Chapter 4 

To walk alone, in the woods, within the sound of water is a divine sort of experience. There were no other habitations within miles of the farm and if one started walking toward the top of the mountain they were assured that nothing would stop them. Well, there were bears and snakes but they weren't necessarily going to harass the humans out on an adventure.

I had never walked for pleasure before. I had always walked because I had to and usually the walk happened in the city. A walkable city is quite remarkable but to walk in the woods, along a drawn out piece of water is transformative. It dissipates all 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 becomes 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.

There were dogs 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, writer, 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 the snake represented something, was a symbol for sudden danger that could be inflicted in a second. But 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 into every bit of high grass 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.

Walking is like most lost privileges; it is 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, sere day I remembered that picture I saw. 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. When I returned from a good walk I realized I had no excuses or bitterness. I always 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 that would make me happy.

Once I went outside in the cold, cold night. The full moon appeared over a peak of hills and I looked at it for awhile 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 have put into understanding the universe. That's sometimes what a little walk will do.

As we 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 whole 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 no 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, well, millions of fish that had no doubt 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 sat watching that water I was hypnotized by. 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.

Water always proved to me that the healthiest things are free and we squander them under foot since free things appear abundant. Something worked to bring the water. The difficulty for free things to appear should never be taken for granted. I learned 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 ot it. They knew the benefits of the truly free and once you get some density in the population money comes into the picutre. 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 walked 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 fellow 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 a 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, even, struggled to get to his feet to acknowledge their approbation.

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 farmer peasant hut and the farmer 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 farmer 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 farmer 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. I do not even consider this place an experiment. cIt'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.

David Eide
January 24, 2014