At about 7:00 am, on February 26, 1979 there was a total eclipse of the sun near the town of The Dalles in Oregon.  Being a life long crazy guy about the stars, astronomy, and physics I really wanted to see this event.  At the time, my wife Mary Jo, my year and a half old son Kevin and I lived in McKinleyville, on the far north coast of California.  A little 500 mile jaunt to the The Dalles on the northern border of Oregon seemed like a reasonable weekend trip (even though the 26^th was on a Monday and there was snow on many of the roads).  The physics department at Humboldt State University was making the trip and planned to watch the eclipse from an observatory on the north bank of the Columbia River.  However, since I had graduated from the department five years earlier, I was not invited to join their adventure.  That meant that I would have to make the trip on my own.  Mary Jo decided to accompany me with Kevin, which I found to be a great blessing that would really enhance the adventure.

My family and I headed north toward The Dalles on Sunday the 25^th hoping to be in a good location by first light Monday morning so that we would have a view as the eclipse started at 8:00am.  Since we were poor at the time, in order to save expenses we decided to camp on Sunday night, get up early to see the eclipse, and then drive home that same day.  We would miss only two days from work this way, so it was really just a long weekend adventure.

The drive over highway 99 to Redding and then north up highway 5 to the region was uneventful.  Since it was the middle of winter, the camp grounds in Oregon were not full – in fact they were empty.  Luckily they weren’t all closed.  We found a beautiful campsite next to a crystal clear river.  The campsite was set in a grove of aspen trees, many of which had recently been felled by beavers.  It was cloudy and cold, but at least there was no snow. 

We spent a cold night sleeping in the back of my work van.  The van was just a shell that I used as a work-truck when building houses.  It had no insulation or other fancy things (no carpets, back seats or anything else).  Moisture kept forming in the ceiling and raining down upon us as we slept.  Our son had a fever and didn’t feel well.  We tried to stay warm as we settled into our sleeping bags – but it was not a very restful night.

At first light we woke up and headed east, looking for a good place to observe the eclipse.  The weather was not promising because it was mostly cloudy – the last thing you need for observing an eclipse is cloud cover.  However, as we traveled east, the clouds started to break up, becoming patchy in the dark sky (the moon is always dark when an eclipse of the sun occurs because it gets between the earth and the sun, hence no sunlight falls on the side that we observe). 

We finally came over a rise and found ourselves on the ridge of a hill that sloped down to the east.  The Columbia River was to our left (north) and in front of us was a great rolling wheat field, disappearing over the eastern horizon in front of us.  It made me think of looking across the fields of wheat in the Midwest.  It was almost time for the eclipse to begin, so we had to stop if we were going to catch the show.  We pulled off the road with a couple of other cars, and got out to wait.  By this time it was almost 8:00 am and the sun was up.  We could see the observatory with the other folks from Humboldt to the north, just across the river. They were in the shadows of the clouds with no view of the sun, we were standing in the sunshine.

We got out to watch the show, but unfortunately our son decided it was time to scream for attention.  Not a gentle cry, or something that could be remedied with a little food, but rather a full blown tantrum that required some serious attention.  It was one of those terrible, distressing moments in my life.  My son demanded attention, but the eclipse was starting and totality would last less than three minutes.  We had just driven ten hours getting here, and it would probably be the last time in any of our lives that we would see such a thing.  We were going into a 15 minute event; my opinion was that we just let him scream for 15 minutes and deal with him later.  He was a very colicky child and did this often.  My wife couldn’t bring herself to let him be for a few minutes, the mothering instinct was just too strong.  I wanted to watch the event, so I did – but with a huge amount of anger being directed at me for ignoring my son.  She was extremely forceful about making sure that she was going to deal with him, and ignore the eclipse.  I finally decided that even though I was clearly getting into lifelong trouble, I wanted to watch the eclipse – she would only take glances now and then, so I think she missed most of it.  It was really too bad, because we were in for such an amazing experience.  For the next 15 minutes I kept trying to point out what was happening, but by then she was so upset that I didn’t think she could really see the magnitude of the beauty that was all about us.

The day was breathtakingly beautiful.  Large clouds were swirling through the sky, dark ominous rain clouds with large breaks edged with bright white borders.  The sun was low in the eastern sky, lighting the wheat fields in a way that made them like golden waves reaching toward the horizon.  The fields dipped off to the river on the north which cut along the base of a bluff, where the observatory was located – still in deep shadows and rain.

Then it started.  The first thing that I noticed was that the fields felt like they were pulsating with light.  At first it was a gentle pulsation about a second apart.  They gradually become more evident and I could see that they were bands of shadows racing across the fields from the east toward us.  The shadow bands, as they are called, went perpendicular to their movement.  They looked like waves in a pond where someone had splashed a rock on the far side from where we stood.  They were very distinct, dark shadows and bright sunlight alternated between the lines of shadows marching toward us.  As they crossed our location, the light level went from almost dark, to full sunlight, which accounted for the pulsing.  The pulsing got to be so strong that it felt like my entire body and the earth were pulsing in a giant coordinated unity.  It jarred me.  I felt my entire body react with each pulse, which got faster and faster with time.

I looked down to the ground and saw that the shadows of things (my body, arms, hands, the car, trees, etc) had somehow grown long feathery hairs.  The hairs looked to be about a foot long and were wavy, they edged everything.  I am not sure, but I think they began to grow on things themselves, not just their shadows.  For some reason this is difficult to recall, I am not sure if the “feathery hairs” were just on the shadows, or on things too.

So there I was, pulsing with the light, seeing hair-like projections on everything, watching the moon slip across the front of the sun though my welding goggle lenses, as the day got darker and darker.  I was totally amazed and transfixed by the experience.

Then the moon finally lined up completely over the sun for the beginning of totality.  Everything went totally silent.  The pulses stopped, the shadows vanished, it felt like the breeze stopped blowing, and all noises stopped – we were suspended in complete stillness and solitude, while in the sky the sun blossomed into a huge shinning mandala of golden light encircling the black disk of the moon.  The sun became the size of a basketball held at arm’s length in front of your face. It was no longer a solid object with a defined surface, but rather it was a wispy, glowing, beautiful thing surrounding the dark central disk of the moon.  We all stood in awe at the majesty and beauty of the sight and feeling.  The cold air settled in my bones as I watched for the almost three minutes of totality.

Then the pulses started up again, slowly at first but quickly returning to their rapid pace. It all repeated, playing backwards in time.  I could see that across the river the observatory never got a glimpse of the magic that was playing out on our side of the river.  Too bad their luck failed them on that trip.

After the event was completed I felt like I had been carried into a dream, I was just standing there feeling like I had been blessed with some sort of universal magic.  It was a totally awe inspiring and huge experience.  It was nothing at all like what I had expected.  I had expected to see the day get dark, I had seen photos of totality so I expected to see the corona beyond the moon, I had heard that it got quiet as the birds went to sleep.  However, I didn’t know about the shadow bands, feathery hairs, or the feeling that it all forced upon me.  It was truly an overwhelming experience.  I can understand why it was such a big deal by the ancient ones, it IS a big deal.

It was finally over, and my son had finally calmed down.  I was in trouble with my wife, but was pleased at having been able to observe such a magnificent sight. I am still sorry that my wife couldn’t find a way to set a few minutes aside to fully appreciate the beauty of the event.  We left to travel home, taking a short cut over the mountains near Crater Lake.  The road past Crater Lake was open, but the snow was 15 feet or so deep.  We traveled over the mountains through canyons of snow, vertical walls fifteen to twenty feet on either side of the two lane road.  It was beautiful, but a bit scary, to be in such wilderness in the dead of winter, with almost no other traffic on the road.

A few years later we happened to be traveling in the desert near Needles, California.  We had heard of an ancient native America rock art work next to the Colorado River.  It was called the Topoc Maze.  It is located on a gentle rolling desert hillside.  The native peoples of the area had moved rocks into long parallel rows, some with the dark desert varnish showing, and some with the white side showing.  This pattern results in waves of light and dark lines going across the hillside.  It is hundreds of feet across, with the lines staying parallel to each other as they wrap across the hills and valleys of the area.  My first and current reaction is that they recreated the appearance of the shadow bands in rock.  It looks just the same to me as what I saw in Oregon on that cold and beautiful morning.  I think that the maze could be dated by finding out the date of the last full eclipse of the sun to go across that region.  I wrote to a noted expert in the field and told him my theory.  He shot back that it was impossible, that the Indians never did anything that didn’t have immediate practical use and they would never make art the attempted to reproduce real experiences.  I thought it was a pretty odd response, but it didn’t do much to change my mind. I can understand how they might have found an eclipse a moving enough event to want to copy in on the ground for whatever purpose.

Here are a couple of short accounts of my brother’s adventures in Death Valley. I suppose they could be called coincidences, although sometimes I wonder just how far you can stretch a coincidence.  I was on the sidelines of these experiences, observing my brother but not experiencing anything “out of the ordinary” myself.

It was in the late 1960’s when a group of us from the Eureka area of northern California decided to take a road trip to Death Valley.  I don’t recall all of the people who were on that trip, but there were probably ten or twelve of us, approximately the same number of men as women.   One of the couples in our group had purchased an old school bus, and we made a group effort to fix it up to function as a house car complete with a picnic table bolted to the floor, beds and various types of comfortable chairs for the trip.  There was a large wooden platform mounted on the top where we could ride for a more scenic, albeit rather dangerous, view.  Of course, it might not have been very safe to change from the “upper level” to the main level while traveling because we had to do it by crawling out of one of the side windows and pulling ourselves up and over the side of the platform to the top.  As unsafe as that seems now, that is how we did it while going down the highway.  I considered us to be just a group of friends off on a desert vacation, but I suppose all who saw us considered us to be a bunch of crazy hippies.  Both descriptions were correct.  When crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on the way south, the toll taker didn’t believe that we were a “house car” so he boarded our vehicle to check it out.  Since the table was bolted to the floor instead of being loose, we passed as a house car and saved some bridge fare.

On our way through San Francisco with our old school bus, we started the journey in the pre-dawn hours from my parent’s home in Sonoma, ending at dusk in the desert on the eastern edge of Death Valley.  We entered Death Valley from the east side, down a winding narrow canyon in order to avoid tourists as much as possible.   Before descending into the valley we decided to stop for the night and camp in an open area that was surrounded on three sides by high, many colored rock cliffs.  We slept under the stars, which is how I always like to sleep in the desert so I can watch the beauty of the stars slowly circling overhead.

I woke up at my normal time before dawn when you can feel the air change to become cooler in advance of the glow of dawn.  When it got light enough to move around I found my older brother, Michael, sitting cross-legged facing the soon to be rising sun in the eastern sky.  As the light got brighter, the colors of the place intensified until we were sitting in the middle of an amazing palette of blazing colors on the walls of the cliffs surrounding us.  My brother complemented that blaze of color because he had been up early working with a box of pastels.  He had painted himself from head to foot with a wild, bright, sunburst design reflecting the reds, yellows, browns and whites of our surrounding – he was quite regal in his naked splendor.

I watched him for a while before asking him what he was doing.  He said that he was calling the lizard to come to him.  I hadn’t noticed that there was a fairly large lizard doing its morning “pushups” on a rock about thirty feet in front of him.  Wondering how this lizard calling was going to work out, I just sat still and watched.  To my amazement, the lizard slowly made its way across the ground until it came to Mike’s foot.  Then it climbed up on him, making its way up to Mike’s shoulder, turned facing the same direction as my brother, and seemed to settle down to watch the sun come up! There was my brother Mike and the lizard, waiting for the sun to come up over the cliffs and heat up the day.

Our next camping spot on the trip was to be at the Race Track toward the northwest side of Death Valley.  This place consists of a large, dry lake that has many small to medium sized boulders sitting on its surface.  The boulders apparently move about on the surface of the lake bed, as evidenced by trails that they leave in the hardened mud, attesting to their movement.  The interesting thing about this is that the trails go in all directions, even crossing one another at various locations.  It appears that the rocks do not move in a coordinated manner, sometimes some go one way, and sometimes others go another.  I have heard lots of theories about what causes the movement, and how the paths manage to cross each other, but none of the theories seem entirely satisfactory. 

The road to the Race Track is a very long, desolate, dirt road through the desert.  We had been driving for quite some time along this road, seeing no other vehicles, when we were stopped because a car was broken down smack in the middle of the road and we couldn’t get by.  In the car was a man, his wife and his teenage daughter.  Of course we got out of our bus to see what we could do to help, which apparently scared the man half to death.  (This was about the time of Charles Manson, which had people a bit nervous about hippies in the desert.) The man made his women sit in the car, roll up the windows, and lock the doors while he got out to talk to us.  He told us that his car had stopped running and wouldn’t start again. 

We flew into action, bringing out the large supply of mechanics tools that we had packed under the assumption that our old bus would break down, and started to work on his car.  He looked very apprehensive about all of us getting out of the bus, and even more so when we had him open the hood and we started taking things apart.  At one point we had removed the carburetor and had taken it completely apart in our search for the problem.  I understand  being stuck in the middle of nowhere with a couple of women, and a bus load of wild haired, oddly clothed hippies would make any sane person nervous.  We managed to get his car going (it was a carburetor problem), and he finally drove out of there – very relieved I would guess.  He was so anxious to get going that he neglected to thank us for our assistance.  We found his failure to thank us to be kind of funny, he surely would have if he had been in his “normal” mind – but this encounter was just too much for that.  I don’t think he was aware of it, but it was obvious that his daughter wanted to get out of the car and join our fun.  She clearly wasn’t afraid of the spectacle that we must have presented.

I found this entire event to be quite funny because of the range of points of view expressed by the various participants, and how that those points of view were shaping their perceptions and experiences.  Our little group of “crazy hippies” wasn’t really so crazy at all.  We consisted of a group of college educated and highly skilled friends and family, out for a fun adventure in the desert. When we came upon the stranded family in the middle of nowhere our goal was to help them out and make sure that they were safe – which we did.  The husband’s view appeared to be that was in great danger, first by being unprepared and stranded in the middle of the desert and secondly by encountering a bunch of strange people and being forced to accept their help.  The daughter’s view appeared to be that she was trapped stuck in the back seat of the car, rather than being able to get out and play with the hippies.  All of these views shaped our interactions and our emotions.  I found myself in a mental space where I stepped back and observed the event from the perspective of each participant, noticing the very different emotions that their individual assumptions were creating.

That night we camped next to the Race Track. In the morning we decided to go hiking for an adventure.  We left camp just after sun rise, heading across the flat, dry lake bed and over the hills.  We had no maps or other means of navigating; we were just planning on exploring the surrounding desert and return after making a large circle in the desert during the day.  As we were leaving camp, my brother told me that he was going to get a bird that day.  I found this to be a rather odd statement since there were very few birds in the desert that time of year, and we had nothing to “get” them with.  I just nodded and wondered what that was all about.

We hiked up hills, down into valleys and across the desert going no place in particular, just wandering around, exploring the desert.  At about lunch time we came upon an abandoned mine site. There were lots of old metal things, rusted vehicles, abandoned mine shafts and other evidence of mining activity.  There was also an old, abandoned house trailer.  The windows were broken out, and the door swung on its hinges, so it was obviously not really trespassing to enter it.  My brother entered first, and I followed him.  He entered through the back door and walked right to the front where the kitchen was located.  He stopped in front of a kitchen cabinet, opened the cabinet door, reached in and picked up a perfectly preserved beautiful little dead bird!  Its feathers were clean and shiny, with shades of blue and red glistening in the sun.  So this is what he meant; he indeed did get a bird that day.

This event occurred a few days before Christmas of 1968 when I was 21 years old.  My fiancé, Katie, and I were spending a few days over the Christmas holiday with her parents in Palo Alto, California (in “Silicon Valley”).  It had been a hectic year at college so we hadn’t yet finished our Christmas shopping. The two of us went to a nearby shopping mall (the Mayfield Mall) to see what we could find.  The mall was busy, but since it was early in the morning it was not packed or in a “Christmas rush” mode. It was kind of fun to just relax and watch people coming and going. The mall was all decorated in the spirit of the season, with Christmas music playing softly in the background.  Everyone seemed in a good mood that day. Since Katie was the one who was most interested in shopping, we decided that I would hang out in the open part of the mall, watching folks, while she did her shopping. 

I picked a spot near the main entrance that was out of the pedestrian traffic, but close enough to watch the comings and goings of folks.  I was in a covered courtyard that connected the entrance to the shops on either side of a wide hallway going off in an easterly direction.  There was a little roll-around flower cart next to where I was standing, and a bench about 20 feet away, facing me but facing away from most of the foot traffic. 

I was leaning against a railing along the wall when I noticed two men on the bench.  They were Hispanic-looking men, sitting and talking to each other.  One was an older gentleman wearing an old, slightly floppy, wide-brimmed felt hat and neat, clean, “farmer” cloths.  He was dressed like what I would expect an older, rural, Mexican gentleman to wear when he went shopping in town.  The other man was younger, slightly chubby, wearing slacks, white shirt and tie. 

At first I didn’t pay much attention to them because they were just a couple of guys sitting and chatting, probably waiting for their women just like I was.   However, I then noticed that they were watching me very intently, and apparently talking about me. This caught my attention, especially when I realized that I could easily hear what they were saying – in clear English with no apparent accent.  The old man gestured toward me and told the younger one that I was a physicist, and had worked at NASA.  (I was majoring in physics at the time and had spent a summer working for NASA at Moffett Field).  He then went on to describe my summer job at NASA and added other specifics about me that should have been impossible to know.  They were both watching me in a most unusual way, it felt like there were catching me in a “spell” of some sort.  I found myself connected to them, and oddly disconnected from the rest of the environment and people in the mall.  It was like I was floating in suspended animation wrapped in a cocoon with those two men. 

After a few seconds (minutes?) of this, I got a really embarrassed feeling because I felt that I was somehow being stripped naked by these guys.  In my embarrassment I stepped behind the flower cart to get out of the “heat” of the moment, and hide from them.  My action broke my spell and I was immediately overwhelmed with curiosity.  I quickly turned back, determined to go up to them and ask them who they were and how they knew these personal things about me.  I had the very clear impression that the two men were Carlos Castaneda and his teacher Don Juan and I wanted to know for sure.  It couldn’t have been more than two or three seconds before making this decision and turning back.  I spun around to confront them, but they were gone! 

I looked around the mall, but even though the mall floor was 60 or 70 feet wide, and there were only a handful of people on the floor at that moment, I could see clearly that they were not in the halls.  I wondered if maybe they had somehow gotten up and left through the entrance a couple of dozen feet away, which would have been the only possible way for them to have gotten out of sight.    I ran to the entrance and checked it, the attached hall and the parking lot, but they were not there.  My only explanation is that they vanished into thin air; they were just gone (or maybe hadn’t actually been there).

At that moment I realized that I had failed an important test that Carlos Castaneda had discussed in one of his earlier books.  Don Juan had told Carlos about “cracks, or slivers, of opportunity” that open into the other side of reality. He said that we have to stay awake to be able to jump into them at the moment they open.  Somehow those men opened such a crack of opportunity for me, but instead of reacting immediately to the opportunity, I become confused and embarrassed.  I missed the moment, and once I missed it – it had closed and was gone.   It became clear to me that one of the main things that a warrior on the path to enlightenment needs to do is become aware and quick enough to spot opportunities and jump – to jump or step through the opening.  It is like being a cat, watching and watching (stalking) for the moment, but once the moment is right, then putting all of your energy into pouncing to catch the opportunity.

Katie showed up looking for me and found me frantically running up and down the mall looking in vain for those men.  I knew that they weren’t there, but I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t overlooked some obvious and mundane explanation for their disappearance.  She just laughed at me as I babbled on about the weird non-encounter encounter. 

This story is about love, lust and heartbreak.  While this isn’t really a story of the “other side,” it is a time that fundamentally changed me in ways that are still unknown to me. This story concerns the first time that I learned that it is possible for me to lose connection with almost everything outside of the focus of my attention. 

At the time of this story I lived in a tiny house on Q Street, just west of downtown Arcata.  It wasn’t exactly a house; in fact it was barely a building.  The floors were rotten, the roof leaked, the porch was rotting off, there were rats running around at night, and a dried dead rat somewhere inside of the couch in the living room.  (The dead rat had stopped smelling long before I moved in.)  However, it was in a nice quiet neighborhood next to an abandoned saw mill and VERY affordable.  Part of the agreement that I had with the landlord was that in exchange for low rent I would tear the building down when I moved out!  I had cheap rent, but a difficult job to do at the end. 

At that time I spent quite a lot of time at my brother’s rooming house in town and knew all of the roomers.  One of the roomers, Bill, brought his girlfriend Darlene by to visit.  I liked Bill, but found his girlfriend to be mesmerizing.  However, since they were a couple I stayed out of it and didn’t do anything to interfere.  I just watched and appreciated her from afar.

The three of us got to be friends. One day they invited me to go to the beach with them.  We went to College Cove, north of Trinidad, for the day.  College Cove is a traditional college student hang out, featuring nude sunbathing, beautiful beaches, very cold ocean water, lots of beer, and occasional big parties.  At that time it was only used by younger folks because the access down to the beach was treacherous. Access was by way of a tiny slippery, steep, muddy trail down the hill from the bluff to the beach.  Darlene seemed to be having trouble navigating the trail, so I stayed with her and helped her down and back up at the end of the day.  On the other hand, Bill ran and slid down the hill and was on the beach long before we worked our way down. We hung out on the beach, just enjoying the water and beauty of the place.  Nothing special happened that day, we just talked and played as friends. 

I met Darlene the next day and she said that she had a wonderful time, really liked me, and wanted to do things with me instead of with Bill.  This was slightly confusing to me since she was my friend’s girlfriend.  I considered her “off limits.”  She explained her reasons, including the statement that she was going to break up with him in any case.  I agreed with her proposition to be more than mere friends and we started hanging out together as a couple. 

She was a theater major, so I spent a great deal of time visiting her in the theater department. I would stop by and visit as often as I could, thoroughly enjoying the other theater students.  I got to know everyone, was welcomed back stage during rehearsals and productions, got to help in the make-up room and building stage sets.  Darlene designed and made costumes, so I spent time in the costume department visiting her and her friends.  I was really amazed with the process of the process of painting very fluid looking watercolor paintings of the costumes, watch them be transformed into doll sized ¼ scale models, and finally into full gowns worn on the stage.

I was having a marvelous time.  Darlene and I spent most of our free time together talking, walking on the beach or in the woods, cooking for each other, making love, and all of those things that lovers do.  At one point she wanted to go to the Pleasure Faire in Marin County, so she made us really neat costumes.  She made my costume by purchasing standard patterns at the fabric store, then modifying them to fit her design and my body.  The Pleasure Faire was intimidating to me, but she got right into the swing of things and played the part to the fullest.  She ended up on a stage giving a production, and talked and acted in the style of the ancient times.  She was being very theatrical and visible; I was being very shy but enjoying being included in the “inner circle” of theatrical folks. 

Fall came, and we just continued to enjoy our time together.  I was in bliss, feeling so open and free because I had found someone who always looked delighted to see me, who welcomed my attentions, who seemed to love me, and who just liked to play. I found it amazing that I could be on top of the hill on campus and could pick her out of the crowd of hundreds from far away just by the way that she moved and walked.  It was almost as if it was a black and white view, but she was colored bright yellow.  My attention would instantly go to her, even when it seemed impossible to distinguish her in the crowd.

One day I met her in front of the theater building, and while talking to her on the sidewalk she told me that we were through.  She said that I was being too forceful, was paying too much attention to her, and that she felt too confined by my attentions.  I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t talk.  She just said that it was time to move on, and that our relationship was finished.  And then she walked away.

I was stunned.  The day instantly turned from being a pretty fall day to one of pain, fear and darkness.  I could hardly breathe, and couldn’t think at all.  My mind just started swirling around as I replayed the events that we had enjoyed together wondering how I could have so missed the clues that must have been there.  Up until that instant I had no idea that we weren’t both feeling the same.  Obviously I was wrong; I would never have considered breaking our relationship off because she wanted to spend too much time with me!  She had a much different view of things than me, but I was blind to the differences until that moment.

I wandered around for a couple of hours in shock, trying to understand what had just happened.  I couldn’t. It was too unexpected and too far from anything that I understood.  I finally decided to take my old Renault for a ride to see if that might help clear my head and soothe the pain.  I had no idea where I was headed, in fact, I wasn’t really headed anywhere. I just wanted to do something to occupy my mind.  I went east on highway 299, toward the Sacramento Valley.  The highway was steep and twisting, I was driving too fast. 

I eventually came to the town of Willow Creek and decided that I had driven enough and had been lucky to have stayed on the road.  It was getting late in the afternoon, and I decided to stop at a local bar and have a beer before returning home.  I pulled into the parking lot of the first bar that I came to, which was an old time rustic affair.  The front door faced on the street, but I entered through the side door to the parking lot.  It took my eyes a little while to get used to the darkness.  I walked up to the long bar and ordered a beer.  At the far end of the bar, near the front door, there were four or five guys who obviously worked in the woods because they were dressed in the traditional black pants with the cuffs torn off (to let them rip should they get caught by a cable or snag of a tree), plaid shirts with suspenders, and boots.  They all appeared to be local Indians. I guessed they were probably from the nearby Hoopa reservation.  I didn’t pay much attention to them.  There was also an “older” white guy and his much younger, blond girlfriend standing near where I had ordered my beer.

The old guy started up a conversation about nothing in particular.  He was a friendly, jovial kind of a guy who seemed to be enjoying himself and his lady friend.  I was immediately attracted to the blond, even though she appeared to be completely out of place because of  her dress and manner.  She was obviously a city lady, probably from Los Angeles.  My first reaction was that she was a “floozy” but found her to be pretty, engaging, flirtatious and funny.

I finished my beer and started to leave, but they asked me to stay and have a beer on them.  That sounded good to me, so I let them buy me a beer and settled in to talk a bit. The man then started to tease me about my pony tail and long beard.  I took it as a joke, and just played along.  Then he pulled on my beard, which I didn’t like much.  However, when I showed a bit of a reaction, he bought me another beer – which settled me down again.  His girlfriend started flirting with me, which caught my attention – even though she was ten years older than me, she was quite attractive.  They played back and forth for awhile, doing things to irritate me, and then soothing me.  He encouraged his girl to flirt, then would get pushy about it.  It was an odd little cat and mouse game.  I would start to leave, he would buy a beer.  I would start to get angry; she would snuggle up and flirt with me.  I was getting kind of disoriented, as well as pretty drunk.  The Indians at the other end of the bar were watching, but not joining in the activities.

At one point he grabbed my pony tail and pulled me along the bar.  This really got me mad.  I stood up to him and said that was too much, if he wanted to act like that we could go outside and have a fight. I was pretty strong at that point in my life, and felt like I could take on anyone.  This was not my normal way of acting, but for some reason that is where I ended up that day.  He just laughed at me and asked if I knew who he was.  I said I hadn’t a clue, but that it didn’t matter, I wasn’t putting up with his actions any longer.  He introduced himself as “Rocky.”  I said, “nice to meet you Rocky, I am Charlie.”  Then I reiterated my challenge, which he turned down.  He then bought me another beer, and left with his girl friend.

Now I was sitting alone at the end of the bar furthest from the Indians.  I could see that they were pretty drunk, and were not looking at all friendly.  In fact, they were looking positively hostile.  The bartender came over and said that he heard them talking among themselves and that they were planning to beat me up and steal what little money I had in my pocket (they wouldn’t have gotten much) when I left the bar.  This was a problem! 

The bartender asked if I knew who I had been “playing” with.  I said I had no clue.  He then told me that I had just asked Rocky Marciano (the World Heavyweight boxing champion) to go fight in the parking lot!  I guess I lucked out when he wouldn’t take me up on the offer. I think by the laws of the day he couldn’t fight me or it would have been attempted murder.  The bartender told me that Rocky came every year to Willow Creek to hunt deer, fish in the rivers, and just spend time in the mountains. 

As I was sitting there wondering how I was going to get out of there alive, Rocky walked back in.  He said that he was worried about me and the Indians, and had come to rescue me.  He walked me to my car and said goodbye in a nice friendly way. I was relieved that I no longer had to try to figure out how to get out of there.  (Rocky was killed in a plane crash the following year at the age of 45, so he wasn’t really such as old guy after all.)

By now it was dark and raining.  The drive back down off of the mountain was going to be a little more difficult because it was difficult to see, the roads were slick, and I was drunk.  I was driving too fast down the hill going around a sharp turn when my headlights went out.  Now I was in real trouble, all of a sudden I couldn’t see the road.  I tried to remember the corner, but hadn’t been paying all that much attention. 

Then I noticed smoke and fire coming from under my dashboard, so I guessed that the wires had burned and shorted.  I reached under the dash with my right hand while steering with my left, grabbed a handful of wires and crushed them together.  Amazingly, the headlights came back on so I could see to get around the corner.  The wires were still burning and sparking, burning my fingers and the palm of my hand.  However, I could at least see and made it around the corner.  I stopped the car by the side of the road and checked out the wiring.  It appeared to be working, so I continued down the hill to home.  I finally made it home and fell exhausted into my bed, worn out by a day that seemed to go on forever.  

In the morning when I woke up it felt like I had woken up from a huge dream.  It seemed like I had been in some kind of trance during my time with Darlene.  I was unable to recall many of the details of what had happened during that period of time.  I tried to think about how long it was, but couldn’t really put a date on it. I thought that it must have been a year or more, but that didn’t seem right because the seasons hadn’t changed and things that happen during a year hadn’t.  Confused, I went to find my brother to ask him what the date was.   It took me awhile to figure out the month, and then the day, and found it had only been a couple of months.   I searched around papers on my desk and figured out what classes I was enrolled in, and what I was doing there.  Somehow I hadn’t flunked out of my math and physics classes, but I think I missed almost everything being taught.  I found my school books and some homework that I had somehow done.  I must have been attending classes and doing things, but I didn’t recall it then, and still don’t have any memory of those activities.  I managed to pass all of my classes, but only by attending them in some kind of a fog.

It felt like an extra year in my life.  I had all of these experiences, all that I would expect in a year or year and a half, but it only took two months.  It remains an odd period of my life that just doesn’t fit into the rest of it.  It was a kind of side trip into love and lust, ending in heartbreak.  I was crushed for weeks because I missed the feeling of bliss and joy that had made time stand still for me, but was finally out of my trance.