Sketches of Those We Have Known: BERKELEY PEOPLE

A Man Returns from the Mountains

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

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

Frankly, the writer had forgotten about him in the intervening years. The war ended, the south fell, the nation plunged into an unfathomable pessimism, an abyss that had carried the writer far out into the periphery of things. He had already collected valuable material for his future endeavors.

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

'Well, you made it out of the woods ok,' the writer said.

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

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

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

Michael grunted a little and then they told each other what they were doing in the world these days. They reminisced until nothing more could be dredged up of those they knew and the experiences they had shared.

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

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

'Ah, I want to hear this story.' And the writer settled back in his chair waiting for the tale to be told.

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

I was brought up the road by a strange giant of a man who turned out to be a kindly nut. When we approached the house I saw a group of three people by the side. They were discussing anything imaginable. Then there was sudden laughter. One young man had thrown his head back and the other two turned away with faint smiles.

The house was old. There were rusty implements hung from one side. The wood looked original. The whole house was built on blocks several feet off the ground and I learned later that was because of the proliferation of snakes in the area. One day I knelt down and peered under the house and saw the glint of old, dried snake skins laying askew over themselves.

It was in a meadow and surrounding the meadow were two cultivated fields. Out of one was flourishing corn stalks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can you do anything useful?"

"I can always fetch water from the stream."

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

This commune or farm or whatever it was had been organized five years before by the tall man whose name he had changed to Rasputin. Soon after they put me up in a little cottage the tall man called me into his place and offered me a glass of wine. There was activity, no question about that, slow as it was, nearly hidden from view. This Rasputin plied me for information. I told him how I'd grown up here in this area and was not much into school. That I had fallen in love, well, I said, maybe it wasn't love but we were close. In fact, I told him, my adventure was particularly difficult without her. I felt foolish for saying it, as though I was embarked on a great epic.

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

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

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

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

"Hm, I see."

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

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

Now it was Rasputin's turn to explain himself so I sat back in my chair. It was growing dusk and I became conscious of the stream running on the otherside of the trees twenty yards or so from the house. I couldn't see anyone. It seemed strange to me since I had been conscious of the movement of people all the time I was up there. Rasputin began to speak.

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

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

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

As far as I could make of it the commune has been built out of ideas. It wasn't the single-mindedness of Rasputin but ideas seeded from the beginning of time. Thoreau, who Rasputin talked about constantly, headed the list since he had re-taught American men how to withdraw their attention from the inane and porous world and listen in solitude to the intellect of nature; divine, sensuous, eternal nature. He said he read a lot of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Marx, even, because he was convinced that money made for mad men. He was always dismissing one of his old favorite thinkers. 'Ah, he was an old crank,' or 'he's obsolete now, no use talking about him.'

The genders were allowed to develop freely without any prejudice or judgement. Some of the women had taken over the tractor as their own machine and would nurse it like a child.

I was reminded of the early Christians and some of the people told me that they had seen Jesus, had spoken to Him, and were continually inspired in their dreams by His appearance. And what greater example had been created than the simple, egalitarian, truth-seeking community of those early Christians that broke, finally, under the pressure of the will to power?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there was the woman. She was there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

"Do you miss it?"

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

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

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

Did I miss women during that time? No. I didn't miss anything. Most especially I didn't miss the TV and daily newspaper. I became convinced during my time in the mountains that both are driving the world crazy. On TV they showed the bodies. They showed a kind of attitude but they didn't have credibility. So, the smell of water filled me with pleasant reveries of the passage of history and my time, my city became the merest fragment between the sharp angles and mad shouts from one end to the other.

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

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

And there was always smoke from various chimneys and dogs lingering in front of doors or roaming out by a herd of cattle.

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

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

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

There were lulls. The sun would catch high and all the work below seemed to bow and sag under the heat. The fields were listless. I would find a empty orange crate and sit under the eaves of my shack and try to remember a dream I had. Sometimes I thought it was a series of dreams and the images were mixing in my waking mind, under the sun. I would try to name the objects of the dream and give them motion but as soon as I did the dream images vanished like kids that taunt their parents on some vast beach where everyone feels free. Ah well, I'd say to myself, it's too hot for the purpose of remembering dreams.

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

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

"Hello there Blu," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stopped and looked at me for a second.

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

He stopped and looked at me for another second.

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

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

"One of these days anti-war man, I'm going to take you up to Crazy Jacks and we can wait for the demise of the world."

I had heard of Crazy Jack; Rasputin had spoken of him. He lived on the adjacent mountain and the people were in awe of him.

Blu Davis got up and dusted himself off and sauntered off. Maybe, I thought, he was interpreting a dream he had had.

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

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

There was one man in particular who haunts me to this day. He is the one I think about and wonder what happened to him. His name was Peter and, after dinner one late afternoon, we walked outside to a wonderful breeze, warm, quiet so that the stream was roaring. I had gotten into a long discussion with Rasputin at table, during dinner. He wanted me to be honest in an assessment of the place and I told him and the others I was very impressed but I wasn't sure how long it could last. "After all, one of these days, some of these people will want to move on. And others will want to change the place. And others will, even, want to be the head honcho." Rasputin laughed, "Anyone who wants to be head honcho can have it right now!" The others laughed and I was amazed at their simple trust and faith in the operation.

After dinner we walked outside and I found myself next to Peter who I had only spoken to several times. We wandered near the fence and looked over at the quick falling dusk that would bring the night. When I looked at Peter he was staring at me with a broad smile. "You see, we are an experiment so whatever feelings you my impress on us are just marks of the laboratory."

I was a bit surprised by this. "Do you really see yourself as an experiment? Just that; just playing out theories of your spirit to see how they mesh or conflict with other experiments?"

He fit his finger under his chin and looked off to the side as though deciding whether I was criticizing him or not. He seemed almost grave. "I'll say this if you let me. And I've thought a great deal about this. People have talked about it but not honestly. They have talked about it incognito, with subterfuge and with various strategies to prevent them from actually admitting the truth."

"And that truth is?"

"We are failures here. Every last one of us has failed in one capacity or another. Don't you find this to be true? And you, too, no matter how you feel yourself to be a stranger here....you too have failed. Otherwise, you wouldn't be with us!"

I was taken back by his statement. I have to admit that the great weight I had felt for some time had to do with failure. I had failed someone but I wasn't sure who. I tried to shift it out of view whenever I could.

I tried to say something positive to him. "What do you mean? You haven't failed. This is the beginning of a great success. This is what I see. Yes. It's a tremendous success that will have its moment of glory.

There was a rock that had, over the years, been rounded and embedded in the soil. Peter sat on it and held his head. "This has all been done before. Over and over again. And it doesn't change anything. There is no change. No stopping the darkness. We are little failures in a massive failure."

I felt a moment of nausea. Peter had stooped down and was picking little daises that grew wildly around the rock. He uprighted himself and looked at me. "Don't believe me. Just look for yourself."

"Can I ask you what you are going to do? If you have judged this project to be a failure what are you going to do?"

"Forget, forget, forget, forget." Peter threw his hand up with a clump of daises between his fingers. "Memory," he said with disgust, "is full of illusion. I want facts. I want the beauty of machines operating at full efficiency. I want to live in a place where the aspects of one's personal existence are more important than the impersonal existence of the world at large."

Peter stood up. He was a bit taller than I. His hair was long and braided into a ponytail. He wore overalls with shiny buttons on either side of his hips. His arms were long, lanky, and hairless like white ash stripped of its bark.

"You see, talking like this destroys everything. I can understand why people don't go to confession any more. It drains the strength from you but you want to do it more and more. Do it once and you must do it forever until nothing is left but a mess of jelly that can be pushed and prodded any way they want."

I did nod at this. I hadn't thought about churches or confessions for 10 years but the man sounded sincere. He had obviously been thinking about this for some time.

"I'll tell you some more things too. Do you want to hear a little theory of mine? That's one good thing about living up here....so much silence that you can think up a hundred different theories."

"Sure, tell me your theory."

"When the church, I mean the Catholic Church, the one I was a member of, against my will, when that church was at the height of power many hundreds of years ago, the merchants and capitalists were just getting started. They were in the shadow of the church. And being not quite in power but feeling their oats they saw that the strength of the people was drained from them by confession. So they conspired with the new science, Galileo, Newton, and these fellows; they conspired to free people from confession and give strength back to the people. For a brief moment there was freedom; a great opening of mind and spirit. But, just as quickly, what strength had been liberated from the church was drained by the new enterprises. Work became the great confession. A confession that we are greedy animals. Do you know what I mean? Do you understand what I'm saying?"

A little. You're talking about the Renaissance period?

The Renaissance! Yes, the Renaissance. And after came the great closing down into a military machine. Do you know what I mean?"

I laughed. "Of course, I'm running from one right now."

No, no. The whole society is a military society. It's all organized around the idea of the military. The society is a vast field of war where the strongest weapons and best strategies win out. Do you know what I mean?"

"No. But your theory interests me so continue."

"I've lost my train of thought now." Peter was sweating in the early evening. He rubbed his white bare arms as though he were cold. "I...I don't know. People have told me I'm paranoid but I know what I'm saying is true. I can see it all the time. Even in the little towns here in the mountains."

"Perhaps you are seeing what you want to see."

Yes, yes. What I'm trying to say is that there is no progress only transformation. It's a theory I had after I read science. There's a theory in science that says there is no progress only change. That's a subtle idea humm? You see, then, there's no progress from the freedom people have struggled for; there's only change from one form to another. What freedom is won over here, is lost over there. Do you see what I mean?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe you're right. Can you put your theory a bit closer, a bit clearer and simpler?"

"Oh, I never thought I was going to talk about these things so it comes spewing out like nonsense but before you leave I will make it concise for you. That's a promise."

I smiled at him. "I look forward to that. Before I leave we'll sit down with some wine and talk about this theory of yours."

He moved away from me, toward the gate and move slowly down the incline path to the creek. As I watched him I wondered why I didn't get more history from him; his own history and what had brought him to the mountains.

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

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

As we went further up the trail I could hear the stream, off to the left, and got glances of it. What a sight! It was so wide and majestic for a mountain stream. There had been stories of a flashflood many years before. A log jam had built for decades until it broke one year and the water destroyed some mills. The life on the stream thinned out after that. The water could hypnotize me with its combination of sight and sound. I wanted to throw off my clothes and go wade into the water and laugh like a madman. I didn't but I wanted to.

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

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

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

"All the things covered that needs it?"

"Yes, that's taken care of."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was the man-who-talked-to-himself who worked the lathe run by a water wheel they had fashioned from the stream. There was a mahogany table and manzanita products in an air one can only describe as proletarian. He wore these old overalls with a Gorilla icon patched in various places. He was a graybeard and talked a long time about his old life as a radical publisher. He printed his flyers and newsletters on an old hand printing press. "There were good days and bad days," he told me. "The 30's were good days, the 50's were bad days. Now the days no longer belong to me." He was not sad at saying this, simply a wise old man. "Politics," he spat out. "It leads to misery." His hands were shaping a bowl, a dark-red bowl, from which he was going to drink his wine. "Wine, I drank when I was a radical and now when I am an old man in the mountains I drink."

He began talking without prompting from me. He told me that when he was young he was a disc jockey at an LA radio station and discovered a young singer named Woody Guthrie. "Me and Woody were pretty tight, then we hung with young Hollywood types before McCarthy. Those were good days."

He was going to speak no matter what I said. It was cool and light and though it was quiet I had a feeling of the air filled with life. Speak, old man, I thought to myself. Speak your memories. But rather than memories he began to declaim to the air, as though I wasn't in the little shack with him; as if I was invisible. When he could he punctuated his orphic exclamations with a hand shooting out when he could safely let go of his dark-red bowl.

"The distinctness of each thing of significance so that it can be viewed as complete, unsullied by the horrible working hands of the fierce judgment."

"The knowledge that the Muse is Real, that God is Real, that the Spirit is Real, that the Mind is Real and that he who knows these things the best and with ease and joy empties what he knows; and he who knows that he can not possibly know what is supreme in its totality is the man of deepest happiness."

"The politician is a clot that an idea must move through in searching for the future."

"Hope and be happy because the people strive to be free!"

"All strive toward their happy destinies; earnestness negotiates away threats to the future."

"There is no rest for those who see the future."

"To learn to be delighted by the surprise and the sensuous that lurks behind the next corner."

"Scorn shudders from the obdurate buildings and moves the massive shift of humanity walking through its shadows. It is dripping from their faces and breaks out, occasionally, in hysterical laughter."

"Abundance, excellence, sustenance; these are some words that save humanity!"

"The world is full of itself at this point in time-joy be to that!"

I had started to back away from the man-who-talked-to-himself and leave the shack as unobtrusively as I could. He was not looking at me. He was declaiming like a great prophet from the Old Testament. I wasn't going to interfere with him. I felt he was capable of writing great poetry if he sat himself down and disciplined himself but he was always in the shack, standing in front of the lathe and singing his talk to the birds, dragonflies, and waterbugs.

As I walked up the path to the mainhouse I thought to myself, "If only the works of genius could be forced out as a corporation forces out its products!"

The days could be very long. In the beginning the days were extremely long, a dream that kept transforming through doorways and shadows until you think you are in eternity. Yet, you wake. It was only a catnap! I found myself standing, at times, in the middle of the garden in the afternoon heat, just standing like a goof, standing there conjuring up memories after memories of other days. Perhaps it was only a minute or two standing in that heat but it passed very slowly. All through the day this would happen. I would find some happy spot in the sun and think of the past. I was a happy man.

Soon enough though I was like the others, doing chores, getting to know the people on their own terms, and before I knew it the days were sailing past. When I suffered boredom I would go to the little shack they put me in and write. Ah writer, you always knew I wanted to be a writer. Don't we all in this city? And I have a manuscript but have lost interest in it. It details things a great deal better than our conversation but it's as though I have to let this period of time die away before I complete the manuscript.

The first symptom of boredom is nostalgia. Even the things about the city I despised started to look good to me. The bridges! I had such clear and fine pictures in my mind of driving the bridges and watching the boats in the bay. Or driving up Grizzly at sunset and watch the light play on everything I knew to that point. I even missed television once in awhile. Needless to say they didn't have TV there. Rasputin marked it down as the second evil after tobacco. Yes, even those ponderous desires to succeed that seem to flow effortlessly from the screen and simple, 3rd rate stories that makes somebody millions of dollars; I missed it in a way. What I found in my shack were 1940's National Geographics that had outdated maps.

And I noticed this writer. Even as I got use to the place my mind, when free, started devising ways to leave it with peace and honor and go to the next destination. I never knew what the next destination was going to be but I was happy to think about it nonetheless.

Someone had suggested Canada. Canada? What's in Canada but more nature? And a funny thing occurred to me. It would be pretty easy to change my identity and go off to the mid-west or east to live. That always seemed very plausible to me.

I really didn't want to think about it. No, I always tried to get my mind to think of something else as soon as possible. Often I simply enjoyed some of the contradictions that existed in the arrangement in the mountains. I figured it existed on its own and was beyond any point of critiquing it on my part. But one thing stood out. In the city there is nothing but a massive flux of faces, personalities, ideas, machines, roles, and so on who claw the air for some individual identity. By the time that process is complete, phhhttt, no community. It all becomes an ad hoc affair organized by the lowest grade of energy in nature.

Paradise, sometimes, appeared to me when I walked around the mountain. It had a gentleness to it, an ease to it that was a great improvement over the stupidity of city living. On the other hand there was sporadic violence and great tensions seething for the most trivial reasons.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I can only say this. If a man isn't rooted in the conscience, if he isn't rooted there he becomes a leaf in the wind and emptied of everything but a bunch of jaded desires the world puts into him. His body becomes an instrument the world manipulates at its will. Oh yes, the pressure to do this is immense. Every word and gesture confirms it."

"What made you see this?"

"Profound shame. Weeping. The innocent faces of these children. The blight of the city I was living in and which I hated but which I became through my hated so added another stone to its yellow dust."

I felt disturbed by the man. There was a hint of violence he passed unconsciously.

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

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

"Perhaps. Look at here."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five of the children were with me. They caught their breath. I decided to tell them a story I had been saving. It was about a man who felt confident at the entrance to a foreboding wood.

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

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

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

The writer wasn't listening any longer. His long-lost friend had an interesting tale without question. In his desire to escape the lawless war he had stumbled into an adventure which was worthy of long meditation. For instance, the people Michael had barely described were, for the most part, from the same splendid area as the writer. They were members of some high ideal, some gargantuan hope that waxed and waned between the gray, cylindrical city with its yapping mad men and evil cars. A city of dogs and blind musicians. A city of many smokes (and how many dreams had gone up those smokes?); a city tilting on a perpendicular plane leading to the ocean and its silicon beaches.

And they had escaped all this wonder? The writer thought to himself. Had they waited a mere decade they would have found a new world right there on the desktop.

He felt a certain guilt, no question. He could hear women he had known say, "why aren't you up there with them, in the mountains, fighting for what you believe?" He didn't know how to answer them. They had the same voice as the old men who asked them how much he was worth, "on the open market." Or the black man who stepped on his shoes to start something and then accused the writer as a "slave master, killer of peoples, master of none!" The two old friends were nearly in dark now. The cafe was shutting down with chairs upturned on the tables and a few employees eyeing them to signal it was time for them to go. The writer could see the night traffic, the lights of the shallow buildings and constant movement of people through the imperial night. The beer was warm.

"Well," Michael told him, "I have a lot more to tell. In fact, writer, you've jarred some good memories for me."

"Tell me, have you kept in touch with any of them."

"One, the most significant one."

"The woman?"

"Yeah, the woman."

"She knows what happened?"

"I think so, she changed when she left the mountain."

The writer felt uncomfortable around his old friend and wasn't sure he wanted to meet with him again. Michael was already planning the next meeting at his apartment and he said he would go there but in his mind was, already, making excuses of why he couldn't make it. There comes a time, he thought, when the past must slip behind one like a booster rocket that falls to earth without its energy anymore.

So young to have a past! It was a significant first past outside of which ranged a world with too many hooks into his sentience; yet, an inviting world, a good one too.

So now the writer made his way down the crowded street known as College Avenue, past Lewin's Metaphysical Bookstore and Dream Fluff Donuts and the bike shop and old theatre, down into the surrounding neighborhood where he spent his most extraordinary days. It was among the denizens and venerable trees and holes animals had made while burrowing the ground. He usually arrived with a notepad and pen or two or three books he had purchased at Shakespeare and Company not wanting to leave the nook he found back where the philosophy tomes were. Gods of the obscure mind, gods of the light. Well, it was a good place. They were all good places that played Handl in the background.

But now he had nothing and was effected by his old friend and his tales from the mountain. He had an indescribable desire to know more, to go to the apartment and listen to these tales and think about the strange people who lived there. He knew instantly that it was gone, now; the people perhpas wandering uselessly from town to town or settling in some tent off the blue highways where owls and Indians ruled. He had a knawing feeling that he, too, should have gone into the mountains and danced to the delights of the moon and got skilled in some useful instrument.

The park was cut square behind the old junior high school, up from the infamous street that always reminded him of tear gas and refugee camps. Today it was alone. Other days he had seen plays and movies being made and jokesters and children. Today it was alone but for two dogs who chased after each other in wild, long looping paths until one stopped suddenly and began to charge the other direction.

The writer watched and took a familiar spot under an oak tree and imagined, sometimes, that he was Isaac Newton about to discover the law of gravity. It was a lovely spot and already filled with the writers previous dreams that seemed to linger around even though he had told himself, no more.