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Harmonic Convergence

December 31, 2011 By

In 1987 a free-spirited woman invited me to a harmonic convergence. I didn’t know what a harmonic convergence was, but she was an interesting person with whom I wanted to spend time and I was happy to learn something new.

This harmonic convergence, I learned from Wikipedia, was a synchronized, worldwide meditation taking advantage of an alignment of the Sun, the Earth, our Moon, and five other planets. I don’t remember being aware of the convergence goals of shifting the earth’s energy from warlike to peaceful, initiating a five-year period of cleansing, and removing false structures of separation, but I was glad to help.

She picked me up in her battered pickup truck––I love battered pick-up trucks with history and adventure written in every dent. The tarp-covered bed of her truck was filled with the stuff a person who is working on more things than she finishes collects.

We drove to a field selected for its convergence and harmonic powers somewhere near Eklutna, Alaska, not far from where I live. It was a 24-hours event from the 16th to the 17th of August and participant’s tents were set up along one the edge of the field. I didn’t know this harmonic convergence was a 24-hour event and didn’t bring any camping gear. My guide knew it was a 24-hour event; but she didn’t bring any camping gear either. She did, however, bring three large, heavy suitcases she considered necessary for the event.

We parked in the trees at the edge of a large field near the tents. In the field were perhaps a hundred people walking in a circle, chanting, and banging drums.

I helped carry her suitcases to a rock outcrop at the edge of the field where we had an unobstructed view of the participants––and they of us.

Her suitcases were filled with rocks and crystals and fabrics and the paraphernalia of many mainstream and obscure religions and beliefs.  She created an elaborate alter with the trees for a backdrop and the chanting circle as a congregation. I thought this was pretty cool.

Then she put some feathers in one hand and a smoldering sage smudge in the other and started to dance and wave her hands around and chant loudly in front of the alter. I began feeling a little less cool; but I had my back to the circle of participants and I hadn’t recognized anyone I knew so I didn’t feel too conspicuous. None of the participants seemed to think anything was out of the ordinary and I thought, “Okay, I can do this.” and sat on the grass to watch her incantations. I was quite comfortable.

When she finished, turned to me, and said; “Now you do it.”

In for a penny, in for a pound!

*       *       *

Of course I did it. I don’t know how well. She seemed happy.

Later I walked in the circle, chanted, and occasionally banged on a borrowed drum. I met a lot of interesting people. They shared their time and their food. Later in the evening when it began to rain my partner took a tarp from her truck, folded it in half, and we slept on the ground between the folds.

We were cold and soggy in the morning and decided that since the planets were doing all of the heavy lifting anyway we could safely leave the convergence goals to them and put our efforts elsewhere.

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Bungee Jumping

December 11, 2011 By

The road from Chitna to McCarthy, Alaska, follows, in fact is, seventy miles of the defunct Copper River & Northwestern Railway bed that carried copper ore from the Kennecott mine near McCarthy to steamships at Cordova. The tracks are gone now and the sleepers and many spikes and nails are covered with too thin a layer of gravel. I have never made the one hundred and forty mile round trip with fewer than two flat tires.

There is a certain mind-set required to travel that road. Over the Copper River Bridge outside Chitna the road becomes single lane as it traverses up a continuously collapsing sand bank. In spite of constant maintenance the collapsing sand leaves deep scallops in the road creating many unstable sections.

Then come eighteen lulling miles of perfectly fine, two-lane dirt road that rejoins the old railroad bed near the Kuskulana River Bridge.

The bridge is a test in itself that until recently most people couldn’t pass. The ore trains rode on top of the box-girder, which was not designed for automobiles. The original upgrades to the bridge to accommodate cars were minimal. The tracks were removed and two, two-foot wide parallel boards were laid tire-width apart across the railroad ties.

The improbably narrow boards stretched several hundred feet ahead with nothing but a person’s driving skill to keep him or her from falling onto the ties and becoming stuck. And if one looked down through the ties it was a disconcerting two hundred and sixty-eight feet to the river below. There were no guardrails, no handrails, and no pedestrian walkway. Anyone walking across stuck to the driving boards or railroad-tie-hopped. Many people couldn’t walk across. Many people couldn’t drive across. Many people couldn’t even ride across with their eyes closed. I drove and walked across several times and it was giddily daunting.

Today the bridge has a proper wooden surface, but still only a low barrier to keep an errant car from going over the edge and a deceptively slack and risky hand wire to protect (I don’t know how) foot passengers who might need to lean on it.

*          *          *

The Kuskulana River Bridge is a bungee jumping venue.

Several years back the Vance twins and a friend sold bungee jumps from the bridge: $50 for one jump, $100 for three jumps, free if you jumped nude (no woman ever took them up on this).

I first learned about jumping of this bridge from my friend Paul. He invited me to go to Chitna with him when he learned his back flip record had been broken. He knew I loved Chitna and McCarthy and he wanted company for the daylong drive from Anchorage. We camped outside Chitna and drove the last forty minutes to the bridge the next morning.

When we arrived at the bridge it was hot and sunny. There were people from all over: Anchorage, Fairbanks, McCarthy, and visitors to the state who had come from farther still. At least a hundred people either camped at the bridge, were there for a day of jumping, or just lucky travelers who happened by.

There is usually little more than two degrees of separation between most Alaskans who ventured this far off the beaten path and when we arrived there was already a carnival of old friends. Everybody became childlike with the rare blue-sky, warm-temperature perfectness of the day. Even strangers felt like family.

But what really brought people together was a sense of shared excitement––bungee jumping! Whether you were a jumper or not the place was electric.

Paul didn’t get a chance to reclaim his record. The line of people waiting to jump was too long to take the time to add extenders to the bungee cords and haul everything up to the top of the box girder to give him the extra time and space he would need to set a record. It didn’t matter. The day was perfect.

Nearly fifty people jumped that day, and more than half of them were first-time jumpers.

The bridge was built with a see-through, grated walkway with handrails running down the bottom center of the box girder. The bungee cords were wrapped around the girders at the outside edge of the box frame. A jumper signed and initialed six pages of releases and was fitted with a waist harness and a chest harness. (Ankle cuffs were available, but I didn’t see anyone use them.) The cords––three for lighter people, four for heavier people––were attached to both harnesses and a three-foot foam sleeve was placed over the cords to keep the jumper from getting tangled between them.

Then he or she climbed over the railing and walked the horizontal diagonal girders to the edge, ducking under the vertically diagonal girders. It would be precarious even without the weight of the cords and the great space below. The jumper was told to put his or her toes over the edge and then, no really, put them over the edge. Then the crowd shouted down from ten and off they went.

The Kuskulana River’s gorge is narrow with steep walls where the bridge crosses and the twang of the bungee cords going taut echoes off the canyon walls.

After the jumper yo-yoed up and down for several minutes a line was lowered, clipped into the harness, and a gang of volunteers pulled the jumper back up. Bungee jumping at Kuskulana required a lot of teamwork and there were eager hands to help. I helped pull jumpers up all morning and noticed that every first time jumper had an expression on his or her face I had never seen before. They didn’t just look like they were surprised and pleased to be alive; they looked like they had been somewhere special––very special. Eventually, I decided I had to see where they had gone and learn what they knew.

I was ready to go. But one cord had just been removed to accommodate lighter people and I had to wait another two hours––and have time to worry.

When my turn came I signed and initialed six pages of releases. (I usually don’t read releases––as a lawyer I have more rights if I don’t––but I went through this one out of curiosity. It was well drafted, but essentially worthless as most of them are.) Malcolm put the waist and chest harness on me.  Then his friend checked each connection. I climbed over the rail and headed for the edge. My heart was pounding (I never know how to evaluate the sliding scale between excitement and fear––or accurately measure the intensity of each when both are happening simultaneously) and I, too, had to be told a second time to get my toes farther over the edge.

Before the countdown began I started to think about what I was doing. I felt the thoughts coming before I could articulate them and I knew that when they arrived I was going to panic or change my mind––so I dove.

The jump was a total mental lock-up, which I only experienced after the fact. I was pleased to learn that someone had videoed my jump. It wasn’t a pretty jump. I had forgotten the proper launch technique: push out parallel from the bridge with an arched back and emulate a swan dive. With proper technique upper body weight will pull the body into a head down dive when the cords engage putting them in a straight line between the jumper and the bridge.

In my hurry I dove down instead of out and did a complete 360 degree flip. The bridge was behind me when the cords engaged and the protective sleeve whacked me in the face when they went taut, popping the lenses out of my glasses. My first memory of the jump is rebounding back up toward the bridge, blind and stunned. On the video someone can be heard saying, “Ewe, that was ugly!”

I was alive! And I was yo-yoing up and down while simultaneously swinging back and forth under the bridge. Pure magic. In the photo of me climbing back onto the bridge (I can’t find it!) I have that same expression I had seen on other jumpers. I have now been there––I can’t describe it––and I have rarely done anything that has benefited more.

The inner voice that wanted to “talk” to me when my toes went over the edge was my critical voice. My your-not-good-enough, who-do-you-think-you-are, you-will-not-succeed, you-shouldn’t-be-doing-this voice. I didn’t always obey this voice, but it was always hectoring me. This time when it started in on me I dragged it, against its will, over the edge toward what it thought was certain death.

In a sense there was a death––my critical voice’s death. The moment I jumped––against its screaming warning––and survived, my critical voice lost its power. It no longer had much influence over me. It got humility. Now if it wants to talk to me and I am busy it has to wait. There are no more ultimata. No more scolding. It talks. I consider what it said. Period. What a relief.

*       *       *

I went back later in the summer with two other friends to jump again. It was a nice day, but there were very few jumpers. I jumped three times. On my first jump I corrected my previous error and my form was perfect––except that even though I was in a proper head down position one of the cords wrapped around my left leg. I had only a second to wonder what this might do before the cord engaged. When it snicked taut it pulled my shoe off. There was no mental melt down on this jump and as I began to slow my shoe continued to fall and I reached out to grab it, but it was just out of reach. I also heard someone on the bridge ask, “What did he lose this time?”

My second jump that day was magic. I pushed off backwards, spread eagle, and watched the bridge recede and the cords go from a “U” shaped to and “S” shaped to straight. I felt so much faith that everything would be fine it was like falling into the arms of God. I did a forward flip as I was tossed into the air on the rebound. I lay back in the harnesses and enjoyed the up and down, yo-yoing swings under the bridge between the canyon walls until the retrieval rope was lowered.

*       *       *

Bungee jumping boosted my adrenalin to the max and gave me hours of residual energy. When the energy faded I felt exhausted and got an unpleasant headache. I also saw, as I was falling asleep and the headache was fading, a bright flash of orange light that was the same saffron color as a Buddhist monk’s robe.

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Garuda

October 21, 2011 By

The Tillum Gallery is in Mas, Bali, Indonesia, between the villages of Kuta and Ubud. It is in a typical Balinese home that seems to be only a garden until you understand the function of its many pavilions and small temples. A guide greets you at the gate and shows you the house, leading you past the seated wood carvers to the gallery at the back. There, among exquisitely carved wooden sculptures of Hindu deity, are carvings of Garuda––large, vicious looking, toothed and clawed birds that are transportation for the Hindu Gods. Garuda are often depicted with Lord Krishna riding on their back. I first learned about Garuda when I visited Indonesia in 1982.

In 1972 I attend the University of Oregon. Near where I lived in Eugene, at the edge of town, was a small park, Bodenberg Butte. It was a popular overlook with a parking lot on the back side away from the city lights and a steep, switchback trail up through large spruce to its summit. The year before I moved to Eugene I lived in a log cabin on a ridge above Fairbanks, Alaska and I hadn’t re-acclimated to cities well. I liked to climb to the top of the butte late at night when no one was there and sip hot tea that I brewed on a backpacking stove. I would sit with the woods at my back, look out over the city––often hazy through the typical Eugene drizzle––and enjoy the solitude.

One night the clouds lowered, the view disappeared, and it became pitch dark when it was time to descend. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, let alone the trail. The butte was steep and slippery and I worked my way straight down across the switchback trail in a crab walk on my hands, feet, and butt. It was slow, tedious, slippery, blind work.

When I was part way down the path and the trees lit up. I looked to the light’s source expecting to see a car’s headlights in the parking lot. Instead, I saw a giant, white, glowing bird soaring, on un-flapping wings, through the trees below me, lighting up the entire woods. It was at least 20 feet long with an even greater wingspan. It sent bursts of colored sparks from different parts of its glowing body like miniature, silent fireworks. It had a huge mouth and teeth; its feet, tucked up in flight, weren’t visible.

“Soaring” and “flight” are not descriptively accurate. The bird was only several feet off the ground and it was moving very slowly; only several miles an hour. It wasn’t aerodynamic flight.

“Through the trees”, though, is descriptively accurate. The bird’s wings passed right through some trees. Other times it disappeared entirely behind a tree and did not reappear until it came out on the far side of the next tree over, showing nothing between the two trees!

It was slowly turning it head––searching for me. I was scared and froze in place. After a minute or so the bird just faded out and I was left alone in the dark.

I didn’t learn that the bird I saw on the butte was a Garuda until a decade later at the Tillum Gallery. That was when I learned what a Garuda was and that they are transportation for Hindu Gods.

In Eugene, ten years earlier, I didn’t know the bird I stared at frozen in fear was a means of travel. I don’t profess to be a God, but I sometimes wonder if I had been summoned by One––and missed an important invitation.

If I ever see a Garuda again I am going to risk those teeth and climb on.

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Are You On The Bus Or Off The Bus?

September 13, 2011 By

In the 60’s being on or off the bus was often a metaphor for hipness––to hark back a generation still for a descriptive term. And hipness in the 60’s often meant drugs––psychedelic drugs, “the revenge of the guinea pigs”, to quote Tom Wolfe.

I recently listened to Teri Gross, of Fresh Air on NPR, interviewing Robert Stone about his memoir prime green: remembering the sixties and decided to read his book and re-read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I had forgotten how good Kerouac’s writing is and how well Wolfe described experiences for which words rarely suffice.

I was a teenager and young adult in New York and California in the 60’s and car-toured much of the rest of the US on vacations with my family in the 50’s. My experiences tell me that what these guys wrote is accurate.

I wanted to be on the Ken Kesey’s bus. Fortunately, I had neither the courage nor the tolerance for drugs. Drinking was what I did best. I never became very hip. Weird was within my abilities; occasionally inappropriate.

But I did get the sense. I felt the slipstream of what Kesey was trying to do and I trailed along in my own way, at my own speed, to my benefit.

There is a stupid (and fun) saying “If you can remember the 60s, you probably weren’t there”. More accurate, I think, is that if you weren’t there the 60s can’t be explained to you. Certainly not the feeling of it.

But the goals can be explained––my goals, my friend’s goals, the merry prankster’s goals (according to Tom Wolfe). I was looking for meaning and reason and God and things I couldn’t articulate. The way my parents made sense of––everything––didn’t work for me and I struck out for the same destination by a different path.

This-way-be-dragons only added to my excitement. (I think my daughter did about 15% of the “things” I did and she scared the Hell out of me.) I am proud that I survived––and that I made about as much sense of life as I think possible.

I looked hard for the answers. For a long time I thought I would find them in places like high mountains, on the other side of the earth, in a language I didn’t understand. I was wrong. When I gave up searching, answers, tailored for me, became obvious. My path, to which I am happily committed, is in storefronts and church basements with other ex-drinkers.

I now know what I am doing and what I can do.

I am on the bus!

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Straw Man

August 17, 2011 By

In 1982, when I was thirty-four years old,  I quit my job, cashed in my retirement, and took off around the world. I gave myself a year to accomplish four goals: see Greece, see Nepal, see the Southern Cross, and get a suntan. I left behind friends, family, job, community; all of which was inexplicable to most people who aspire to everything I was leaving.  I took my passport and a backpack to the Anchorage airport and bought a standby ticket to London.

I found the international travelers at Heathrow exotic and the airport food great. I stayed and watched and ate at the airport all afternoon. It could have looked, to someone who was trained to look, like I was waiting to be met by someone who didn’t show up.

When I got bored with the airport I took the Tube to a youth hostel, checked in, and started to wander around London on foot.

When I stopped in a pub for a pint of ale a young guy in a suit asked if he could join me. He struck up a conversation about my travels, but he wouldn’t respond to any of my questions. Guessing he needed a formal introduction I stuck out my hand and gave him my name. He wouldn’t shake my hand or tell me his name. He said he was from some government agency and that they knew I was in England. It was all slightly menacing, but he was young and not very good at it.

After that night in London I decided to visit family friends in Bristol. Sir Charles and Lady Frank spent every other summer in Schenectady, New York, where I grew up, often staying on the third floor of my home. Maita Frank became one of my mother’s best friends. Sir Charles was a visiting physicist at the General Electric Research Laboratory where my father worked.

The Frank’s are the first of several family connections that make me somewhat unique. Sir Charles worked for British Intelligence during the Second World War. My father’s best friend, Thomas Paine, was a vice-president at General Electric, NASA’s administrator, and president of Northrup Aviation and must have had knowledge, if not direct participation, in secret projects for the government. Jack Lubahn, the husband in the family my parents shared child-rearing with, to facilitate adult-only vacations and create seven children multi-family outings, worked at the Knowles, the US Navy’s nuclear research facility.

Down the shore from our summer cottage on Drummond Island were the Beldons. Tom was an analyst for the CIA. There was at least one future Noble Laureate around, Ivar Giaever, and my father’s other best friend, Ed Schmidt, seemed like a James Bond without the “00” certification.

I knew some, but not all, of this at the time I went walkabout. I can understand how if someone was already concerned about my behavior, challenged me about it, and I ran to see an ex-intelligence person, that I could peek their interest.

After three days in Bristol I went back to London, decided that I didn’t want to spend another night in the youth hostel, and took a 1 AM night bus to Lion, France. I arrived at 6 AM in the morning and caught an 8 AM train to San Sebastian, Spain. I had no agenda, remember, except my four goals, and moved as the spirit directed me.

I spent the day in San Sebastian and took the overnight train to Barcelona where I got a cheap room ($2.35/night – very nice!) and began to explore the city. I am a fan of Gaudi’s architecture and I walked all over the city to look at his buildings, his parks, and his Sagrada Família.

I also walked in neighborhoods looking in people’s trashcans and vestibules. The climbing boots I was taking to hike with in Nepal were too big and heavy and I needed a box to mail them home in. Boxes, apparently, were rare and it took me several days of rooting to find one.

While I walked form one neighborhood to another, from ritzy to slum, from commercial to residential, looking at Gaudi architecture and in trashcans, I noticed I was being followed. I had recently read a spy novel where I learned that the weak link in multi-costume, close surveillance was a person’s shoes. Other items of clothing were easier to change on the fly, but shoes too often stayed the same.

I didn’t need to know this, however, to spot my tail. I was working this poor woman to death. She didn’t have time to change her clothing, let alone her shoes, and I was moving her into such diverse neighborhoods that she was often wildly, inappropriately dressed. Her “cover” had no reason to be in many of the places she had to follow me.

After three days in Barcelona I took the train to Nice, spent one night and then went on to Rome. I arrived at 6 AM in Rome and had two “cardboard girls”[1] try to pickpocket me under the approving gaze of a policeman. Pissed off, I left Rome at 1 PM the same day for Greece.

In Athens I followed my usual wandering habits. After a week of exploring and random contacts with interesting people in cheap hotels I took the night ferry to Crete. I met a New Zealander, Mark Crosley on the ferry and we hiked together on Crete for a week. He had been traveling and working around the world for three years and had given himself eight months to get home.

Mark was only one of a number of people I hooked up with on this trip. I was a shy person then and yet the guy I sat next to on the bus to Lion chatted me up about my travels. A German backpacker hooked up with me on the train to San Sebastian and we spent the day sight-seeing together. Mark spent a whole week with me. There were too many other meetings before and after Mark to be normal for me.

I had become quite a popular guy––people wanted to meet me, travel with me, keep track of me! I began to wonder why. Why would people be interested enough in me to commit sizable resources to keep track of me; a middle-aged drunk (at the time) living out a mid-life crisis?

The only thing that makes sense to me is that I was a “Straw Man”; and a particularly effective one at that. Every government has spies that it works hard to protect. One way to protect a spy is to hide him or her within a much larger group of fake spies––Straw Men. Straw Men are ordinary, unsuspecting people that spies and their handlers have regular contact with to throw off the opposition who can’t tell whether the contacts are important or not until they invest the resources to check them out. Until they do so they have to assume any contact could also be a spy. This misdirection stretches the opposition’s resources and takes focus off of the real spies.

This is a clever, efficient, and inexpensive way to confuse an enemy. There must be thousands of Straw Men; unaware of the role they play. I am sure I was one.

My theory about Straw Men is obviously conjecture, I don’t have any inside knowledge; but I would be embarrassed if the United States weren’t using this ploy. By luck of birth I was a particularly effective Straw Man. I could easily have been up to something––why else would I abandon family and career?  I had many contacts with people of interest to other countries and . . . who knows?

[1] I was warned about cardboard girls on the train to Rome. In my case, two eight or nine year old barefoot street urchins ran up to me holding unfolded cardboard boxes covered with writing in different languages. Each poked me in the stomach and side with their box, pointed at the words on the boxes, and jabbered at me as fast as they could. While I scanned the writing looking to understand, the girls pointing hands disapeared under the boxes, that block my view from my waist down, and into my pocket. The poking masked the feeling of their hands rummaging in my clothing while the jabbering and writing confused me. I suppose the observing policeman delayed my sense of peril. It all happened in seconds. I had to reach around and under a box to pull a hand off of my wallet.

When I travel I carry my wallet in my front pocket. After my encounter with the cardboard girls I carry a diaper safety-pin to pin my pocket shut when I am in dicy areas. I had one I really liked with a blue ducky clasp that I lost. I now have one with a yellow heart.

 

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Ghosts – In The Literal Sense

June 21, 2011 By

I have never believed in ghosts. I don’t believe in them now. But I did see ghosts once. If I were placed under oath I would have to swear that I saw them. I don’t expect to see a ghost again (because they don’t exist!), but I will be pleased if I do.

In 1981 I fell in love with the island of Bali. Over the next twenty years I visited ten or twelve times. I explored most of the island, but I am a creature of habit (ten or twelve visits) and I would also re-visit my favorite places each time I came back.

One of my favorite places is the water garden and temple at Tirtagangga in the Karangasem District. (If you ever go, take the road from Rendang to Selat.) Tirtagangga sits on the edge of a long triangular valley. The valley is broad at the base and comes to a point about a mile above Tirtagangga. The valley is nearly flat and no more than a few hundred feet below the surrounding hills. It is entirely covered with rice paddy fields (sawah) and is one of the prettiest places in a place that is already pretty beyond my ability to imagine.

The road to Tirtagangga goes up the left side of the valley and takes a chicane to the right and then the left as it negotiates the small side valley of the Tirtagangga spring before getting back to the edge of the valley proper. The temple and a few accommodations are just before the first turn. The road then crosses a stream, climbs past an abandoned house on a point overlooking the valley, and turns left with a spectacular view over the valley and the low, tropically wooded hills on the other side. It always takes my breath away.

But at night it is even more of an adventure. It is very dark at Tirtagangga, even near the several restaurants and accommodations. On the road you feel your way with your feet if you don’t have a flashlight. What little sense you get from starlight of the hillside to the left and the valley to the right, combined with the slope, camber, and curves of the road cause a bit of vertigo. And at night Bali already feels different from any other place I have been.

When you get as far as the overlook you sense the valley more than see it––unless there is a bit if the moon out. Either way, unless it is raining, you will see thousands of fireflies down in the valley. So many at once that your mind will start to create patterns between the several hundred that are visible at any given time. It’s like a Nova representation of how the synapses of the brain work.

The first several times I went to Tirtagangga was with my (future) second wife and we always walked the road together both day and night. I returned to Tirtagangga by myself after we separated and set out at night to see the valley and the fireflies I loved so much. I couldn’t get there. I became too afraid to go up the road to the overlook. I wasn’t afraid of anything in particular. I just had a feeling of overwhelming dread.

Several years later I went back to Tirtagangga and again tried and again failed to look over the valley at night. I never had a problem during the day. By day it is a very benign place. But at night it terrified me.

Two failures had me confused and concerned. I didn’t know what to do about the fear. I was very curious about what was causing it and decided to push through my fear on my next trip.

The night I pushed had intermittent, thin, scudding clouds drifting above the valley. Stars were visible between the clouds. There was just enough light to stay on the road without using a flashlight. I had one with me but I didn’t use it––I didn’t think that what ever was out there was going to jump at me; or if it did I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it anyway.

I felt that I was going to die as I walked up the road. I accepted the risk because it was so irrational. When I got to the overlook I was very agitated but in no physical harm. The valley was as it always was––except that there were no fireflies. There were the scattered clouds above, several lights from houses on the other side of the valley, and the dark, featureless valley below. No big deal! What a relief!

There was no spectacular view that night, but I stayed for a while enjoying feeling the adrenalin fade away after.

As I watched the valley I notice some new, lower clouds drifting slowly down the valley several hundred feet out at about my height. I was a meteorological observer in the army and I pay attention to clouds. Each of these clouds was a collection of several score to several hundred individual shapes unlike anything I had ever seen. Each shape was like a stereotypical ghost––a flowing shape with a big “head” and a tapering tail, but with no facial, arm, or leg features.

I believed this was a figment of my imagination; the result of my recent extreme fear and my straining to see in the dark––until one of the shapes passed between me and a house on the other side of the valley and momentarily blocked the light. That is when I knew I was seeing ghosts.

I spent an hour watching hundreds and hundreds of ghosts gently float down the valley in one cloud group after another. Some were close (never closer than several hundred feet), some far, some slightly higher, most of them slightly lower to the valley floor.

Initially, I was frozen in place but I decided to make myself known and face whatever additional fear there was. When I did move the ghosts didn’t react at all. They just continued to drift down the valley. Eventually, they became, somehow, comforting.

I was told by someone smarter than I that the true nature of reality is counter-intuitive. When I think hard enough about anything in this world I come to the conclusion I don’t understand most of what happens.

That time at Tirtagangga I saw ghosts––and as a result I found comfort.

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Utah

May 3, 2011 By

In 1972 my wife and I drove across the northeast corner of Utah, taking Interstate 80 out of Montana and 84 into Idaho. We left Montana after dinner and crossed into Idaho that same night before the bars closed. We were in a hurry. I was going to the University of Oregon and had five days to get from Massachusetts to Oregon; pulling a sixteen-foot trailer behind a three-on-the-column 1963 Rambler Classic. I remember the entire trip across Utah clearly, although several of the things we saw could not possibly have happened. I haven’t been back to Utah since, except to pass through the Salt Lake City Airport.

For three days we had been driving pretty much non-stop. One of us would drive and the other would sleep in the back seat. We were both tired from uncomfortable sleeping and the strain of driving while pulling a trailer bigger and heavier than the car, a trailer with no independent brakes. Once up to speed it was like being randomly pushed from behind by something that didn’t always want to go where you wanted to go.

Just before Utah we pulled off the interstate for dinner. The cafe we found had typically western food (we had burgers) and clientele (western shirts and hats) but a Vietnamese family ran it: grandparents, parents, and children. The burgers were pure American but the Vietnamese proprietors were pleasantly disorienting after the normalcy and monotony of the Montana interstate.  After dinner, we got back on the interstate. It was dusk and there was a red-orange glow in the west; but it wasn’t the sunset.

It wasn’t a fire either or any other red-orange glow I had ever seen before. The interstate was beginning a gradual descent off of the plateau we had been driving west on for many hours. Where the ground had sloped away gradually on both sides, creating a sense of unbounded openness, it began to flatten out and then became a broad valley with ever narrowing walls. The valley finally turned into a deep canyon. And as the road descended into the canyon, and the canyon got narrower, the red-orange glow got brighter.

I grew up in New England where the streetlights in my neighborhood put out that greenish light that was typical in the 1950’s. I had never before seen the red-orange glow of the sodium streetlights that is so common today, but that is what I was seeing. That light, reflecting off of the narrowing, red canyon walls, made it look like we were entering Hell. That was my unbidden thought in my exhausted state, that we were entering Hell; and I suppose it could have influenced what happened later.

The eerie streetlights lit a ”T” intersection and the beginning of interstate road upgrade construction from a two-lane road to a superhighway. I turned right toward Oregon and as I drove farther into the twists and turns of the still narrowing, descending canyon we left the disorienting glow behind. Soon there was no light anywhere. The cars that had turned with me at the intersection were gone. I was going 60 mph down hill in the dark and began to come up on construction equipment on the road, a compressor here, stacked concrete forms there, that I had to slalom to avoid. I was slowing to manage the weaving trailer pushing me on when I drove off the edge of an eight inch slab of concrete . . . and then another . . . and another. There was also much more construction equipment to avoid. It was like pinball in the dark.

I was slowing to stop when I reconnected with the old two-lane interstate; back with the traffic driving down and driving up the canyon that I had, somehow, lost track of. When I missed the detour and drove through the construction area I would have hit construction equipment if it had blocked the road or run into the face of an eight-inch face of a concrete slab if they had been pouring the other direction; with a sixteen-foot trailer squishing us from behind it would have been disastrous. I started to shake so I pulled into a rest area to relax.

The rest area was almost on the road but had a high concrete, construction traffic barricade separating it from the road. No traffic headlights lit the rest area and it was almost as dark as the construction area had been. The rest area was narrow, too, with just room enough for one driving lane and parallel parking. A seemingly unreasonably high chain link fence blocked access to the canyon wall just beyond. There was a slight glow from the traffic and if I leaned into the fence and strained my eyes I could just make out some tortured rock strata and a sign explaining what I was supposed to be looking at. It looked like I could have touched the rock if I could only get my arm through the fence.

As I strained against the fence for a look a blast of air knocked me sideways as a freight train, coasting down the canyon at great speed with its lights off, flashed by within arms reach. I hadn’t heard it coming. The blast of air and the roar of the train scared the wits out of me, again.

With no relief at the rest stop I started to drive again. The canyon stayed very narrow and the road became ever more twisty. Along with the road and the train tracks the canyon now had a rushing mountain river that had come in from somewhere. For miles the road, the train, and a river braided their way down the valley, over many bridges, crisscrossing in surprising, roller coaster like ways. Now I would be ahead of the train, now behind, sometimes parallel on the left or the right. The river would be left, right, underneath. It was sort of like skiing and created the relaxation I get from any activity requiring total concentration. This is the only part of Utah I liked. The train was slightly ahead when the canyon widened into a valley and the tracks began to drift off to the left. I was driving 65 mph and the train was pulling away rapidly. I watched with concern as it headed straight into a residential neighborhood, into what appeared an eminent disaster, running through back yards and passing between houses that were already too close.

We had a few moments of normalcy before there was another ”T” intersection. I turned right again, this time crossing the valley toward a shoulder of land with a now familiar, but still unwelcome, red-orange glow beyond. I drove under an old train overpass, braced for another train shock that didn’t come, and started up the hill. At the crest we left the darkness and looked out over Ogden, Utah, brightly lit with an improbably bright glow. With few trees or hills to block the streetlights it was almost like daylight.

It was around nine or ten on a Saturday night and there were teenagers out and about in cars and in groups on the side of the road. They were doing what teenagers typically do on Saturday night; cruising, and meeting, and talking, and having fun. Everything seemed normal again. I had been a teenager five years earlier and all of this made sense to me. But when I passed the first cruising car I saw that all of the occupants had horns. Not blow-into-them party horns, but horns on their foreheads; two little, inch long, rounded-off nubs of bone. And as I look closer in other cars and at people gather by the side of the road, I saw that everyone had horns! They behaved just like teenagers everywhere, they talked and laughed and flirted and (thankfully) ignored us, but they all had horns. The horns were very disturbing and disorienting. Fortunately, I had lived in New York City and done other mind-altering things and believed that if I just kept moving and acted like everything was normal I would be okay. (My wife remembers this trip as I do––except for the horns.)

That is what we did until we got lost. The interstates we were taking were being upgraded with new parts built randomly among the old without much thought to signage. When we got to the middle of Ogden I had to ask for directions. I saw a gas station lit with comforting white lights that softened the red-orange glow. It looked like the safest place to get out of the car. I went inside the gas station to ask for directions. Everyone still had horns, but no one seemed to pay any attention to me. The attendant behind the counter was constantly busy and I was shy about pushing forward for fear of drawing attention to myself, and I was not making any progress. While the attendant never looked at me I realized, after seven or eight minutes, that he was talking to me. He must have seen me pull in with the trailer because he said, “You go back two-and-a-half blocks and turn right down the alley just past the dry cleaners.” I was late understanding that he was talking to me and he repeated, “That’s right, you go back two-and-a-half blocks and turn right down the alley just past the dry cleaners.”

When I got back in the car and told my wife the directions she just shrugged with the resignation we both felt––completely at the mercy of forces we didn’t understand and were afraid to question. I drove back two-and-a-half blocks and turned right into an alley just past the dry cleaners. It was a tight corner between main street businesses into a typical city alley. But in a block the alley ended and became a residential street. The streets to the right and left were residential too. The neighborhood was single family, two-story California style bungalows. There were sidewalks and lawns and trees and, for once, the normal greenish streetlights that made everything look back to normal. After driving several blocks through the neighborhood I came to a stop sign. To the left was a typical neighborhood street, houses, lawns, the works; and to the right was the same; but directly ahead across the intersection was a gleaming, new four lane concrete interstate on ramp crammed between two houses.  The ramp took us up higher than the houses on each side and then dropped us down into . . . nothing. The neighborhood was behind us now, there were no lights ahead, and we were on eight lanes of new blacktop with no lane lines for guidance and no traffic, anywhere, to worry about. Within a mile the pavement became six lanes; then four lanes; then two lanes. The pavement finally quit altogether and we were on a dirt road; and then the dirt road became two ruts in the desert. We were now four or five miles outside of Ogden, on two dirt ruts in the desert, with nothing visible except the glow of Ogden behind.

The two ruts put me over the edge. I was afraid to go on and I couldn’t back the trailer up in the ruts in the dark. I told my wife I couldn’t do any more, climbed into the back sleep, and went to sleep. I would see where we were in the morning and figure out what we should do. She, however, noticed moving lights several miles away off toward the left and decided to drive on while I slept. She told me later that as she continued to drive the ruts became a dirt road again, then the dirt road was paved and grew wider; eventually reconnecting with the car lights on the interstate.

I woke up when she stopped at a bar, across the Utah border in Idaho, to use the restroom and get some coffee. It was the only place still open. I followed her in several minutes later, woozy from the trip across Utah, and I discovered that the trip wasn’t yet over. The bar was crowded with scores of people from Utah who had come across the border to drink. Every man I looked at in the bar looked exactly like our old landlord in Fairbanks and every woman looked exactly like our old landlady in Fairbanks (both of whom were from Utah). Everyone had left his or her horns in Utah.

We decided, before we went into the bar, to sleep in the car somewhere nearby. But seeing landlords everywhere convinced us to press on. I took over the driving again and when we found an unoccupied parking lot at a small municipal airport we slept. The morning brought everything back to normal; or as close to normal as anyone’s life ever gets. Later that day, as we pulled across Idaho in first gear, at fifteen miles an hour, into a horrendous head wind, we bent three valve lifters. But, thankfully, that was just normal bad luck.

[I wrote about this trip thirty-eight years after the fact––as a prelude to another trip to Utah. I flew in and out of Salt Lake City this time and drove to and from Moab for a canoe trip on the Green River and to hike in Arches National Park. Every Utahan I met looked normal and the state, in the daylight, is spectacular.]

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Magical Life

April 9, 2011 By

Sometimes I feel like I’m packed in cotton. I see what is happening  around me, but I don’t feel very connected to anything. Nothing––good or bad––comes through at its usual intensity.

I remain comfortable enough, but my life is muted and not very interesting. There is no magic and without magic life seems . . . blah.

I am not normally a Sad Sack. My life has been filled with magic: childhood magic, teenage magic, young-adult magic, marriage magic, child-rearing magic, travel magic.

Not all of the magic was pleasant. I wouldn’t wish teen-agedom on anyone. I’ve been divorced. I’ve struggled at work.

But in both pleasure and pain I knew I was alive to the events of my life; life had intensity.

Now I find that things are just . . . ho-hum. I feel like a fly caught in amber. I can’t experience the world outside clearly as the amber slowly hardens around me.

I have resolved most “issues” from my past––I rarely dwell on the unpleasant aspects of my life that used to plague me. I hope, however, that I remember that this “amber” feeling has happened before and that it is never permanent.

Through the good, the bad, and the ugly, I was always able to reconnect with the magic in life; not always right away, but I have always found it. Now, just like before, I remain cottony-connected until I find my magical life again.

I know what magic feels like. Today, for whatever reason, it is just out of reach––but not forever.

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Why Don’t I Get Respect?

April 9, 2011 By

I got serious about recycling about ten years ago. Before then I didn’t recycle. I believed that recycling shouldn’t be required until it could support itself financially. As my father said, when his city made him do the sorting of recyclables into bins, “I didn’t retire to become a trash man.”

My wife was an early fan of recycling and spent years politely coercing me to do more recycling. Ten years ago she became the Executive Director of ALPAR (Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling). I become an active recycler to support her in her career choice.

I still didn’t believe in recycling that couldn’t support itself financially, but I decided to do what she believes is the right thing. (And recycling in Alaska has its own unique financial challenges because of its isolation.)

I stopped dragging my feet on recycling and started doing all of the things she wanted me to do––without objection. And this is where it got tricky.

I got no respect for doing the right thing! I got no respect because she said I wasn’t recycling for the right reasons. Doing the right thing and supporting her didn’t count because I still didn’t “believe” in recycling. All I got from her was a reprieve from criticism for not recycling and continued comments about my lack of belief.

This floored me. It is easy to do the things you believe in. It is harder to do things, even proper things, when you don’t believe in them. I thought the latter would garner more respect, not less.

I have now become a believer (as has my father) in both the necessity and advantages of recycling, regardless of the financials.

But I have given thought to the difference between doing something because you believe in it and doing it because others tell you it is the right thing to do. I think that doing something you don’t believe in because the majority of people influencing you, whom you trust, are telling you to do it is a superior moral act to merely following a belief. My wife doesn’t agree . . . and I am coming to believe that she may not be in the minority.

Even still, a person’s actions must be far more important than their beliefs. It is only actions that can cause good––and harm. Beliefs don’t do anything until they are acted on.

In my perfect world actions would be the only things that count; and good actions taken without the underpinning of a “proper” belief would count even more.

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