rockets to go to the moon; we could fly there ourselves.

I think this is the meaning of the universe ...infinite possibility and I think that when you reach immortality you've reached this place and become part of the universe ...no you become something of the universe itself. What are the two main impulses in people? I call them the UP and BACK impulses. The attempt at connection with what Is UP THERE, you know and BACK THERE at the beginning. These impulses can't be explained away as escape or fantasy, they're as real as this chair. ..Solid within us like the hardness of the chair but moving all the time like atoms. Two things emerge as truth when we think about the UP and BACK impulses. We know that there's life on other planets or I should say consciousness on other planets and that back there we were bequeathed TRUTHS that have since been perverted or lost. These are not things we think about or formulate consciously but are intuitions, part of our heritage that makes up a great deal of our hopes, desires, philosophy, religions science, etc. the whole shit bag. Our relation to these two impulses determines the quality of life here and now. So the further back we get the closer to the truth we get realizing all the time that we can't view with a clean eye.

People used to think that life was pervaded by spirits... everything was spirit and I believe this is very close to the truth and possibly this is the truth that man has lost. Everything as spirit and consciousness; clods of dirt, spoons, bottles, lightning everything possesses consciousness, ..pure consciousness. The work of a lifetime, ..that's what I'm doing...that's my life. If consciousness is energy or vice versa it must be released at death, ..and as energy connects expands I mean if the universe infinite possibility. It's also infinite discovery I believe this star or conscious' souls or at one time were and evolved to that energy and will keep evolving 'till they explode scatter and term new life tirelessly forever...I think this is immortality.

I leave with strange unwanted buzz in head. Sensible no-sense. Will think on flying through universe tonight as I look up at the stars, at the gaze of 'em.

Then the pages stopped. I tucked them in my pocket and carried them with me but in secret, as a secret until I could learn more.

After reading through the pages I got very curious about the origins of it. Without showing the people anything I began to question them one by one on whether they knew of anyone living in the cabin before they arrived. Of course they had heard stories. They had made up stories as well.

"Years ago an old gold miner was driven mad by his failure to find gold and by his isolation. He built that crude cabin and spent his last days in it."

"There was a guy who in the 1880's robbed stagecoaches from Weaverville and came up here to hide. He buried some gold on the otherside of the mountain, no question about it. He's your guy." Said without the person knowing that the note contained references to cars and things a person in 1880 would have no knowledge of.

"An owner in the war years had a crazy son that he put up in this cabin to keep him out of trouble."

"It's one of our own. Probably Blu who is always off by himself anyway."

Who lived in the cabin was a brief item that circulated hot and heavy around the place and then drifted off into nothing. I didn't want to show anyone the writings for a variety of reasons. I was particulaly concerned about Barb who believed in extrterrestials, UFO's and the like. She said flying saucers had been seen descending into Mt. Lassen, a mountain we could view from the trail when it opened up over the valley. It was an old volcano, still active, and become a national park.She would have taken the paper and made it clear they were the writings of an alien and get people all stirred up. Looking around the place it was clear to me there was enough to stir things up without letting the unprovables get in.

* * * * * * * *

The killing had become legendary. It happened way before I got there. A young man, said to be a rival to Rasputin, had been shot from a distance clean through his head and had died instantly although all the spiritual medicine the people were capable of tried to keep him alive. Rasputin seemed shocked enough and sad enough to keep any suspicion away from him about the shooting. "Could have been a hunter who didn't like a group of people living in his hunting ground."

A huge discussion took place about whether to bring in the cops. "No, we can't bring in the cops because we aren't supposed to be here. They will ask questions that we have no answers for." Rasputin won out in his argument and the poor dead man was buried out between the rocks where the creek makes a wide bend. It was quite a ceremony they told me. "There weren't many tears but some excellent goobly gook about living forever and "in a better place," and the happiness and laughter good Jake had left."

The burial was marked by stones piled up to resemble a crude smile believe it not.

Over the years people began to speculate about it and the story changed each time. There was one shot, no, now two. He fell instantly to the ground, no he limped wounded toward the garden and fell among the sheaves of corn. He had some last words. One time it was, "they know where we are." Another time was, "it is time for paradise." Later there was a terse last word. "Shit." That usually brought on laughter and a few nodding heads. But there was no question that man still cast a shadow over the operation. For one thing he had a lot of qualities that Rasputin did not. He came from the people and was of the people unlike Rasputin who seemed to come from a portion of his own mind and liked to boss and rule.

"When he put the bandana around his head he was all business and worked harder than anyone else but made you feel as though you had done more work. That's magic my friend."

"There was a lot of weeping sorrow at that man's death."

He was a ghost who hovered in and through everything as the people talked about him constantly, always as a way to get from the shadow of Rasputin. The ghost became a kind of ideal figure they made up out and beyond the people of the commune, including old Rasputin who knew how they venerated the dead man and didn't seem threatened by it. Before long it was clear that the ghost of this Jake had created everything and made the commune into a thriving village that the people spoke about in tones of regret and nostalgia. "It was different back when Jake was the guy. Every day was a joyful day and we were much more productive."

"We didn't have to keep reminding ourselves of what we were about. It was just a natural thing.

Let me tell you a story about how the dead man ruled the living.

This Jake had been a veteran and was in combat at the beginning years of the Vietnam thing. Apparently he didn't talk much about his experience there. "He told me he was an intelligence officer." "He was a sniper in the South Vietnamese army hired to pick off important communist officials in the boonies." That's what people told me he had said to them. But nothing was ever confirmed.

"He came down one time dressed in his camouflage and it scared the crap out of people. He was carrying a rifle of some sort with a grim expression on his face. Some of the women ran around thinking he was going to hurt people. But he was just distracted and laid his gun against the fence and let people look at his camouflage. That was as close to getting him to tell about his adventures as we got."

"I saw him one time perched behind a tree pointing his rifle at something and then making a sound like he'd shot it off. Then he moved quickly to another tree, hunched and made another noise. I didn't approach him but watched with both fear and fascination from a distance."

He also had a lot of good ideas they told me. They said every week he came up with a new one; ways to improve things and make things run better. He thought up the idea of generating electrical power from the waterwheel and to make a rope bridge across the stream so in winter when it was running wild we could get to the otherside. Most of the people would listen and then forget what he had said. I'm not sure they really wanted to do anything more than what they were doing. I'm not sure but they didn't seem all that ambitious. Every week he'd come down to the table and give up an idea. He would articulate them peacefully, without a lot of energy behind them but with some sort of authority as though they would know to enact the idea and follow through with it. Rasputin would look thoughtfully and write something down in his notepad. "Interesting idea there Jake," he'd say. He sounded sincere but no one believed Rasputin would ever carry out any of them and without Rasputin it was hard to get the resources to do anything.

But then the poor man was killed and within a short time many of his ideas were put to use.

They had a new age sort of approach to death and after the shock wore off they would dance and drink for several nights. The shock was of the sudden violence that came into their bucolic lives. Some admitted they couldn't quite trust people after that event. "A lot of blood was spilled that day," ----- said. "When I saw his eyes fixed that way I freaked out and couldn't get it out of my mind for days."

Mona took me up to the gravesite, up past the mill, near the waterfall. Out in a little clearing were the rocks neatly piled on the ground with smaller rocks and pebbles making a crude smiley face. It was crude but you could definitely see the shape of it and the first thing you thought of was that damn smiley face. Mona began to talk to the stones, keeper this and keeper that and a few snippets of what she remembered of the poor man.

"Were you two lovers?"

"That could have happened. The man was powerful and sexy, he exuded allure for me at least. But he didn't seem interested in the women even though he could have had the pick of the litter. He was completely committed to making things work. We all knew that. We all shared that loss. It was nothing really personal. He was like this fine idea standing up in the heat of nowhere and making the impossible become real. That's what people fell in love with."

"His spirit is laughing now, no question. He sees us as fools for the things we have said and thought about him. But he stays a bit then zooms to another part of the universe. He's free."

"You believe the spirit is liberated at death and flies freely around the universe?"

"There's probably more to it than that. How would I know? It would make sense wouldn't it. It would explain why the universe appears to be a huge obstacle to life. Death is a way to fight through that hard illusion. It's a gift of some sort."

Mona was talking to herself. She had little desire to convince me of her beliefs.

"Oh, I wish that man were still around. He marks a spot we'll never go back to."

I went into Daniel's room one time and on the wall was a photograph of he and this Jake fellow, arms around shoulders, smiling like there was nothing wrong with the world. Jake had the look of a common man but with an aura of stark privilege. Larry forced the conversation to Jake, the subject. "He's around here, believe me. Maybe his ghost hasn't been released yet, I don't know. Maybe we all carry of piece of the man and don't know how to let the sorrow go. I don't know. But that was one powerful man let me tell you. He shouldn't have been wasting time with us, he should have been in politics or inventing something."

"Did he have family? Did anyone know of his background?"

"He probably had family somewhere but back in the midwest or east coast. If he did I don't think he cared much to communicate with them. I know he was in the war. He never said he was for or against the thing only to stay out of it. I was always bugged by that. I thought he should have been more anti-war than he was. He said to stay out of it, not because it was an immoral war or an illegal war but that it "would mess your mind up." Ah, I still see him in those fatigues and aviator glasses. What a different specimen that guy was, cut from something I know nothing about."

"What was the rivalry with Rasputin?"

"Oh you know, two strong males fighting over women and/or power. Rasputin was much more concerned about it, I don't think Jake cared too much about it, would laugh about it and let Rasputin make decisions. But you could see the splits in loyalty in people. Each had something that spooked people in different ways." sure, they make things up to please themselves. It's never about the guy himself. And I was shocked and sorry about his killing. I ran up to where he was laying and saw some godawful stuff with blood and brain tissue, bone fragments, eyes fixed, body sort of shaking. People were talking to him as if he were still alive or talking already to his ghost. "Hey Jake, stay with us. Come' on Jake there's still lots to do..." Things like that. And I could see the man was gone and his spirit half way to Alpha Centauri I imagined. Why not? Why would the spirit of a dead man stay around here?

"And if you ask me I don't think the shooter was a total stranger. Now, there are hermit nuts that live around here in shacks and people stay clear of them. It could have been one of them. Or, someone could have hired one of them to bump him off. In my mind it can go many different ways but the fact is the man is dead and we bury the dead to move on."

"His lingering memory points to the general consternation there was about he and Rasputin. And now one group wants to rub out his memory and the other wants to put it on a miner's cart and carry it into the deep future. So, go figure. It's part of life. You choose what you want to believe and don't look back. If you have to get into a group to protect you then get into a group. That's what they are there for."

One guy told me that certain women got suddenly sad after the killing and never came back with their careless smile and laugh. I couldn't quite figure out with all the different information coming from people who knew him and were witnesses to his killing. Perhaps they had all been traumatized in ways they wouldn't fathom until they were off the land and back in the city. Trauma would be one thing to account for some of the blank stares I saw on people. I thought it was fatigue and it could have been. At any rate, something died with poor old Jake.

* * * * * * * *

We finally left the place and went outside. It was nearly dark and we walked down Ashby Avenue until we came to a hamburger stand.

"All this talking has gotten me tired, let's stop for a while."

The little stand was painted white and covered with a cloth roof and heated with glowing heaters. It was as comfortable as the plastic benches. He kept looking around expecting to see someone he knew. There were a group of people talking, salesmen, jabbering about some new age practice that they were taking. And a greybeard guy talking to a young woman about poetry and how to perform it in front of people. My friend slumped against the brick wall of the stand and stared off while I munched away. I didn't disturb him in his thoughts.

"I will say this writer. (And you are so kind to stick around and listen to an old friend. It is really good to see you.)

It was not all sweetness and light. There were people there who lived in a kind of penitence. I can remember one conversation, in particular, that I had months after I had been in the mountains. He was a small dude with this wild black beard and black hair. He would work hard in the field, breathing hard and jabbing his spade into the earth as if he were preparing a grave for his worst enemy. I noticed that he would only speak when spoken to and would avoid eye contact with me. We had an opportunity one day to talk. It happened this way: We were sent to buy some supplies in a town about 15 miles away. He drove. "So what did you do before you came up here?" He asked. I told him. There was a long silence. The road was an old horse path paved over as part of the projects of the New Deal. The truck made it down stealthy like. I had wanted to get splendid scenes of the mountain and stream but the man wanted to talk. "Think you'll stay a year?" I told him that it was possible. A year seemed a long time during those days. A year? May as well have been ten thousand years. I finally asked him what he'd done for a living.

"I did many things I was ashamed of doing. Time has given me distance but I don't like talking about what I did."

This struck me as par for the course for the people of the mountain and didn't follow up. And, naturally, when I felt tension I always spoke. "One single thing? Was it one thing you did?"

"Yeah, one specific, single thing that has changed everything. It made me understand the evil in my own spirit. Before I was glib about evil, 'ah the world is evil but not I.' That was my thinking. I revealed the darkness in myself. And I was smiling the whole time! Can you imagine? I did something totally opposite my common sense. It perverted my integrity and virtue but I did smile the whole time as if it were another daily task."

"But you won't tell me what it is?"

"No, never, no one knows but the God I give me conscience to. He has judged me and lifted my guilt so I don't feel any need to confess. I tell you it was a terrible thing to do."

"Well, could you tell me why you did it?"

"I can only say this. If a man isn't rooted in the conscience, if he isn't rooted there he is rooted to something rotten. His body becomes an instrument the world manipulates at its will. The pressure to do this is immense. Haven't you felt it? Every word and gesture confirms it."

"What made you see this?"

"I had a fit of profound shame. Weeping. Looking at the innocent faces of children. The blight of the city I was living in. I hated and loved it but ended up hating more than loving. Another bad rock was added to the pile."

He had a hint of violence in him but it passed.

"Never follow your first dream, that's all I can say. If you follow your first dream you'll be destroyed by the world, taken in by its shabby temptations. Break that first dream down through an act of some kind. And then recover and learn. This is what the mountain provides, a place to recover and learn."

"Do you think you'll return to the city?"

"Only if I have the resources."

He took a hand off the steering wheel and pulled out a tattered paperback book and threw it on my lap. It was on the politics of technology.

"This book is teaching me quite a bit. I'm re-learning many things. I was oblivious for a long time. I didn't read, not even the newspaper since it all made sense in a crazy way. Every event reported in the paper I could understand, even war, murder, political scandal, every bit of violence and evil I saw there."

The man stopped talking. Someone had told me he had Indian blood. I had met women with Indian blood but few men. He seemed on the verge of tears. His face suddenly became very expressive.

"...but I felt it was all my fault somehow. But I couldn't control it. Couldn't control any of it."

About that time the truck went up a little rise and when it leveled out I saw the little town with its gleaming tin roofs and old cars and old signs come into view.

I hadn't been to the rural parts for many years. And when I first walked the street they stared at me as though I was some lost relative who had gained a bad reputation. We stopped at a small restaurant to get something to eat and I heard a mother whisper into her daughter's ear, "he's a sensitive, that guy is...slick." It was bright daylight and we went to get supplies. Most of the proprietors knew Bix but he never introduced me. I was put aside and silently picked up the sacks and tools and put them in the truck. I spotted one man, a rancher type with a big hat walking down the street with cow shit all over his shoes. One solitary guy walking down the street like that makes an impression.

The popular media had it wrong again. Small towns were not full of kind, naive people but filled with nasty, paranoid types who waited, nearly frozen in hostile thoughts, for the stranger to leave.

It was as though the stuffing had been kicked out of these towns and everyone left but the resentful old. The young could not make a living but by cultivating dope and selling it, the young women got pregnant early and were taken down to the welfare department by their mothers to begin collecting what would be a long line of checks. The old knew it was all bleak, lived in memories and waited for everything to leave the good Earth. Not that I had any pity for them. I learned later that most of the industries that had supported the town such as lumber had moved out. It wasn't the people's fault that the world moved away as it did. But it left a lot of bad feelings hovering over everything.

"Everything moves away from the center," someone explained to me. "And then many battles are fought for new centers. And when those are settled everything moves away from them." Ah, that explained it I thought to myself. The fact is I spent some time gathering information about these towns in the mountain valleys and found them to be what everything used to be. That's what people wanted for the most part, to build a place out of the woods so the neighbor was only a feint ax sound away. I thought, 'what was the modern rebellion about anyway if not the loss of old ways and the steamroller effect of the modern world?' So it was natural that people who felt the sting the most would move from the center, out to the old, dormant centers in the rural mountains and valleys.

I had assumed that the old towners were resentful of the young coming in but many were not. They welcomed the young, even the new sources of income such as marijuana growing. "Send it all down to the cities so they destroy themselves." I didn't hear anyone actually say that but I could read it in them from time to time.

Our interactions with the towners depended on the circumstance. A lot depended on what you were taking in a manner and speaking and what you were giving.

It didn't pass me by that maybe these towners were the normal people and we, young whippersnappers par excellance, were a new and bizarre sprout from an old human seed destined to slink back to the old people, their guns and paranoia, their stale art but wonderfully free, wounded minds. And make no mistake, once the towners saw me with the group they had me pegged and I could do nothing to shake it. I did get to know this old guy, a drunk, who knew a lot about the stock market. We used to sit in his trailer and talk numbers for quite a while. One time when he was roaring drunk, he made me get into his old truck and off we went through the rural roads driving like a maniac until we came to a hillside. He kept pointing up and I saw a fire watch built up on the hill. "Go climb those steps over there and I'll be with you shortly." I did it and when I reached the top a guy unlatched a door and I climbed into his little nest. "You with Bart?" "Yeah, he wanted to bring me up here." "Is he drunk?" "Yeah." "Ok." So in about five minutes he tells me that the guy is a multimillionaire and used his trailer to get away from his wife who didn't want him to drink. "I think his family caused his drinking but I don't know. He's a good guy when you get to know him. Smart in the brain that hasn't been damaged so far by the drink. Reads good books. I've seen them."

So the multimillionaire joined us at the top, laughed, shook hands and sat on a small bed the nest contained. The tower was enclosed by windows all around so he could see the whole valley for hundreds of miles. He had a rack of paperback books, field glasses, a hot plate and various boxes. On the center table was a green topographical map with a magnifying glass and compass.

"Did I ever tell you how Jesus was impotent," Bart suddenly blurted out.

"I've heard it more than once," the firewatch replied.

"It was the impotence that put him on the road to preach. He had no honey to marry, don't you see?" And the man leaned back and roared a drunken laugh and upset the stillness of the wonderful nest and the splendid views 360 degrees in every direction. We felt some awkwardness and then the firewatch showed me his daily ritual.

"A fire up here is it's own self-created beast. It consumes the very air and turns it into cinder. It's an awesome thing to see. You have to respect it and give it its due even as you fight it to death. I see them in their seedling state and call it in. I've seen some I've called in catch a new wind and get into the news."

By the time we left the firewatch the multimillionaire had become somber and pensive. "I wish I'd have a job like that. Every time I tried to get a job my mother would step in and pay me off. She didn't want me to be a working guy."

I was an educated working guy and couldn't help but feel that the poor old drunk realized too late that he was never in control of his life. Every man wishes to be rich but the men who get rich turn out to be wretched. I could see that especially coming from the farm where money was held in contempt, blamed for all the world's problems and so on. Yet, I wonder how many of them would have taken a maternal bribe to go get some normalcy. When I left the millionaire, he was cracking an egg into a glass, then another, and a third and then swallowing the whole concoction. I winced and then left. I never saw the man again.

When I think long and hard on it I wanted to shake the rural folk up, get them out of their torpor. They had a weird habit of looking as if they knew everything to know. It was in the stubborn crags in their faces. And to try and penetrate that worn face would be met by laughter or a tight sort of scorn. And after that they'd have nothing to do with you. It pained me because so much of my own came from the rural country and their adaption to the modern world was like people absorbed by conquest that they finally resolved with. "We are alive and have our pleasures, why worry?" And there was a lot of mutual aid that used to be commended in my anarchist books. The crux of it is you can't change people. They are little monuments sanded down by time before a brief wind swooshes them off to lord knows where. My people. They fought in the Civil War and came out for gold. I am from them but never felt of them if you know what I mean.

Our little seance on the past was interrupted by a disturbance. A man had entered and sat behind an elderly couple. He suddenly got up and said in a loud voice, "I am God. I am God. And I'm going to kill you!" He was pointing to the elderly man's wife. The husband stood up and gave the man the evil eye. "Don't mess with me punk." I later found out he was on the faculty at the University. Perhaps the crazy guy had been a student. It was completely possible, I knew that.

"I will kill your wife because she takes up too much space. I will kill her because she contributes to the bad world. I will kill her because she is in a tapestry." He threw out a few more epithets before the cops arrived and took him away. He resisted at first and then relented and off he went. I always wondered where they went. The cafe had become stone quiet with frozen gestures but as soon as the man left they were chatting it up as if something exciting had finally come into their life for a brief time.

My friend seemed non-plussed about it. "You'd be amazed by how many people think they are god or a god. Many, my friend, many."

---

The children loved to play in the water that pooled beneath the waterfall. From huge granite rocks they jumped, laughing with glee, or took the tire tied by rope to the tallest tree to swing back and forth over the water.

There were a dozen children added to a few babies and one woman who was ready to deliver at any moment. While the men looked angry a lot and the women looked tired, the children were like God's perfect creatures and hooted and howled without a thought in their head. They often led me into the overgrown paths. "You watch yourselves now," I'd tell them. And they'd laugh or look at each other with quizzical expressions.

One time I stopped them in a clearing. It was one of those bitter hot days that seemed to leak from the earth itself. A tree had fallen from the previous winter and lay half in decay across the crude path we were following. The area was hot and dark with the stream purling in the distance with a clean sound; I could hear the old waterwheel churn in the distance.

Five of the children were with me. We caught our breath. I sat on a half-decayed log and the kids stretched out on a small meadow in front of me. I decided to tell them a story I had been saving. I had thought for a time that I would tell this story to adults but it ended up told to the kids. It was about a man who felt confident at the entrance to a foreboding wood.

"The man had been a great man in his life. He had accomplished great deeds and looked at the woods as a new obstacle to a new task, waiting for him on the other side. When he entered the woods he began naming the trees to himself. They were so familiar! And when he heard the sounds of animals he knew them as well and felt buoyant at the intimation of a variety of animals hidden in the nooks and crannies of the wood. Now, he would follow the path of the sun and when the sun rose he would wake and as the sun crossed the sky he would follow its rise and fall and when the sun set he would sleep. He was so happy! He thought about the deeds he had accomplished and how free he was in the woods and how everything was familiar. Then one morning he woke up by the side of a stream and the sun was nearly above him and he was in a panic and suddenly the trees and sound of animals werer unfamiliar to him and he could not remember his deeds and didn't know where he was in the woods and started to run and felt the murky stare of the woods and birds and lingering, stark pressure of the trees as though now he had become the obstacle. This started another adventure which is too long to tell."

When I finished the little fable a kid named Jason asked me where I had heard it. Was it referring to the woods we were in? Was the man in the story lazy? Did he get eaten by a bear? Did he eat roots and leaves?

I thought for a moment and then said, "Why, I just made it up." And one of the kids asked, "It was just in your head?" "Yes, that's how it was, it was in my head."

I didn't tell them the whole truth of the matter because I had thought about that tale and cultivated it a bit and rounded it somewhat so it would come out right when I had to tell it. Frankly I didn't know how it ended. I told myself, "don't tell it until there is stillness." So it was the right time and I didn't think twice about it.

And you're right to ask what the next phase of the story would be. Laugh with me now. It is a nasty series of ass backwardness and humiliations among the unpitying. I was trying to make the kids understand that things aren't always sweet pools of light and water. And that animals are not always warm and cuddly. It was my small way of contributing to their growth. The environment was such that things were either a lesson or starkly beautiful that needed no comment, just the presence of the things. And there was a great rivalry between the lessons! Everyone thought they knew the truth of the matter. That was a good lesson in itself.

It was no paradise but once in a while it felt like it or seemed like one. Nothing disturbed the sense of well-being and freedom of the people. And I don't mean licentiousness either. I mean this sense that there was no resistance to a kind of inner perfection, therefore there was no need to want, therefore all was right with the world. It didn't last but it was good enough to keep people mobilized in their hopes.

In periods of darkness people either find the only ones that can help them or the only ones who can destroy them. I felt the darkness these people fled from brought them to those who could help dispel the awful closing in that bad times can initiate. After all, I was there with them. I had fled the darkness.

* * * * * * * *

Invariably someone would start up the old truck and back it up so it spit dust and I would try to figure out where the truck was going in this heat and what would happen if it broke down somewhere. Like others I sat around asking myself what I could do any given day. The waterfall and its chilling pool seemed inviting.

That's when Blu Davis came around. Now Blu Davis was a poet of sorts and played guitar. I hadn't connected with him too much. He had a special place because of his talents and the women loved him. He didn't work all that much but Rasputin respected him and kept him by his side when things were going wrong.

"Hello there Blu," I said.

He gave me a little wave of his hand. Didn't even pick up his arm but sort of wiggled his hand at me.

"The anti-war man," he said. "I wanted to show you something."

He found another crate and pulled it up so we were face to face.

"I'm scribblin' all the time like a fool. And I have this dream poem goin' about the end of the earth. It's about the war to end all wars. It's about the transcendental glory hole that sucks us down to nothing. It's about the dawn of nothingness."

Blu Davis had a certain rhythm to him. He should have been on stage or television with the rap he had.

The sun was unbearably hot but I'm thinking about that time that a long poem about the end of everything would be appropriate. I made a little gesture of encouragement. I was waiting for him to take a piece of paper out but he didn't. He just sort of stared at me as if I were a mummy and started talking fast but not loud, just fast and smooth and delicate even so that I got into a trance. It was like I was a cobra and he the mongoose.

"You see, anti-war man, in my dream song sirens are knocking the bluebirds out of the sky and everyone runs to their own tomb. I appear laughing. It was getting so boring! I yell to the huddled faces. And now you have bored yourselves to oblivion. I begin dancing like a clown snorting up the thermonuclear dust of my neighbors, co-workers, friends, family, enemies, and all anonymous souls of the recent just completed history. Now! I shout. Now! I bring you to life as each ash tickles my nose. Now! Everywhere death gets deader. Bridges, girders, coat hangers, zippers, cyclotrons, glass eyes, beer cans, belts, buttons, spigots, dimes, clocks, TV sets, microscopes, cameras, coffee pots, light bulbs, wells, cymbals, clarinets, guitars, hash pipes, trucks, cities, needles, and all paraphernalia of human endeavor becomes a molten flow, flowing toward the horizon and off the surface of the globe. The earth turns delicately once and the molten things burst a trillion times over and begin to wonder, points unknown. The molten cuts a swath to girdle the middle sphere, furrows lay bare on earth mantle, cold nether zone freezes and thaws coming into or coming out of a Piscean land of no this and maybe that, upstream and downstream until it's all equal in the end. The caps close sealing everything in ice walls, reheating the tropics, Cancer and Capricorn....Bighorns and Antelopes, alligators and piranha come together, clapping each other, 'the judgment has come!' Great icicles break off the North and South and penetrate to the mid land filling it with icy rivers that sting the few vestiges of the molten flow. Arctic trees unhibernate and break the ice to trek to the mid zone skipping merrily. Ice birds descend carrying monstrous stones that turn into mountains, earth phalli, that spin like dervishes with brown coats and glistening crystals where the timberline is; a song emerges from the top of the mountain, a vibration of laser properties so everything sways and shakes and bends and twirls in fascination of the end."

He stopped and looked at me for a second.

"I still breathe the noxious gas of humanity and spit up vaporous holograms to the sky; images form and intermingle. The shapes are human. The images embrace and pass through each other like ghosts. They play and dance in lactating showers. There is great joy. Even the animals look to the sky in amazement."

He stopped and looked at me for another second.

"What do you think they'll say about that anti-war man?"

I was kind to him and said he would become famous among certain groups but that the world would not be changed. That was about the time I started thinking about things if you know what I mean. I was starting to wonder why the mind puts such thoughts into the head of young people. It does all get taken away doesn't it? Is it the hand of God? Is it the laughter of nature? I didn't think like that at that moment I was looking at Blu Davis but later on, when I left and came back to the city when I thought about that day I started to think about these things.

I had to ask him if he had any desire to write a novel or whether he'd started one. "Me? Sure, why not? Haven't Lennon and Bob Dylan written novels?"

"Did you start one up in the cabin there by the stream?"

"No. I've been in it but it didn't appeal to something in me. I need to get well-known first then I'll write a novel."

"About this place?"

"No, just a compendium of what I've seen." He paused and then got up and dusted himself off and sauntered off. Maybe, I thought, he was interpreting a dream he had had.

At any rate, the sun kept beating down all that day and at night I did not want to dream but just sleep and keep the bugs off me.

My only real pleasure all during my stay was sitting and listening to the people. They viewed me a man immanently qualified to confess to or express their worldly principles. They were not ignorant or dumb by any means but rather educated and weighed down by the ponderous earth. That was my impression. If they had only let go of the ponderous earth.........

"There's too much noise when you want to say something. Back where we all come from, right? It can be a physical obstruction or a psychological one, what difference does it make? So what you think I mean is not what I meant. And from that minisculality great waves are created and they crash in unsuspected areas so the brain is startled all the time."

"So you are here to make sure the communication is clear and clean?"

"Oh yes, without a doubt. It's one of the keys to good health. Now that doesn't mean we like everything we hear, no, far from that. But we know exactly what has been said as the speaker intended." I began to observe to see if this was true. Odd little gestures would be exchanged that apparently both parties understood. And I was the only one they elaborated their thoughts and feelings to. With each other it was a clip and a quick. Whether it led to better psychological health I couldn't say. Some of them appeared the happiest people on earth. Others were a bit more subdued. They could get rowdy, a few of them at any rate. I could hear them laughing like wild hens while I lay on my cot usually reading a book Rasputin had in his library. Forgotten philosophical books usually written by authors who had the enthusiasm of a spirit that knows he will survive despite everything. Oh, they would laugh and laugh and after a while I thought they were laughing at me since I was absent and an easy target. They laughed as I heard it one time in a park of homeless people late at night as they drank and danced around a fire. But no, they were laughing for the sport of it, for the health of it. Thomas had told me that laughter, "expelled old thought," and "made new thought possible," so perhaps they were all laughing philosophers, drunk on the fact they could think without any consequence, therefore were free in a sense that others could not be. I didn't know.

"Oh you don't understand. It wasn't about getting back there all the time but getting back there in little bundles of time that seemed to last forever. Then you knew it didn't last forever but for only a precious moment. Then what you thought and felt during that time was the most important time, nothing else ever came close. The mundane chore of life then took over and we were compelled to obey it because we knew we'd get back there. That's all it was. That's all we expected. And we tried to get good with the mundane chore of life but who can know whether we were or not."

I had become a journalist because the world was rotten and yet the good had to live in it. I wanted people to hate the rottenness the way I had but you get disappointed without question. The rottenness grows on them. They expect it and the good they interpret as comfort and safety.

I found that rather than victims of a society they were supremely arrogant and believed they were much better than the society. People I could admire but not trust because at some point the arrogance would turn on them and get pounded out one way or the other. No, not victims, not people who believed they couldn't make it in the society they had run from but their first entrance into the society must have been quite a shock no one prepared them for. It was a shock to be young, smart, lovely and be forced to the bottom of the totem pole. It was a shock to see what the world hated and why. It was not unusual. These types of endeavors were around from the beginning. I knew of distant relatives that had help build the Hopedale community and then go off and help found Tufts University. Ah, those with more sensibility, more intelligence had to have a break to play out their ideas and value's. That made sense to me.

* * * * * * * *

There were times when it was the real thing, other times I thought it was a dream of some sort that tricks you into believing it's a reality until you wake up and you are in the same place, you are the same person you were before the dream. The people made it real, nutty as they could be. I learned early on the thing was to look and listen because later there would be time to filter out the useless from the useful.

It was in this sort of mind I found that path, so long and gentle near the stream. I was warned of bear and mountain lion but I had the dogs with me. I would sit on some broken logs once in a while and watch the dogs romp and play with each other. They told me again, in that way animals have to speak to humans, "what are you afraid of? Don't fear human, we are here with the mother and she will protect us even as she devours us." So I got up, took my walking stick and continued up the path. It had bends and at the bend were the vistas; valleys with little trails of smoke, the freeway, a slithering concrete snake as I had heard it described, a small mountain here and there and at the far horizon the dancing, shimmering rims of the Sierra Nevada's where I had done some backpacking as a kid.

I would stay at the bend and then move on, each bend showing the same vista but from different angles. I sucked in the great smell of pine cone and would stoop to pet one of the dogs or all of them and move on. At these times the world faded into nonsense. "Who needs a military up here or politicians? Who could possibly own all this? It belonged to God or the great spirit or mother earth and we were seduced into believing something beyond our own pettiness." These were my thoughts up the path. It was beautiful. And then I moved on. And isn't it ironic that after feeling these profound things I was confronted by a bear who had been rubbing its back against a big tree. It looked at me for awhile, didn't say anything and then the dogs started after it. And it went after the dogs and I saw this nature tear itself up like a crazy movie. The dogs drove the bear out but I kept feeling the bear blamed me for the incident and went back into the woods to wait until it had an opportunity to rip me as it had been ripped by the dogs. It made me feel small and meaningless.

It had been a month since I had seen other people than the ones at the farm. C and I went to the little store at the bottom of the valley to get a few things and put gas in the truck. A big willow tree gave it shade and bells rang above the door when we entered. What I remember is the speed at which the heads turned as we made our way inside. Fierce eyes, old tired eyes, startled eyes, drunken eyes. And faces deeply creased with age or worry and stress. I flinched because I was not used to the types I immediately took in. Even my grandparents lived in cities. I wasn't used to the rural types.

There was a small store and then a bar in the back with baseball schedules on the wall and a mirror that looked like a holdover from the old west. Some animal horns hung up over the bar but I couldn't identify them. The waitress, a big scowling woman, asked us what we needed. I was going to say something clever, something urban but resisted and settled for a beer as did C. A few of the locals were sitting in a row next to us, not looking at us but listening and wanting to hear a good piece of news or something that would define us so they could put us in our place. I learned after a time that the rurals believe they live in a kind of heaven and hell all moshed together. Hell are the banks, the kids, the women, the economy, the boss, the government but the heaven is in the ability to surrender to nature and be whisked away into eternity. "Ah you see we know what it is and you snobby urbans don't." It didn't seem to bother them that they were considered backward, provincial ninnies. They considered such opinions as jealousy because the urbans were forced to live in boxes piled up on each other and nature was rarely anything other than a reminder of death. But who knows?

One finally piped up, "you boys from that hippy place up the road?"

"Yeah," C answered.

"Having fun up there?"

"Oh sure."

"Smoke that pot up there?"

"No" He lied.

"And what about you fella, you don't look so rough and ready. Do you have fun up there?"

"I'm a guest. I live in San Francsico."

"Oh I love that city. North Beach. The Giants and 49er's. Can't stand the people," and he half laughed and coughed at the same time.

Things went silent for a time. We drank and looked up on the wall at the little signs posted there.

* * * * * * * *

"There's too much noise when you want to say something. Back where we all come from, right? It can be a physical obstruction or a psychological one, what difference does it make? So what you think I mean is not what I meant. And from that minisculality great waves are created and they crash in unsuspected areas so the brain is startled all the time."

"So you are here to make sure the communication is clear and clean?"

"Oh yes, without a doubt. It's one of the keys to good health. Now that doesn't mean we like everything we hear, no, far from that. But we know exactly what has been said as the speaker intended." I began to observe to see if this was true. Odd little gestures would be exchanged that apparently both parties understood. And I was the only one they elaborated their thoughts and feelings to. With each other it was a clip and a quick. Whether it led to better psychological health I couldn't say. Some of them appeared the happiest people on earth. Others were a bit more subdued. They could get rowdy, a few of them at any rate. I could hear them laughing like wild hens while I lay on my cot usually reading a book Rasputin had in his library. Forgotten philosophical books usually written by authors who had the enthusiasm of a spirit that knows he will survive despite everything. Oh, they would laugh and laugh and after a while I thought they were laughing at me since I was absent and an easy target. They laughed as I heard it one time in a park of homeless people late at night as they drank and danced around a fire. But no, they were laughing for the sport of it, for the health of it. Thomas had told me that laughter, "expelled old thought," and "made new thought possible," so perhaps they were all laughing philosophers, drunk on the fact they could think without any consequence, therefore were free in a sense that others could not be. I didn't know.

* * * * * * * *

* * * * * * * *

So we packed up the old horse Woolsey and started the trek over the mountain down to where we hoped we'd find gold. As a guest I couldn't say it outright but I believed all along it was a foolish crapshoot and we'd never find the gold in a thousand years. But the gift of it was the breaking of the routine, the ability to see something else of the big country around us, and to get to know some of the members of the farm on better terms. Besides Rasputin there were five others including myself. Pete, Erich, Justine, and Bart. Justine was the "intuitionist" as Rasputin called her for her powers of knowing where the invisible things were. "She sat at a table and conjured up one of the caved in mines," he told me, "and we used it as a food storage."

* * * * * * * *

Rasputin figured it would take three days before we reached the area Rattlesnake Dick had buried the gold. "We'll grid if off and make some decent searches using this metal detector hanging on the side of old Woolsey."

* * * * * * * *

The first thing was to get to the mountain top that had a crude trail and the kindly creek running next to it. It took us four hours to make it and we stopped for a while and brought out some food and drink. Rasputin was lounging against a log with his legs crossed and said to no one in particular. "Whether we find it or not is not the point. It's all about getting there and getting back."

Pete laughed, "Yeah, the experience. It's almost as though we are going to the center of the Earth."

"You never know what opening we might find!"

Delight comes when acquaintances are transformed into comrades. And these were comrades as we went up the trail, swapping tales, cussing, laughing, pausing to eat and drink, poor old Rasputin huffing and puffing most of the time. Out there, away from everything men are who they are and you no longer fear them. They are funny and startled as though some day has descended to put them on a distant moon and all they are left with are a satchel of gestures to show their derision for the gods that put them there.

They kept telling Rasputin to shut up.

"We will fund a new hothouse with this loot. We'll give it to the women and they can buy new curtains for the place."

"Oh shut up."

"And in the end we will show the unbelievers that truth can be lived out among rational people."

"Shut up there!"

"Did any of you guys ever read Rosseau?"

"Shut the trap there."

"Do you know Thomas Jefferson knew Madame de Stael when she was a young woman?

"Who's talking all this shit?"

"He also knew Diderot. Think about it."

"It's our leader, the fearless one."

"And he fed Madison a lot of books on political science from Paris when Madison was working on the Constitution?"

"Oh, the owner. Ha. The owner speaks."

"You guys kill me. Yeah, I'm a regular guy treat me like it."

And then there would be long discussions about the women and what sort of thoughts and fantasies emerged. I found it odd that the men seemed to slightly hate the same females they seemed to need when around them.

Justine soaked it all in and didn't say anything but you could tell that she listened to what the men said about the other women and it registered something in her as though she now had an advantage. There was no doubt in my mind that she felt being out with the boys on their adventure gave her an in no other women had and she played it close and well, later describing the adventure in ways that I couldn't relate to but were entertaining to hear at any rate.

On the second day we found a meadow of sorts on the downside of the mountain and pitched our tents and made a fire. Justine got some ribs and corn and wrapped them and threw them on the fire while Rasputin brought out some red wine he'd tied up on the saddle of old Woolsley. It was a pretty night. We were looking for shooting stars. "You know it isn't what it appears to me. Someday we'll fly free through those spaces as though there's nothing to it. We have a very long time to figure it out or have it strike us like a bolt of lightning. Nothing tells me we want to stay on this planet, the rate we kill it off. And then we kill each other off. It has to be restlessness. We feel the limits now and it makes us ornery."

"Maybe we fly through it already. Out of body you know."

"Oh, I know all about out of body. But those are premonitions of what could actually happen. Those are seeds to put a bee in the bonnet you know."

"Does it matter whether its dream or reality?"

"It will to those who see the sun die."

"Ah, it will be a vast entourage of flying spirits."

"Could be. Another couple of billion years. Sure. I have no problem with that. It will happen."

So we ate absorbing this thought. It was so pleasant to think about, even a bit eerie. As long as we could come back if we wanted to. I didn't say that but I wanted to. They were getting drunk and laughing like they didn't care one way or the other so I didn't want to expose my sincerity to them.

The food was good. It tasted important at night along the slope of the mountain. I ate slowly and listened to the weird conversations of these people who seemed, at times, out of their minds and then back deep into some sorrowful place. I thought to myself, "I know why they moved away. They could never survive in the city. Their imaginations are too large and generous for that. They were too wounded by slights and deviousness one encountered daily in the city.

* * * * * * * *

In the morning we moved further down the mountain toward a pretty valley. The other side was neatly furrowed with rows of unidentifiable crop or crops. Someone said it was pot but that was ruled out. Then there was the suggestion is was grapes. "Too hot for grapes." This speculation and general admiration for the work that went into the furrowing occupied most of the conversation down the mountain. We moved slowly but rather boisterous like a small family that has finally found a hike that has made them all free and generous with words.

Rasputin sat on a rock with Erich and Bart around him. He had neatly trimmed off an area of the topographical map with a red pen. "From my research if he buried the treasure somewhere it would be in this coordinate. They always mention a valley and the markings on some of the rocks around here, things you can see if you look around you."

After a short rest we moved into the mapped area. Bart had gotten the metal detector out while Rasputin dismounted and started to make camp. He had a portable table with them that he put up, then his tent. J started collecting twigs and branches for a fire and Erich dug a pit. My job was to make a latrine which I didn't have a clue. I was told to do it out away from the camp. I had a shovel and post hole digger so I could make a crude stand for the party to sit on. I dug a deep pit and dumped a bit of sand in the bottom. Then made the post holes and stuck two strong limbs in them and then made two more behind for first two and put two more in and then brought to paired limbs to a point and crossed them where I could lash them good and secure them. Then I got a long sturdy limb and lashed it to the stand so a person would sit and steady himself a bit as he went along. The woman too would have no problems. I tested it even though I was bone tired and then went back to the camp to get something to eat and pitch my tent. "The journalist has made a crapper." And there was general clapping among my comrades. "It's waiting for your asses." And I made a wide, facetious bow to them all and went about pitching the tent. Hours had passed. Hours of thoughtless labor. It was wonderful. I knew now that the stubbornness of the earth had a lot to teach, especially to people who lived thoroughly in the mind. Many useless abstractions fell away at the simple effort to build the latrine. I did not want praise, only a little satisfaction.

I knew it was a wild goose chase but that's exactly what we needed. We didn't do much that night except eat quietly in our own private thoughts before heading off to our tents. "Tomorrow we will rise early and begin our hunt."

So the hunt would go on in the morning after a big breakfast. At first there were shouts of encouragement and a lot of enthusiasm but as the day lingered no one seemed to be wanting to be there. "Keep looking," Rasputin would shout. "Something good is going to turn up." And he'd get Justine to put her intuitive mind to the quest and she would wander around without a thought in her head it appeared to me. I half expected her arm to suddenly thrust down into the soil and announce she had intuited the gold there but it never happened. She would wander around for an hour among the digging and sometimes toss her head back so her red hair tumbled and made her look like something from a fairy tale or a Victorian painting. She had eyes that seemed like they were going to break at any moment. She was the whitest person I ever saw and painted her nails in bright colors.

* * * * * * * *

What can I say about a single tree? There were a forest of trees, man. It was a sport of mine to imagine the life they had witnessed from their first germination. There was one tree in particular. A small, broad oak set by itself on a level, grassy meadow above lush farmland off the road that joined the commune with the town. It felt the secret of silence looking at it. Even the wind that blew warm and soft seemed to say a thousand things in a moment, against my face.

The tree was significant because of the few graves under it. Rasputin's grandfather was buried under there. An old, iron gate circled the tree. His grandfather, apparently, was a vagabond from the east coast until he connected with a mining company out west. Then he was a logger and owned a little logging company until the Depression came along. He had been a lady's man and even with a growing family at his feet, would roam to the prettiest woman in the town until he had a reputation envied and despised by the rest of the people. I had run into one who told me, with relish, "we ran that old bugger off when he had the audacity to run for city counsel...just ran him off into the hills," he told me. But Rasputin claimed that he had retired to the hills after his marriage wore out. "He wanted to make peace with nature and learn nature's ways. He brought a woman with him and they lived in nature for 35 years. A whole generation of time they spent in nature until they were filthy with it."

There was a fine, heavy granite stone empty but a simple name and date of birth and death. The empty space seemed to invite some intrepid chiseler to come along and bite into the stone a favorite saying; a saying of grace and redemption. "Here lies a man who loved well." "He happily kissed the faces that pleased him." "No man fears the dark wound of Nature."

There were no such sayings, only blankness. Now I can't say I believe or disbelieve in spirits. I've seen enough both ways. But I have to believe that when a spirit sees that nothing is written about it in the graveyard it gets spooked. The whole area seemed, at times, spooked by old gold miners, Indians, stagecoach robbers, prostitutes, assayers, and the like. The heat smelled of these spirits.

There were rumors all over the hills of loot that had been buried by robbers. The robbers of the mountains wrote poetry. And there had been a few hangings. I saw a description of it in an old newspaper. They had no mercy for transgressors at that time. No, that tree and graveyard sparked something that I wasn't too conscious of when I first arrived.

* * * * * * * *

"Oh yeah, we had a black guy come through here. He stayed for a few months and then moved on. I told him we are all brothers up here and everyone was welcome as long as they worked hard. He worked hard, very hard and got along with everyone. We were all nice to him. He taught us a few things we didn't know about ganga and had this stare dance I never figured out but the women loved it.What was that black guy's name?"

"He called himself 'The Judge,' as in the judgement."

"Oh right, I knew it was a strange name. The Judge, right. A wiry fellow, more East Africa than West. I asked him what the name was about."

"It's ironic," he told me. And I never saw him judge anything or anyone. Everything was good to him. "Good man," and then he'd giggle.

"He was from Los Angeles, Rasputin."

"Right, that smoked out, flatland of nothiness."

"Remember when he started complaining there were no "brothers" around. And we kept saying, "we are your brothers man, you're home here?"

"Right. And for a time it felt like it, truly it did."

"What happened then?"

"He didn't want to join our little group. I don't think it was any more complicated than that."

"I saw some hurt in his expression when he left. Don't know about that.

They had a picture of The Judge that they showed me. He had a put-on menacing scowl that was full of mischief and fun. He'd put up a hammock along the path to the waterfall and threw a netting over him to keep the bugs off. He only had a problem with one guy named Bishop. The moment they saw each other they were enemies. We talked to Bishop and told him to accept his brother and lighten up but Bishop was a hard guy. He's been in fights with black guys in the Army and didn't think much of them. "They want to do to you what they had done to them," he would say. Most of the wise people there argued against this notion. "They will hate us for enslaving their ancestors and we'll always think we're better than they are." Bishop was adamant about it, wouldn't listen to anyone and became more and more isolated.

And then the government official showed up, unannounced, and great fear tore through the place and the people. Some of them recovered but others were greatly upset. The official drove a white car with the state seal emblazoned on the door. He parked and sat in the car for a long time. When Raputin was told he became panicked, then sat down and peered off into space for a while, then said he was ok, he was ready to see the official. By the time he was going down the road to meet him, the official had gotten out and was half stretching and walking around with his hands on his hips, looking up into the surrounding hills, forested hills.

"What can I do for you sir?"

"You the owner of this property?"

"I'm the caretaker. The owner lives down in the Bay Area."

"Well, my name is Daniel Sorge and I'm from the State Department of Mines and Safety."

"Sure, what can I do for you?"

"There's a lot of concern about the mining that went on up here years ago. We want to see the toxicity levels of thosse mines, have them cleaned up if they need it."

"Are you an inspector of some sort?"

Yes, an inspector. I can just take my little kit here and check out some of the ground where the mines were."

Rasputin began to balk at the idea and wanted to know if he could see some papers. The inspector reached into the car and got out a binder filled with copies of surveyed property with little notes on them. He had a card with his name and title.

"Well, this tells me something. Are you saying you need my permission to walk around and do your thing?"

"That would be so kind of you. I could leave if you want but then I'd have to file a report and the state is going to think the worse, that you have something to hide and they'll come up here with a court order and they will find what they want to find." And the inspector looked at him with a slight cock of his head, a kind of attempt to establish an understanding.

"I have no problem with you running your tests." Rasputin, however, was deeply worried. By this time he had been joined by four other members and looked skeptically at the inspector. It was obvious the inspector was uncomfortable. I stood off to the side and he spotted me for a moment, stared a bit as if he recognized that I was not "of them," that I was like him in a way but then he turned his head and looked up toward the hills in the distance.

"Ok, ok. I know of one mine that is open. Follow me." And Rasputin turned and headed up the road that led into the property, followed by the inspector who was wearing a decent suit but looked completely out of place. It was as if the world had suddenly decided to intrude into the paradise, a God or Snake in the Garden. But Rasputin had something of the personable about him and made small talk with the inspector up to the mine. I saw them laughing like old friends. They walked past the rusted out ore cart, past the remaining rail tracks that led into the mine. We were always told to stay out of the mine and people did. The kids were the ones you had to watch out for and I saw them run in and out in a hurry just to test the idea it was a dangerous place. They got yelled at and seemed to stay away after that. The inspector did his testing Rasputin told me later, took soil samples from various places in the mine, went to another site where the entrance had been filled in and took more samples. It was at this moment Rasputin got worried and began asking the inspector what the government would do if they found it filled with toxicity. "Oh probably make you clean it up. It would take a while to get the paperwork in order but eventually you'd get a letter that would spell out what the property holder would have to do." "But no one here has gotten sick. If all the toxins are buried in the Earth why don't you just keep it undisturbed?"

"Because it leaches into the ground water for one. At any rate you'll never be able to sell this property until it's cleaned up. If, that is, it has toxic material. That hasn't been established yet."

"When will you know?"

"It'll take a few weeks."

Rasputin closed his eyes and twisted his head in disgust.

"How much does it cost to clean these places up?"

"Could be a little, could be a lot. Depends what's there and how deep it is."

The inspector kept his eyes on the mine, looking at Rasputin occassionally but rarely let his eyes roam around the area. One woman without her clothes on quickly skittered inside, a few people stood in front of the pot plants trying to hide them. He finally moved away and headed down to his car. "Interesting place you have here," he said.

* * * * * * * *

After the inspector left Rasputin was depressed and sat in the kitchen drinking wine. I tried to talk with him but he waved me off. "No, this is serious. I need to think this through." His biggest concern was that the inspector would send others up the road and check the place out, to see if it was up to code. He thought it may be a scam and the inspector or someone else from the state would want a bribe to keep them from doing something costly. He knew they didn't have enough money to clean up the toxicity. Just the intrusion of the state into the little farm sent the place into a crisis.

And after Rasputin had paid the inspector it became the talk of the farm. "Did you see that? He paid him off! He bribed the stranger, the government official!" "He did it for the good of the work being done here, for the future." "Who says the inspector doesn't rat us out and they send up another guy up here?"

"He kept telling the women, "assume you are the freest of the free and have attained every particle of knowledge in the universe. Now what? What do you do?"

It took a while before Mona grew on me. That is, when I would lay on my cot and think about her, roll her over in my mind and probe and poke my imagination. "Was this going to happen?" I thought perhaps I had fallen in love with her cynicism. She seemed to know everything, why this was, why that was, she had all things pretty well thought out. It gave her a sense of power because she knew no one was going to contradict her judmgement of them. She didn't want to be lost in other people, she said. They could get close but at some point she would go, "get back dude, step away and go entertain yourself." There had to be some kind of primitive energy that would snatch away her chance at happiness or fulfillment. She loved living she said. But she was hard at it and it was hard on her, much more so then if she had simply let go and go along. It diden't shcok me to find empty cigarette packages in her room although she claimed to have stopped. I think she would seduce a guy, then wait to see if he came and swooped her up to some beautfiul nest he had tucked in the mountains. If he didn't she cut him loose and made him into a memory she easily cancelled with her next encounter. She could be superbly playful, especially in the water. She didn't talk about God but more Light and Spirit.

"Why would you want to return to something so awful, so corrupt and stressful with no real benefit to it? That old thing, as she called civilization, is coming to an end, cranking down. It it doesn't poison itself it will kill itself through these bombs or the needy will get after the greedy and even if it doesn't it grinds the soul on down a personal sort of Hell. Why would you return to a deal like that? I won't. I don't care if this place burns up, I'm staying in the mountains and enjoying the pure air and fish and birds no matter if there is a bit more discomfort. Not even a contest."

Rasputin had always fancied himself as a teacher. He wanted people, espeically the young ones to have some practical knowledge of how to live. He held informal gatherings on money management, career development, and child rearing. He would say embarrassing things at times and people would lower their heads and laugh, trying to stifle the laugh but it would burble out. They thought, "he's so serious!"

I did have a chance to do one thing I always had wanted to do. In the old barn there were a series of pans hanging up on the wall. One day Jake took me to the barn, he swipes two pans off the wall and gives me one. "We're going to find some gold today!" The pan had heft and was discolored from all the times it was in the water I suppose. "These were up here laying around when Rasputin came up. They seriously thought this area had a lot of gold, maybe even a "mother lode." And the truth was that this general area contained what were known as the "upper mines" in the Shasta-Weaverville area. "Eventually they brought in the dredgers and corporations and destroyed a lot of the rivers. But before that they had hangings and stage coach robberies and such."

As a California kid we learned about the gold rush, the find along the American River, building up of San Francisco, Levi's, Mark Twain and Brett Harte and all of this. It had been a great local event, a national even, even a global event and filled the area with the idealists and the criminals, saints and sinners. It was, in the end, about young men out and away from their families.

"The purpose? Purpose? There was no purpose except one. To prove to ourselves that we could will somethuing into being better than what we saw when we were passive types or too intimidated. Let us go, let us tweak the thing in ways that satisfy our sense of being human. That was the only purpose. What? Do you think a whole new civilization was going to burst up out of our seed? So what do we all return to? The office, the streets, the gas stations, the televison sets, the endless egotism, the sudden flashes of conflict, the endless abuse to the weak, the ruttiness of all the ruts rutting together. Perhaps the purpose was to return to the rotten thing refreshed, remoralized so that the rotteness would no longer sting. We had lived out something better so we endured."

It wasn't as though they were living a perfect life. It was more that they were always searching for that singular point, that effusive center that could connect them to each tried in their own way to do that. But that required a profound assessment and critique of themselves, of which not many wanted to engage in. They felt if they connected to the core of effusion they would be able to wander out to the furthest edge of themselves and yet come back.

"You have to admit that a lot of what exists today was simply an empty dream in another time. So if you're going to dream, do it with some purpose, do it while pointing toward God or the multidudious universe."

"America devours all the good and bad in it because it demands to be known but is beyond knowing the hugeness and complexity it exists in. Feeble human nature is projected aginst America and America laughs, squats, and shits on the critic. The truth is you have to purify yourself, your own onery, putrid self first, top to bottom, and then approach America with a deep and humble mind.

Why utopia and idealism flourish every generation is like asking why does murder or sex or new agism? It can and consciousness seperates from every other consciousness so that one person is able to experience the utopia and its disillusionment in one lifetime. There is no one without the other that seems plain to me. I love to see the flight to utopia by earnest people. But they are always disillusioned by it, always come back to what they despised and, in the end, understand why and why not.

"It's really a practical matter. The creative, thinking mind can't do its job if it's entangled in the gross reality. It needs its offset, its own planet, its island, its spot to build with the same energy that builds a computer or animates a city."

"You see these people? They are simply sacrifices, designed to do the impossible so that a mind, somewhere else can push the envelope and make the impossible, possible."

I didn't like the feeling of being in a closed-ended system. If I wanted to move on I would move on. If I felt strangled by the nature of the people or circumstance I didn't stay around. I was a child of the West. Even a small town on the great plains could drive two men to kill each other rather than just move away deeper into the plains.

Making the base of the pyramid the apex didn't open the pyramid any to allow light in. It simply gave more power to more people. When I explained this to Rasputin he roared back in laughter. "Wait a few years until you are fully disillusioned of that idea. We are animals of a sort and need to be kept in a closed-system. The point of it is to give people the belief that it is anything but a closed system. It's all a mind game anywway."

I didn't want to admit it or see it. In retrospect I can see that it made me a prime subject for the little farm in the mountains. "You are on top and the light hits you first." That's what Rasputin kept urging us to believe, especially when he sensed some discontent.

It was impossible not to notice that the people all worked harder when they had a stake in things. They took pride in everything going on as long as they felt they helped run it. If someone saw a more efficent way to do the farming he piped up and people listened. It was always tested by the polar opposites, say the women. And I talked with all the women and they all had some secret resentment or complaint but rarely showed it because the situation they were in was hetter than what they left. Still, their minds were never satisfied and Rasputin would get a pained expression when a woman contradicted him in some fashion.

It was clear to me that the people hated confrontation more than anything. The whole thesis of the farm was to transcend confrontation and live in a kind of bliss not attainable in the choas making places. "The hell worlds" as I heard the city called.

* * * * * * * *

It was no utopia, it didn't give off the feelings of being a perfect place. "We head for perfection but not there yet," one had told him. The word perfection was always greeted with a shrug of the shoulders. "What the hell is perfection? A pretty picture in your brain? No, we're more experienced than to believe that. But, more important than perfection, we are tough and encouraged to believe that things continually get better because we are frustrated at the lack of perfection. So you go figure it out." Laughter was never meant to scorn but always highlighted the stupidity of trying to figure things out. "You're trying to figure it out, just let it go, let it be," was a kindly scold more than once.

"I like to think that rather than producing perfection we produce the very best out of each person, given that the creature is different in so many ways. If a person strives to be his or her best and reaches a sense that they "have never operated at such a level" they achieve happiness and can be tolerant of all other manifestations."

One thing I could not understand. The people were doing well, they were bringing some good in the world, ephemeral as it may have been, but all around them were hostile people ready to burn them out, starve them out, drive them out, ignore them and so on. The place had an upgraded look to it with fresh flower beds and new-built fences. If people could have seen the loving care that the people had for their little spot on the Earth perhaps attitudes would have changed. Maybe they would have hardened it was hard to figure out in America. "They have vigor for what they hate," Rapstuin used to say. "Their hate is a belief system all its own so we stay away. We know what we do is good, it's advanced because it's conscious living just like the philosophers say to live."

"I had a sudden realization by a lake where I'd taken a few books. I looked out at the stillness of the lake and a bird that kept circling it. Suddenly my mind felt lifted up and I was looking at the world and I saw its iniquity, its evil, its violence, its bigotry, its death and I was overwhelmed with the feeling I didn't know the world at all. I thought to myself, "then it is true, my fears of what I am about to enter..." And that was the beginning that led me up here to this place. We all had the vision and then left our old lives and refused to participate with such a corrupt world."

Everyone dreams at the beginning. That was not the task he thought. "It's seeing it through to the bitter end to see if it renews itself." In the beginning was the sharp jazz of anticipation, of the clear heart of knowing one was right and surrounded by others who were right, no matter what the world thought. It was all energy in the beginning because everyone knew the prospects were not good. There would be treachery, there would be misunderstanding, there would be jealousy of loyalties, there would be the scarcity of resources. "The ship will come in when the fog rolls out." He would say that to no one in particular and despite the fact they were many hundreds of miles from the ocean. There was an artifical lake backed against the dam and a river and all its twisting tributaries.

A question arose about who actually owned the land. Rasputin claimed he had the deed to the property but no one saw it. No one questioned him because they didn't want to get on the wrong side of the guy. They had come from an ethos of honest bargaining for the things of life rather than the market that was corrupt and rigged.

* * * * * * * *

"Men and women were meant to be free. They were meant to rule themselves. They were meant to worship ideal pictures of themselves." Rasputin explained this to me 'while walking along the path, along the creek, a little above the waterfall where there was evidence of mining that had taken place. "But what is freedom," he asked. He was talking to himself, I hardly counted. Or he had said these things to many people over time. "Freedom, my friend, is the ability to say 'yes' or 'no' because you know that one or either of those answers to our questions triggers something mysterious, a path we might not be ready for or a dead end we aren't ready to admit we're on." "I said 'yes' and here we are." "You said 'no' and here you are." "But Rasptuin, if something happens to you how will these people rule themselves? They seem to look to you for the answers." "Oh they heap powers onto me that I don't have. When I'm gone they will heap those powers on themselves, it will muddle through."

* * * * * * * *

Fire was a treacherous word to the people, especially Rasputin who knew there was only one escape route, the road, and if the fire came from below they would all have to jump into the pool by the waterfall. He kept a big storage of water in one of the open mines and had a pumper in case a fire broke out. He knew the forest service had a helicopter that could take people out but, then, he didn't like the idea of government knowing about his project. "Years ago, a man died on that hillside fighting a fire." He was pointing to the hill behind the house, wooded, from which roughe bears would appear from time to time. "The guy was trying to burn off some bush and the fire got out of control. He got into a panic and tried to get it out, running up and down the hill until he collapsed right in front of one of his sons. They got some men and equipment up here and got the fire out but it was too late for the old guy. Didn't know him but heard of him. Had a faded tattoo of an anchor and the name of the ship he served on in World War II. A stand up kind of of guy I hear." I couldn't help but wonder if any of the people now living there had the same fortitude as the old seaman.

The wind blew softly and things began to liven. The bugs seemed to dart a bit faster. The leaves came one by one down the path or over the crops. Always the rush of water from the stream whether you could see it or not. It was the other world down among the granite rocks and dark ferns and clear water. The trees were ramroad straight and full weighted down with cones, a shade from the sun, where a good skinny dip put energy back in the body.

Into the mountains secrets were the snakes and the bears. They were talked about all the time and one expected to see one on their hikes up the mountain. An old trail had been cut to the top.

* * * * * * * * f

The day of the riot started quietly enough. The work was going well, a few people were lounging in the sunshine by the main house. The ones who wanted to work or felt compelled to work were busy with their tasks. What tripped it, I think, was the appearance of a drunken Rasputin who started threantening people or tessing them causing a lot of tension to build. "Go back inside man," someone yelled at him. "I don't go inside. I go where I want to go. I am the emperor of your maladies. Without me you'd all die!" There was scoffing and people staring at the man who tottered on his large legs. It's tough to see the bugger side of a man. He suddenly inflated himself as if to protect himself against a certain decrease in his power, his stature. He had already started the ball rolling up that hill with his antics and kept componding the problem with wild gesutres and loud declamations puncuated by cuss words. Not a few of the people who were now standing around were smiling and watching as if they knew something was ending at that moment. A man destroys himself when the bugger gets out. That's when the first rock came flying through the air, skipped across the dirt and hit Rasputin in the leg so he bucked up a moment and let out a yelp. Several men and a few women came to his aid and started looking up where the field was for the perpetrator. Others came out of the fields and up from the creek and began to circle Rasputin. Then all hell broke loose. It was as if it was all choreographed in the mind before it actually took place. Some definitely saw an opening to end the dominance of the big guy. I don't think they wanted to kill or hurt him but they wanted him out of the center of power. There were an equal amount of people ready to defend Rasputin with everything they had and picked fights with the perpetrators so a big battle got under way. Rocks, clods of dirt, fists, kicking feet, shovels and hoes were all used as weapons.

* * * * * * * *

(ending)It was strange for me to consider that at one time living on the side of a mountain with the sky open and stars looming was a normal part of the American experience. It had started off the grid was strong there and then collapsed inward toward the city. And many of those at the place felt this acutely. They did not have the disdain for American history and experience that the urban types had but believed that the actual living of the American obscure type was the fully realized and liberated American. "The sun says we are our own bossmen. And the moon comes out of night and confirms it." One of the guys had told me that, as we were slumped down against the barn wall, starting to break down for the evening. "The rich have their money and we have this and they can't take it away from us."

In the end they couldn't stand each other. And from what I hear Rasputin did hold the deed to the property and he sold it in parcels to those who wanted their own little piece of it, to cultivate and farm it as they saw fit and to take the produces of their labor to the market and make a profit. It made me smile to hear this and called back to something my old dad told me years ago. "Give a man a piece of paradise and he will destroy it. Give that man the means to make his own money and he will create epochs."

Ah, so old Rasputin himself had written the papers found in the upper cabin! He had found this piece of land on a tip by a native American he had met in a bar in Redding. He had come up with some hashish and no timetable. "It just came out of me. I was escaping the world. I was into science fiction so felt compelled to write an impossible story. The first man! I had a vision of it. The first man who appears between rocks just as the I Ching said it. I wrote the triagram even before I knew what the I Ching was. I believed there was a better way, that's what started it."

* * * * * * * *

"They rejected us, we rejected them." That's how Tommy put it to me as we sat on granite rocks overlooking the purling stream. "We had all the great ideas, all the energy, all the dreams, all the happy endings and they pissed on it and laughed and told us to go away." He had a rock in his hand and tossed it through the trees so we heard the plunk as the rock hit the water. "Who was they?" "They were the satisfied ones, the winners, the lucky ones. They had everything but ideas, dreams, and happy endings. So much for them."

He scoffed and looked at me. The people in this farm had peculiar eyes that were formed out of their devotion to what they were doing. Soft and piercing at times, sometimes quickly turning from one to the other in a second. "Perhaps you are ahead of your time. Perhaps you are teaching the future something and those who you described will have to pay attention to what you are trying to do here." "Perhaps, anything is possible. Right?"

I couldn't pity the people. They had made their decisions. I knew however, that their minds would change and would abandon things in the future. I understood them perfectly. They had to establish an idea theyg believed in before they could move forward into what one had told me was a "monstrous jaw pulling everything into it. The unrelenting monster." I laughed at the description. They were right. It was a damn monster devouring all who entered. And out its ass came a few types that then organized everything to ensure the monster existed for the next generation. And then you had to pretend it didn't exist!

Tommy slid off the rock and headed up the path. "See ya. Hey, we'll outlast the game of baseball and every TV show on today," he laughed.

* * * * * * * *

I did have a chance to do one thing I always had wanted to do. In the old barn there were a series of pans hanging up on the wall. One day Jake took me to the barn, he swipes two pans off the wall and gives me one. "We're going to find some gold today!" The pan had heft and was discolored from all the times it was in the water I suppose. "These were up here laying around when Rasputing came up. They seriusly thought this area had a lot of gold, maybe even a "mother lode." And the truth was that this general area contained what were known as the "upper mines" in the Shasta-Weaverville area. "Eventually they brought in the dredgers and corporations and destroyed a lot of the rivers. But before that they had hangings and stage coach robberies and such. The famous Black Bart used to hide out up around here and rob the gold shipments from Weaverville to San Francisco. He would hide out by Ono, just down the road from the farm."

As a California kid I learned about the gold rush, the find along the American River, building up of San Frrancisco, Levi's, Mark Twain and Brett Harte and all of this. My great grandfather came out to this area as a mining engineer. By the time he got here all the romance was out of mining and was the work of big mchines like dredgers and hydrolic hoses. It had been a great local event, a national, even a global event and filled the area with the idealists and the criminals, saints and sinners. It was, in the end, about young men out and away from their families. A lot of fights took place. Many of the women turned tricks to make a living. The Chinese played a big role and suffered violence at the hands of some of the miners. It was consequential. It stimulated the development of the transcontinetal railroad to get the gold and silver in the West back to the eastern banks ASAP. It also crowded California with new citizens, so many that it became a state. It voted for being a slave free state and that was a fierce controversy. Some say that was one of the catalysts for southern states to start thinking about succession.

I Learned all this over a period of several hours, bent over the calm water of the stream, dipping and swishing the pan, looking through the silt, over and over again. The twittering birds and sun play on the water got my attention for a bit. Jake was there telling me all about the gold rush and California. "Yeah, Black Bart was up here for awhile. He would write little ditties for the robbed and ride off to safety. Some said he was a disgruntled bank employee and the robbing was to get back at the bastards. Then there was Rattlesnake Dick who, rumore had it, hastily buried his stolen gold in these very hills, behind the mountain here. Then there was Joaquin Murrieta who was feared up and down the San Joaquin Valley. Robbed and killed they say, on behalf of the old Spanish and Mexican families that had land stolen from them by the gringos. They finally caught Murrieta and cut off his head and stuck it in a big glass container, filled it with vinegar and passed it around to all the commmunities that had been terrorized by him. Whenever I hear of a guy getting his head chopped off I think of that. The people here weren't exactly civilized were they?" And when Jake was done with all this stories and commentary he abruptly grabbed his pan, "forget it compadre, there's no gold today," and we marched back to the barn.

* * * * * * * *

I never bought into the idea that Rasputin was a saint. People were in awe of him and gave him credit at every turn. "Oh the man is showing the way to the future. He's a great man and will be recorded in the history books." Those were some of the comments I heard about him. I kept everything in perspective. The communal idea had taken off because an ideal, some say pampered, generation came of age during the awful war and even worse prospects with the nuclear thing hanging over everything. There was nothing historic about them. I tried to imagine Rasputin in the history books and always came up short. But then, many historical figures would no doubt disappoint us if we were right there, in real time, watching and listening to everything. Would moderns follow Christ or Socrates? Buddha even. No, I doubted it greatly. A man for the history books would invent something or go on outrageous adventures no one had attempted. Merely organizing them into a new form may have been unique to the group that was organized but in the larger scheme of things it was a slight accomplishment. I never told Rasputin that or anyone for that matter.

No, Rasputin was all too human and had a streak of the fraud in him. He had this majestic stare when standing on the path looking over the wood and stream.

"Here's what I want from you," he told me one evening. And when he talked to you it was as if you were his favorite or a long, dear friend. "I want you to keep an eye on how the people are doing. Whether they get the bug up the ass you know?" I knew but I didn't know. A spy? I laughed to myself at the thought. A spy would not be a good thing. It would break down the necessary trust that had to exist between those who managed the thing and those who were dependent on its good management.

A spy was a spy was a spy. I didn't care that much whether there were people in the group that wanted to undermine Rasputin. I figured it was all part of human nature and power. Ultimately I didn't have that much concern with Rasputin's project. It would shape the individuals involved in it for awhile, then they would go into the world and forget it, only to dredge up memories as they aged. "Ah, I remember...." Perhaps it would become a semi permanent memory they could go to time after time when they felt swallowed up by the reality they finally surrendered to. But once Rasputin deputized me as a spy of sorts my relation to the whole idea changed. I was to detect misgivings or a sense of despair, even out and out treachery. "Don't think treachery doesn't exist here, even in these bucolic hills and forest," he said eyeing me carefully, perhaps thinking I too was an agent of dissension of some sort. And as if he were reading my thoughts suddenly blurted out, "I don't worry about you. This is just one of many trips for you. Your next one may be venal and groteque, your values completely inverted from what they are here." He laughted. "I have lived too, my friend."

I vowed to myself that if I heard any dissension or threats to his leadership I would not report it. I was the last one to step inside a family conflict, having escaped my own very deftly. I would do the professional thing and get the person to reveal all the reasons for their feelings.

* * * * * * * *

A con man appeared in our midst: I was suspicious of him first time I saw him coming up the road. He had on dark aviator glasses and a wide smile. But he was the type of guy who wins you over because for all the suspicions you have of him he passes all the tests you might put in front of him. You watch him, listen to him and at some point you say, "this guy's for real." That's when they have you, that's when some threshold is crossed and he can suddenly do what he wants with you." A few of the guys chased him off after a while. He had tried selling us life insurance! Imagine that. Most of the people here figured life was going to end on the planet soon anyway. What good is life insruance in oblivion?

We all secretly or no wanted to live to the final moment. When it was all disintegrating. When it was all going down. When people finally realized we had crossed a threshold and, to be honest, we crossed it willingly. It was hard to accept but I think more than a few us thought as much. We believed we were only spirit and that our bodies were not real. That included the planet Earth. I had a long conversation with a guy, you've seen him around, who couldn't wait to get released from the body and shoot out to space and fly around the universe, find new life, new being. Why not? I've heard plenty of strange opinions."

"Doom puts a spark in life don't you think? To believe you will experience the end of all life sends a jolt to the imagination that thinking about the issues and daily problems and the way things are never will. People live for that jolt." It was clear that a sizeable number of people had this view. It was surprising to me but not shocking. It altered some of my views on the people because I always had the impression they made the move to a place like this because they wanted a more meaningful existence they couldn't find in the mainstream. But more than a few were just hanging out until the end came. And how could you blame them? If you put a parameter around people, gave them a sense of community and let them be as free as they want to be in that parameter, it's more likely they will do positive and meaningful things. Crammed in a city with cameras all around, with rules at every step, with anger and resentment at the local store many people could feel pushed in against themselves. And those who let go of life seemed to gain more of it. Those who gave up clinging to the dear old planet and the times that danced on its stage found a richer vein of human creativity. That was one of the odd conclusions I came to."

* * * * * * * *

"I'll tell you how I do it. I treat each one of these miscreants as though they are the center of my attention and make sure they each get something of value, even it's only a complement. That gives them all skin in the game, they want to make it go because they have a little bit of investment that pays off from time to time." <

"It finally comes down to two might words: Trust and Respect. If those are in the heart of the people anything can get done, any conflict can be solved, all wounds can be healed. If it is all a show the thing will break down at the first opportunity. So far trust and respect have won out. And that's inspite of the fact we have people here who once trusted and respected no one!"

"At the bottom of it we have to see ourselves as the children of a higher spirit, as inspired by something sacred that feeds any emptiness that crawls up from time to time. It's more than the tractor, the crops, the people even, it's the higher purpose. Do you think those townspeople have it. Maybe here and there but they are doing what they are told to do and a fleeting glance at the holy left them long ago. Or they assumed they were it, the sacred itself and that will do in any decent people."

* * * * * * * *

"It took a while before Mona grew on me. That is, when I would lay on my cot and think about her, roll her over in my mind and probe and poke my imagaintion. "Was this going to happen?" I thought perhaps I had fallen in love with her cynicism. She seemed to know everything, why this was, why that was, she had all things pretty well thought out. It gave her a sense of power because she knew no one was going to contradict her judgement of them. But I wondered if a relation with her was going to commplicate things a bit much. I was going to leave at some point. Something would call me back. I knew this. The more I was with a woman the more ensnared it became. What if she got pregnant? What if she used me to make another guy jealous? What if, in her secret heart, she had her own plan that was worked out to the minutist detai and I was simply a twig she needed to throw on her pile?"

"Yes but you were getting some weren't you?"

"Oh yes, that happened. It was crazy for a few days and then tailed off. I know Rasputin knew what was going on. He approved of me though so there were no bad feelings generated. And after, more than once, laying there in the heat and steam of it, vibrating in sweat, silent, I had vast utopian visions of the woman and I absolutely happy and contented some place that I couldn't identify."

"She liked to do men things. She liked to climb rocks and kill chickens. She liked using the "f" word. Only other female I heard say that word was my mother and I was embarrassed for it. Her favorite painters were Mondrian and a few cowboy painters. She was not embarrassed when she farted. She didn't care. Her eyes could get fixed hard sometimes but would eventually soften if she felt safe. She had a husky laugh, a man laugh. Remember the Dylan song, "she makes love like a women but breaks like a little girl?" That was her."

"Left alone and the women seemed to do very well. They did their tasks and would get into a group. Something was said and they'd burst out laughing. They protected each other if they sensed any problem with the men. It was rare because the men, for the most part, were fairly passive. Their grand gesture was sometimes a protracted shrug of the shoulders. It had always been my experience that when men got together they always talked about women in a negative way, a crude and vulgar way, as if they harbored deep anger against the poor things. One could even go so far as to say there wasn't much love between the men and women. They respected their rights and collaborated on projects but had no desire to pair off and romance.That's why the thing with Mona was a bit oblique," he now said to his friend. "Get a bit close and whoosh she'd slide somewhere else. But then she'd come back hot and heavy after a few days. Then I'd try to get close and boom, she was out of there. I never felt hate from her. I felt some anger, some hurt. Someone had hurt her along the way. When I discovered that I made a greater effort to get connected emotionally. She swore at me and told me to back off. So I backed off. Then we did the thing. And she practically threw me off of her. I didn't undestand it. I still don't understand it."

* * * * * * * *

The winter made for a gentle whiteness on everything. It was cold and bright. The house had a corrugated tin roof slanted at a steep angle so the snow would roll off. The stream would roar and they would tell stories about the great Flood in the late 19th century that came down and swept through the community that had been built along the stream. "Everything was destroyed except this place. Our place was on higher ground but it took out some of the chicken coops apparently. The community disappeared after that and a few of the old homesteads were rebuilt once they discovered the source of the flash flood had been downed trees and backfill that got clogged and let loose one day. How many times would that happen they figured?

They had little or no media. Once in a while someone would go to the little town and pick up a newspaper. It was passed around quickly, got ripped and disorganized.

The pertinent information was passed along quickly, then forgotten. Rasputin had a small transistor radio and a tiny tv that he kept under lock and key in his so-called office. I wandered in one time into the office and he was in his chair bent over looking at the TV and quickly switched it off when he saw me.

"Same old junk, same old messages." I told him the last thing I missed was television, although I did miss a good movie from time to time. "We like to believe our minds are the best media, the best camera, the best organizer of drama. All this stuff just interferes, it's called white noise and makes the real instrument less than what it could be." He must have detected skepticism in me because he became defensive. "You have been too altered by living in the city, too corrupted." "Well, I don't see what the big deal is." "The deal is," he said slowly, "that we are taking back everything stolen from us, especially time and mind. Those two things most especially. That's what it's about." "And who is stealing your mind?" "Who isn't," he laughed. "It's the rich, the politicians, the corporates, the religious fanatics, anyone who puts their moves on you." I didn't say anything and he added. "It's all a con. Once they convince you to turn it on the con is in. Turn on the media machine that is. It makes the con the norm rather than the thing that should be expelled from a free society."

"Well, why were you watching it then?"

"I always check to see how fast it takes me to see the con that is being played. Have the woods done their job? Has the hard work driven the con from my brain?"

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