Introduction: Chamomile began with a text from my friend Kali to our maker group, The Magpies. She told us about finding a desperate, anonymous letter cringing in an Oregon gutter, picking it up, and bringing it home. Wanting to offer the stranger’s words a blessing, Kali created a piece of art—layering five bright chamomile blooms over the fragment to heal its pain.

Inspired by her gesture, I developed her account into this short story. Later, I bound the story into a physical accordion book and presented it back to Kali at one of our Magpies gatherings (photos below). Here is the piece, born from a lost letter, a friend’s compassion, and a sacred herb

Chamomile

for Kali

The letter caught her eye because the light struck its folded edge, white against the dark of the gutter. The artist stopped to inspect the shiny thing, a habit born from her life as a collector of found objects: a red button, a short length of copper wire, a muddy prayer flag of a moon goddess. A letter in the gutter surprised her, though. It cringed there as if it didn’t want to be seen, freshly white, expecting the strike of a boot, the tear of a bicycle wheel, erasure by rain.

The artist spared a glance at the sky – rain on the way—she smelled it in that freshening change of humidity Oregon natives always recognized. She crouched down on her heels to memorize the placement of the letter: a water spout flecked in chipping blue sky paint to its right, the rectilinear, red and white mortar brick wall laid in another century behind it. The gutter itself ran dark with the grime of runoff from recent rains.

The artist couldn’t clearly distinguish the object as a letter—only a crumpled sheet that had half unfolded itself. Slowly, respectfully, she reached out and used her right thumb and forefinger to pick it up. Still crouched, she smoothed the paper on her knee and read.

The handwriting began neat and controlled at the top of the page, but by the bottom, the lines tilted downward, crowding each other out like people trying to fit into a small shadow. The ink smeared on the phrase, “before he wakes,“ but the writer had written “before“ with such a frantic downward stroke, it had nearly torn the page.

The artist looked away to steady herself against the sudden prick of pain. Between the water spout and the brick wall, a spider wrapped up a bee struggling in its web. The spider moved confidently, darting out to throw silk threads, tightening, tightening. Without thinking, the artist lifted the sharp edge of the letter and cut the bee free. It buzzed its wings experimentally and lifted off, just as Spider stopped to investigate this invasion by an unimaginable force, an entity too far away to comprehend or bring into focus. It paused. Stilled.

Almost nonchalantly, almost as if she didn’t even think about her actions, the artist returned her attention to the desperate page: a woman’s struggle to free herself from an abusive partner. Her instinct demanded she help, but she found no identifier on the paper, which featured a torn edge, as if ripped from a journal very like the one she carried herself.

She realized she had stepped into a private moment, one she possessed no right to observe or interfere with in any way. She quickly smoothed the page, flattening the creases where a hand had hurriedly crumpled it. Instead, she carefully folded it in half and then into quarters, pressing the folds flat, then into eighths. She slung her backpack off and tucked the letter like a bookmark into her journal.

The journal featured two hard, black, square covers, and it opened like a concertina. The pages sang with scribbles of colored pencils – elephants in the sky, slices of pizza, and a mango tree. Other pages revealed mighty splashes of acrylic paint, cheerful yellow flowers against stormy Payne’s Gray skies.

The accordion pages bore a heavy layer of collage pieces found in the forest park or city streets – bits of a rodeo poster, a bronc rider pasted over dried orange poppy leaves, the circular tracing of a tin can lid too heavy to affix. The journal opened like a story, ordering the jumble of an observed and gathered life. Into this world, Letter found her first home between the elephant and the cowboy.

The artist put the journal in the pack, the pack on her shoulders, which instantly felt as if it had taken on weight. As if she had placed a stone in there, or an unread book.

The artist’s work room resembled a nook more than an actual studio, but she liked to call it that anyway. If she wanted a window, she moved a small table into her kitchen. When she unpacked her journal from her walk a week before, Letter fell out onto her work table, and that pin prick to the heart drew a little blood again.

Letter found her second home tacked to the artist’s mood board, a small sheet of cork for her ephemera—a place where objects rested alone or with each other for a long time, dreaming into who they might become when they came again into the green intensity of the artist’s eye.

Letter herself lived a long time on the mood board. For days, she kept company with an orangutan with so much to say for himself that the artist took him away to a painting all his own. Orangutan left her side, replaced by Lake, calm and reflective, the depths falling off to ever-deepening greens. Placed next to Lake, the jagged edges of Letter seemed to soften into that cool, quiet water.

One day, the artist entered the studio nook holding a bouquet of weedy stems with white, yellow-centered flowers. The chamomile emitted a pungence the artist recognized as a healing scent. The white stars lit the dark sky of the studio nook, remaining long after the water in the vase evaporated and Chamomile dried to ghostly stems. The artist pinned Chamomile to the mood board, its woody branches crossing Lake, the flowerhead resting in the lap of Letter.

The artist appreciated this white on white composition. The flowers resembled paper now, thinning until she thought she could read the words of anguish hidden behind them. The yellow centers still glowed like little suns, and the scent coaxed her eyelids to droop into one of those afternoon trances where the soul drifts away for a while to do other business, then slips with pollen-streaked cheeks back into the body just as it wakes.

Somewhere in the back of the house, a sharp bell rang. Awakened, the artist began to open the accordion journal. As she did, a fine dust arose from it like an elixir caught in a shaft of lamp light. She gently pried some of the pages apart where the gloss medium made them sticky. She unfolded the pages the way you would an old, known book that as a child you’d read and reread, always finding surprises in the ending, forgetting as each page turned exactly how the story went.

The last four squares of the journal remained blank. She always assigned an unreasonable amount of importance to the final pages of any of her hundreds of art journals, just as a new one always required a clean brush and a sharp exhale before the first mark.

The moments swirled like dark ink around her. She stilled within, then saw Letter, waiting. The artist reached up, unpinned Lake, Letter, and Chamomile, and placed them on the white planes of unmarked paper. She unfolded Letter and faced the source of the inky dark. A solitary glance through the paragraphs sufficed—seeing, yet choosing not to see, the words as they clashed and cried into each other.

Very carefully, she tore Letter in half lengthwise. Then again, until Letter fell in strips. She heard a sigh as the strips fell outside the pool of lamp light into the shadows. Understanding the sound, she picked up each strip and tore it into further fragments, dropping the torn phrases and teary exclamation points into a pile on the lit page. Every little, “I loved you,” “I hate you,” “you hurt me” broke into the fragile heap. The artist gently swept them to one side and opened a bottle of matte medium. She decanted two ounces into a plastic applesauce cup, the smooth white gel pooling like double cream.

Using an old brush, the artist painted the surface of the pages until they shone wet from edge to edge. She used tweezers to pick up the torn shards of Letter. Every piece claimed its place, as if it knew of its own accord where it belonged in the whole. When she had wallpapered the four pages with the fragments, the artist let them dry.

The way certain phrases stood out—“the click of the garden gate,” “iron,” “broken”—bothered her. She entered this private moment with a doctor’s trepidation, knowing these words belonged to no other eyes. Chamomile waved from a corner, so the artist relocated her to a pencil holder patterned with yellow and black bees buzzing around and around. She noted with pleasure how Chamomile and Bee resembled each other.

She mixed white with Payne’s Gray and used a roller to cover the surface of the pages, obscuring the words yet letting the selfness of Letter show through. Chamomile bloomed on the page: five large, emphatic flowers lined in strong black, the gold center splash repeating in sky blue and spring green.

As she painted, the artist thought how down through thousands of years people had dedicated Chamomile to Ra, the sun god, the Egyptians burning it as sacred incense. How communities featured Chamomile in rituals of the dead to ensure safe passage to the afterlife. How history honored her as one of the nine sacred herbs, endowed with a supernatural ability to overcome venom and infection.

The painting seemed finished to her, those five flowers blooming over the obscured and broken words. She paused, brush suspended. Through the half-open window she could hear the distant buzz of bees in her lavender. The scent of chamomile lifted from the page and drifted over the sill. She saw how the scent carried the words, and how the words blew away in the wind.

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P.S. If you love Kali’s “Camomile” as much as I do, you can find it on the cover of an inviting journal, shown here, available at this link: CHAMOMILE DREAMS

Janet Rabbit may only be twelve inches high, and just a “chubby little cubby all stuff’d with fluff,“ like Winnie the Pooh, but she is Tuesday’s child and full of grace. She has golden fur all over, including her sturdy, oblong feet. White belly, white chin, and the soft interior of her almost upright ears a pale ecru velveteen. Janet Rabbit extends her paws in front of her as if clapping them in eternal surprise and delight. She wears quite a fetching coral cape around her shoulders that clasps under her tiny white chin. It is lined with a darker orange, to show how she is stylish. Best of all are her vivid, very dark green eyes with black expressive pupils that catch the light from many angles. Along with all the other rabbits who live on the bookshelves of my studio (which we call The Meadow of Dreams), she makes lively daily commentary tracking my journaling, my comings and goings, my to-ings, and fro-ings.

***

Two years later, I stepped straight out of my journal and into reality. The Italian company name, “It’s Liquid,“ was almost a mythological choice of name as I think back on it – they definitely flowed, that’s for sure. Using an online enticement, I was assured I was especially chosen to show my photographs at the London Contemporary Art Fair.

In some ways opening night, as magnificent as it was, was my own fault or at least of my own doing. Maybe two years before, I had fallen into a reverie one day while writing in my journal under the guiding eyes of the Meadow of Dream rabbits – this was long before Janet came to live with all of us—and I saw clearly in my mind‘s eye that I was having an opening in a European capital, Paris, I thought, or London. In my trance writing, it was opening night, and people were arriving into the vivid, glowing gallery. Champagne flowed. Outside, the streets were wet with rain, neon reflecting in wide puddles. Young women with tall boots and mini skirts arrived with young men with full sleeve tattoos and partially shaved heads. It seemed all the world like a scene from a 1980s movie, you know the one, that rainy night at the Art Gallery scene.

(Above) “The soul’s high adventure caught on film: entering the vivid, glowing gallery night pre-created in a dream.”

***

Janet Rabbit and I met in the Victoria and Albert Museum gift shop during an expansive Beatrix Potter exhibition. I turned sharply, and my big Kate Spade bag clipped a display table edge. Janet tumbled from her clone-stack, but bypassed the floor entirely, diving head-first straight into my tote’s wide-open mouth. Looking down, I found a pair of sturdy, oblong feet kicking mid-air amidst my wallet and keys. Once righted, she sat up, adjusted her eye-catching coral cape, and claimed her new home. She occupied that roomy harbor, her eyes and curious ears scanning the London cityscape as we set out to explore it together.

The dream-like night of the opening arrived: it was raining, and the girls wore tall, high heeled boots, and the boys had handsome tattoos. Exactly as in my journal entry so long before so specifically detailed.

Pay-to-play meant sliding gallery walls were hung cheek by jowl with every wild style and attended by artists from all over the world. These sleek Italians operated on a different cultural currency altogether, building the physical stage by their own lights, magnificent and glittering to my hometown eyes, but I had already pre-created the night itself. My gilded photographs hung in the back and were displayed with a little more air than most. I was well pleased, at any rate, as nothing this exciting had ever happened to me.

The best moment arrived when a woman speaking a language I didn’t recognize raised her voice in fierce complaint just as the gallery doors opened. She grew louder and louder. Luca, the owner of It’s Liquid, marched over and tried to shout her down. This abstract artist insisted she had received a promise to have her five muddy, politically important paintings hung in a straight row; instead, the curator had stacked them.

“The story doesn’t make sense otherwise!“ she screamed.

By this time, all the other artists had either gathered around or tilted their ears from behind their respective walls. She possessed a carrying voice with the distinct wail of a devastated Greek chorus. Only a few gathered artists spoke her language, but they quickly translated her fury into a dozen other tongues. I caught the narrative from an Italian artist, who simulcast the drama for the benefit of all of us huddled in the back room in a bewildering mix of Czech, Italian and English. Fearless Luca went toe-to-toe with her. She could either accept the arrangement as hung or leave the show.

I’m pretty sure there was no talk of a refund. It’s Liquid didn’t stay as well liquefied as it was by doing anything quite so foolish as returning money. Eventually, the artist subsided into a puddle of dark mutterings as the gallery filled up with boots and tattoos.

As a small-town, West Coast American girl now navigating my senior years, I soaked up every drop of this internationalism. I even posed for a photograph with the handsome Italian owner.

Then suddenly the magic snapped, the lights died, and I stood on a wet street in a foreign city. I had absolutely no idea how I had gotten there, or how I would navigate my way back to an Airbnb tucked into some distant, unpronounceable suburb. Janet Rabbit had drifted off to sleep in her Kate Spade burrow hours ago and was of no help.

A man I had chatted with earlier about my art materialized by my side, radiating genuine kindness. He walked me the half-mile to the Tube, boarded the train, and rode all the way to my stop, ensuring I knew which direction to walk once I stepped onto the eerily empty platform. From the safety of her leather harbor, Janet’s sleepy velvet ears seemed to tilt toward his quiet, guiding voice. He carried an angel’s name—Michael, perhaps, or Gabriel, I feel certain of that. The thing is, I was on the soul’s high adventure, and I could feel them all around me in the empty station—the unseen protectors, the guardian animals from the bookshelf back home, keeping watch alongside my guide.

***

Mass-teria ambushed us on October 14 inside Room 43 of the National Gallery, instantly turning a quiet museum into an arty war zone. The improbable smell of tomato assaulted the wax-and-varnish gentility of the Great Masters’ hall. Peace evaporated as screaming voices shattered the air: “Oh my God! Security! Security!”

Janet and I barely caught a glimpse of two young women hurling Cream of Tomato Soup onto one of Van Gogh’s multi-million-dollar sunflower paintings. Glass protected the canvas, but bulletproof barriers didn’t stop young Phoebe and Anna from super-gluing their hands to the wall. Phoebe was beside herself, shouting, “What is worth more, art or life?”

As the crowd surged backward in panic, my big Kate Spade bag swung wildly on my shoulder. Instead of tucking her ears away in fright, Janet Rabbit scrambled right up to the unzipped leather rim, her green eyes wide, body vibrating with the high-stakes thrill of the commotion. She didn’t want quiet. She wanted a front-row seat to the revolution.

As security guards hustled Phoebe’s potential audience out onto the promenade, her voice trailed us—still ringing out about climate change and dying ecosystems. We had caught what would become a global news sensation across mere seconds, not minutes. The moment of violence struck, vivid and abrupt—the way a memory of something bad you did in high school will suddenly hijack your mind while you’re standing at the kitchen sink washing dishes.

***

In a world tethered strictly to the surface of things, an older woman who gives a live voice to a plush companion might look like someone losing her footing in time. But looking into Janet’s vivid green eyes, the clock’s rigid rules dissolve. I refuse to live inside that mechanical Grandfather Clock. My feet have always preferred the path over the bone rope into myth time, where stories begin inside a dream and continue years later in a London gallery.

In my private world, all things possess story and hold agency. In the Meadow of Dreams, Spirit Bear beats the drum, gathering us early under the Great Tree by the River Nowhere. I emerge from the frosty orchard of my childhood, tasting the metallic bite of early ice, then step through the brass-barred Gate into the sudden, balmy warmth of an early summer dawn. Wild clover fills the air. The mythic white Horses of the Dawn, tinged rose with radiant light, flash by in a loud gallop, throwing up warm turf-divots.

A child again, I cross the Old Growth Forest to enter the Meadow of Dreams. We gather in Council—all the Rabbits, Sloth, Otter, Sasquatch, and the Sandy Doll my mother made for me so long ago. Great decisions are made here, and even our smallest imaginings are made large in our Dreaming together.

***

Janet Rabbit rode high on top of my luggage as I wheeled it through the long Customs line. As we approached the kiosk, an official-looking, uniformed woman stopped short, parking herself with wide legs, arms clasped behind her back. She leaned forward, thrust her chin out, and addressed Janet firmly: “Young lady, every passenger must have a passport.”

Janet clapped her hands in delight. The Customs Woman accepted that joyful sound as passport enough, as if the scent of wild clover had been stamped on a blank page, and let us through the Gate.

***

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My sister Cheryl was born an artist—a fact our mother discovered when she caught her scribbling with a Marilyn Monroe red lipstick on her white crib sheet. Our parents fostered her love of art by sending her to Susie Wilson, a watercolorist friend of theirs. Watercolor became her medium of choice, although throughout her lifetime, she worked in oil, pastel and acrylic, always coming home to watercolor. Early photographs show her with knees tucked up balancing a sketchbook, pencil hand poised like a bird in flight while her far-seeing eye considers the vanishing point between sea and sky.

Today, I am looking back at her life from the wreckage of the present. She and her husband Tom are both gone, and I’m here as one of five women seeking to preserve their legacy while also cleaning their house and getting it back on the market. Hers was not an easy life, but art sustained her. A graduate of Burnley School of Art in Seattle, she worked as a demonstration artist for Daniel Smith, a premier watercolor brand that specializes in essential minerals to make their product. Cheryl also taught through many different art schools and galleries; however, she is best remembered by her last generation of students in Ellensburg, Washington. All these remaining framed paintings and flat art are the end of the world they had built together – the final end of a lifetime in art.

Before Cheryl passed, she had a three month window to get her affairs in order. She gave away as much art as she could. Her art supplies were given away until only one plastic bin remained. Two other bins contained her sketchbooks. These and 30 or 40 framed paintings, went into storage as Tom struggled through his last two years commuting monthly in his truck to Sacramento to tag-team his brother in caring for his 100 year-old mother.

Those were punctuated years, and his distress was evident in the neglected house. We five women arrived in early June to deconstruct the house. The rats had gotten into the house during his many absences, destroying art on several fronts – the paper backing on framed pieces, and then the highest quality watercolor paper.

When we arrived, we each chose our battles; for example, daughter Tristan was the project manager, rockhound niece Maya took on the curation of Tom’s collection of crystals, thundereggs, and specimens, both raw and refined, and so on. My job was to salvage as much of Cheryl‘s art as I could.

Framed art had been shoved back behind a second floor stairwell, a place where the house cleaners hadn’t reached. Masked and gloved, I dove again and again into that dark, rat-infested hole to drag out art that still sparkled with Cheryl’s characteristic verve, for she was an ecstatic and painted with a rich, compelling palette of saturated watercolors. A few I had to abandon due to damage, but by and large, I rescued gem after gem after gem.

It broke my heart to see her asking prices, which couldn’t have even covered the price of the frames. I hated that she lived on the edge – money was always a problem.

But the house held one more secret.

In another attic corner, we found two stacked flat drawer cabinets – metal on the bottom and a nice wood one on top, both with multiple drawers, each one full of flat art: attempts, tries, half finished, almost finished, and whole original art that I had never seen before. This was a mother lode: hundreds of sheets of Arches watercolor paper still glimmering with Cheryl‘s characteristic washes—moody, rainy skies or horizons saturated with dawn light. One perfect kestrel. A snowy owl in flight. The fierce amber gaze of a golden eagle. Starlight on junipers. Earliest yellow maple catkins, marsh grasses in the wind, stark, black poplars silhouetted against the storm.

Here was all Cheryl‘s passion for beauty, for both the abstract splash and the avian detail. Her joy in every season, her zest for the experimental, and the deep, quiet currents of her spirituality—captured in the translucent, floating form of an empty purple gown suspended in the clouds, and a crimson jacket drifting weightless over cresting blue waves.

Here, too, was her obsession with Mexico, the Southwest, and the drylands of the interior Pacific Northwest.

[In the video above, Cheryl talks about the beauty of the Southwest, her paintings, and a road trip she promised never to forget.

Overwhelmed, I struggled with how to even physically deal with this cornucopia of beauty, the art at the end of Cheryl’s world.

At one hopeless moment, I thought about just walking away from it all, but my husband said on a text, absolutely not – bring it all home if you have to. I unloaded all of the flat art into my Subaru, which was already riding a couple inches closer to the ground from other salvaged boxes.

Once all the framed art eventually made it down the stairs, we staged it across the living room. We had a master list of people requesting pieces—maybe a dozen in all—but what were we to do with the rest? Put it in storage and worry about it later? In the back of my mind was a memory of Cheryl‘s daughter Tristan taking dictation from Cheryl on her deathbed. And one of those instructions had been to donate her art to her favorite local Ellensburg art museum. We were all from many driving hours away, and there were so many other details to get our attention that we hadn’t been able to make that connection: we just ran out of time.

We stopped for the day, went back to our Airbnb for showers before going out to Bruce’s Place for drinks with Marlena Capes, who had been a student and friend of Cheryl’s.

Marlena was a slim, attractive blonde with a warm personality. She told us that she and Cheryl used to meet at this bar to share Old Fashions and talk art. We all ordered an Old Fashion and rose them in a memoriam cheer to Cheryl and Tom.

As we all talked all things Cheryl and art, it dawned on me that Marlena might know how to help keep all this art in safe local hands. She told me that she was in contact with Cheryl’s art group and how many of them had wished they had a piece of Cheryl‘s art. Then and there I proposed and Marlena accepted the transfer of all this art to her garage, where she could clean it up and distribute it locally.

I couldn’t have been more thrilled. I felt she was yet another of Cheryl‘s last angels.

And so it was all of the flat art got out of my car and into hers – the framed art out of the house and into her garage. What a relief that was to us all, what a lifting of a weight on our hearts.

Mary Oliver asked a very pertinent question: “Tell me, what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?“

One product of that life is the legacy we leave behind at the end of our worlds. But a wild and precious life isn’t just a collection of “art”—it is the fierce amber gaze of an eagle, the saturated dawn washes, the Marilyn Monroe lipstick on a crib sheet. That legacy is actually the enduring electricity of the person who made it. When we leave, the art remains behind as a living testament to how deeply they saw the world.

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Last night, the boundaries between then and now simply dissolved. I was sitting in the darkened theater, listening to the local performer Siri Vik sing French chansons—the very melodies that would have scored my parents’ lives in the 1930s and ‘40s.

As I gave myself to the music, the air beside me shifted. My father, Warren, materialized in the seat next to me. He was young, dressed in his uniform, his service cap resting in his lap with a soldier’s quiet discipline. Mickey sat beside him, their hands entwined, her face tilted toward the music with that ecstatic nature I remember so well.

I sat inside the bubble of their great, expansive love—an aura so thick and rich I could almost breathe it in. Though I was invisible to them, I was held by them. I saw my sister Cheryl there, too, but Warren and Mickey were oblivious to the passage of time. They were suspended in a ‘perfect time’—a vie en rose—the singular purity out of which our entire world would eventually expand and grow.

Crying in the dark, I realized I was witnessing the ‘earliest heart’ of my own existence. It was a reminder that the spirit of love is always closer than breathing; nearer than hands and feet.

This profound visitation felt like a confirmation of a talk I gave just a few weeks ago. I stood in the quiet light of The Oblivion Gallery to share the story behind my two current collections, I Dream in Gold and Where Memories Softly Fall. Because my art class at the Maude Kerns Art Center was canceled for the holiday, I finally had the time to sit with the transcript of that talk and realize it was always leading me back to this moment in the theater.

I wanted to share the highlights of that talk with you here—an origin story that begins in the apple orchards of my childhood and ends with the 24K gold on my studio table. It is a journey between two worlds, and I’m so glad you’re walking it with me

The Orchard and the Dream

I want to say that when I was a young girl growing up in the apple orchards on horseback along the Wenatchee River, I lived inside the dream that was my family unit. My father was a World War II vet who turned his government issue gunstock into a camera mount, a soldier remaking himself into an artist.

My mother fell in love with him when she was only 11 and he was 13; they married after the war and raised us four siblings and many more like a pack of wolf puppies who followed wherever they led.

We were a backpacking family exploring the splendors of what would become the North Cascades National Park. In our back yard was the range called The Enchantments.

The older I get, the deeper the mystery of their unshakable, expansive love affair—my father’s clarity, my mother’s ecstatic nature. If my mother met any one of you, within minutes she would have brought you to tears with her heart to heart ecstatic message that “You are divine. Your very nature is love. I see you, and I love you unconditionally”.

Of all my beloved siblings, for much of our mutual life, I was closest to my older sister Cheryl. She was a watercolor artist and teacher who suddenly passed two years ago, which combined with the death of our parents, left me hopelessly lost and increasingly looking to the past for a way to express what our life together had meant.

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The Nest and the Mystery

My earliest memories are of being with my dolls and cat under the green veil of a weeping willow tree. I remember making a nest in a meadow, braiding the grass over my head until I looked out through the layers of leaves. I dug a hole there and buried a tin can I had filled with stones and shells and a skeleton of a mouse I found in an owl’s pellet.

I lived then, as I realize I do now, at the edge of the Great Mystery, Between Two Worlds. I was accompanied by an enormous Giantess who was real in one world and imaginary in the other.

I came to understand while exploring those magical apple orchards that are no more, that I was always in the company of wild animals that loomed large with their vast energies and their knowing eyes. I’ve never stopped living in that world of layered lights and wordless shadows.

The Shamanistic Role of Art

In college I earned my MFA in Poetry with a thesis about the shamanistic role poetry has in connecting the world of the rational with the world of the imaginal. I went on to have a career teaching writing where my Writing 121 classes were called The Hero’s Journey. Although I succeeded at teaching at LCC, the teacher’s life was a difficult one for me, and I gladly retired from it in 2015. I turned, somewhat bruised and battered, to my father’s love of photography and my sister’s love of abstract realism.

After a few years of experimentation I turned back to these images which first formed my earliest heart. My desire then and now is somehow to convey through art how the light of That Other World always finds a way to stream into this one.

I Dream in Gold / Where Memories Softly Fall

I developed a technique of printing on transparency Lumina Film then coating the back with 24 Karat gold. The result is a soft golden glow that reminds us that the spirit of love is always as I said earlier, “closer than breathing; nearer than hands and feet.” The pieces I call I Dream in Gold are for my gold and silver leaf work.

On the other side of the Oblivion Gallery (and my brain!) is my effort to explain what I feel when the spirit leaves this world and crosses over the Great River to That Other World. I call this collection “Where Memories Softly Fall,” and these are primarily printed on a beautiful watercolor paper then cold waxed by hand to create a rich, old world surface where the light can come in.

The genesis of "Where Memory Softly Falls" emerged in the late autumn of 2023, during a breathtaking drive down the Columbia River Gorge with my younger sister Toren on a radiant autumn evening, just days after our final visit with our sister Cheryl, who would soon depart from us. The vibrant landscape mirrored the raw, unresolved emotions of impending loss, becoming the visual echo of a profound personal transition.

This series explores the experience of grasping at slipping memories and the shock of absence when a beloved sibling, deeply connected to the Great Mystery of art and the wild, moves between worlds. In these dreamlike compositions, I feel her spirit ascend even as her journey ends and a new one begins for those of us left behind.

Through composite photographs—layering images to reflect fragmented memories and evolving perspectives—I recreate the brilliant abundance of nature, often incorporating symbolic figures and elements. These pieces evoke the veil between living and departed realms, exploring themes of spirit and lingering presence. "Where Memory Softly Falls" is an evolving series, a contemplative journey shaped by the ebb and flow of dream and memory.

Video: “A Story I Don’t Want to Forget”

I would love to hear from you in the comments—is there a specific 'image of your earliest heart' that still guides your life today?

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P.S. If you’d like to hear the music and poetry that grew from these memories, you can find my new tracks on Bandcamp here: Music/Sandy Brown Jensen

It has been a quiet season here on That Mystic Road. Sometimes the most important work happens in the silence, in the slow steps taken when the air turns sharp and the light begins to lean toward the horizon.

Lately, I have been walking with my camera, trying to catch the feeling of this transition—the way the land holds our memories as the seasons shift.

I. Shadow Walking

I recently found myself at Fall Creek Delta. There is a clarity there in the deep cold. It is a strange, wonderful thing to be amazed by one’s own shadow—to realize that despite the passage of time, we are still here, walking across an ancient land with our hearts in our hands.

I’m amazed I have a shadow,

I’m amazed I have a life.

The river holds the afterglow.

The cold cuts like a knife.

II. Rainy Day on Wild Iris Ridge

Earlier this winter, I walked Wild Iris Ridge. I felt that fragile “bridge of thorns” between the storms. It’s a place where the “scrumpy apples” light the way, even as old friends begin to slip away into the overstory of time.

Sun is out

And Sun is gone,

But always love threads through my song.

In both these places, the land has left its mark on me, just as the years have. I am learning to walk home in the dark, sheltered by the stories we tell ourselves and the love that “threads through my song.”

I would love to hear how the winter light is finding you. Are you, too, finding yourself “shadow walking” this week?

With gratitude,

Sandy

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A Note to My Local Friends

I tell stories, I write poetry, I make videos.

I am a seeker of light in the Pacific Northwest, capturing the places where memory and landscape meet. You are receiving this because we’ve connected through my art exhibitions, “Viz City,” or my local studio work in Eugene.

I’m moving my digital dispatches to this home on Substack. Beyond my gallery shows, That Mystic Road is where I share the “behind-the-scenes” of my process—from the gilded photography of I Dream in Gold to these quiet video meditations. I’m so glad you’re here.

If this isn’t for you, you can unsubscribe at the bottom of this email at any time—no hard feelings!

The entire journey—my life, my work, and the final breathtaking drive down the Columbia River Gorge with my sister Toren just after saying goodbye to our sister Cheryl—continues to be a mystic road.

My upcoming exhibition, “Wonder/Tender,” at the Oblivion Gallery here in Eugene, Oregon, is the next step on this path. The “Tender” half of the show explores the raw, unresolved feelings of impending absence and the quiet ache of memory already slipping away. It’s what I feel as her spirit ascends and her body descends—a season of departure and transition.

The medium I use is the perfect collaborator for this theme. Encaustic, the ancient medium of beeswax and damar resin, creates a warm, translucent veil. It is a protective skin, allowing the composite photographs—where autumn leaves, shadows of birds, and half images of a woman walking away (the animals who live in the Great Mystery, as did Cheryl)—to glow through a beautiful, gentle haze.

The process is like holding a memory in the light:

A Glimpse of the Journey

These are some of the images from the “Tender” half of the show that reflect that autumn feeling of contemplation and journey, of grasping at a beautiful memory.

This exhibition will be a conversation between the transient and the eternal, the Tender memory and the flash of Wonder (which we’ll explore in the next post).

If this resonates with your journey, I would be honored if you would join me.

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Invitation

The “Wonder/Tender” exhibition, featuring gilded photography and encaustic work, opens December 6th at Oblivion Gallery in Eugene, OR. My Artist Talk at 2:00 pm.

For daily, behind-the-scenes video updates and process notes, please follow my social channels and the hashtag: #WONDERTENDER

P.S. I am delighted to announce I am now represented by Xanadu Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. You can view my evolving portfolio here: https://tinyurl.com/JensenAtXanadu

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I'm still buzzing with energy from the recent Studio Art Walk, a fund-raiser by Maude Kerns Art Center! What a fantastic opportunity to set up shop in a printmaking studio and connect with so many passionate art enthusiasts right here in the Willamette Valley .

It was truly inspiring to welcome everyone into my creative world and share the stories behind my pieces. I especially enjoyed the conversations we had about my process – from capturing the initial image to the intricate application of 24K gold and silver leaf, which, as many visitors noted, adds a unique inner glow to the work, reflecting my belief in the inherent spiritual beauty of the natural world.

One of the highlights for me was the genuine interest in the texture and luminosity of the gilded surfaces. One visitor was an abandoned husband who was cooling his heels in the hall while his wife oohed and aahed elsewhere. I asked him if he’d like to see my work and took him into the gilded room I had created. He immediately became engaged with a demonstration of my process, asking many questions. It's moments like these that fuel the artistic journey and remind me why I love what I do.

I was also thrilled that my piece, "Bandon Labyrinth, Circles in the Sand," found a new home with a couple cosmically named “Love.” Oregonians all love the sacred summer spectacle of the Circles in the Sand. The labyrinth design is drawn freehand working with the beach as a fresh canvas. The path for each Draw unfolds organically on the sand. The overarching theme for the year is, yes! love. When completed, the labyrinths are one continuous path with no dead ends or wrong turns.

I photographed one of the Draws from a viewing platform above Bandon Beach. I printed it on transparency film and backed it with genuine silver, which gives it the glow that people experience when they visit this special site.

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It’s always rewarding when a piece resonates so strongly, especially one that captures a place so familiar and beloved to many in our region.

While not every new art piece found its perfect match this at the Studio Walk, the experience provided invaluable insights. I learned so much from people’s feedback and observations. For example, the enthusiasm for recognizable local landscapes has inspired me to explore more of these iconic scenes in future work. And the allure of the "Gold Raven" is definitely something I'll be revisiting in upcoming pieces!

I also realized the importance of having even more detailed information available about each piece, and I need to be better about making sure to keep capture contact information for those interested in future work. Every event is a learning curve, and I'm already thinking about how to make the next one even better.

Thank you to everyone anywhere who goes out to support local artists and for your genuine appreciation for the creative spirit. Your curiosity and enthusiasm made any artist’s weekend truly special.

Stay tuned for more updates on new work, including more local landscapes, perhaps some more ravens with that signature gold touch, and some exciting explorations on Kozo paper with gilding and cold wax. You can follow my artistic journey here on my website sandybrownjensen.com and of course, on Facebook, Sandy Brown Jensen, Artist.

We are all on That Mystic Road together. More stories coming, more art. Do you feel it in your own life, that pull to the light divine?

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By way of introduction, this story is fiction. I’ve been writing family stories for the past few months, so I wanted to give you a heads up that this is made up. I got the idea when I was in about 7th grade, when a teacher from Orchard Junior High School (Wenatchee, WA, circa 1962), took my class on a field trip to look for Bigfoot.

On retrospect, I understand that this creative teacher had taken a popular local legend and turned it into a teachable moment: we learned how to track animals along the creek sand and through the forest. We learned to identify edible plants and brewed our own nettle tea. It was a whole fun day full of nature studies woven together with the exciting stories of how we were in Bigfoot country.

I became if not a total Bigfoot believer, then certainly an aficionado of the big guy, also called Sasquatch.

Then recently, I became bemused by a famous newspaper article from 1884 that alleged some railroad men had captured a teenage Bigfoot. As I dug deeper, the story got mixed up with an escaped circus sideshow performer named Jacko. A more dedicated researcher than I am wrote a book that I read; stir in childhood memories, and a story was born.

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Captured! A Strange Creature

“What is it? A strange creature captured above Yale, British Columbia” —Daily British Colonist, July 4, 1884

Fedor Adrianovich Jeftichew, born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia in 1868 heard the train coming down the mountain headed into the Yale station seven miles away. The whistle carried sharp and clear through the morning air, getting up an unkindness of ravens off a kill in the woods. A hundred sooty birds screamed back at the train, imitating its screech until the sound seemed to gather and arrow down toward Tunnel #4 where it was swallowed by the dark.

Fedor, called Jacko since his father first began to tour him as a sideshow freak, was walking the rails and could see Tunnel #4 not far ahead and heard the oncoming train. He left the railbed, skidding down the cinder slope at a place where rail ties were stacked up in a yard, smelling of green creosote.

He saw the boy then, on the far side of the tracks by the eastern bluff. The train had picked up speed since leaving Boston Bar the best part of twenty miles ago, and Jacko could see it entering a long turn along the Fraser River. He had been headed for shelter behind the rail tie stacks, but he was surprised by the boy and his hesitation at the rails like a nervous young buck at a stream. “Cross now or don’t cross,” he thought. He dropped his pack and ran toward the boy shouting.

The boy stood as if consumed by the noise of the oncoming train. He looked up at the swirl of screaming ravens, then back at the train, as if he didn’t understand the connection between the rails and the ravens and the oncoming train. He put a foot on the rail as if it mystified him, as if he were encountering it for the first time.

Jacko had no such hesitation. He didn’t think. He hurtled over the track and collided with the boy as the train arrived and rushed by. They rolled together down the cinders. Jacko stood crouched over the stunned boy as the hot air from the iron wheels blew back the fur that covered his head, face, and hands. The boy under him growled and snapped. Jacko felt his immense strength and pulled back to look at who he thought was a boy but in fact was a creature who looked remarkably like him, Jacko. The boy was covered in dark fur about an inch and a half long except for his hands. His forearms were much longer than Jacko’s, and when he struggled out from Jacko’s protective hold, he rested them on the ground in front of him.

In the quivering air and noise of the train passing above, the two lookalikes stared at each other, each one wondering what the other one was. Jacko’s mind ran a mouse-in-a-maze pattern looking for a way to call the dark, hairy boy. “Is he like me?”

Jacko thought of his father who had been as ugly and hairy as both his father before him and his son due to the inherited syndrome called hypertrichosis. He and Jacko had toured all of Europe as sideshow freaks, “Jo-jo the Dog-Faced Boy.” Jacko remembered briefly the faces that had jeered and pointed and spat and poked. They had traveled for a while with a bearded lady who his father said was like them. And for a while on the Prague circuit, a mountain gorilla had joined the circus, screaming inside his barred cage, baring his teeth, gripping and pulling endlessly at the cage bars as the terrified faces of the ghostly crowds passed by.

One night on a long rail trip through the Caucasus Mountains, he finally broke the bars and hurled himself off the moving train at a place no one knew how to find again. Maybe he had lived and maybe he had died, but Jacko was certain this creature in front of him was not like the gorilla, something other, some other order of someone altogether.

”Are you all right?” He pointed to his head and patted his legs with their blue military pants. “Okay?” Jacko had traveled with people of all languages and spoke rough and ready versions of many tongues. He had known the deaf, the mute, the traumatized silent and knew ways of communicating with them all. But when he looked into the hairy boy’s brown, simian eyes, he saw no flicker of recognition that communication was being attempted.

He put both hands on the boy’s shoulders and just looked him in the eyes. In that quiet, he heard the terrified crying as if in his own mind. He understood this then was the voice of the hairy boy. He tugged the child toward him, and the boy collapsed into his arms in an anguished embrace.

Jacko rocked him as the last cars roared by overhead. The ravens scattered like hot cinders blown back from the stack. He saw two men standing on the caboose. The men spotted the two of them and pointed, shouting with excitement as they disappeared into Tunnel #4 still pointing and shouting. The second he heard the sudden screech of brakes, Jacko understood the train was stopping.

“Run!”

The only way out was up the eastern bluff. He and the boy began the ascent, grabbing for roots. Four men ran out of the tunnel and gave chase. The climbing was perilous for all of them. Jacko moved fast, but the boy was a natural climber, grabbing rocks and brush and scrambling straight up. Jacko was more strategic, making for the edge where the bluff broke off into the forest. The four men were agile and focused on the boy. Jacko tried to mind-shout him to move out of the open toward the forest, but he couldn’t feel anyone listening. The terrified child scrambled up onto a projecting shelf of rock where he could neither go up nor down while the men corralled him from all sides.

Jacko made the safety of the trees and climbed up, looked out. He could hear the men discussing how to capture the boy alive. The man they called Craig crawled out on his hands and knees until he was about forty-five feet above the child. He began to throw rocks at the boy, who cowered and barked on his rock. One good shot by Craig hit him on the head. He fell unconscious off the rock and rolled down the bluff, his body stopping halfway down, the men jumping and shouting after him.

The men gathered around the boy’s body, poking and kicking him to make sure he was unconscious. Craig suggested tying him up with the rope from the caboose bell, so one of the men ran away down the hill, disappeared briefly into the tunnel and returned with the bell rope. Between them, they trussed the boy and lowered him to the bottom of the bluff. It took all four of them to heave the boy’s body up onto the tracks. Jacko soon saw the train emerge from Tunnel #4 and steam off toward Yale, the hairy boy’s body visible just inside the baggage car.

As the red caboose disappeared around the bend and a kind of silence fell, Jacko dropped down out of his tree, scrambled down the bluff and crossed over the tracks to retrieve his pack, which had only one working strap. His heart was racing not just from the chase, but having felt so much so quickly for the boy and then to see him so violently captured and taken away. He knew how much like the hairy boy he looked. “It could have been me.” But it was as if the rail men hadn’t even seen him separate from the creature or noticed him climbing up into the woods.

Jacko spotted the length of white rope on an alder, so white and slim it could have been taken for a branch. Pieces of rag hung moving in a light breeze from vine maple and tag alder surrounding a rough circle of stones and grass. A sacred place, then. He had seen rag tying and offerings left at springs in Ireland and England. The found rope seemed just the right length to do the job of replacing the broken strap on the other side. It seemed newer than the bits of tattered flags, faded yellow or red or blue. Jacko slipped it off the white alder.

The length of rope had a cool strength in his hands that reminded him of years on the road with the circus. He remembered the early mornings with mist rising from a river, dew cold through his leather boots. The crew would haul out the massive canvas guy lines and stake ropes to secure the main tent. The reef points were untied, allowing the canvas to be spread out. The halyards were raised, hoisting the tent poles into place. With the tent firmly anchored, the sideshow performers began setting up their booths. They strung up ropes to hang their banners and cords to tie down their props.

This rope seemed cooperative, and he knew from experience that wasn’t always the case. Jacko looked around for an offering to leave in return for the rope. He picked up a large black raven feather at his feet. He smoothed its long, shiny length between his fingers, feeling all the wind it had flown for a few seconds, then tucked it into the knot end of a red rag tie.

Jacko shrugged into his pack, looking up at the ravens. They had fallen eerily silent and were now dropping back down into the forest in a funnel formation, around and around and down until all of them silently disappeared. Jacko mentally marked the spot on the eastern bluff of the river, closer to the rail yard he knew was known as Spuzzum Flats, a few miles this side of the town of Yale.

Jacko reversed his journey to the north, and followed the tracks southwest after the train. He hadn’t ever wanted to see Yale again, but his feet followed after the boy of their own accord, as if his heart was in his boots. “It could have been me.”

Two miles down the tracks, Jacko jumped down into a creek bed for water. He was standing there in the dappled shade when he heard again the mutter of the ravens. Not far off this time. He must be near either their kill or their roost.

Jacko got very still, so he could hear the low mutterings as he eased through the forest. He followed a moss-covered deer trail under the cedars and vine maple. The woodland smell of wild strawberries made him dizzy with hunger. He sat down under the swaying bough of a cedar and dug out an apple and a piece of bread. He ate as quietly as possible, stilling himself, trying to decipher the tone of the gathered ravens he knew couldn’t be far away now. He worried about the fate of the boy, who had felt almost like his own, however brief their moment together.

He stood up and stepped cautiously back onto the deer trail. The breeze shifted. He smelled a new smell. The smell of blood. Jacko moved like a shadow off the trail and under the trees until the forest opened into a rough clearing. In the center the sawn stump of a cedar eight feet or more across shed fresh sawdust onto the forest floor. He could see the notch the sawyer had cut for a foothold. Jagged shards on the falling side stuck up and through the corpse of a huge creature that had been ten feet tall in life, covered with brown fur or hair.

Jacko felt the shock travel up out of the earth through his feet to race up to his heart like ground lightning. He reached a compulsive hand out to grip a branch to steady himself. He had never seen or felt such violence before.

The belly was flayed open and ravens surrounded the open body cavity, worrying after gobbets of intestine and flying off to nearby trees to eat. Two young ravens worried at the eyes and another set of twins pulled at the long tongue lolling out of its mouth.

Jacko saw right away this was another creature like the boy. He could see the long, leathery dugs flung up over her shoulder, and it came to him that this could be the boy’s mother. Her skullcase was blasted off and being argued over a dozen feet away, and by this he guessed that she had been shot by one of his kind, a human.

Jacko had left Adrian, his father, in a drunken, maddened fury in Vancouver. Jacko had finally said, “Let’s go.” He wanted nothing more than to be accepted for what and who he was, to escape the world his father had given him of Jo-jo the Dog-faced Boy. He urged his grotesquely hairy father to leave with him, insisting as he had since Prague that nothing could be worse than this existence. But a lifetime of alcoholic rage against the fate of his body had left Adrian trapped like the mountain gorilla inside the safety cage of circus life. “I’m going,” Jacko said, and went, hoping to find a different place and different people.

The black shapes of a hundred ravens rising and falling over the body made Jacko dizzy. The blood continued to drip thick and slow out of the mother’s body into the widening dark pool in the ferns. The ravens were yelling again in a head-splitting, disorienting cacophony.

Then the ravens fell silent. They saw or heard something Jacko didn’t, but he was too nauseous to look. He leaned over and vomited. His pulse raced, and for a while, he could not stop retching. He cleaned his mouth with wet moss, spitting and coughing out the grit. Too ill to move for a moment, he remained hunched over. Then the illness passed, and he heard again the silence of the ravens, which only his own noise marred. He lurched up cautiously and looked again out into the clearing. Jacko felt he was the uninvited guest at some terrible ritual slaughter attended on by the ravens, who were going about their grim business of feasting on the dead. Some human had come here and shot this remarkable creature, and that was part of his nausea, not just the blood.

He turned his head and tried to listen for what had silenced the big black corvids. But instead of a sound, a smell, a different smell. A bit skunky. Feral. A feeling came with it, both a foreboding and an anticipation. The smell came closer and wrapped around him. Jacko instinctively put his back to a Doug fir. He heard the bent back whoosh of a kicked aside cedar bough. They were tall shapes of shadow among the shadows of stumps and snags.

Then they were there: five of the big dark-haired creatures closed in on him. Not in an attack but in a curious circle. Male and female, all towering two or three feet over his five. He opened his speech-mind to them. No words, though, only a swirl of group emotions, the way an eddy in the river will swirl with currents and upwellings and countercurrents: bewilderment, grief, fear, fight, flight. He willed himself first to peace, so he wouldn’t get sucked into the whirlpool of clashing emotions, then he thought an image of the boy hugging him and just held it there.

The group of creatures quieted and eventually all looked at him. They didn’t poke, prod or act astonished at the little hairy man dressed in people's clothes. He wondered what he smelled like to them or if he’d been roughing it long enough to smell like a root system. As best Jacko could, he acted out the meeting and the kidnapping, imagining it as clearly as he could, so they could receive.

When he finished, he pointed southwest toward Spuzzum Flats and Yale. As far as he could tell, there was no discussion. They rose as one and moved as one back to the trail. Soon Jacko was in a line with the creatures who hadn’t even pinched him to see if he was real, trotting his short legs along at a good pace with their long strides.

He noticed how broad their feet were, leaving seventeen and eighteen inch prints behind in the muddy areas. At one place, the largest female stepped off the path and came back with a large burden basket woven of cedar bark. With no warning, one of the male creatures picked Jacko up and put him in the basket. The lid came down and was fastened with a stick through a loop. His heart raced as panic threaded his veins with fear. Even as he began to push against the cedar withes, a warm calm washed over him, and he began to bounce rhythmically against the woman’s back as the group picked up their pace to a long-legged run. Jacko half propped, half curled himself up in the bottom of the basket. He felt strange, almost paralyzed in place, a place so silent it was almost like a ringing in his ears.

Then Jacko felt a small soul-shake. He rose up out of the basket through the secured lid and saw his body jostling gently against the body of the running Giantess. He rose above the running group and floated with them without effort or volition.

Ahead on the trail, he saw a white rope. He rose higher and saw the rope came up out of the Fraser River and ran along some line of rock and hill with a smooth and sinuous grace. It marked the landscape along a curving and recurving line Jacko could almost see. White as a new lariat, the rope seemed to imply a magnetic line.

The White Rope came down from the remotest northern places, having crossed the Siberian land bridge, laid down by the great shamans and Giants who ruled the Ice Age. It ran between the geologic world and the Otherworld. White as bone, thin and luminous as the new moon, the White Rope snaked along river valleys, down into gorges, and up through mountain passes. Like an albino snake, it ran through wildflower meadows where the oldest megafauna rose and flourished through the millennia and went extinct. And still the White Rope moved through time. It was woven and placed by those who could see, those who could follow, those who could cross over into the Otherworld and back again. It wasn’t for many of Jacko’s kind to see or travel the Great White Rope, but carried on the back of the Giantess, he saw, and out of the depths of his childhood memories of Russian folktales, he recognized it for what it was. He wondered at it, but sideshow freaks see many strange and wondrous and magical things down in the back alleys of the traveling circus, and it also seemed to him that while touring in England, he had heard of The Old Straight Track that followed the mystical ley lines.

The group of running creatures turned to run along the White Rope, their feet touching, not touching it, and with a kind of whoosh, Jacko felt they were entering a zone of heightened power. Now they were running along the Rope as it led out of the open foothills through the most ancient of forests where elflight glowed faintly in hidden springs and canopy light filtered green from above and owls watched their swift passage through time.

Jacko drifted back into his small, hairy body with his blue circus uniform jacket with the gold cord and brass buttons. His blue military pants with the stripe down the side. His high black boots, once brightly polished, now scuffed and dirty from his long journey from Vancouver. Adrian had dressed him up like a hurdy-gurdy, organ grinder monkey in this mock uniform, and they were the only clothes he had ever known.

The cavalcade stopped at the edge of the clearcut and let Jacko out of the burden basket. There was no White Rope in sight. This clearcut may once have been an old growth forest, but was now a wasteland of stumps tied to earth in a tight tangle of blackberry vines and wild huckleberry bushes. Jacko scrambled up on a stump to get a better view.

From where he stood, Jacko could see the black and white rail sign that said Spuzzum Flats. The train tracks disappeared into another tunnel on the final three-quarter run into Yale—although the road route was seven miles, as Jacko remembered. Spuzzum Flats was a wide place where the building of the tunnel had been staged and the machine shops built. Jacko could see a couple of miner’s shacks, what might be a tavern, and a large metal box with bars that was the local jail.

September 24, 1884

“Respected Yale veterinarian and keeper of the livery stable, Mr. George Tilbury, was committed to prison for his own protection on a charge of insanity. During the day, he tore off every stitch of clothing and thrust the articles through the cell wicket. On September 23, he was found stark naked and stone dead in his cell. The deceased was 45 years old. Many years ago, he was a theatrical agent, subsequently settling in Victoria as veterinary surgeon. His mind gave symptoms of failing earlier in the summer.”

—Daily British Colonist

June 30th, 1884

Word came to Mr. George Tilbury about a strange creature captured above Yale. The messenger described the creature as five feet tall, covered with an inch and a half of dark hair except for its face and hands. It had a flat face and large feet. The railroad men who had captured him thought he should be placed in the veterinarian’s care.

Tilbury made all haste by horseback to the jail, where the creature was being penned until further decisions could be made about its fate. When Dr. Tilbury arrived, he looked into the freestanding metal room through the bars. Inside were two wire bunks and one very frightened creature who growled and barked.

”What are you feeding this animal?” Tilbury demanded of Costerton, who had escorted him to the cage.

A bit abashed, Costerton admitted that it hadn’t occurred to him to give the creature either food or water during the twenty-four hours it had been in captivity.

“Get it some water,” Tilbury said, then turned to the only woman in the small crowd of about a dozen men. She was a native woman who understood perfectly the nature of the hairy boy. Her people called them Big Brother, but she was of no motivation to enlighten the white doctor. However, when asked her opinion about his diet, she left and came back with a tip or two of blackberries and a half gallon of goat milk.

Costerton and Tilbury were cautious about opening the cage door for fear the strong creature would rush them, but he remained cowering beneath the bunks like a barn owl will flatten itself against a furthest wall to escape attention. The berries, milk and water were lined up on the stone pavers, and the door slammed and locked again with a heavy black skeleton key that Mac the barman kept behind the till in the tavern.

The onlookers jostled for their chance to peer through the cage door, tall hats and short hats bobbling up and down, but there was nothing to see but a lump of furred shadow under an iron bunk.

The entire crew of an independent logging operation had come out of the nearby woods to see what the uproar was about. About fifteen men turned away from the jail to the tavern that faced it across Main Street and jostled for the door.

The bar was a tight little log cabin not much bigger than the metal jail, just a sixteen-foot pen with two doors and a corrugated tin roof. It had been built snug against a low hill by the miners twenty years earlier, the same miners who had burned both native villages to the ground in 1858. Man's gotta drink, and it didn't take much to throw together a structure that would keep booze oiling the spirit of community for decades to come.

Inside, the air was acrid with tobacco smoke and stale beer. A sawdust floor that hadn't been swept out maybe ever crunched underfoot. One window, covered with paper greased with pig fat, was coated with a build-up of smoke and dirt until it was only a translucent smudge in the wall. Dim oil lamps cast shadows across half-sawn log tables, their light barely reaching the corners. Mounted deer antlers drew shapes on the walls. The sound of hobnailed boots and men's rough, shouting voices overrode the quiet murmur of the two women at the Native table by the back door.

Jim, the owner, had accurately felt the mood of the crowd shift from spectacle to drinking and told Mac the barkeep to line 'em up. The beer mugs kept flying down the slick bar and willing hands grabbed them as they came.

George Tilbury and Craig Costerton took their pints and found a back table. A log to the mid-back was none too comfortable, so the men leaned forward with their elbows on the rough-hewn table, which gave them a conspiratorial air. Tilbury was some kind of veterinarian, the only one between here and Vancouver, but at one time, he had also been a theatrical agent, and he was quite taken with Costerton's idea.

"We should dress that little fellow up in one of those hurdy-gurdy monkey outfits and take it to that circus in Vancouver and sell it," Costerton suggested.

Tilbury was a man of larger ideas. "I heard that the circus burned up in the Vancouver fire a few weeks ago. But we could take it to London on an exhibition train." Every time he slurped his beer, his mustache and beard would float up in it, and he'd swipe it dry with his flanneled forearm.

There was a rifle behind the bar and several firearms scattered among the patrons when the first rocks hit the tin roof. Craig Costerton had just been leaning forward to say to George Tilbury,, "Now, that is one mighty fine idea," and to ask him something about a private boxcar when the first volley came. Everyone stopped talking in shock and looked up at the roof. Silence hung in the air for a beat, broken only by the slow drip of beer from an overturned mug.

"What in tarnation?" muttered a logger, his eyes wide.

Another volley of rocks pelted the roof, sounding like a stampede of miniature horses.

"It's the end times!" shouted someone from the back, voice cracking with panic.

"Don't be daft," snapped Tilbury, "It's clearly a..." His words were cut short as a particularly large rock impact sent a shower of dust raining down from the ceiling. Men ducked and covered their drinks, priorities clearly in order.

Over at the Native table, Annie York was just reminding her sister Bea that their uncle Chief Khahtsahlano had described seeing two little Big Brothers in captivity at a circus in Vancouver earlier in the year, a father and a son, not a thing to interest the whites. In the astonished lull after the first rocks struck and turned everyone's attention to the ceiling, Annie and Bea got up and left by the back outhouse door.

The barkeep hauled his Winchester lever action 1873 out from under the bar and took aim at the roof. Owner Jim, a small guy anxiously working the till, yelled, "Don't shoot a hole in my roof, you damn fool!" and launched himself at Mac's shooting arm. Mac's one bullet hit smack between two deer antlers, a real kill shot before the impact of Jim's weight brought them both down into the slurry of sawdust and beer that was the floor.

Four of the loggers were dislocated Americans who had followed the cut north after the Nez Perce War of 1877.

"Clem! It's them Injuns! They tracked us down!"

"It's them escaped Canadian Nez Perce!"

"C'mon, Joey, help me build a shelter!"

More thunder on the roof. You haven't heard noise until you hear rocks thrown down on a corrugated tin roof. The racket rivals a battlefield.

Clem and Joey put their shoulders to three half log tables while their buddies in red and blue neckerchiefs manhandled a fourth to make a shelter. "It's the end of the world!” screamed the scrawny guy from the back, and he ran forward and dove under the makeshift shelter.

Mac and Jim crawled out from behind the bar. When Jim saw the destruction of his tables, he took a flying leap and latched on to Clem's back, "You sonuvabitch! You're gonna pay for this!" Clem was a more than sizable guy. He swung back and forth like a crazed bull trying to dislodge Jim, who hung on like a monkey.

Mac scrambled for his Winchester, sat back on his haunches, cocking it, then he blew a hole in the roof, which pretty much sent half of the tin sheets flying out of their grommets.

George and Craig stumbled across the room, drinks in hand, heading for the door, trying to dodge Clem and Jim. Joey grabbed the antlers off the wall, put them over his head and charged Jim but caught George in the neck. George's beer went flying and the glass struck the table that was the top of the makeshift shelter. Beer ran down like rain and the scrawny guy inside yelled, "It's the apocalypse!"

Just as the men thought the worst was over, the barrage of rocks changed direction and began pummeling the front door. Men manhandled more tables and benches and hid behind them. Costerton and Tilbury stationed themselves on either side of the window. Craig poked a nervous hole through the paper and slid his rifle barrel through. As the rocks pounded on the log walls, Craig jumped and pulled the trigger without looking. The bang of the bullet ricocheting off the metal box of the jail added to the mayhem.

Tilbury was at the door when it began to shake violently. Something or someone extremely tall and powerful was trying to get in. The guy inside the table shelter crawled out to see what was going on and then passed out cold on the barroom floor. Mac, rushing to help George, tripped over him. "Goddammit, George, hold the door," he yelled as he went down and staggered to get back up. Clem was still trying to shake Jim off his back while also trying to stuff the passed out guy back into the shelter. At least four guys managed to brace their bodies against the door, which was being shaken violently not at the door handle but high up near the lintel.

It was five minutes of mayhem, but it seemed like the Battle of the Alamo to the men inside, frightened into a stupor and without any idea of what or who was doing the attacking. Clearly, the enemy must be many, tall and powerful.

When silence finally fell, the men remained frozen in various poses of defense or cowering. They exchanged nervous glances, each silently daring the others to be the first to check outside. The air was thick with tension, everyone certain that another attack could come at any moment.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Into that uneasy moment came a quiet knock. Everyone jumped and every rifle and revolver swung to cover the door.

The knock came again, quiet and small, like a child or a woman, no louder than the quiet peck of a raven at some insignificant bit of fat.

”It’s a trick, it’s a trick,” Mac muttered as the knock came again, gently insistent. They could hear weak fingers trying the iron latch, but the big wooden bolt had been shot from inside at the first attack.

It was Tilbury who finally put his head down to the level of the latch and whispered, “Who’s there?”

”My name is Fedor Jeftichew. May I enter this fine drinking establishment?”

Opinion was clearly divided, but Tilbury drew back the bar and opened the door a crack to peer out,

Jacko knew this would have to be the performance of a lifetime. He slipped into the dimly lit bar and stepped up onto a box balanced on a chair to give himself a better view of all the faces frozen in a rictus of astonishment and fear below him. His brass buttons winked in the light and his military suit gave him an aura of authority. He could smell the spilled beer, the fetid sawdust and human fear in the reek of their sweat.

He pitched his voice low and rhythmic. "Hello, I am Fedor Jeftichew, late of St. Petersburg, Russia. You don't know me, but I know you for a very fine people. You are a community. You don't know me, but I thank you for welcoming me, a stranger like your own brother into your house.

“Listen to my voice. It's been a long, exciting day, hasn't it? So much commotion, so much noise. But now, everything is calm. The danger has passed. You're safe now, all of you. Safe and relaxed.”

The box on the chair wobbled beneath him, but Jacko found and kept his balance easily. Jacko had been taught the basics by the circus hypnotist, and in theory he knew it should work with a crowd because Baxter had told him he had the gift. “Not many people do,” Baxter had cautioned, “and they are usually politicians or cult leaders. It will probably be useless to you as a sideshow freak, but if you ever need it, the trick is in the voice and in the mind.” Jacko pulled Baxter into his thoughts now as he began to hold the group in thrall.

“Take a deep breath. Feel the tension leaving your body with each exhale. That's right. The noise on the roof? It was just a passing storm. Nothing to worry about now.

“You're all good people. Hardworking, honest folk. You protect your own. And sometimes, strange things happen that we don't understand. But that's okay. We don't need to understand everything.”

Jacko shook his head, trying to remove the memory of the night he had escaped from the circus, Saturday, June 12, 1886. Baxter had distracted the guard for him, putting himself in danger as Jacko thrashed his way through blackberry bushes and ran. The fledgling settlement of Vancouver comprised no more than a thousand buildings on a small pocket of land along the Burrard Inlet. The Canadian Pacific Railroad had just finished the Vancouver terminus, and the circus had been right behind.

He had slept rough in the hills. On Sunday morning, June 13, he saw Vancouver burn until only three buildings were left standing. The place where the circus had been camping went up in the inferno—Baxter, his father, his friends, horses and tigers and bears. Barkers and ballerinas. Torn between the pain and the horror and the miracle of his eerily timed escape, he had accidentally found the dirt wagon road to Yale.

He beat back the memories. This work required a clear mind.

“Now, about the creature in the jail. It's just a small thing, isn't it? Harmless really. But it doesn't belong here. It needs to go home, back to its own kind. And you, being the good people you are, you want to help it, don't you?

“Imagine how proud you'll feel, knowing you did the right thing. Imagine the stories you'll tell about your kindness and wisdom.”

Jacko desperately wished Baxter was here to tell him if he was doing this circus trick correctly. He’d never considered he might need this skill—learning hypnosis was just something to do while the circus traveled long miles across the West.

”So, we're going to let the strange creature go. It's the right thing to do. And you'll feel so good about it. So calm, so proud.”

Jacko slowed his voice to a murmur. He deliberately didn’t think of the child in the jail. He didn’t think of what would happen if he were exposed as a fraud. This was a dangerous crowd, he felt that. Emotions were running high, which is part of why he had been able to get their attention so quickly. But he knew his mind had to be clear as springwater to collect everyone together in one place in his head.

“Now, who has the key? Ah, yes, you there with the fine rifle. What's your name? Mac, is it? Mac, you're going to be the hero today. You're going to open that cage and let the creature go. And everyone here will remember how brave and kind you were.

“Shall we go outside now? Nice and calm. Everything is fine. We're just going to do this simple task, and then we can all go back to our drinks and our stories. Doesn't that sound nice?"

George Tilbury opened the door wide, and everyone with just a mutter and a murmur drifted across the street to the jail. Jacko jumped down to their level and immediately felt the fear that always came when the tall heads of people surrounded him. That usually meant being prodded with a stick or getting spit on his uniform if not his face.

Jacko’s hold on the group's mind began to slip immediately. “Where are all the rocks?” someone asked, and everyone looked around. “If it was hail, where are the hailstones?”

Jacko skipped ahead and jumped up on the hitching post in front of the jail to regain his height advantage. His boots slipped on the steel, but he grabbed for the rough wooden post. “There’s the child,” Jacko continued his quiet patter with an inner desperation, “so small, so harmless. Did one of you shoot a big one a few days ago? Mr. George Tilbury, congratulations on a dead shot. You must be very proud. She was a big one. You didn’t report it to the authorities or anyone else. I think that was a wise choice.”

Jacko jumped down and gently led Mac’s fingers with the key to the lock as Tilbury started to stumble into an explanation about the big shoot. “I almost forgot about that. Craig, do you remember I told you about shooting that big female bear the other day?”

But before he could get further, the jailhouse door swung open as the crowd fell back with a gasp.

As the door opened, Jacko felt his carefully constructed spell shatter like glass. The world seemed to slow down, his senses heightening with the surge of adrenaline. He could smell the fear radiating from the boy, could feel the shift in the air as the crowd's mood turned from docile to dangerous. In that moment, Jacko realized that everything was about to change, for better or worse.

A brown storm erupted from the jail and landed with both arms and legs locked around Jacko. They were of a size, Jacko much the slighter, so he staggered under the force and weight of the scared child. His heart moved and his focus wavered, weakening the charm further. He had to loosen the hypnosis thread long enough to reach out to the boy. “You’re going to be okay.”

The boy clung tighter, and Jacko carefully loosened his grip. He projected an image of the Great White Rope to the boy. ”Follow the White Rope home. Everyone is waiting for you. Now go!”

Mac shook his head like a dog trying to dislodge a bee, “Why, you!”

Mac grabbed at Jacko and the clinging boy, and Costerton, too, snapped out of the spell and dove for Jacko’s legs. Jacko mind-shouted to the boy as he had once before, “Run!” The boy sprang five feet past the group then ran with a speed everyone would later say was preternatural. “No animal or person could run that fast, that’s for sure. And then it just disappeared right before our eyes!”

Costerton kicked Jacko down into the dirt. Jacko was on the ground, protecting his face with his arms. He’d had plenty of both stage and street fighting experience in the circus, but a hob-nailed boot landed on his ribs before he could gather himself. The kicks and blows came thick and fast. “Look! He’s one of them! Why is he all dressed up like a human? He looks like a monkey escaped from the zoo!”

Hands plucked and tore at his pants. His boots were yanked off and his socks and his military jacket stripped from him. The jacket was stomped into the ground until someone later picked it up where you can still see it on display at the Yale Historical Museum.

Jacko knew he had to find the strength to escape before anything else besides his ribs broke. For the briefest moment, he realized if he ran, he’d be breaking ties with humans and throwing his lot in with mysterious strangers who in some ways seemed more like him. Experience drove his mistrust. With a thrust of his heels and a wiry twist, he leapt onto Mac’s back, the tallest among the mob. Mac bucked, but Jacko rode him like a jockey, both legs locked under Mac’s chin, tightening, making his watery blue eyes bulge and mouth gasp like a fish for air.

Jacko tried desperately to reweave his spell. He put both dark-haired arms out over the milling crowd. He tried to empty his mind of his pain and his fear. Later, Costerton would say his eyes glowed red as a devil’s, and his whole body caught on fire, the hairy little man with a face like a mask like a native might carve and sell at a kiosk on the Seattle waterfront. Costerton and the others would always be confused about what they saw. Jacko began to say something none of them was ever able to remember because strangely, everyone got fed up with the whole scene and decided to go take a nap. Some went over to a wagon and climbed in. Others went back into the bar and crawled behind an overturned table and caught a few zzzs.

Tilbury decided he would ride home to Yale and explain all this to the sheriff. Or maybe the magistrate. Or his wife. He got on his horse, rode a quarter mile down the road and fell off by the creek. His head hit a rock that gave him a smashing headache he never did quite get over.

As Mac gave a final desperate gasp and his legs began to buckle beneath him, Jacko sprang off onto the ground, blood from a cheek cut dripping into the dust. He heaved one last, long breath out, one last, long glare of disbelief and a kind of hatred at the humans—his kind— distributed around the single block of the fair city of Spuzzum snoring under their hats. Then he turned and ran in the long footsteps of the escaping boy. No one was awake to take note of his less than spectacular speed and his inability to disappear into thin air. His run was more of an accelerated limp hampered by the kicks and punches he’d taken.

In the short window of time before he found the family, Jacko considered freedom. He had escaped the abuse of his father and life in a sideshow freak cage. Now, he had run from these men who seemed no better than his father in their eagerness to capture the boy, jail him, imprison and exhibit him. This had been Jacko’s fate. Here on the forest path, limping and bleeding, Jacko couldn’t see a way alone through the wilderness that might spell a freedom he could live with.

He found the family on the east bluff above the Great White Rope that he could see ascending from the river gorge below. Like a quiet crowd of shadows and lights, they gathered around him, closing ranks. The boy was on someone’s back, his face buried in the dark mane of fur. Jacko’s ribs and just about everywhere else was sore and swollen, but there was no time for repair. He was lifted up by powerful, kindly arms and put back into the burden basket.

“Always the cage!” he raged even as the group began to run along the mystical White Rope. Soon they entered the elflight of the old growth forest, and in this way they traveled unnoticed up the treacherous passes and gorges of the Fraser River.

Jacko put his fingers through the willow branches of the bouncing basket. “Where are we going?”

In reply, his mind was flooded with images of enormous cedar, hemlock, and spruce trees twenty feet across and thousands of years old. “Kwa-mist,” he heard over and over, “Kwa-mist.” Kwa-mist was home, their timeless refuge in the Great Bear Rainforest in the far north of British Columbia. As he rocked in the burden basket, Jacko tried to understand what had happened, to wonder if he had options. What would become of him now? Alone in the world, orphaned by fire, he had thought to find a place for himself among humans, but he hadn’t realized how deep the darkness was. They had stripped him naked and tried to kill him.

As the basket swayed with the Giantess’s movements, Jacko felt a strange mix of fear and hope. The world he knew was behind him, but what lay ahead? Would these creatures accept him, or would he always be an outsider? He thought of the boy, how easily he had communicated with him. Maybe, just maybe, he had found where he truly belonged. That was, of course, impossible—he was human, and they were…Other. As they followed the Great White Rope deeper into the wilderness, Jacko realized he was on a journey not just through the forest, but into a new life he could never have imagined.

The traveling family was far away when the disheveled townsfolk awoke from the longest village drunk any of them could remember. It was Jim who noticed the jail was open and the captive fled. A half dozen ravens had flown in and taken up positions on top of the jail and a couple of neighboring trees. They were having their own discussion while the men who could remember inexactly what had happened compared notes with the men who were just making up possible scenarios.

They were all standing around gawking and yapping about the eighteen inch running footprints in the dust and mud of the yard pointing out how the bare footprints of a much smaller and obviously human foot were interspersed. About that time, Dr. Hammington rode in from Yale. He’d been curious when he’d heard a description of the creature and had gotten up first thing to come see for himself. He’d helped Tilbury out of the creek, bandaged his nasty head wound and sent him on his way.

Hammington pushed his way through the crowd and knelt to examine the over-sized footprints. He slapped his hat on his knee in recognition, raising a little cloud of dust that made the ravens jump up and fly around squawking.

“Goddamn Sasquatches! I had a feeling!”

”But Doc, what about those little prints there beside it?”

”Bah! Sasquatches! The lot of them!”

Bonus Story: In the Raven Glade

The storm tore at the veil between worlds, stitching the Realworld and Otherworld together with threads of lightning. In its wake, giants ran. Jacko, hairy human runt, bounced in a cedar-woven burden basket on the Giantess's back, his world shrunk to the rhythmic thud of her footfalls and the basket's metronomic sway. The makeshift lid rattled with each of her impossibly long strides, tempting him with the illusion of escape. But Jacko knew the truth: his stubby legs could never match fleet-footed Rope-runners, and the loggers behind them thirsted for blood—his blood.

When the Giantess had first secured him in the basket, Jacko had used his people's voice. "Where are you taking me?" he asked, his tone a mix of fear and curiosity.

The Giantess's reply came not in words, but in a mind-thought that felt like a cool breeze in his head. "Kwa-mist." So Jacko knew he could get out if he wanted. The storm overhead seemed to be guiding the tribe north, a living, breathing entity that had appeared as soon as intent had rippled the group into a run.

But still, he fumed in his cage, but knew there was no going back to the angry loggers who had lost the little Kelsach boy due to one very small, very hairy human. If they caught him, they would jail him or kill him. They had already torn off his fine, hurdy-gurdy circus uniform, leaving him to run naked after the escaping tribe of Kelsach. Like them, he was covered with long, dark hair, but unlike them, he was only human, and being hairy did nothing to warm him as the cold rain began.

He had heard the Kelsach mind – talk about their destination, Kwa-mist, prehistoric home of the Kelsach people in the far north of British Columbia. They were running along the Great White Rope, that magical road that runs between the Realworld and Otherworld. Jacko had the impression he was in for a long, hungry ride. And a wet one. They seemed to be running straight into the heart of the storm, which was so large that it also trailed behind. Jacko, looking backwards from the Giantess’s traveling basket, could see the roiling purple and dark blue clouds like bruises in the rough elephant skin of the dusk.

The family moved under the canopy of the old growth forest where Jacko had first followed the ravens down to the corpse of the boy’s mother, impaled on a cedar shard, her head blown off by George Tilbury, who explained to anyone who would listen that he had thought she was a female bear. The great trees filtered the storm light into an eerie yellow and muffled the rumble of thunder. Up in the canopy, the massive treetops tossed like the heads of running horses in the wind. With each step, Jacko felt further removed from the human world he knew.

The orphan boy rode on the back of a big male, his flat, wrinkled face buried in the long black mane. As everyone entered the Raven Glade, they stopped and squatted in silence. Jacko‘s basket was opened, and he was lifted onto the ground. He found a tree to relieve himself, then came around to join the group. The smell of ozone from the storm mixed with the sharp sweetness of cedar. He hung back, unsure of what to expect. They had all worked together to free the boy from the jail, but he didn’t really know them. He was just starting to comprehend who they might be now that he understood that they were not like him. Not human, that is.

As a circus sideshow freak, Jacko was used to being poked and prodded, peered at and commented upon in multiple languages, all of which he knew, but he only had a taste of Kelsach mind – talk. It seemed more like the way wisps of many clouds gathered into a central storm cloud, many voices rumbling or murmuring until all at once they spoke as one. He knew they were talking, he just hadn’t broken the code yet, although when he had mind – shouted “run!” to the boy on two different occasions, the boy had run for his life.

As Jacko grappled with the alien concept of mind-talk, the group's collective grief seemed to pulse through the air, almost tangible in its intensity. The storm, momentarily subdued, gave way to an eerie stillness that only amplified the solemn atmosphere. In this heavy silence, Jacko became acutely aware of another presence - a scent that cut through even the petrichor of the rain-soaked forest. The smell from the mother's body was more pungent than yesterday's fresh blood smell. It reminded him of the ripe, gamey odor that would waft from the circus menagerie wagons when they were first opened after a long journey—a potent mixture of sweat, musk, and decay mingled with sawdust and straw.

When the Kelsach entered the clearing, all the ravens stopped feasting on the enormous corpse and flew up in a circle to land on tree branches, where they observed in silence with the occasional cackle of commentary.

As Jacko approached, a place was made for him on a hillock of moss. The boy was lifted down and placed beside him, and he promptly latched onto Jacko‘s neck. His leathery little fingers took a painful grip on Jacko’s shoulder hair. Jacko reached up and tried to ease his grip. The Giantess observed this, and mind-spoke a surface ripple to the boy, who moved to sit between Jacko‘s legs while preparations were made. Jacko felt cold and miserable sitting out naked in the rain, the tree not much shelter from a storm that seemed to be settling in. As the storm enveloped them, Jacko noticed how the Kelsach seemed to lean into the wind, their fur glistening with rain, as if embracing an old friend. He felt his own alienation keenly in that moment, a creature caught between worlds, belonging to neither the storm nor the shelter.

The tribe seemed at first to be waiting out the storm, which only seemed to be intensifying. A couple of younger Kels loped into the dense underbrush, returning moments later with makeshift cups fashioned from broad leaves and springy moss. These natural vessels brimmed with mountain huckleberries, their deep purple skins glistening with raindrops. Jacko, his stomach clenching with hunger, eagerly accepted his portion. The berries tore open between his teeth, flooding his mouth with a complex flavor – a perfect balance of tart and sweet. The tiny seeds added a satisfying crunch, contrasting with the berries' tender flesh. For a fleeting moment, as the sweet-tart flavor burst on his tongue, the storm seemed to recede.

As Jacko devoured the berries, the young Kels who had gathered them chuckled, a sound like rolling pebbles. "Slow down, hair-boy," he said in a mix of words and mind-speak. "The storm's not going to steal them from you."

Jacko paused, juice dripping down his chin. "Sorry," he mumbled. "It's just... I've never tasted anything so good."

As the last of the berries disappeared, leaving only a lingering sweetness, the brief respite evaporated. The wind, a restless dancer, grew teeth, biting at exposed skin and whipping hair into pennants.

Jacko thought they were waiting for the storm to abate, but as minutes stretched into what felt like hours, the tempest only grew fiercer. The rain became a hammering sheet of mist that stung his skin and obscured the forest beyond a few feet. Thunder rumbled overhead, each crack seeming to split the sky itself.

To Jacko's surprise, it was precisely when the storm reached its zenith that the Kelsach stirred. As one, they rose to their feet, their massive forms suddenly alert and purposeful. The air crackled with an energy that had nothing to do with the lightning—an anticipation that made the hair on Jacko's arms stand on end.

The Giantess let out a low, sonorous call that vibrated in Jacko's chest. It was answered by the others, a harmony of deep tones that seemed to resonate with the storm. Without a word, they began to move out into the Raven Glade, their steps sure despite the slick ground and pelting rain.

Jacko hesitated, unsure of his role in whatever was about to unfold. The little Kel boy clung to him, shivering—whether from cold or fear, Jacko couldn't tell. Figuring himself for the babysitter in this strange scenario, he scooped up the child and held him close, as much for his own warmth as for the boy's. The child's wet fur pressed against Jacko's rain slicked hair which was plastered against his thin human skin, a reminder of the vast difference between them.

As the Kelsach family stepped out from under the meager shelter of the trees, the full force of the storm hit them. Wind whipped around them, carrying leaves and small branches. The rain felt like icy needles on Jacko's exposed skin. Yet the Kelsach moved forward with determination, and Jacko, clutching the boy tightly, found himself swept along in their wake.

The Kelsach moved slowly, their massive forms silhouetted against flashes of lightning. They formed a circle around the fallen female's remains. Jacko then received the first clear mind-thought. In his head, he heard what he knew must be the Giantess’s voice, “Join us and bring the boy.”

Jacko's feet, soft and vulnerable compared to the leathery soles of the Kelsach, screamed in protest with each step across the treacherous ground. He picked his way gingerly through the rough field, eyes straining in the dim light to avoid the worst obstacles. Despite his caution, every footfall brought fresh agony: here a broken pine cone jabbed like a handful of needles into his arch; there a hidden stick scraped a raw line across his heel. Sharp pebbles and jagged bits of bark conspired to torment his tender soles, each step a new lesson in pain.

The constant, bone-deep chill of the rain only amplified his misery. Jacko's body hair, usually a source of warmth, now lay plastered against his skin in saturated curls, conducting the cold rather than repelling it. Violent shivers wracked his frame, his muscles clenching and unclenching in a futile attempt to generate heat.

Gritting his teeth against the dual assault of cold and pain, Jacko tightened his grip on the Kelsach boy's small hand. Shuffling forward with halting steps, wincing at each new pinprick and slice underfoot, Jacko found he was walking almost to the rhythm of the thunder; in the midst of his pain, he was also becoming attuned to the storm’s energy. When he finally reached the circle, he took his place next to the Giantess, feet throbbing and muscles quivering, but determined to see through whatever came next.

The storm crackled and roared overhead, the lightning strikes hitting trees in the forest with enormous explosions of sound and light. The giants raised their arms to the sky, as if embracing the storm. Their long manes whipped in the wind, blending with the rain. Jacko and the little boy raised their arms, too, and Jacko could feel every wet hair continue to rise up with all the electricity in the air.

Jacko heard a bass note in the storm he couldn’t identify, a rhythmic throbbing. But then he realized the Kelsach were actually vocalizing. They began with a low, rumbling chant that moved around as if seeking a special note. Jacko and the boy both added their low tone, and then Jacko realized they were harmonizing with the thunder. It started as individual grunts and grew into a unified, mournful song orchestrated by the storm.

Jacko forgot about his misery. The chant was exhilarating, coming from deep in his chest. Then starting with Black Mane, each Kelsach knelt, pressing one hand to the ground. With their other hand, they scooped up mud and smeared it across their chests in three vertical lines. When it came his turn, Jacko, too, pressed one hand to the ground. He grabbed a handful of the black loamy mud and began the three streaks. “Life. Death. Rebirth,” slipped into his mind. He shivered again with the chill of the mud and the rain but also with the realization he was partaking of a ritual of grief that drew from the earth and was charged by the energy of the storm.

The Giantess then approached the impaled body of the mother. She gently touched the cedar shard, then pressed her forehead against it, as if absorbing the pain of her fallen sister. One by one, each of the tall ones followed. When Jacko approached, his five feet weren’t enough to reach the shard, so Black Mane lifted him. He awkwardly pressed his forehead to the bright red wood and was surprised at the arrow of light and grief that shot through him. Black Mane set Jacko down and picked up the boy who cried and shrank back, tucking his head in Black Mane’s neck. But Black Mane turned his face and held the boy so that both of their foreheads touched the shard. The boy screamed, but Black Mane held him touching the wood until he settled, then quieted, and Jacko saw that the boy had opened himself to the power they all had felt coursing through the red cedar wood.

The Kelsach then began a slow, circular dance around the body. Their footfalls were surprisingly light, once again merging with the rhythm of the thunder, mirroring the swirling winds of the storm. Jacko felt faint with the cold and pain of walking, but he was determined to stay inside the circle of giants. They were his only hope of survival.

At the ritual's peak, the Kelsach let out a long, mournful cry that ululated on the wind, a primal sound, an eerie chorus of grief and loss that pierced through Jacko's defenses, reaching something both fresh and raw and deep and forgotten within him. Jacko's own losses crashed over him: the circus burned to ashes in Vancouver, the death of his father, the carnie world he had both loved and hated, fled from yet missed. Out here in the wilderness far from Mother Russia, among giants, these personal tragedies felt like mere droplets in an ocean of shared grief and resilience.

Jacko let his own voice waver out into the sparkling night air left by the storm’s beginning retreat. He howled for his losses, for the strange events that had brought him to this mysterious family. He howled for the journey behind him and the journey he was on now. He howled with pain and cold and hunger. His voice joined with the many voices around him, and he felt every voice howled for its own losses as well as for the loss of the Mother.

As he howled, Jacko felt something shift within him. The pain, cold, and hunger that had consumed him earlier now felt distant, overshadowed by a profound sense of belonging. The storm, which had been a torment, now felt like a cleansing force. Each lash of rain had seemed to strip away another layer of his old self, transforming his cry into something wild and ancient. For the first time in his life, he wasn't an outcast or a freak—he was part of something larger, something ancient and powerful.

There was a moment of absolute stillness. In that silence, Jacko felt reborn. He was no longer just a human among Kelsach, but a vital part of this clan, bound by something far stronger than blood or appearance. Jacko noticed his body no longer shivered with cold but seemed to hum with an inner warmth that matched the energy of the Kelsach around him. The journey ahead, whatever it might hold, no longer seemed daunting. He was ready to face it, not alone, but as one of the Kels.

The storm passed and was muttering off to the north. The wind quieted, and the rain stopped. Jacko had no idea what was going to come next and was surprised when they began the solemn task of gathering the scattered remains.

The Kelsaches used obsidian flensing knives, six-inch curved knives meeting a straight handle of antler, and worked with practiced efficiency. They gathered all the pieces of the shattered head. The mandible was still attached to the back of the skull case, and the ravens had picked it clean. Black Mane sent Fern, the young Kelsach who had gathered the berries, and two other youngsters out to retrieve every possible bone fragment. Coyotes had passed through in the night, but the corpse was too muscular for them to remove even a finger or toe without starving commitment.

Using long, sweeping motions with the obsidian blades, Black Mane, the Giantess and another adult male stripped away the skin and removed the outer layers of muscle from torso and limbs. They made clean cuts through sinew and ligaments and disarticulated the long bones from their joints. The internal organs and rib cage were broken down into manageable weights.

Jacko stood under a tree shivering until the Giantess came over and gave him an image of skunk cabbage leaves. Jacko saw massive, three-foot leaves with a waxy sheen. He knew a smaller species from the wet woodlands and moist forest floors around the cave in Kostromo where he and his father had lived when he was a boy.

He remembered the stream where earlier he had stopped to drink and to watch the ravens. Those leaves had been thick and bright and the smell sulfurous, fetid. The Giantess put the Kelsach boy’s hand in Jacko’s, handed him a short, sharp knife with a comfortable bone handle and pushed them off toward the trail. The path was soft moss and dirt, unlike the logged clear-cut below, and the stream not far.

Jacko looked around and found a sturdy slab of cedar bark from a downed log. He and the boy waded into the creek. The boy was distracted by this new adventure and dove for one of the dozens of bright green frogs that leaped from the bank into the stream. Some leaped onto lily pads and the boy threw himself full-length after them. Others dove, and he dove like a little frog making a “ribbity” sound that mimicked theirs. Jacko laughed at the moment of pure joy and childhood wonder, then handed the boy the slab of cedar.

He waded deep into the jungle of elephant ear-sized skunk cabbage. He selected one and showed the boy how to position the slab just under water at the join of stem and leaf where Jacko made the cut. In this way, they moved upstream, cutting and stacking. When they had a dozen in a stack, they carried it back to the trail and found another slab. The work took them upstream, both of them invisible down in the golden forest of leaves, now backlit by the sun, each leaf translucent.

As they rounded a curve, the creek opened into a still pool beneath the sweeping branches of a massive cedar. A bull elk stood at the far end, the thick, muscular neck gleaming brown in the low light, his head crowned with a rack of antlers that were like a tangle of living branches against the sky. Jacko put his hand on the boy’s arm, but the boy was as struck by the sight as Jacko was. The elk’s presence bent the forest around it like a lodestone bends iron filings, every leaf and shadow seeming to orient itself toward the still center at the water’s edge.

The elk lowered its head to drink. When it paused, its eyes came level with Jacko’s and the boy’s. It held their gaze for a long moment in what to Jacko seemed like a profound connection. To Jacko’s show-trained eye, the elk was no performing beast. Its liquid eyes were brown and focused, deep with yet another unspoken message, this one of power and presence.

The boy moved, tree frogs plopped and yelled “ribbit!” The elk turned and faded into the shadows of the cedars. In his place were the first constellations of the blue hour.

Jacko and the boy moved the stacks of leaves back to the clearing where the butchering continued. They were next sent with the other two young Kels to tear long cedar fibers from trees. The redolent strips acted as ties as the working adults systematically secured every part of the murdered Mother into packages.

Black Mane picked up the flensed pelt and surprised Jacko by singling him out. He put the pelt down at Jaco's feet and brought out his knife. The other Kels paused in their work and gathered around to watch.

Jacko felt a flutter of alarm and had a momentary fantasy of making a run for it. Almost immediately, he knew that for an old thought and stood still, watchful.

Black Mane unrolled the pelt and shook it out. The fine furred skin was surprisingly supple and light. With sure strokes, he divided it, choosing the heart skin and holding it up to Jacko's naked body. He held out his hand to the Giantess, who handed him a length of white sisal rope. He pinched the skin at Jacko's shoulders, then smoothed it with a firm pass of the rope. The edges fused seamlessly. Jacko looked down in amazement. Black Mane was making clothes right on his body. Black Mane started to seal the shirt tight across his chest. Jacko put his hands on Black Mane’s where they were crossing his chest. With short gestures, he asked for a double row of slits where he could add cedar cord lacing. He needed to be able to put it on and off.

The same in the crotch; he needed to be able to get his equipment in and out. As he demonstrated, all the Kels rumbled with laughter. He was pretty sure there were some remarks made about the size of said equipment, but it was more than proportional to his size. He had fine brown hair on the upper half of his cock, which he didn't consider laughable at all.

Black Mane smoothed and twitched the pelt suit until it fit Jacko perfectly, fine, light and warm. Black Mane chose a tougher section of the pelt for boots, and then a cap, and a large cape that could also be a blanket roll. Jacko looked at the Kels and couldn’t figure out how they were carrying their knives, so he gestured for a belt and a knife sheath, all of which the proficient tailor Black Mane created with his knife and length of what Jacko had thought was rope but now wasn't sure. He had learned of such magical tailors during his long Journeys with the circus deep into Ireland and the other lands of fey.

When the belt fit, he held out his hand, and a straight-edged obsidian knife with a leather-wrapped handle was put into it. He slipped the knife into his tough new sheath. He stood with his head bent, thinking. The Kels had been amused by this project and now waited expectantly to see what this small creature would do next. Jacko lifted his head with a clear image of a belt pouch and a shoulder bag. The Kels all laughed, although Jacko didn't know what was so funny about a pack and a pouch. They had burden baskets and who knew what other tools. But Black Mane nodded, smiling, and obliged. Jacko felt put back together again. He had been reduced to nothing and now was redressed, re-armed, still hungry, but ready to go.

Each of them had a burden basket now, each one loaded with the green and yellow packages, even the extremities and long bones wrapped and tied for transport.

As they loaded up, Jacko took in the metallic blood scent, the smell of the pungent viscera, the wet fur from the rain-soaked Kels, the aroma of cedar, the stink of skunk cabbage. He felt dazed, as if had been sleeping and was reborn. These smells would always connect him to this time and this place in the Raven Glade mourning the Mother.

Jacko and the boy were lifted into Black Man’s basket, wrapped in the new cape.I n the stifling darkness, surrounded by the remnants of unimaginable violence, Jacko felt a paradoxical sense of peace emanating from the boy. The pelt, though born of brutality, now seemed to pulse with a mother's eternal love—a gossamer thread of tenderness woven through the fabric of horror, binding them in a tapestry of both dread and solace.

Warmth blossomed within Jacko, a stark contrast to the chill of death that had surrounded him moments before. Through gaps in the basket's weave, he glimpsed the giants emerging from the ancient forest's embrace into a world washed clean by the retreating storm. Tendrils of mist curled around their feet, parting to reveal the Great White Rope—a shimmering pathway between realms that seemed to pulse with its own ethereal light. As they approached the Great White Rope, the storm seemed to split, continuing to rage on either side but calm directly above the path. Jacko realized the storm itself was a bridge between worlds - the human world of clear skies and predictable weather on one side, and the Kelsach world of primal forces and magic on the other.

The Giantess, her form both fearsome and majestic, took the lead. With each of her steps, the Rope unfurled northward, tracing the contours of the Fraser River like a spectral guide. The Kelsach moved with a grace that belied their size, their gait swift yet eerily silent, as if gliding between the veils of reality. As they moved along the Great White Rope, Jacko noticed the storm was changing. The harsh, driving rain of the human world had gradually transformed into something else - droplets that seemed to glow faintly, falling in complex patterns that hinted at a deeper order. With each step towards Kwa-mist, Jacko felt he was not just traveling to a new place, but evolving into a being who could perceive and belong to this magical realm.

Cradled in this cocoon of fur and bone, surrounded by the remnants of horror transmuted into something sacred, Jacko felt an inexplicable peace settle over him. The boy, nestled against him, radiated a calm that seemed to resonate with the maternal energy emanating from the pelt.

As the basket swayed gently with Black Mane’s rhythmic strides, Jacko's eyelids grew heavy. The boundary between worlds blurred, and he and the boy drifted into a dreamless sleep, borne onwards to Kwa-mist on this impossible journey.

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In early May of 1950, Mickey Brown was 24 years old and very pregnant with me, counting down to my May 23rd date with history. She, along with my dad and my older sister Cheryl, lived in the northwest Washington hamlet of Sedro Woolley. Their home was a shake house built two or three decades earlier for workers at the local logging mill.

One day, while Mickey was doing dishes with her hands in soapy water and standing slightly to the left, a storm blew through. She jumped when she heard a loud clap of thunder and simultaneously saw a flash of lightning outside the window. The old house didn’t have a lightning rod; however, even if it had one, it wouldn’t guarantee protection against the erratic nature of ball lightning.

Suddenly, a glowing, crackling orb bounced in through the closed window. It found its way to the metal trim on the linoleum countertops and buzzed around it like its own personal racetrack before leaping toward the dining room window and disappearing across the neighbor's yard. As it passed, it kissed the side of my head. This encounter left me born with a streak of white in my dark hair—a mark I still see from time to time when I let my gray grow out too far. Little did Mom know, this event would connect me to a long line of electrical encounters.

Needless to say, Mickey let out a yelp as she jerked her hands out of the water. My Grandpa Kalles had witnessed this whole event from the doorway; he hurried over to check on both her and hr baby, but he was mostly amazed by what he had just seen. The electric kiss on my head, a jolt for Mickey, joined the other strange sights Grandpa Kalles had witnessed in his lifetime, and now, as I try to understand my own relationship with those electric threads, I find myself drawn into the currents of his past, to a time of, literally, shocking discoveries.

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Grandpa Kalles Gets a Shock

Dusk gathered early in the bunkhouse under the big, old cedars in the dim light once called the Green Hell. My grandfather, Frank Kalles (1892-1977), worked the Skagit Valley old growth as a timber faller in those days. He was also a bookworm, willing to be changed by a new idea. He was one of the few men who didn’t drop like a fresh-cut Doug-fir into his bunk after dinner. An oil lamp set in a niche just under the rafters shed a low, flickering light over his book. Electric lights were a luxury of the urban lowlands in those days.

A decade into the new twentieth century, the owner snaked a line first to the shake house that served as company headquarters, then to the mess hall, and as an after-thought, and because there were a few feet of wire left on the huge wooden spool, out to the bunkhouse. There it ran the length of the room, dangling one bare bulb in the middle.

The first time Frank saw the electric light, he immediately grasped its potential to extend his reading time. Hooking his thumbs into the top of his canvas pants, he stared at the wire-and-bulb contraption for a long time, figuring it out. A mechanically-minded fellow, he reckoned that a second, shorter wire could be spliced into the main, run over to his bunk, and a second light bulb rigged. He obtained the permission, the light bulb, the socket, the wire, and a pair of wire-cutters for the job.

None of the boys, including Frank, knew anything about electricity; it was the new technology on the block, so they stood around and watched with interest as Frank attempted the maneuver. Frank reached boldly up with the wire-cutters and clamped down. The two live wires flipped through the air: Frank landed on his butt, electricity crackled, and the boys yelled and scrambled to get clear of the hot lines. Someone figured to switch the light off. On the floor in the dark, Frank roared with surprised laughter at his own ignorance. “We didn’t know a darn thing about electricity in those days,” he said later.

He told that story on himself for the rest of his life. Electricity had caught his imagination. He was fascinated by Ben Franklin’s famous flying-a-kite-in-a-storm story, and he told it to us kids story-chained together with his own memory.

Ringing Ben Franklin’s Bells

Because of Grandpa Kalles’s repeated stories, sometimes I have to stop and think about Ben Franklin and his fascination with electricity. Sometimes we forget that Franklin gave us the beginnings of the vocabulary of electricity: battery, conductor, condenser, charge, discharge, uncharged, negative, minus, plus, electric shock, and electrician gave a voice to the power.

The whole business about standing with the kite in the storm and the sparking key is a visual myth, of course, based on popular 18th century illustrations of the famous experiments. If Ben had tried it like the pictures show it, he’d have been electrocuted like a rabbit. In fact, he was knocked senseless one time while trying to kill a turkey by electric shock. He described the feeling as, “an unusual blow throughout my whole body from head to foot…after which the first thing I took notice of was a violent quick shaking of my body, which gradually remitting, my senses as gradually returned.”

The proliferating media illustrations did lead people to think they could repeat the experiment just by looking at them. It captured the imagination of scientists across Europe and likely contributed to Georg Wilhelm Richmann's own research into atmospheric electricity. He was a Baltic German physicist working in Russia. Richmann was a pioneer in the study of atmospheric electricity. In 1753, he was conducting an experiment to measure atmospheric electrical phenomena during a thunderstorm in St. Petersburg. Tragically, he was struck by what is believed to have been ball lightning. Thousands of volts of electrical energy came down the wire, through his body and into the ground, boiling the water inside his cells on the way, a fate Mickey/Mom and I thankfully were spared.

The problem here is that the illustrators of that time couldn’t figure out a way to draw an action which takes place both inside and outside a structure, like lightning coming out of the sky into a house. Ben was actually in a house up in the second story. In an early version of the experiment, the wet thread from the kite passed under a nail in the window sash to a sparking key, and Ben was holding an enormous wad of insulating hemp rope. In a further development, the kite attracted electricity, and the current flowed along the wet twine to the key, which charged a Leyden Jar, storing the electricity he needed for his experiments.

The endless number of “false news” illustrations also missed the point of his experimentation, which was to demonstrate that electricity amasses any time atmospheric conditions change. The rain in the pictures was dramatic but misleading; rain wasn’t needed, and it was much better that lightning didn’t strike the kite.

Ben Franklin and my Grandpa Kalles were equally curious about the new science of electricity. I can imagine my grandfather watching Ben Franklin set up one of his experiments with great interest. Ben would explain to him what he was doing: "I have a nine-foot iron rod on top of the chimney. From the foot of the rod, a wire about the thickness of a goose quill comes through a covered glass tube in the roof and down through the well of the staircase. On the staircase across from my bedroom door, I've divided the wire and separated the ends about six inches. There's a little bell on each end. I have suspended a brass ball between the bells by a silk thread. Theoretically, when clouds charged with electricity pass by, the ball will play between and strike the bells."

Then Franklin would say to my grandfather, “Frank, go watch the storm coming from the attic window. Can we predict the atmospheric conditions that will ring the bells?”

The storm is still far away, yellow and purple on the horizon, the distant slant of rain a smear of gray from sky to ground. Grandpa throws open the attic window, sticks his head out and cranes to see the nine-foot iron rod vibrating above Ben Franklin’s house. He’s paying full attention to the tense quality of the wind, that whiff of ozone in the air. Then he sees the hairs on his arm rising. He doesn’t know exactly why, but he yells, “Those bells are gonna ring, Ben!” Down the stairwell in the hall, he hears the sound that will one day light a bunk house in the Northwest woods, the soft sound of bells rung by the power of a gathering storm.

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The Electric Fence

Under the sprawling shade of the ancient mulberry tree, where the backyard met the creek, my dad Warren erected an electric fence. A thin wire, strung between rough-hewn posts and threaded through pristine white insulators, hummed with a gentle, eight-volt current, enough to deter a wandering horse.

Late one summer evening, as we children played hide-and-seek among the weeping willows, a scene unfolded that I never forgot. Little Mark Wilson, barely two years old, reached out and grasped the wire. His small body jerked with each pulse of electricity, his face a picture of innocent curiosity. He did not cry, he did not pull away. To him the shocks were a new and interesting sensation.

It was only after his sister, her voice laced with concern, asked, “Doesn’t it hurt?” that he looked at her, his eyes mirroring her worry, and began to cry.

I remember the feeling of unease as I watched, and how we all learned that night, that what adults know to be pain, is not always known to a child.

The Mar-don Resort Incident

The innocence of childhood, and the incomplete understanding of danger, was shattered on a hot summer day at Mar-don Resort.

In the 1950s, the Mar-Don Resort was a scruffy scatter of campsites scratched out of the alluvial gravel of Potholes Reservoir, almost in the center of Washington State, 16 miles southwest of Moses Lake on the west end of O'Sullivan Dam. A ramshackle structure served as an office and store for camp supplies. A few RV sites had been wired, and a small pump house hummed in a ditch bringing water up from the lake in an exposed irrigation pipe.

My brother, Lisle, was a dark-haired toddler of three or four, and I—that same dark, unruly hair—was seven or eight the year we camped at Mar-Don over Memorial Day weekend. Lisle and I went for a walk along the lakeshore beach as kids do, picking up bits of shiny flint and oddly shaped concretions of clay. When we came to the water pipe, we just sprawled on top of it and heaved ourselves over.

The day was hot, so we were in our little bathing suits, splashing in and out of the water. Potholes Reservoir stretched almost to the skyline from a kid’s-eye point of view. The sun shimmered and shook over the surface. Aluminum fishing boats elongated into shiny dinosaurs or sharks. One disappeared into a distant indigo mist, then reappeared with a black dog standing like a plastic toy on the stern.

Lisle and I heard Mom’s lunch-time call to return, so we walked more briskly back the way we’d come, kicking up water as we went. Lisle approached the water pipe first. He crawled over; then, I was astonished to see him flung sideways into the air to land hard on his back.

I ran to the pipe to get over and help him. I leapt up with my whole body and felt the animal that is electricity reach out and suck me down. It was eating my soul alive. I struggled to move but could not. It sucked and sucked like the ten black leeches I had seen on my sister Cheryl’s leg at Stake Lake. As I tried to scream and struggle, the creature hugged me closer, I closed my eyes as it went for that last long drink that was my life.

As quickly, it shoved me away. Like my brother, I flew through the air and landed on my back, beyond limp, drained almost of all life, unable to move or breathe. In the distance, I heard my mother call out and the sound of my father’s footsteps running toward me.

Was it pain I felt? I didn’t have a very complete vocabulary of pain at that age. What I felt was, I think, horror. I had met the monster under the bed, and it had almost killed me. So also, terror, and incomprehension. The memory lives not in my head but in my body where I felt my own death at an early age and someday will again.

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The Dinner Party

At a dinner party decades later, I told the Mar-Don story and opened it up for discussion. “What’s up with this? What happened?” I asked.

Mike, a graphic artist, jumped right in with both hands twisting first one way and then the other, toward and away in a pattern that demonstrated, he said, “Those magnets you played with as a kid. If the poles are opposite, the magnets suck together. If they’re the same, they push away from you. The electricity in the pipe switched polarities at random, sucking you on, forcing you off.”

I nodded with more comprehension than I felt. “But why does it suck the body?”

Mike explained about lightning coming up from the earth and down from the sky. I refilled my wineglass.

Jeff, who is a doctor, added that in the United States current alternates at about sixty times a minute, roughly correlating to the electrical pulses of the human muscular system. It is that strange correlation that enhances the affinity of AC current for the human body. “It’s called tetany,” he said,” like tetanus, which refers to the rigidity of the muscles of tetanus victims.”

“But why were there alternating currents of any kind in that pipe?” I wondered.

“It shorted out,” Mom told me later when I asked her about the incident. “I read the owners the riot act, and the pipe was buried underground the next time we camped there.”

The conversation at the dinner party table moved inevitably, it seems, to ball lightning. Peter told a story about a college friend, Sid, who saw his mother in the bathtub during a hot summer storm. Ball lightning came in the bathroom window, bounced off the floor and flew back out, leaving the wet woman shocked only in mind. Sid looked back to that moment when he declared himself a physics major.

That reminded me of the time our whole family packed the car and left our Wenatchee, WA home just before dawn. We wanted to drive west over the hump of the Cascades to catch an early ferry out of Anacortes to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island for a long Memorial Day weekend. As we came down to the stop sign at the bottom of Horse Lake Road, the main street was empty. Dawn touched the graceful crown of Burch Mountain with a creamy pink and gold, which stood in glistening contrast to the dark, receding cloudbank of last night’s storm.

I don’t know who saw it first, but we stayed parked there, all of us silent as a mysterious oblong of light gathered on the flank of Burch Mountain and slowly rolled our way, in and out of view, growing larger as it came nearer. Fifteen or twenty seconds later, it hit the road somewhere around Monitor, then rolled majestically across the bridge in front of the car, then disappeared down Wenatchee Avenue, bouncing gently, big as a house, silvery-white with pulses of snaking magnetism. It was like looking into a crystal Christmas tree ornament that glowed and crackled with blue lines.

“A flying saucer,” Mom said.

“Ball lightning,” Daddy said.

“And that’s probably all the family psychology you need for self-knowledge,” my husband said, as I finished my tale. Then somebody else had another ball lightning story, and the conversational ball just kept rolling from the electrical wiring of one person’s memory to another, stories joining us in an alternating current of what my Grandma Kalles used to call fellowship.

As a flash of that lightning called laughter flowed over me, some other light rose up from the dark, a memory of another dinner party a dozen years before in Fort Collins, Colorado. I met a couple there in their thirties; more than that I couldn’t say because what was unusual about them both was the stricken looks on their faces. They smiled, shook hands, arranged themselves in poses of calculated nonchalance, but they only contrived to look like terrified mannequins with faces frozen in a rictus of pleasantry. To be in their presence was to stand in the shadow of dread. The conversation skated on surfaces, offering no tool for seeing beneath this ice.

After dinner, the man began to speak compulsively. I felt like the guest as the Ancient Mariner was compelled to tell his story; I was just as compelled to listen. “I was raising rabbits as a commercial venture up on the Cache l’ Poudre. I wanted a quick, humane method of slaughtering them and rigged up a system with two wires that went either side of their heads and electrocuted them.”

The man glanced at his wife, who had locked her face into a tetany of normalcy. I thought she was going to faint. Certainly I didn’t like where the story was going. I wish now I’d followed my instinct to just get up and leave the room as one may go to the bathroom during the violent scenes in a movie.

The story plowed inexorably on: “One day I trained our eleven-year-old son Aaron to help with the rabbit slaughter. He was doing fine. I thought he understood the technique and the danger perfectly. I left the rabbit house for just a few minutes to do some chores. When I came back, I found him on the floor, dead, electrocuted with my own invention.”

I wanted to be able to say something reassuring like, “It wasn’t your fault. You need to forgive yourself,” but when you look into the eyes of a man who has electrocuted his own son, you see into the Edvard Munch scream that is the maw of the universe. The wife’s face twisted into the shapes of ancient anguish, “Why would God let it happen?”

This wasn’t my dinner party and as struck by the bolt of their story as I was, it wasn’t my place to say, “It was an accident. Statistically random, unguided by any power other than the stupidity of father and son alike. No one’s watching out for you but yourselves. You can’t get over this; you never will.”

This is a story I have hated so much I haven’t told it until now. But while one story ended in tragic finality, another experience showed me that there may be more to the end of life than just the end.

The Sparrow’s Story

One crisp October morning in California in the early 1980s, a shower of hot pink bougainvillea leaves scattered as I opened the pool gate. The still, reflective aqua mirrored the sky, and, beside it, a small sparrow fluttered erratically, a broken wing trailing blood. Compassion, swift and wordless, moved me. I scooped the small bird into my hand, leaned over the pool, and gently submerged it. The frantic pulse of its tiny body stilled, and then, a jolt, an electric current surged through me, from my hand up my arm, a tingling in my throat, and a release through the crown of my head. For a timeless moment, I felt a vast, open space within me, as if air itself were flowing through my very being. I straightened, the sodden weight of the sparrow in my hand, and, in that instant, I understood that the soul is a spark, an electrical essence connecting all living things. That feeling, that charge, has stayed with me, a reminder of the unseen energy that flows through every living thing.

Electricity, in its capricious dance of power and danger, illuminates not only the physical world but the hidden currents of our lives. From Grandpa Kalles's laughter to life’s devastating shocks, we are all conductors of experience.

Perhaps, in the end, the true current is not the pulse of electricity, but our shared capacity to find light and meaning. Our stories weave through our lives, illuminating memories like electric threads.

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I tried stepping on both snowshoes at once and buckling leather straps with my liner gloves on, but after fumbling with the elk-hide straps, I finally pulled the gloves off with my teeth. The leather had stiffened in the wind while riding on top of the car, so now they twisted backward on the bias. A couple of yanks and some nimble opposing thumb work later and I straightened up, pulling my thick moosehide mittens over my liner gloves. I stamped a couple of times to check that the 48-inch, rawhide-laced snowshoes were on securely, slipped my hands through the straps of the wide-basket poles, and was ready to hunt for that perfect, high-mountain Christmas tree.

My Dad’s stocking-capped head was bent over my eleven-year-old sister Toren’s feet, where he was helping her strap on a shorter pair of bear-paw shoes. When Dad looked up from helping Toren, his voice carried that mix of instruction and care I'd grown so used to: "Everybody ready? Remember, test your footing, watch for signs." He picked up his big, double-bit axe and camera, and we were off on our annual hunt. My brother Lisle had shuffled a trail through unbroken snow toward the pine forest, and we followed after.

The day was clear blue and cold as the Babe the Blue Ox’s nose. We were high on the eastern slope of Washington State’s Cascade Mountains. The view from the ridge was of more ridges and peaks in the increasing distance, more pines. Black basalt outcroppings stood in eye-aching contrast to the snow and sky. Far below, the silver ice thread of a river flashed in and out of view like a mirror snaking through the trees.

In this high country the pines grew individually. The first one we passed looked perfect for our front room, tall, round and redolent. It was also over twenty feet tall Dad pointed out; we needed one half that size. Fortunately, that meant wandering deeper and deeper into the landscape until the bright orange splash of our International Harvester (a kind of very large, early SUV) disappeared and the glass shard sparkle of snow surrounded us.

Lisle led us on a healthy huff uphill and around to a south slope. When we stopped for breath, Dad pointed his axe handle at the base of a big pine. “Be careful, “ he said, “The south sun melts the snow next to the tree trunk and makes a hole. Then the next snow blows over it, so you can’t see the hole.” He banged the axe on the ice rim at the base of the caramel-scented ponderosa. The ice and snow caved away, and we couldn’t see to the base of the cavern that yawned beneath the trunk. “We’re up on a variable ten to twenty foot snow pack on this side of the hill, so it’s a long way down.”

Only one person fell into an ice well that day, and that was me.

About one in the afternoon, Dad suggested we spread out across a likely looking area and shout when we found a tree. I always liked going out of sight of the others to be alone with only the sound of silvery ice bits sifting down from the big trees. I rounded the south edge of a ridge and immediately spotted the perfect tree—round and full, and short.

I shuffled closer to take a look, the massive elkhide snowshoes forcing me to swing my feet wide. Just as I opened my mouth to shout, the snow gave way beneath me with a sharp crack. The front of my snowshoes punched through first, pitching me forward. I threw my arms out but it was too late—I plunged headfirst into cold shadow. The long snowshoes caught crosswise in the narrow well, tangling in tree roots and ice. The sudden stop wrenched my legs back as my body swung down, leaving me dangling upside down in the frozen shaft, my own startled scream still echoing off the ice.

The first thing I noticed was that the tree wasn't ten feet tall, it was maybe sixty or seventy—though from this upside-down perspective, it might as well have been a hundred. Its trunk disappeared up into a distant point of daylight, like looking up from the bottom of a well—which, I realized with a shiver, was exactly what I was doing.

My terrified heart ran like a rabbit, and for a minute, it seemed like I couldn’t catch my breath. I expected to be hurt after my Alice tumble, but mostly I was just upside down in a room of blue ice with a wet tree trunk next to my cheek.

I had landed splayfooted, my heart hammering as blood rushed to my head. The ancient elkhide snowshoes were crossed above me like massive wooden scissors, their worn leather bindings creaking against the ice. The well's walls glittered in the weak sunlight filtering down, barely wider than my outstretched arms. My wool hat had slipped off, and my hair dangled in icy tendrils.

Testing each limb sent stabs of pain through my shoulders, but nothing seemed broken. The real challenge was the snowshoes—they'd wedged themselves perfectly between the tree roots and ice walls about eight feet up, leaving me suspended like a trapped bat. My breaths came out in frightened puffs of steam.

I fumbled at the buckles with trembling fingers, forced to take off my mittens despite the biting cold. The metal clasps had frozen into lumps the size of walnuts, crusted with ice. Twisting my torso upward, I reached as high as I could along my leg, my abs burning with the effort to maintain the position. My numb fingers picked at the first buckle while blood pounded in my ears. The leather fought me, stiff as iron in the cold, and each movement made the snowshoes creak ominously above.

One buckle finally gave with a sharp crack, and my right leg swung free, slamming my knee into the ice wall. I gasped, both from pain and the realization that releasing the second shoe would drop me completely. Groping blindly up my left leg, I managed to wedge my right boot into a gap between two roots. Only then did I dare to work on the second set of frozen buckles, my muscles screaming from the awkward position.

The second snowshoe was worse—the buckles nearly fused to the leather after my wild tumble. I contorted upward, abs feeling the workout, to get a better angle on the clasps. My fingertips were turning an angry red, but I couldn't stop to warm them. The frozen buckle bit into my skin as I worked it back and forth, my breath coming in sharp gasps that echoed off the ice.

A sudden crack above made me freeze. One of the wedged snowshoes had shifted, sending down a shower of ice crystals that stung my face. If they came loose before I was ready... I forced myself to work slower, even as my arms trembled from maintaining the awkward position. Finally, the last buckle surrendered with a harsh scraping sound.

For one terrifying moment, I hung suspended by just my trapped foot, the massive snowshoes still crossed above me. Gripping the root with both hands now, I braced myself and pulled my foot free. I dropped the last few feet, landing in a crouch in the deep snow at the bottom of the well, my boots sinking in up to my ankles. Heart still pounding, I looked up at the circle of pale sky above. The elkhide snowshoes remained firmly wedged between the roots and ice walls, a stark wooden X against the light. Now I had to figure out not only how to get myself out, but also how to retrieve those family heirloom snowshoes without damaging them.

Various resourceful heroine ideas came to mind. The tree trunk that had created this well ran straight up the middle, its rough bark and protruding roots offering natural handholds. Dad had taught me how to get out of an ice crevasse using a roped technique called prussixing, but I didn't have a rope. Still, I could apply the another principle he’d taught us kids called chimney climbing: brace against opposing sides while moving upward.

I pressed my back against the ice wall and set my boots on two protruding roots, facing the tree trunk. Testing my weight, I found I could shimmy upward by pushing my back hard against the ice while using hands and feet on the trunk and roots. The process of melt and freeze had created dozens of layers of rotten snow crusts that sometimes crumbled, but as long as I kept solid pressure between my back and the ice wall, I could inch my way up, reaching from root to root.

Snow sifted down from the tree looming above me, its crown high above in bright sunlight. The walls of the ice cave glowed an eerie blue, and I shivered in the shadowy cold.

I made it almost to where my snowshoes were wedged when Dad's head popped over the top. He was stretched out on his belly looking down at me. "Anybody home down there?"

"I've almost got it," I said, panting. "But the snowshoes are stuck tight up here." I was high up enough now that I could see where the well widened around the tree's lower branches. The transition would be tricky—I'd have to shift from my back-against-ice position to getting fully onto the tree trunk. Taking a deep breath, I reached up and gripped a solid branch with one hand, keeping my back pressed hard against the ice. Then, in one quick move, I pulled with my arm while pushing off with my legs, swinging my body around to hug the trunk fully. My boots scrabbled for purchase on the bark, but I had a solid grip now on both the branch and trunk.

Lisle and Toren's heads appeared over the hole. "Cool," Lisle said.

"Are you cold?" Toren asked, "Get out and come see the tree I found."

"Stay right there," Dad said. "Let's get those snowshoes loose first." He inched his big axe with its sturdy leather sheath over the edge. "Hook it around one of the frames and we'll work them free together. Don't let go of your hold on the tree."

The axe swung down within reach, and I carefully hooked it around one of the curved elkhide frames, keeping my other arm locked around the tree trunk, boots braced against roots and ice. Working together with Dad tugging gently from above, we wiggled the first snowshoe until it came free with a sudden scrape.

"Easy now," Dad said. "Get a better grip on that trunk." I pressed harder against the tree as the second snowshoe shifted above me.

The second snowshoe took longer, frozen tight where it had wedged against a root. When it finally gave way, a shower of ice crystals rained down my neck. Dad handed the axe back to Lisle, then reached down with both hands.

"Ready?" he asked.

I hugged the tree trunk with one arm and grabbed his wrist with my other hand. "Ready."

"Lisle, Toren, anchor my legs."

A final push with my boots, a strong pull from Dad, and I scrambled over the edge onto solid snow. We all lay there catching our breath for a moment, looking at the perfect dark circle my fall had created. The snowshoes lay nearby, unharmed except for a few new scratches in their ancient varnish.

"Now," Dad said, sitting up and brushing snow from his jacket, "Toren, let's go see this tree of yours and no more diving into ice wells!”

I started to buckle back into my snowshoes, my fingers still trembling slightly. "It's perfect," Toren said. "You'll see."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“It’s a long way down,” she added, taking a last admiring look at the dark well, “It’s sort of like a secret fort.”

"You're lucky you didn't break anything," Dad said, shouldering his axe and turning away from the well. He led us around the slope to where Toren's chosen tree stood waiting. It was perfect - shorter than my ice well tree, with sturdy branches spread evenly like a layer cake. The sun had warmed its needles just enough to release that sharp, sweet pine scent that meant Christmas was really coming.

Dad took a few practice swings to clear the snow from the base, then the bright blade of the axe bit into the trunk with sharp, rhythmic strokes. The tree fell with a soft whump into the crusty snow. While Dad fastened the four guide ropes, I flexed my still-trembling fingers and checked my snowshoes one more time - tight and secure.

The long tracks we left, hauling our prize back through the forest, looked like some strange creature had passed. Now, all these years later, when people ask about my childhood Christmas memories, I tell them about elkhide snowshoes nearly as long as I was tall, about ice wells hiding beneath perfect trees. I tell them about learning to climb backwards up tree trunks, about how rescue smells like pine needles and sounds like my father's voice coming from above.

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Hello Everyone!

This the last installment of Fianna’s World. You can find Part 1 here, Part 2, “The Vision,” here. I really appreciate you following me down this particular rabbithole, and I promise the light does appear at the end of the tunnel. At the end of Part 2, I had first introduced you to Doc Holga at the failed dinner party. She was the head of a local coven of self-styled witches, and we pick up with her now as we race none too fast toward a new world.

As always, I appreciate your comments!

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High Weirdness and Covenplay

Bill started seeing Doc Holga professionally for acupuncture treatments. They saw eye to eye about all kinds of whackadoodle ideas, including our local fleet of flying saucers, the current rash of attacks by aliens snatching people and putting crystals in their foreheads, and the presence of attached entities in Bill’s gut.

Doc Holga and Nurse Randi and Bill were all conspiracy theorists of the first order. I was as disinterested in all that then as I am now but with less ability to filter the weirdness that was all around me. Sometimes in the middle of one of these confabulations, I would stop and gasp for air; I felt like I was drowning.

These two women were also on an outer orbit of Sunrise Ranch, as were the couple dozen other people Bill and I started to hang out with. Not because I was compatible with them but because we had Sunday morning services in common to fuel a week’s worth of rehash. By which I don’t mean any intelligent conversation worthy of a person who called him or herself an Emissary of Divine Light. It was more like MacBeth’s three witches cackling over the toxic cauldron muttering, “Boil, boil, trouble and toil.” But those three were pikers compared to the gossip, the rants, the blusters, diatribes, the fuming and haranguing, blathering, blethering, babbling, malicious meddling, scandalmongering defamatory calumny, drivel, gab, gabble, jabber, tattle, prattle, wiggle-waggle gibberish and please! Let me tell you what I really think.

If January 1989 began ominously with finding a black widow spider in my bed, January and February 1990 had their own portent of sticky times ahead. On Jan. 17, our Emissary world spoking out from Sunrise Ranch at the center, reeled with the arrest of one of our close-in own for seven accounts of sex with a minor. Joey Mandela, husband of Tara Redstone, apparently had been doing “spiritual” sexual awakening rituals with young boys in the area.

After he was arrested, Tara Redstone had the apartment in their home where the deeds had happened available for rent. Bill had sold my sister’s home, and it was time for us to move out, and for some reason, we thought this apartment, so recently the geographic location of so much pain, would be just right for us. Certainly, the price was right. So we moved up to 7000 feet into a small daylight basement apartment with a great view out over Rattlesnake Lake. I assure you, I pay much more attention to signs and portents these days as a cautious rationalist.

On February 16, 1990, just a month later, the Loveland molasses factory exploded, and the streets ran first hot with molasses then brittle as the freezing temperatures froze it where it flowed. Brer Rabbit wouldn’t’ve dreamed of a better Tar Baby. People drove cars into it and didn’t drive out. They tried to walk across it and had to be rescued by firemen with blowtorches to melt their shoes out of the molasses. Everything about my two years in Colorado was like that molasses spill--at the center was a black morass, and everything I threw at it stuck and froze.

Bill just got sicker, but it was some kind of cycling illness that let him up then threw him down. On my May birthday 1990, he took me out to lunch in a lovely outdoor restaurant in Fort Collins. The sun was shining, and May roses cascaded out of colorful pots hung from an adobe wall. A fountain whited out the noise from the street. Bill wanted me to have a special day, but the demon chose that moment to reach up and grab him under. Bill put his head down on the table and said, “Order anything you want.”

My heart broke for him, broke for the good, kind and generous person I knew him--or part of him, or one of him--to be. Worst birthday ever. But sometimes compassion kills. I thought I could help Bill on so many, many occasions, but whenever I reached out a hand, nothing ever useful came of it. It just was not my battle to help fight. Once, toward the end, he said, “Sandy, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”

And then with a clarity that suddenly cut across all the illness, all the manic craziness, all the despair and confusion, his old voice spoke to me directly soul to soul, “Sandy, save yourself.”

When I think of those frightening, complicated days in Colorado, my mind often turns to the age-old problem of evil. And when I think of evil, I remember a first hand account from a survivor of Jonestown I met one time. This woman, who had loved the community life of The People’s Temple in both California and in Guyana, tried to explain to me how Jim Jones had become increasingly possessed by some malevolent entity, which she called a demon. “Look at the videos of him,” she told me, “You can see his flickering tongue. That’s how you know demons.” And I looked, and I saw that uncontrolled tongue flicking like a heat-seeking pit viper had got inside him.

“The day before the suicides,” she continued, “a black cloud of evil came in from the jungle and settled over Jonestown. When it left late the next day, 900 people were dead.”

“You mean a real cloud? What made you think it was evil?”

“It was freakish. The clouds just suddenly blew in and started blowing everything around. Children started crying. We looked at each other in fear. That wind brought in the evil.”

Other survivors commented on this wind. “That freakish storm and the mood seemed ominous. ‘I felt evil itself blow into Jonestown when that storm hit,’ recalls Tim Carter, one of the few settlers to survive that day,” in an interview with Tim Reiterman, who covered Jonestown for the San Francisco Examiner.

I thought about that and about the sorcerer’s mist that had killed Fianna on the Ides of March 1991. “So you think evil can exist external from humans?”

“Yes,” she replied with absolute conviction. “It is a free floating force of nature.”

Another young man who by the grace of circumstances did not go to Guyana, remembers the first time he met Jim Jones. “As I approached [Jones], he bent over and extended his hand to shake mine. At the time our hands made contact--as he was bent over--I could see his eyes over the top of his dark sunglasses. What I saw scared the daylights out of me, and I jerked my hand back. There was something very strange and frightening about what I both saw and felt...what I sensed was pure evil.” This is not the intellectualization or psychologization of evil; it is the atavistic encounter.

The term “hidden complex” is not sufficient for me to explain this primal recognition of malevolent darkness, yes, of evil, in another person. And by “evil,” I mean with the power and intent to do deathly harm to others. I am not even thinking or speaking of morality here, or jurisprudence, religion or situational ethics; I mean something more pre-rational, savage.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field: I’ll meet you there.

This is Rumi’s invitation, and encounters with atavistic evil can best be remembered, described, and mulled over out there in that field.

I don’t not believe evil can gather in the forest and be drawn in and down by the dark attractor of a deranged and dangerous nutjob like Jim Jones. As an educated, perhaps over-educated rationalist, science, psychology, intuition and experience twist and turn in my mind like a Rubik’s cube constantly trying to solve itself. I understand with part of my education that demons are unresolved, unconscious complexes that need to be consciously integrated into the individuating wholeness of the self. I’ve read about the Shadow and about projection, and I only partially believe all that because of what happened to me one night.

Bill was so sick most of the time that we had long ceased to be lovers. But one night he was on an uptick, which meant he was really turning on the Irish seductive charm. As we were lying side by side in that twilight post-coital state of half wakefulness, I became aware that a shadow figure, a full grown man was slipping sideways out of Bill’s body and entering mine, not sexually, but laterally, like the full insertion of one figure lengthwise into another. It was like two figures standing in front of a mirror, then stepping together and becoming one, and that second figure emerged out of Bill and moved into me.

I was wide awake now. I jumped up off the bed. Bill was now also awake and trying to make sense out of what was happening.

I opened my mouth to scream, but instead of my own voice, an old, slow, guttural voice came out. It twisted my face into a shape I had never made before.

Thirty years later, I looked up “demonic possession” in Wikipedia to read the list of features. One of them is, “drastic changes in vocal intonation and facial structure.” That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

This is a stupid and dangerous thought, I know, but now I sort of wish I had had the emotional maturity or shamanic training to endure this visitation, to interrogate it, and then to exorcise it, if that is the right word. Could I have removed it from Bill forever, moved it out of him and through me and along out into the universe? Would it have remained itself or could I have transformed it into a being of light? I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.

In reality, I found the presence, the voice, the whateverthehell it was, unacceptable, unendurable, 100% not an optional experience for me. By force of a will I didn’t know I had, I denied this moment. My own voice overrode the terrifying drone of the demonic voice. I screamed and screamed. I jumped up and down and shook my arms and hand violently as if shaking off snakes. “No!” I yelled. “This is NOT alright with me! Out! Out! Out! Out!”

Not a minute later, I felt whateverthehell it was move out of my mind, free up my body, and I was my calm self again.

I remember Bill said in the most shocked voice ever, “You know this means we can never have sex again,” and we never did.

One theory I have always had about Bill is that he was cursed not only by a parasite when he was in Guatemala in the Peace Corps for four years, but that he was cursed by a powerful witch--and there are plenty of those there to this day. By his own account, he went, as we say, “native” during those years. He told me he went off the Peace Corps script entirely, that he lived in a village that was flooded by a hurricane. He told of being involved in saving people from trees, from uprooted huts floating by. He said that during the emergency he became the de facto mayor of the little village, going on raids to gather supplies. His descriptions of this chaotic time in his life always sounded permeated with the local witchcraft culture. They sounded lawless, chaotic, like a time when he could have had the shaman’s bone pointed at him and some demonic spirit driven into him while he was under the influence of the concoctions he said they mixed up out of the local jungle flora almost nightly.

Or maybe my speculations are all bullshit, man. But I am now sixty-six years old, looking back at a vulnerable time in my life when something very strange happened to me that I can neither explain nor forget. I find myself groping for language to explain how I felt when my life was brushed by some dark wing, and how I felt it reached out and took Fianna’s life in that witch’s mist in the hollow of the road. All these threads tangled together--leaving my cloistered seminary community, the death of our beloved leader, the implosion at Sunrise Ranch as that vacuum rushed to be filled, the vicious snake pit of gossip that surrounded it, Crazy Doc Holga and Crazier Nurse Randi with their flying saucers, crystal implants, and alien evisceration of cows.

The culminating event came after Fianna’s death when I couldn’t leave the house without Bill threatening to slash his wrists in the bathtub. He was a crazy bastard, but at that time and in that space, he was MY crazy bastard, and we clung together in the grieving depression after Fianna’s death.

I got a call from Crazy Doc Holga to come have a visit with her one evening at 7:00 pm. This meant driving down off the mountain at dusk, leaving Bill along with whatever razor blades he had stashed away under a garden rock like an alcoholic might hide bottles in the garage, but she was insistent. It was the Emissary naivete in me that thought all Emissaries had to be friends. I didn’t have the vocabulary of no at that time. I was reluctant, but I went.

When I drove up to the ranch, I saw several other cars parked, which surprised me because she had been clear this was just the two of us. I was greeted by Crazy Nurse Randi in full witch regalia--the long, tye-dyed dress, the dangling crystal necklaces--crystals no doubt mined from the foreheads of her clients and claimed in lieu of payment. She began smudging me with sweetgrass and white sage before I even got in the door. This was the first time I realized I had fetched up in the company of witches.

In the living room circled around either side of the fireplace was the whole coven, all in full regalia. Some wore the horns of Venus, others held staffs dripping with stones and bones. Hands and wrists flashed with amulets and charms. The witches meant business, and the business was me.

Crazy Doc Holga was in charge, in full High Priestess mode. I was brought into the circle, and she laid a crystal wand on my shoulder and said, “There is a place for you here. Now you must come away and be here.”

As if on cue, all the witches joined hands, closed their eyes and started pulsing in toward me, holding me in a tight circle and then pulsing away and then in again, all the while chanting, “Come away, come away, come away.”

The pulsing and chanting made me dizzy and disoriented. “Here? Where? Away from what?”

“It has come to our attention that Bill is in toxic possession of a demon that is destroying him. You must flee far from him. We have taken the dog so that you might be free.”

“Wait. What? You took Fianna?”

But this wasn't to be a rational conversation. The pulsing stopped but they continued to sway and hum as one by one each woman “spoke her truth” to me. They were all into enigmatic coven-speak, but I gathered they were trying to speak on my behalf and against Bill, who had done a lot of work around the ranch and I knew considered himself more of a friend than I did. The different speeches sometimes sounded encouraging, at other times scary. One woman would praise me, another would praise Bill, then another would say we were both toxic to each other.

I was trying to interpret the many messages through the haze of white sage smoke, the humming and mazy motion of the swaying skirts. Why I even stayed there I don’t know. I wouldn’t stand for any of that dangerous play acting for a moment now, but I knew each of these women in their daily life guises, and it just didn’t occur to me that this was not friendly, that I should walk away.

What they thought they were doing was an intervention to separate Bill and me. This was an all-lesbian coven, and Crazy Doc was recruiting me in her own inimitable way to come live with her and Crazy Nurse Randi here at the Crazy Ranch. I have no real idea to this day what Crazy Doc meant when she said they had taken Fianna away, but I finally literally broke out of the circle and ran to my car, driving miles up the curving mountainside with yet more terrified tears streaming down my cheeks. Had they put their witch’s curse on the mist that killed Fianna, and had that curse been meant for me? I felt--and was--utterly and completely betrayed by this circle of so-called Emissary women friends. I hadn’t been in town long enough to be truly close to any of them, but I hadn’t had any other support system, either. They had been it.

When I got home, I got out of the Jeep and walked out to look over moonlit Rattlesnake Lake far before. The rattlesnakes, those so-called friends, had struck.

I had plenty to think about as I stared down at those dark waters far below. My own culpability was that perhaps I had stayed too long at the fair; that is, perhaps twenty years wrapped in the wonderful cotton batting of seminary life had been a little too long for my internal growth. Nothing had toughened me up, let me experience and come to grips with the darkness in the world. After all, we were called Emissaries of Divine Light.

In that quiet moment, I felt a strong, distinct energy move up out of the ground and into my feet, rippling up my spine and through the crown of my head--not the attaching entity experience with Bill, but a powerful wave of personal strength I could feel was both of and not of myself. It had a message for me that I heard loud and clear. “Leave this place or someone else will die.”

Getting out of Colorado with Bill resisting the move every inch of the way and with no help from anyone--for I never spoke to any member of the coven ever again--was like crawling over glass, but I absolutely did it.

Am I still angry at these women all these years later? Certainly that is the emotion my memory rides on. And yes, I think they deserve my anger for presuming they could reach in and yank me out of my life. But I am most angry at myself for not knowing where my own boundaries were. I was living in a dream of a fenceless West where Emissaries were ALL ONE. I was in my thirties with the sunny idealism of the rural teen I had once been. I didn’t know I would need a vocabulary of evil once I left the protective surround of the Glen Ivy Community, but willy-nilly, I got my education in weirdness.

My sister Cheryl, by this time re-located to Eugene, Oregon, sent me an envelope with a half dozen or more college catalogs in it. I spread them out on the coffee table. The Lane Community College catalog had a picture of a cherry tree in blossom on the cover. I tapped it and said, “I’m going to work there.” And I have just retired from Lane CC after a twenty-five year teaching career.

The turquoise tin with Fianna’s ashes went with me. One day in August 1991, Cheryl and I went to the beach with the specific intent of releasing the ashes into the ocean.

We found a place to park and began the one-mile walk across the dunes to the beach. As we came over the rise of a dune of golden sand, suddenly our ears were full of the sound of happy dogs. To our astonishment, team after team of sled dogs pulling sand sledges swept by--fifty or sixty dogs in training for the Iditarod Great Sled Race up in Alaska. I saw one team of all black Huskies rush by, eager to take the lead. If Fianna’s spirit was still anywhere near me or the little tin of ashes, she certainly jumped out and joined in the joyous race of dog teams. They rushed by us yapping and laughing, the mushers urging them on, the sledges bouncing and careening in the loose yellow sand.

I opened the tin and spread the ashes in their enthusiastic wake.

“Farewell, Fianna.”

Epilogue: Two years later, I had met my now husband Peter Jensen and we married in 1994. I haven’t seen Bill in literally decades, but I understand from a friend of a friend that he lives in a foster care home where they allow him to keep his seven rescue cats. It is only now so many years later, reaching deep into that distant past that I find the compassion for Bill that he deserves. Whatever he has is a disease. I didn't really understand that then. All I knew is that I had to save myself, and I did.

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Hello, Everyone!

If you didn’t get a chance to read Part 1 of Fianna’s Story, it is here. This is Part 2, where I go back to how I got in this muddle in the first place, how Bill and I left Glen Ivy, what it was like to be in meltdown central of the Emissaries of Divine Light after the death of leader Martin Cecil, Bill goes round the bend, and a failed dinner party. Something special for the dark, reflective hours of Winter Solstice. Part 3 is “High Weirdness and Covenplay,” where the witches try to save me and finally I figure out how to save myself.

Much love to each and every one of you. I am so humbled that you have been willing to fall with me down this particular rabbit hole.

Sandy

The Vision

A long, long time ago, I made a decision based on a vision.

Bill and I went one night in November 1988 up the Temescal Valley in Southern California to Murrieta Hot Springs. The air was slightly crisp. The parking lot, pools and buildings were swathed in steam rising up into the night. We sat in a big, round pool like a donut where the current of water moved bathers gently around the circle. A dozen of us this evening floated around this giant mandala or wheel of fortune, faces and pale, writhing limbs lit from below by the blue pool lights.

Bill and I were talking over--you know, I wish I could remember what exactly we were discussing because if I could go back in time, I’d shut my mouth, stop listening, and walk the entire way back home to Glen Ivy on foot.

But crazy people like Crazy Bill are crazy like fox, that insidious pseudo-logic, the emotional tendrils, and in his case, more than a touch of the Irish. He was a professional salesman, selling solar-powered hot water heaters to vets, who could get a good tax credit for having them installed. He said it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The company had made him memorize a script. The script proceeded in steps from the Meet and Greet stage through to the Close. Bill bragged that he could present the chunks of the script in any order and still get the sale.

He used to talk about the “Magnum 44 Close,” where he’d hold up his hand and point it like a pistol and say, “Buy or I’ll shoot.”

He told me he got bored with doing the sales pitch steps in order and started switching them up. Finally, he challenged himself to run the script backward by greeting the vet with his pointed pistol hand, saying, “Buy or I’ll shoot,” and finishing with the Meet and Greet as he went out the door with the sale. He said he had a 98% close rate, and even though I came to know him as a liar and a thief, I have no reason to doubt his success rate considering the amount of thought, creativity and charm he put into the job.

Bill was always so full of himself, so sure of the power of that charm and silver tongue. Once, he came home with a bag of music CDs. I had a meltdown when he boasted he had stolen them. He called me a Pollyanna and a Do-Gooder when I insisted we go back to the store and either pay for them or return them. He took this as an opportunity to show off his light-finger skills. “You distract the owner, and I’ll put them back.”

Why didn’t I just say no, that defeats the point? Instead, I obediently distracted the owner, who nonetheless was craning his neck to see what Bill was doing, suspecting him of shoplifting. But Bill was reverse shoplifting, putting all the CDs back in their slots--in alphabetical order.

Of course, that was my effort to shame him; instead, I became weirdly culpable. Bill took it as a moment to glorify his own ability to move like a fox in the shadows. “People are so gullible,” he said, “I can fool anyone.”

And it’s not so much that he fooled me; well, yes, he did, but by the time I had it all figured out, I was all wrapped up in his sticky strands of spider web silk getting my brains sucked out.

I floated around the big circle pool that night and drifted into a light trance. I saw that Bill and I were in a dark colored row boat without oars. We moved swiftly in the stream that ran into a stone-lined cavern under the hill and house where we lived. The current took us out of the light and into the dark.

At the time, I took this as a sign that it was time for me to leave my home of ten years in the Glen Ivy Community and to move to Fort Collins, Colorado. My sister Cheryl and her husband had an almost finished dream home there. She had been sued by her employer (which eventually resolved in her favor), and all her assets had been frozen. Her husband had taken a job in another state, and they asked for our help in finishing the construction details on the house and getting it on the market.

Family calls, and I answer.

But there were other stories in play. The leader of our far-flung, worldwide spiritual community, Martin Exeter, had died January 12, 1988, less than a year before. Although I didn’t know it at the time, a struggle for what the Emissaries were to become had begun, and the repercussions were being felt in all the various communities the world over. People were leaving our spiritual path, called the Emissaries of Divine Light, in droves, shaking up the status quo and destabilizing the already grief-stricken residents.

The most insidious, damaging effect of this power struggle was the rise of gossip levels. Everyone was whispering behind closed doors, then crossing the hall to repeat every word and to cross-pollinate the dark flowers of evil. Layers of toxic talk ran knee-deep in black, curling smoke of nonstop, carcinogenic, contagious, mindless gossip. If Glen Ivy at that time after Martin’s death had been a medieval monastery instead of a New Age seminary, you would have seen demons scampering in the halls from room to room and imps prying open teeth to pull snakes out of mouths; such is the power of gossip to do evil by co opting seeming good people.

Like Crazy Bill’s talk, all this crap seemed to make sense to me at the time, and it is God’s own irony that at the far end of this journey into the underworld, my very first job would be teaching a critical thinking class to undergraduates at a community college. No one could have been less qualified, and no one could have latched onto that class curriculum with any more desperation.

All the Emissary communities were awash in this fast, loose, uninformed talk. The topics on the table in November 1988 were shadow work, cult deprogramming, and co-dependence, with endless speculations about changing leadership, who had done wrong to whom, who was giving blow jobs to which focalizers, how some focalizer had abused some Responding One, or how some follower had bested some leader; who got severance money when they left the Community and how much, and who had gotten screwed by the system, and how somebody else had played the system. The toxic sludge of gossip grew around me, and you can bet I was in the middle of it, confused, under Crazy Bill’s crazy spell, and reaching for something different and somehow better. Out of the frying pan and into the fire was not what I had in mind, but it sure is what I got, and I just as surely had it coming.

Years later, I would see a medieval painting of a boat going into a stone-lined cavern, exactly as I saw in my vision so long ago. That second time, I slowed down and read the small print, “River to the Underworld.” That was the River Styx, and if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have realized that like Psyche, I’d have a whole lot of life seeds to sort, and that someone would have to die before I would wake up and fight.

Crazy Bill and I talked to our community leader, John Gray. I told him about the vision, about my sister’s lawsuit and request, and I don’t know what he was thinking, but he green-lighted our move to Colorado. If only I could have called out to him, “Help! I’m in a boat with a maniac headed for the Underworld, and I have no oars!”

But I didn’t call out, and nobody saved me from myself or Crazy Bill. On December 31, 1988, we pulled out of Glen Ivy in a big U-Haul truck. Bill’s cat, Felicity, took up her journey perched in the dashboard window, and we drove away from a world I had loved passionately. Those ten years at Glen Ivy were my soul’s high adventure.

By midnight, we were passing through Flagstaff, lost in a snowstorm.

We spent what was left of the night in a hotel in Gallup, New Mexico. This was my first night outside my community as a so-called free person. It was the beginning of a long, slow, scary wake-up call. I may have been 38 years old, but there were so many details about the outside world I didn’t understand how to foresee and plan for.

For example, there we were in the wee hours in the freezing cold snow with a pissed off cat and a ficus tree in the truck; neither of which, Bill said, could stay in the truck while we slept. The motel rules clearly said no pets although I didn’t see a ruling against trees. This was the kind of rule I worried about in those days. I have to hand it to Bill, whatever else I came to think of him, he taught me how to stop and think twice about which rules could or couldn’t be broken under what circumstances.

Bill was not at all crazy when he was engaged on a multi-step project. He made sure we had a room near the back exit. He parked the truck next to it, blocking the view from the hotel office. He ran around the back of the truck trying to catch the cat, who was having none of it. He finally threw a cargo blanket over her, grabbed her up and shoved her under my coat, where she crouched in defensive mode, digging her little high heels into my chest.

Bill couldn’t hide the twelve foot ficus he tipped and rolled into our room with much angry swishing of leaves on the part of the tree, which always preferred to stay in one place, if at all possible.

We reached Fort Collins late on Jan. 1, 1989. My sister’s house was in a rural suburb called Bellevue. It was located on what I see now was a very nice lot triangulated a bit awkwardly into a niche on the hill right beside Larimer State Park. But such were my stress levels at leaving home that the house felt to me like it was built crookedly on the lot.

I feel foolish even fessing up to this weird fixation at that moment, but after I walked the house and yard, I stood in the front room and cried. I thought it was the crooked feng shui of the house I was feeling, and I might have been picking up on my sister’s unhappy vibes, but really, I was crying because something about my life that had always fit into its place had come unfixed. It was all wrong when it was supposed to be all right, and I just cried those hopeless kind of morning after tears. What was to become of me?

I have to hand it to Bill. In those early months when we were first trying to get ourselves established, he did his best to love and protect me and the cat. The damn craziness just caught up with him, and he couldn’t hang on.

We unloaded cat, tree, and basic necessities and went upstairs to the bedroom. My sister had left the bed made and ready for us the previous Thanksgiving, so it had been waiting six or seven weeks. We stripped off our clothes, dropped into bed, shut off the light, and slept the unmoving sleep of the exhausted.

The next morning, I got up, did my morning routine and came back to make the bed. I pulled back the sheet, and there in the indent left by my hip was a dead black widow spider. Her gangly black legs splayed against the white sheet, each hair a fine pen line. Her bright red hourglass glared up at me like a neon warning, “Great danger! Run for your life! Get out of here!”

My husband Peter says a poem is like a little world contained inside a snow globe, self-contained, magical, and complete. My years in Colorado were like living inside a snow globe in a self-contained world that was imploding. And once I got past the warning of the black widow spider, I couldn’t get out.

I screamed and Bill came running to help me dispose of the body, but I hadn’t done a master’s thesis on The Poet as Shaman for nothing--I knew a warning from the new country I had entered when I saw it. From then on, I never forgot that strong image of the flashing red hourglass. “She was dead. You killed her in the night,” I kept telling myself as things just got stranger and stranger.

Living alone in a house with an adult male was something Camp Fire Girls and neither dorm life nor community life had prepared me for. Bill and I had been friends for a fairly long time. But I turned out to be a roamer, like a black Lab off the leash who goes out every day and is gone for hours. This distressed Bill, who I abandoned to his diseases.

I never knew what was true about what was wrong with Bill. Certainly he was convinced he had parasites, entamoeba histolytica, picked up in Guatemala that ran boom and bust cycles through his gut. At different times, he also said he got diagnoses of Epstein-Barr, Crohn's, and celiac diseases. He considered the amoeba colony that lived in him to be an “attached entity.”

We had arrived in Colorado with a quarter million dollar inheritance from Pops, and Bill started to work his way through it with every alternative medicine practitioner within a hundred miles, which included Denver. He was addicted to enemas and acupuncture, and he drank down every herb mixture American or Chinese that made its way into his orbit. It seemed to me he had no common sense about what he was subjecting his body to. Who actually drinks hydrochloric acid? From the beginning, it seemed like he was trying to kill some part of himself. It wasn’t long before this other person showed up.

We were in the kitchen arguing in front of the microwave oven. Snow was falling steadily outside the window, drifting in mounds against the house as if trying to suffocate it. Bill said, “We need to get rid of that microwave. The EMFs are going to give us cancer.”

“What are you talking about? Just don’t stand in front of it when it’s on.”

“Alien entities come in on EMF waves and enter us through the food.”

“You’re full of shit. I don’t use it very often, but when I do, it is a very useful tool.”

“You always defend technology. Are you an alien? Have the aliens gotten into you? Why are you so conservative?”

“Liking kitchen appliances doesn't make me an alien lover, and it doesn’t make me conservative. Conservative is a political or religious position. It has nothing to do with microwaves in the kitchen.” I was losing the plot, if there had ever been one.

“Oh yes, it does. Every choice you make tells me you’re a conservative. The microwaves are everywhere. They’re giving you brain cancer, just like your father.” He was taunting me, winding me up, deliberately trying to make me angry. He had an intent look in his pale greenish eyes. He was enjoying finding a way to make me fight back, like prodding a kitten to play rough.

“You don’t have to use the microwave then.”

“I don’t want you to prepare any food I’m going to eat in the microwave. Cancer-giving, conservative alien food. You always try to control me with food.”

I have always prided myself on working hard to cook well and to consistently put healthy meals on the table. This was a low blow and infuriated me. “I do not!”

“Yes, you do. You’re always trying to tie me to you emotionally with food.” He was pushing at me with a kind of inhuman glee in his eyes and his energy, but I didn’t notice how odd that was until he had me so wound up that I did something I have never done before or since: I took a good, solid, angry swing at him.

He easily caught my fist in his hand with a high, not-Bill cackle of laughter. “You make it so easy,” he jibed.

Then a switch flipped, and my anger stopped as I stepped back in astonishment at who I had become and what I had attempted to do. At the same moment as I came to my reason, Bill went ballistic, turning red, his face contorted into shapes I had never seen before as he spat epithets not at me but at the microwave and the aliens inside it. He flung open the back door, yanked the plug out of the wall, and hurled the microwave out into the yard where it disappeared into a snowdrift. It stayed there until spring when someone finally stole it.

I was shaken by this incident firstly because of my own actions. I have never felt the impulse to slug another person. It was as if some angry demon in Bill had jumped ship and gotten into me. The other reason I retreated to the bedroom to think this over was because it was the first time I consciously said to myself, “There are two Crazy Bills.” But I wasn’t that rational adult yet to see that as a clear problem to be addressed. The clouds of confusion around me were deep.

In so many ways, this is the story of my severance years--what it was like to walk away from my vibrant, bustling community home and to suddenly be alone. Who was I really? What was I made of? What would become of me? I was like a half-grown black dog lost in the mountains above Rattlesnake Lake.

One of the cheery thoughts I had when I talked to John Gray about leaving Glen Ivy was that I would be close to the Emissary mothership at Sunrise Ranch. Sunrise was the EDL omphalos, the belly button of the world where it all began.

When Martin died in 1988, all the pent up frustration with hierarchy and patriarchy, as well as with the insistence on accentuating what was bright and positive; that is, the light divine (“Let love radiate without concern for results”), while ignoring or suppressing the dark boiled to the surface and started churning.

Which made the dark fight back. I can’t draw on better historical images than those demons drawn in the illuminated pages of medieval manuscripts. The lid had been popped on Pandora’s box of evil, and the grinning demons of fear, gossip, pettiness, anger, self-righteousness and downright looniness poured into people’s beds, crawled in through their ears and eyes to multiply as snake-headed tongues. Imps leaped in the aisles of the Dome Chapel from which they had previously been barred by the flaming sword of decency. The demons bickered from either shoulder of whoever had the guts or ego to give a service in this newly demon-haunted world.

Bill and I drove out for Sunday services at 11:00 am at Sunrise Ranch, an increasingly hair-raising experience as the once calmly inspirational pulpit disintegrated into power struggles, vituperous debate and the explosive, marginally suppressed energies of The Dark Side. I observe this from the safety and perspective of thirty years in the future that at the time I couldn’t imagine. Like that lost black dog, I joined up with a vicious pack of wolves that almost cost me my inner life.

Doc Holga was a feminist firebrand of the old school. She could take a hot social topic, the patriarchy was her favorite, and touch a rhetorical torch to it that would scorch your shorts. Within minutes of getting wound up into her tirade, your chest would swell with outrage and self-righteousness; you would weep for the victims and be ready to join Joan of Arc on the battlefronts of freedom.

I found her unsettling from the get-go, but I wanted to see in her what our mutual friend Nancy Rose saw, so I invited her and her partner, Crazy Nurse Randi, over for our first dinner party.

In my Emissary pantheon of Rituals-Which-Are-Inviolably-Good, the dinner party holds the highest rank. At Glen Ivy, my gang of friends and I had raised the dinner party to a high art. It was the sine qua non of social interactions. An acceptance to an invitation to a dinner party was a sacred commitment, and I’m not really exaggerating to make a point. That’s how it was with me, and I assumed that is how it was with others.

This was to be my first dinner party in our new home. I remember cleaning and polishing the wood stove until it glowed with pride of central place. There was shrimp and a dramatic roast crown of lamb and chocolate budins for dessert. Planning, shopping, cleaning, cooking and table design all took my full attention for the best part of three days.

Bill and I were dressed and waiting for their six o’clock arrival. At half past six when I was nervously eyeing the roast, which I had timed to the 6:00 pm appetizer course, the phone ranged, and they cancelled.

It was getting to be a habit, this just breaking down into disappointed and helpless tears. Sure, part of it was feeling sorry for myself, but it was more the shattering of the snow globe of my old world where the lodestones of civility like the dinner party were no longer acknowledged or respected. It underscored once again that I had lost my family. These were the ongoing tears of grief and separation.

Bill sat beside me on the couch with his arm awkwardly around my shoulder. “We’ll have a special dinner, just the two of us.”

“You won’t think I’m trying to control you emotionally with food?”

“No, no,” he said hastily. “I’ll open the champagne, and we’ll have a toast.”

Looking back, I’d have to say that Crazy Holga was one friendship that was doomed to fail, and I should have known it right then. But no. It didn’t happen that way.

Part 3 of Fianna’s World is “High Weirdness and Covenplay,” where I go out of the frying pan and into the fire of weirdness on steroids…

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But some days are bad and some years are even worse: I lost my sister and two close elders this year. Over half my immediate family are gone and some days I can barely stand it. But that is what the Winter Solstice is for: to brood and groan and mutter our way into the longest night of the year like an old ship riding the night sea, hawsers and the old bones moaning against the cold.

Every year I write a poem for the Winter Solstice. It sounds like you could use a poem. I give this one to you, dear old friend.

The Tree, the Star, the Tear

There are worse griefs than mine—can

you imagine—yes, of course, we all can,

too often do—we give where we can.

Are you like me? Do you balance every day

on the thin skin of a tear? Do you, every day,

struggle for the smile? Deny that tear—every day?

Do you say, every day, how lucky you are?

In spite of grief, you know how lucky you are.

Nothing's bleeding—look! How lucky you are!

We'll both do what people do, as always—

choose a brighter star and reach, as always,

out to cheer another—we MUST love, as always.

We must raise the shining Tree and pretend

our hearts are not balanced on that tear—pretend

because we KNOW that Star is real, and not pretend.

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Share That Mystic Road

I tried to write a story for the one year passing of my sister Cheryl’s passing on November 24, but I couldn’t seem to finish it. Now the days are shorter, darker, colder, and my mood has sent me wandering down the overgrown path to a long-ago time. Time for a winter story, time for a story about a black dog, Crazy Bill and the coven of witches waiting out the end times watching for flying saucers.

I don’t give a lot of backstory, but let it suffice for now to say I lived for ten years inside an intentional community called Glen Ivy Hot Springs. I’ll be telling stories about those mostly happy days, but this story is about how I left and why and with whom and what happened next.

I will be sending it in three parts interspersed with some more festive holiday fare. Thanks to Lloyd Meeker for his feedback, which was wonderfully supportive and constructive.

Cheers, Everyone

Fianna’s Story

Dogs don’t live long lives, so you already know there will be tears. But a dog’s story enters your own story at a certain point and changes everything. Fianna has been gone thirty years now, but I can still see those over-sized puppy paws and feel the zip in my chest the first time she licked my hand.

Crazy Doc Holga handed her over, and she filled my arms like a child. She was a purebred black Lab with wide set eyes on a broad forehead and nothing to distinguish her from any other Labrador retriever except her humor and her stubbornness.

My partner Bill was running through his inheritance trying to cure whatever tropical intestinal disease he’d picked up during his four years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. Maybe he had that tropical disease or maybe some parasite was eating his brain from the inside out because that Bill was crazier than a betsy bug. He had two distinct personalities; one was obsessed with his health and was viciously critical of all things political. He ranted against politicians with a kind of compelling rationality that was mesmerizing to witness, like watching a hunting snake striking repeatedly with deadly accuracy. The other personality was the charming Irish lover, salesman and consummate thief.

I could get him to switch between the two simply by saying, “Bring the other Bill back,” and the shadowed personality would move forward into the conversation and the original would recede back. I never could figure out which was the suicidal one, but when he was around, and I had to leave the house, he might say, “I think this is the day.”

I’d pause and say, “What did you have in mind?”

He’d say, “The bathtub would be easy to clean.”

And I’d cock a fist on my hip like a huffy housewife, “I’m not coming home to a bloody bathtub and a half-dead wannabe corpse. Do you have a Plan B?”

“Okay, I’ll get on a bus to North Dakota and get out in the Badlands and just walk until I get lost.”

“The Badlands are in South Dakota, but that sounds good. Just make sure not to tell anyone or take anything with you. Let it be a mystery.”

“Fine.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

“Okay. I’ll be home at five, and if you’re still here and alive we’ll have fish for dinner.”

Fianna was a snow dog. She’d run up the snow banks then slide down in flying poufs of fine white snow. I’d stride along with my hands in my pockets kicking the snow. Fianna would run up behind me and land with her paws on my backside--she knew which pocket the dog biscuits were in. Though often tempted, I never gave her a treat just for being cute with her happy eyes and long, soft black ears. I’d make her, “Sit!” Then I’d walk away as far as I thought she could endure it, then call, “Fianna! Come!” And she’d come tearing down the road through the snow toward me, ears flapping back, laughing the way dogs laugh when they’re having a good time.

As she was about to catapult into me, I’d say, “Fianna! Sit!” And she’d slam into a sitting position, sliding the last two feet on her butt to fetch up at my feet, ready for the biscuit.

Why did I hook up with Crazy Bill in the first place? I had been in love with another man, Eric, but when it came time to make a choice between going with Eric on a church mission to Argentina or going to graduate school, I chose graduate school. However chickenshit that I was, I failed to inform him of that fact. This goes against everything I have become now, but at the time I guess I thought I loved Eric too much to be honest. I took up with Crazy Bill, hoping Eric would notice I had a new boyfriend when he came back from South America. I paid for that dishonesty in the many levels of hell anyone who hooks up unknowingly with a manic schizophrenic knows all too well.

Crazy Bill overflowed with Irish charm. He was quick-witted, insightful, passionate, and super smart. “Too smart for his own good,” his dad, Pops Martin, used to tell me. “Don’t get mixed up with Bill. You’re a nice girl. You can do better.”

Bill and I hooked up in California in 1987 during what turned out to be the only healthy window of time in his life. We went on early morning runs together followed by dawn soaks in the hot springs, the early morning light shafting through the rising steam. We picked oranges off the trees and squeezed our own juice.

Was Crazy Bill crazy in those days? Listening to the voice of Pops in retrospect, I think he knew Bill was unstable. It was a time of entanglement for me, the entwining of those ribbons of emotion that were to prove so difficult to break. Have you ever tried to break up with an Irishman? They will wring your heart dry with their tears and pleadings.

I told a friend at that time that I felt I had known Bill in a previous life and that I owed him a karmic debt. Whatever that meant, and I call it all bullshit now, let there be a very large check mark by my name and his on the Akashic Record. Anyone who has stayed too long with a crazy partner knows what I mean when I say I put in my time. (Now, I know it is insensitive and politically incorrect to call someone “crazy.” So sue me.)

What is evil? When did it first fly in over the hills from the east and start circling our valley?

I awoke to fresh snowfall. In the window, I placed a blue lacquer vase with three yellow daffodils. Behind this spring brightness of blossom was the black and white world--the pine branches stark through the still falling snow. I felt that metaphor, that only here in this house on the mountain was there safety against the chill of what seemed like evil outside forces. Of course, the metaphor was a bitter joke. Fianna lived right there with us--where safer or better for a dog than so remote a mountaintop? What evil is abroad, what massive mischance that she could be snatched off the mountain and thrown down so many miles away into the outskirts of Loveland?

I had come home that night of March 15, 1991 exhausted. I had met an astrologer who had warned me it was the Ides of March, that the planets were star-crossed and retrograde. “Go home,” she warned, “Wrap yourself in cotton batting and don’t come out until May.”

I was startled, “What about this weekend?”

“Stay off the roads!”

This was Sandie Sabo, 250 pounds and proud of it. Normally of sunny disposition, this late afternoon she looked harried and worried when I ran into her at the dentist’s office. “Go straight home. Don’t leave the house.”

It was my idea that Bill needed a dog. He was home alone all day while I was teaching down the hill at CSU Fort Collins. He’d have to take care of a dog, and that would get him out of himself. He’d start expressing love toward another being, and that’d make him less crazy was how my thinking went.

I gave all these reasons to Dr. Holga, and she bought him this $400 puppy from a local breeder. Crazy Holga was a successful alternative practitioner in Loveland strung out on self-prescribed drugs. She explained to me about the flying saucers that cruised up and down Eden Valley every night between Sunrise Ranch and her ten acre spread at the town end of the valley. The flying saucer aliens were beaming people aboard that summer implanting crystals in their foreheads.

Dr. Holga’s girlfriend was Crazy Nurse Randi who had her own office in the clinic where she would neutralize your alien crystal implants using radionics.

In the clinic waiting room was a giant coffee table book documenting cattle mutilations by the aliens. These were photos of dead cows from all over the West that had cubes of hide and flesh surgically excised from different parts of their bodies. There was no blood, for some reason, and no explanation for the death of the cows. We were to understand the aliens had been doing this.

Naturally, Bill had found his way long ago to the Crazy Clinic where Crazy Doc Holga and Crazy Randi recognized him as a fellow conspiracy theory nutjob. Crazy Bill did some work around Crazy Doc’s Crazy Ranch, and sometimes the three of them and a group of fellow Fans of the Aliens all camped out on a warm summer night smoking dope and watching for flying saucers.

So the Doc brought Bill the dog, but the baby black Lab went into my arms first, and that was that. Bill said he didn’t want a dog anyway, and he wouldn’t help with the dog, but he didn’t mind if the dog lived with us.

I named her Fianna after the Irish Soldiers of Destiny who guarded the boundaries of Ireland in the winter and in the summer lived by hunting.

Fianna was just a puppy, and I was just a lost child, even if I was in my thirties. I knew nothing about raising a dog, but one of Bill’s personalities seemed to know a bit, so before long, she knew to be let out and to sleep on the floor by my bed within licking distance of my dangling hand.

Early in the morning, Fianna would weasel her cold, black nose under the covers and nuzzle my toes. Together we went on long hikes all that golden fall and snowy winter. I didn’t know how much that pudgy little body could take of walking, but when she was through, she’d plop herself down in the snow and refuse to move. Stubborn, yes. But I’d pick her up and carry her home. By the time she was too heavy to carry, she was strong enough to outlast me on any day hike.

Soon, Fianna was big enough to ride shotgun in my Jeep on sorties into town. I had to leave her with Bill when I taught as I couldn’t leave her in a subzero parking lot for three hours. Bill did nothing for her usually, as he was wrapped up in his own agonies.

On that Ides of March, I went straight home, but it was still dark and cold when I arrived. Fianna came out to the drive to greet me. My intention was to immediately tell Bill what Sandie Sabo had said about the Ides of March and not going out, but he demanded even before a hello, “Did you remember the Uni-Som?”

“Oh, god, I’m sorry. No, I didn’t.”

He grabbed his hat and keys and stormed out of the house, winding down the hill in the dark, not seeing a black dog just behind him, following him down the mountain.

On the way home from the university that night, I had come up 1st Street, where I was to find her two days later. I had come over a rise, and suddenly I plunged into impenetrable fog. Although I instantly hit the brakes, I was going too fast to avoid any animal or person that might have been crossing the road just there. The Jeep was out of the ground fog as quickly as I’d gone in. “Sorcerer’s mist,” I thought to myself, and uneasily remembered stories of witches and sorcerers who could conjure evil mists to settle in low places or appear as an unexpected danger to travelers.

How improbable that she should come so far to that exact place; how many turns and choices had she had to make to end up precisely there? Did someone pick her up and bring her down the mountain? When I found her, her red collar was gone. Had she been tied to a tree, frantically fought to slip her collar, and then tried to find home?

Friday night, she didn’t come home. Saturday, I searched for hours, approaching people in remote homesteads with my card and the question, “Have you seen an eight-month old black Labrador female with a red collar?”

At home, I called the Humane Society, and perhaps if I’d gone into town to look, I would’ve found her then. But I was tired, and Bill didn’t want to go with me, and I slept while Fianna became more and more lost. That evening, I sat in my office and cried, for she still hadn’t come home. We put a light in the window. I took my drawing pad and drew her under a great dark tree, waiting for me, but then I saw I had inadvertently also drawn a ghost dog hanging by its neck from a limb of the tree, and both dogs in the picture had red collars. I always believed it was at that moment some car barreled through the sorcerer’s mist and hit her. The man stopped, dragged her to the side of the road--perhaps took her collar to call me, but I remember the number was unreadable.

Sunday morning, St. Patrick’s Day, I rose, dressed, and determined to go into the Humane Society. It seemed impossible this story wouldn’t have a happy ending. But coming down 1st Street, I saw a black body on the side of the road and hoped against hope that it was some other black dog. I pulled the Jeep around, got out and knelt by her. By her long, soft ears I knew her. I knelt on the roadside by the body of my lost dog and wept.

It was a grievous day. When I walked into the house and fell sobbing into Bill’s arms, he, too, began to weep, knowing before I said that I’d found her. Together, we gathered her food, her dishes, her green toy, and the soft blanket she’d come in, and drove down the mountain of sorrows to where she lay. We wrapped her in the blanket, put her in the back of the Jeep, and drove to Doc’s house. Here they all were, Doc Holga, Nurse Randi, Jill and Joanne, names I no longer recognize, and Bob, who ran the feed store. They had all known Fianna and gathered us in, all weeping, my grief coming from far down in my lungs where there was a place like the moon, so airless I couldn’t breathe.

How kind they all were in that particular moment. Crazy Nurse Randi had no tears, but she appropriately played the role of the Death Crone, blessing the body, blowing sweetgrass smoke across it. We all rubbed white sage into Fianna’s fur, then wrapped her again in an old gray blanket.

We caravanned in two cars along Horsetooth Reservoir out to La Porte, where we left Fianna’s body at the animal crematorium. She came home with me in a round turquoise tin, ashes wrapped in plastic. Anyone who has ever had a dog knows a dog spirit never really leaves you. Fianna’s body was there on the side of the road, but her little black spirit body leapt into my arms and entered into the country of my heart that, like dreamtime Ireland, needed to be defended in the winter and in the summer taken to the wildlands to wander.

I placed the tin on the bureau by the yellow calla lily in its lilac paper. Beyond the light was the cold, snowy world. Standing there with my hand on the blue tin, I had a quiet conviction that Fianna’s life had been sacrificed for mine. Some new strength came into me as if a thread of smoke from the tin had wafted up my hand and arm and into the mysterious chambers of my heart, and I knew I had to change everything about my life.

And I did.

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https://www.artworkarchive.com/rooms/dream-in-gold/09e5ac

(Link to exhibition room above.)

Hi, Everybody! I'm excited to share my one-woman show, "Ravenscapes: Oregon Dreams in Gold," currently on display at O'Brien Gallery in Eugene, Oregon.

I figured lots, okay, most, of you can’t make it to the gallery, so I spent a day figuring out how to make this exhibition room. I hope you will explore my virtual exhibition and immerse yourself in the golden beauty of Oregon's ravens and landscapes. Each piece is a unique, handcrafted artwork, adorned with 24K gold leaf. I’m currently working n a video that shows how I make them.

This is also actually an exclusive opportunity to own a piece of the "Ravenscapes" collection because I put special holiday prices on them.

When you click into an image, you can read the story about how I made it and also a direct pay link if you just gotta have it. I’d love to get some of these beauties out of the gallery and into the hands of friends!

Here are some photos of the gallery below, and again, the link to my exhibition room is https://www.artworkarchive.com/private_rooms/09e5ac

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Share That Mystic Road

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Now blue October, smoky in the sun,
Must end the long, sweet summer of the heart.
The last brief visit of the birds is done;
They sing the autumn songs before they part.

Listen, how lovely - there’s the thrush we heard
When June was small with roses, and the bending
Blossom of branches covered nest and bird,
Singing the summer in, summer unending-

Give me your hand once more before the night,
See how the meadows darken with the frost,
How fades the green that was the summer’s light.
Beauty is only altered, never lost,

And love, before the cold November rain,
Will make its summer in the heart again.

One of my favorite poems, a sonnet by Robert Nathan (1894-1985)

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INTRODUCTION: A few days, I saw a headline that grabbed my eyes and my memory, “Cat Lost in Yellowstone Is Back Home After Traveling 900 Miles in 2 Months.” Rayne Beau the cat showed his strength and determination after traveling about 900 miles through at least four states to reunite with his family.

I suddenly remembered the story of Sojah, my childhood companion. She also completed an Incredible Journey, and I want to tell you about her, and along the way, a little bit about me growing up.

Sojah’s body was a map of the known world. In the calico complications of her fur I could trace the oxbows of the Wenatchee River. The sungold sandstone cliffs of Sunnyslope broke in vertical stripes down her delicate shoulders. Dark orchards crowded the crosshatched line of her spine. Our riverbend house was blocked in white fur under her chin; each patterned leg flashed the four directions. Behind one ear, the rhubarb patch; behind the other, the mulberry tree. The distance from rump to high-held tail was the long rise of Horse Lake Road. Sojah belonged to the place, and she carried its many-colored meanings wherever she went. 

From the beginning, Sojah showed me her world. One day, she soft-footed up the stairs to my room, leapt onto my study desk, and stared at me. Then she leapt down, and I knew to follow her out of doors. We passed under the jeweled curtain of the willows and stopped above the culvert where Horse Lake Creek flowed under our yard. 

Sojah sat on the brink, front paws together, and looked down. I lay on my belly peering over the edge. I saw a small rattlesnake, tongue listening. I threw a rock at him. The splash startled him into the water. He swam downstream as I ran alongside.  I got around the rhubarb and under the mulberry tree only in time to see him slip into the railroad culvert: next stop, the Wenatchee River. 

I looked round for Sojah. She had a mouse-sized kitten in her teeth and was briskly moving her litter out of her nesting site by the creek upstairs into my closet. Kittens were always Sojah’s first priority, but she had the patience to be dressed in doll clothes. I pushed her around in my baby buggy, spotted face peering out of a ruffled bonnet. Kittens could ride, too. When I graduated from dolls to horses, Sojah became a trick rider. She took up the confident stance of a leopardess on Lance’s rump and would trot with me around the pasture as I practiced pretend-shooting under his neck. If Lance and I left the safety of the corral, she jumped off and returned to mama duty; the places we rode were not on her map. 

Our growing family added another rambunctious member when Sooner the German shorthair dog came to live with us. My dad thought Sooner was the smartest hunting dog in Eastern Washington, but I secretly disliked him. If I got too close, he leapt up and gouged me with his sharp nails. He was chained to the mulberry tree in the pasture, and the beaten circle of dirt always stank of dog poo. 

Sojah found a new birthing nest for each batch of kittens, indoors or out. One autumn, she nested in the twisty root ball of one of the weeping willows.  

The guys had just returned from a chukar-hunting trip. My dad opened the back hatch of our International Travel-All, and Sooner came flying out, long ears flapping. He ran to the nearest willow to relieve himself, then ran to the other tree.  

Sojah fended him off with a screeching yowl and an all-claws slap to the nose, but Sooner was oblivious. He flipped the kittens in the air the way a coyote will flip mice out of a burrow. Sojah attacked, screaming, back arched, teeth bared, claws flying.   

The screen door banged behind Mom as she charged out of the kitchen yelling, “Sooner, you get out of there!”  

Daddy called, “Sooner! You come here, boy!” He ran with a chain to collar the big dog, but the damage had been done. Two of the kittens were dead; three of them injured beyond rescue.  

Mom sewed some scraps of white fabric into five white shrouds. She placed a body in each one. My job was to throw them in the river. Daddy said I should hit the live ones with a rock and put them out of their misery, but I thought they would drown quickly enough in the water.

I thought drowning kittens would be easy. The day was crunchy and sweet as a fall apple. The river rapids shook foam into the air the way a Golden Delicious will spurt when you bite into it. 

 One by one I hurled the white packages into the river. I expected the kittens to sink, but they bobbed on the surface as the current swept them toward the Columbia River. My dad had been right about killing them first. I had thought to distance myself from their death by letting the river do the job I didn’t have the stomach for. Back home, Sojah yowled soft and low while twining about my legs. I picked her up and buried my nose in her fur. There was nothing I could say to comfort either of us.

When I went away to college, the animals I loved seem to recede into the land of memory, but in fact, they were still living their lives in Wenatchee. When the last child graduated from high school, my parents sold the property and moved first to Richmond Beach in the north Seattle area, then a year later to Arizona. Lance the red horse went to live in the Skagit Valley. An uncle adopted Sooner the dog. Sojah the calico cat moved with the parents to the Richmond Beach house.  

The family of my childhood was breaking up, but we entered a new leg of our journey through time together when we all joined a spiritual group called Emissaries of Divine Light. It was decided that over Spring Break—okay, it was 1972, if you must know-- nine of us would caravan to 100 Mile House, British Columbia, for a one-week seminar at the Emissary Canadian headquarters. This trip coincided with my parents’ move from Richmond Beach to Arizona. 

Sojah had made it safely to the beach house, but she disappeared when the packing began again. The chaos factor trebled with the three home siblings packing not only for British Columbia, but to go our ways when and if we returned. Sojah went missing. 

I looked and looked. I see a snapshot of myself sitting on the Richmond Beach cement breakwater, despairing into the sunset of a world so complex that a small, scared cat could be a million impossible, undiscoverable places.  I couldn’t find her. At the same time I was finishing my senior finals at the University of Washington. But I was also gripped by the spiritual fervor of becoming an Emissary. I’m not sure I looked hard enough for the lost Sojah. Not knowing where to look next immobilized me on the pier into doing nothing rather than that something more.  

Sojah did not appear. My parents’ van pulled away from the empty house and hauled away south on I-5. I crammed my red Ford Falcon to the high jams with my few worldly goods and camped out at my sister’s house in Auburn, a Seattle suburb sixty miles south of Richmond Beach. I would be there for a few days while the caravan assembled for take-off. 

Finally organized, we got in our cars and turned on our engines. As I backed out of the driveway, I saw a cat in my side mirror limping down the tree-lined street from the north. It was Sojah. With split-second timing, she had completed an Incredible Journey of at very least sixty miles. 

Seattle is split by the Duwamish River and the Lake Washington Ship Canal. There are four lakes, seven hills and deep ravines all within the city limits. This cat crossed The Highlands, Crown Hill, Ballard, Queen Anne Hill and made her way through the port confusion of Pike Street Market, the industrial wastelands of Harbor Island and Georgetown, the suburban jungles of White Center, Mountain View, Evansville and Burien. She found us in a town and an address she had never been to before at the last possible moment of rejoining her family.  

Even now I don’t know well enough how to respect the love that drove her to make that distance. But somehow I or we were responsible, as if we had homing coordinates implanted in us, and she had a GPS unit in her brain. She had followed some invisible roadmap of feeling across a strange urban wilderness to find us. 

I stopped the car and ran to gather her up, a fifteen-year-old cat now made ancient by distance and ordeal. Her long fur with its distinctive markings was disheveled. She cried out in welcome, relief and pain in my arms. With fingers not gentle enough, I found her broken ribs. We settled her in a box under the dashboard heater by my sister Toren’s feet and smuggled her across the U.S./Canadian border. 

And here’s the thing: I was so caught up in the high of joining this great spiritual family of “conscious, evolved beings” that I didn’t even have the conscious, evolved thought to take Sojah to the vet. When we arrived at 100 Mile House, we settled Sojah’s box in the middle of the half-finished room Toren and I had been assigned. 

Word was sent of the hurt cat, and a white-haired Englishman who introduced himself as Roger de Winton appeared. He squatted in front of Sojah and held his hand over her in a gesture of healing. Eyes closed, she panted quickly, pink-and-black spotted tongue stuck out between white whiskers. She huddled in the box on the cement floor, the map of our old world matted, blurred, and bloodied. Where once the finger-scratched path of the river wound down among the shadows and lights of her spine, the way was lost. The fall of white from chin to chest that was the road through my childhood was smeared into the muddy geography of a city she now knew more intimately than any Seattle ally cat. 

A younger man thumped up the sheet of plywood into the construction zone and said his name was Peter Castonguay. Eager to help the healing master, he squatted and held his hand six inches over Roger’s. Sojah cried out and died. 

Peter felt bad that he had seemed to cause Sojah’s death. “Come with me to the barn,” he said, “We’ll bury her out back, and then I want to show you something.” 

The map of Sojah’s world ended in a Canadian pasture. When the mini-ceremony was over, Peter shouldered the shovel and led us into the filtered light of the big old barn. “Up here,” he said, “follow me.”  

We followed him up a ladder into the hayloft. Peter reached his big paw down into the hay next to a mama cat and pulled out a five-week-old kitten. She was almost a replica of Sojah with her long hair and calico markings. Toren lifted her face up so their blue eyes met. “Look!” she said, “her nose is half black and half gold, exactly like Sojah’s. What are the chances of that?” 

“She’s yours when you leave next week. She’ll be six weeks old, plenty old enough to be weaned.” 

Toren rubbed behind the kitten’s ears and made her purr. “Barn,” Toren said. “Her name is Barn.” And so Barn became Toren’s cat and went to live with her in Arizona. 

As for me, it was many decades before I earned the right to share a home with another cat. In my excitement to grow up, move away, become a more spiritually enlightened person, I neglected a loved one in my care. Yet Sojah’s love was so true, so accurate that she risked her life to find me at the last possible minute before I abandoned her forever. Sojah’s commitment to our lifelong love shamed me, for I had not been so true. Her Incredible Journey made me smaller, less full of myself, and yet more human, after all.

Real-life cat journeys

Some real-life cats have completed incredible journeys, including: 

• A cat that left California and appeared in Oklahoma 14 months later 

• A cat that traveled 2,300 miles from New York to California over five months to be with its owner 

• A French cat that traveled 75 miles through the Vosges mountains to find its owner who had left for military service

Learn more about Incredible Journeys by Incredible Cats here.

Do you have an Incredible Cat story? Tell us about it in the Comments.

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Welcome to a new Substack: Content Preview

I have written many many poems and stories about the Giantess and her Sasquatch tribe that I will post here. Some of these will be free to all subscribers, but longer, in-depth stories will be for paid subscribers only. I have read many books on the topic that I will review. I like to create ai images mostly using Midjourney of the Giantess. She is a rich Meadow of Dreams for me, and I invite you into our magical world.

Origin Story: How the Giantess became my spirit guide

The Photographic Memory

I’ve told this story to myself before, gone over and over it like a photographer who washes the print over and over, changing light, changing emulsion, hanging print after print by short, plastic clothespins to the line. The face of the little girl turns and wavers on the page as the fan whirls angrily in the corner. In the faint orange glow, I examine print after print, looking now at the Edvard Munch scream-faces of my mother and aunts, now at the dark mass of shadow that is the old growth Western red cedar forest. I’m looking for a hunched-over figure seven feet tall with thick, sleepy eyes, huge, leathery lips protruding and painted a garish, haphazard red. The light picks up a tight weave of branches—is that her basket? Is that mass of black the horsehair wilderness of her head? The figure moves forward, recedes, each print different.

A Birthday in the Skagit Valley

What we see in sharpest focus is the four-year-old girl. Her mother made the white party dress for her birthday, and her birthday present from her father is the brace of pearl-handled pistols cinched around her hips. The black-and-white image shifts, some angle of light changes, and all the primary colors leap vivid off the emulsified page. She is gathering dandelions, the enormous, shaggy-headed, neon-yellow dandelions of the upper Skagit River. The pasture she crosses is a saturated kelly green, and there in the distance is her grandfather’s logging rig. Most interesting and compelling to an adventurous, curly-headed girl on her fourth birthday is the big-toothed saw mounted on a John Deere tractor frame.

The high metal seat catches sunlight; the rusty saw blade teeth slicing the air to ribbons even standing Sunday-still.

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First Encounter with The Giantess

I was up on the metal seat when I saw the Giantess in that cedar light. She opened her drooping eyes and looked straight at me. She raised her hand and placed a thick, black finger over red lips as if to shush me, as if to say, “Keep our secret.” Then she turned, looked back over her shoulder and gestured to me. “Let’s go,” the gesture says, an urgent movement of arm through shadow and light. As I move toward her, I begin the fall toward the blade. I fall through childhood and time; I fall toward my mother’s horror, my aunts screaming at the bright, arterial blood on my mother’s hand-stitched party dress, the dandelion suns spattered with blood. I fall toward their perfectly Oh’d mouths. I fall toward playground jeers of “No face! No face!” I tumble slow motion toward a red horse who will save me from high school, who will catch my fall, lead me into the wilderness of a future without a face.

The red convertible with the three young men passed my car. They stared in the windows at the young lady with dark hair blowing back over a tanned shoulder. Her face came into view and they started to laugh. One made a blade out of his hand and jerked it from nose to throat. “No chin,” that meant, “No face. You ugly bitch, why don’t you stay home?" That’s what it meant. She could hear and not hear what they said.

Escape into the Wilderness

The Giantess turned toward the forest, “Follow me,” that meant. The red horse jerked his head against the reins, “Let’s run,” that meant, and bareback, half flying off those high withers, one hand wrapped in thick, black horsehair, we ran.

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The Voice Within

Sometimes when I read out loud some old story, I felt her in the shadows. I was living at Glen Ivy at that time, in that big inn up against the Santa Ana Mountains. That was not Sasquatch country, but during the stormy winter of 1978, the Giantess was there, living in an ancient bear cave high up the ravine formed by Coldwater Creek. I’d catch sight of her basket disappearing around an Engelmann oak, and I’d see where she’d been foraging for acorns, using the centuries-old Luiseño mortar holes in the granite. 

Then those nights when we were all gathered around the river stone fireplace with the pear-shaped keystone, I’d see her nodding in the corner, big eyes closed, that huge head sunk down on her chest. She looked like she was sleeping, but when I opened my mouth, I felt her voice in me. Sometimes it grew large, like the night I read a new story about her. I’d put on my red dress and yellow shawl, my long hair swinging like a horse’s mane in front of my no face, and she was in me from the beginning: a cry, a call, a command, an invitation, a rising and falling in the night wind, a voice of sagebrush and salt, of cedar and longing, of hooves drumming and the distant call of a small bird. After many years, I have never stopped seeing her. Her voice is in my story, my painting of the world, the one with the door that opens on the sky.

Learning to Track Sasquatch

In eighth grade at Orchard Junior High School in Wenatchee, Washington, I had a teacher who put thirty kids onto a school bus and took us all up Bluett Pass to go Sasquatching. We learned how to recognize Bigfoot prints in the sand of the creek bar and how to pour plaster casts. We learned how to track by observing broken branches and nesting sites. We learned the differences between different animal tracks, so we would never mistake a bear paw for Sasquatch print. He taught us to take field notes and how to gather and label evidence such as hair samples and scat, and how to maintain a chain of custody.

This teacher was a natural born storyteller, and around that late afternoon campfire and s’mores before we bussed back into real life, we wheedled out one more story about Sasquatch glimpsed on the far side of a river, up on a bluff, in the shadows under the trees. In this way, I continued through time well-prepared to meet and greet any kin of the Giantess I might encounter in the great Pacific Northwest wilderness I called my home.

The Giantess—More than Sasquatch

She has never left me. She is more than Sasquatch—she is the Giantess, Spirit Guide Extraordinaire. This Scenic Byway of That Mystic Road Substack is for Her. You will find here poetry and story fragments and book reports and news and AI Sasquatch art and whatever else strikes both Her and me as intriguing, significant, and worthy.

The Giantess and I, we walk between worlds, the real and the imaginal alongside our favorite Oregon State zoocryptid: Sasquatch. Please join us!

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Introduction:

Hi! Me, again. Something about me you may not know is that I am the radio host for a broadcast called Viz City, KLCC’s arts review show (Viz is for Visual). Wherever I go in the world, I look at and talk about art. I mostly go to galleries in our Willamette Valley listening area, but I have done many shows from Europe.

In 2001, I didn’t have this cool gig, and the first iPhone wouldn’t be released until 2007, but as the saying goes, some things you just can’t unsee. The deep-fried skateboards are fried in my brain, and the best I can do to show them to you is to illustrate them using Midjourney ai.

Okay, let’s go down the rabbit hole!

A Surreal Journey Through the Paris Modern

Between visits to the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre, I convinced Peter to explore the Paris Modern. The museum, a marble edifice with square columns and nude figures rising from unkempt lawns (at least in the summer of 2001) stood in stark contrast to its more famous counterparts like the Pompidou. Fallen leaves and cobwebs hinted at budget constraints, while overzealous guards eyed us suspiciously.

Our tour began in a hall adorned with seemingly random square dots—a motif that I'd learn had spread across Paris like an artistic contagion.

The first exhibition hall showcased "assemblage art": cafeteria tables laden with visitors' discarded trinkets. Visitors were encouraged to take junk and leave junk behind in a sort of talismanic yard sale ritual. It was less art and more kitsch.

Painted skateboards in gilded frames led us to an example of installation art: deep-fried skateboards hanging from a clothesline. We followed the line of skateboards around a partition and found a video installation in front of the clothesline. On the clothesline, held by giant clothespins, were a dozen deep-fried skateboards. Beside the video was the actual cauldron in which the deep frying had occurred, so you could see it for yourself, the very cauldron. 

As a student, always, of the culinary arts, I turned my attention to the video, which obligingly showed how it was done. There was that same cauldron of boiling oil. First the skateboard was dipped in batter, then it went into the oil by means of a Rube Goldberg crane contraption. The oil boiled furiously; the skateboard rested briefly on paper towels like well-crisped bacon, then got hung on the clothesline.

One skateboard chased a dog through the side streets of Paris. Finally, the dog turned on the skateboard and began to eat it.

He chewed and chewed and chewed. The video camera watched the dog eating the deep-fried skateboard.

We watched the video that watched the dog that ate the deep-fried skateboard. Modern art—at last!

Peter admired a menacing black metal spider by the late, great Louise Bourgeois. It may be famous, but horses couldn’t drag me to stand under a spider that big. It totally creeped me out.

Not to ever forget a roomful of black lemons just because they looked cool.

As whimsy threatened to overtake us, we stumbled into a curved space housing Raoul Dufy's masterpiece, "La Fee Electricite,” or “The Electricity Fairy.” This 60-foot-high, 200-foot-long painting erupted with color and light, jolting us from our giggles. We traced its historical narrative of the history of electricity, from mythological figures to Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison, all amid a kaleidoscope of power lines, cityscapes, and celestial bodies.

Of all the art we encountered that summer in Europe, I want to say that Dufy's work left the most lasting impression, but it actually shares equal time in my memory with the deep-fried skateboards. However, emerging from the comic lowlands of deep-fried skateboards, giant spiders, black lemons and random dots into the rarefied air of "La Fee Electricite" created the perfect storm of intellectual and aesthetic exhilaration.

As we left the Paris Modern, the Seine shimmered with Dufy's palette, and the air crackled with the promise of summer storms and artistic revelation.

Oh yes, for so many reasons, Paris is my favorite city in the world.

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