Chapter 3 

He stipped 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. 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.

David Eide
January 24, 2014