Here are a couple of short accounts of my brother Michael’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 – other than noticing that something rather un-ordinary was happening.

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 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.  I suppose 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, we passed as a house car and saved some bridge fare.

On our way through San Francisco with our old school bus, we traveled from early dawn starting at 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 to stay away from the tourists.   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 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, when you can feel the air change 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 and then asked 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.

The events described in this story took place during the winter months of 1967 or 1968, probably during the Christmas break.  A college buddy and I decided to take a trip to the desert to see if we could find the gold described in my father’s lost gold mine story dating from the time of the Great Depression.  While we were mainly interested in finding a large cache of gold and getting rich, we were also very aware of many “stories of power” associated with the uninhabited desert regions of the western United States.  The destination for our trip further enhanced the feeling of mystery and power because in addition to stories of gold, it has many ancient rock art drawings called petroglyphs on hundreds of rocks in the area. I have always been drawn to these examples of art, finding them to be totally inscrutable, but clearly of great importance to the artist.  The origins of the petroglyphs are completely unknown other than that they are extremely old (possibly several thousand years old).  According to the local natives in the area, they were created by “the ancient ones” for some unknown purpose. The mystery and intrigue of the area was very much evident to my friend and me as we set up camp and proceeded to search for the lost gold.

My father’s “lost gold mine story” started on a summer day in the early 1930’s.  My father worked as a waiter for a “poor farm” in Marin County, California.  One morning my father’s friend, the cook, got a call from the hospital in San Francisco informing him that his elderly uncle was dying and wanted to see him.  Since the hospital was only about 30 miles away, the two of them went to see the dying uncle.  It turned out that the old man had a story about a lost gold mine that he wanted to pass on before he died.

The story, as I recall it, is that the uncle and his partner had been prospecting along the Whipple Mountains next to the Colorado River, approximately 40 miles south of Needles and a little north of Vidal Junction.  When the days started to heat up at the approach of the hot summer months, the two prospectors packed up their mules and wagon and headed toward the coast a couple hundred miles to the west.  After traveling for a couple of days they headed due west up a wash toward the some mountain peaks when their water barrel fell off of their wagon and broke.  This put them into a bit a fix because it had already gotten too hot to travel in the desert without water and it was too far to go back to the river.  They continued up the narrow wash (dry creek bed) hoping to find water, when they came upon a fresh water spring shaded by desert palm trees.  They named it “Two Palm Springs” because of these trees.  That solved their immediate problem, but since they no longer had a barrel, it didn’t solve the larger problem of getting out of the desert.  They decided to take short trips into the desert hoping to find the next source of water.  While doing that, they came upon an area that was covered with geodes (round rocks with a hollow, crystal lined center).   The area had so many of them that it made it difficult to walk.  Past that they spotted a rock arch.  Under the arch they found gold!  Somehow, the uncle’s partner died and was buried on a small ledge near the spring.  The uncle managed to get across the desert to the ocean, but didn’t ever get back to the gold.  Sometime later he became sick and ended up in the hospital, where my father met him and heard the story.  Shortly after my father and his friend visited the uncle, the old man died.  So, being young men in the middle of the Great Depression, the two of them jumped into my dad’s car and headed to the desert in search of gold.

They drove to Needles, turned south on the road toward Vidal Junction, spotted the mountain peaks as described by the old man, took a trail west toward the peaks, went up the wash, and found the spring, with a cross marking a grave behind the spring.  They figured that with this much of the story being true, they were almost rich!  However, the story didn’t have enough details to help them take the next step.  They spent a few days hiking through the barren, rocky, mountains looking for the mine, but were not successful.  They did find signs of early man in the form of broken pottery near the spring and dozens of enigmatic petroglyphs pecked into rocks a few miles to the west on the far side of the mountain. More interestingly, they climbed up a cliff going to the top of a mesa and partway up came to a ledge with a cave behind it.  There were desert sheep horns on the ledge.  They went into the cave, but had no lights so couldn’t go very far because it was too dark. 

They spent a week or so searching for the gold without success.  Since this was the middle of summer and extremely hot, the two green horns got smart and high tailed it back home where my father’s fiancée (my mother) was waiting.  Following that brief excursion to the desert, my dad got married, had kids, and was unable to return until twenty or so years later when I was about seven years old.

When I was six or seven, we finally made a return trip, and then made it a family tradition to take week long trips during the cool seasons of Christmas or Easter vacation to search for the lost gold.  We never found gold (or the cave), but we found a lot of other interesting things.  We found many signs of early man, found what my father called an early Spanish mine that looked like a rectangular hole in the ground to me, but it did appear to be man-made.  After a few years of exploring the area, my father contacted the Museum of Man in San Diego concerning the artifacts that we had found.  The curator, Dr. Davies, of the museum joined us on a few of our winter vacations.  Dr. Davies was very impressed and excited with the things that we had found because archeologists had never found such artifacts in that part of the desert.  Our discoveries filled in a blank in the archeology maps.

During the fall of 1967 I had been telling my college friend stories about the desert and the lost gold mine.  When Christmas break came, we took his VW bus, his beagle dog “Amigo,” and headed south to check it out. 

We took the highway south of Needles, finally finding the unmarked turn-off to the peaks.  We followed the rough dirt track across the flat desert floor to the head of the canyon leading to Two Palm Springs.  That was our first major decision point because the wash was rocky with a very sandy bottom.  I had always used a four-wheel drive vehicle for this road.  All we had this time was the two-wheel drive bus.  We were faced with the possibility of being stuck in the sand many miles from civilization.  Being young college kids, instead of pondering the possible results we just drove right on in – it all worked out just fine.  We drove a couple of miles up the wash to the end of the road and set up camp close to the springs.  I was amazed at how well that bus did in the rough and rugged desert country.  It seemed that if a jeep could make it, so could the bus.

The springs were in good shape, and full of clear water.  There had recently been a fire that had burned several of the palm trees, allowing more water than usual to fill the small pond. Someone had hauled in some galvanized pipe as if they were going to “improve” the spring, but had done nothing other than carry the pipe to the area.   There was much evidence of animals using this spring, including big horned desert sheep that live on the steep hills in the area. 

While exploring a rocky canyon below the springs we came upon old, rusted barrel hoops.  When I saw them I recalled that my father’s story included a discussion that the original prospector’s barrel of water had fallen from their wagon and broken to pieces.  When I saw these metal hoops sticking out of the sand and rocks in the river bottom I got pretty excited because they might be the hoops from the prospectors’ broken barrel, and that I was finally finding physical evidence to support the old prospector’s story.

I told my friend that my family had thoroughly explored much of the country to the south of the springs, we should concentrate our efforts searching to the north.  After walking a short distance, we came upon an area covered with small, two to three inch diameter geodes.  There were hundreds, and possibly thousands, of them littering the surface of a small rolling hill.  This got me pretty excited because afield of geodes was another element in my father’s story.  Previously, my father had expressed his opinion that since we had never found them, the geodes must have been part of a myth and weren’t an important element of the description on how to find the gold.  I think my father had begun to doubt the entire story by then because of all of the years that we scoured the desert looking for clues and finding none.  Now we had found the field of geodes, adding a bit more credibility to the original story.

My father’s story indicted that after passing through the bed of geodes we should see an arch.  We started searching for an arch on the cliffs, wondered what type of arch we were looking for.  One type of arch has a clear space under it that you can see through to the sky beyond.  Another type of arch is a place on surface of a cliff, looking a bit like a relief of an arch carved on a rock wall.  I had no idea which type of arch we might be looking for until we turned a corner and saw an arch very near the top of a high (3,000 foot or so) cliff-like mountain to our right.  The blue sky was clearly visible though the arch from where we stood.

We were getting pretty excited by now.  The next task was to decide what was meant by “under the arch.”  The most obvious answer was inside of the arch itself, directly under the arching rocks.  That meant a difficult climb up a steep and rugged, bolder strewn mountain.  The mountains in this area are just bare rocks with very little vegetation beyond a bit of grass here and there with a few small shrubs living in between the boulders and rocks.  We headed up the mountain and finally got to the top, slowly working our way over to the arch.

The arch turned out to be about eight feet wide and about six feet tall at the highest part.  It was made from a brown colored, volcanic material.  There was nothing under the arch except for a flat rocky surface.  We looked around for awhile, but could find nothing that indicated the presence of gold or any other unusual substance.  However, while we found no gold, the view from up there was magnificent!  You could see across the hazy blue desert to the Whipple Mountains and the Colorado River to the east, the entire layout of the southern portion of the mountain ridge, and the great flat valleys surrounding the barren mountains. 

We sat down to enjoy the view. I became transfixed.  Not just a little transfixed, but totally and completely transfixed – I slid into a trance that lasted for what might have been minutes, or hours; I have no way of knowing.  My mind just stopped functioning as we sat and sat, staring at nothing in particular.  I had stopped talking, stopped moving, and stopped thinking! 

After a very long time my mind slowly formed a tiny thought that not only had I stopped thinking, I could not move.  I was stuck on the top of the mountain, under the arch.  With considerable difficulty I managed to speak enough to my friend to ask what he was experiencing.  He slowly spoke as if from a great distance that he had stopped thinking and could not move.  Awakening from this very odd, and frightening situation we both jumped up and started running down the mountainside to get out of that “haunted” place.  The hill that we ran down was more of a cliff than a hill, strewn with giant boulders and other dangers.  However, neither of us took heed of the danger; we just ran as fast as we could, jumping from rock to rock – hoping that we wouldn’t slip or knock a large rock loose to crush us on the way down.  We finally made it to the bottom, and after catching our breaths decided that we would avoid that place in the future. 

I have never experienced a place with so much power that felt like it could suck me entirely into it.  I felt that I was caught completely; my entire being was under its spell.  Since then I have returned to the arch one more time out of curiosity and found nothing unusual, just a bunch of brown colored rocks.  It seems to have been both a time and a place that was important.

I still have a question about what is meant by “under the arch.”  From up on the hill, all of the mountain below us could be considered “under” the arch since they are all below the arch.  I have spent many hours looking in this area along the gravely wash, but have found nothing.  Not only do I not know what was meant by “under the arch,” but I have no clue about the form of the gold.  Is it ore?  Is it placer gold mixed with small particles in sand?  Does it consist of chunks of gold?  Is it a lost Spanish treasure?  As far as I know, the gold is still in “them thar hills.”

I told my father about this new find, and that of course sparked another trip to the desert.  This time he took along a friend of his from where he worked.  We found the geodes again, and went back to the arch, but found no gold.  Sometime later his friend returned with a truck and picked up all of the geodes (his form of “gold” since they were worth about a dollar each).  He picked them all up, and the next time I was there that landmark was completely gone.

In California the second half of the 1960’s were times of free-love, free-spirits, war protests, and psychedelics- especially LSD.  As a physics student in college, I didn’t have the time or inclination to become deeply involved in the emerging “drug culture” – but there was something intriguing about the stories of LSD induced hallucinations.  By the time of the events described in this story I had read Carlos Castaneda’s first book, “A Separate Reality,” and was very curious about his claims of experiencing and encountering an actual parallel reality.  I didn’t have access to the plants that Castaneda used as the gateway to his experiences, but at the time high quality LSD seemed to have similar results and was readily available. The stories made it sound like LSD might offer a doorway to similar experiences.  In the spirit of “scientific experimentation” (and “fun”) a friend of mine and I obtained some samples to see what would happen.  What I experienced was so unexpected, and so profound, that I ended up adding it to my growing collection of experiences of the unknown.  This event started me on the quest for trying to learn how to see, or observe, the spiritual side of life – but without the use of drugs. 

I was about 21 years old, living as a student in Arcata in Northern California.  One Friday night, my friend and I decided to try some of the new “acid” (LSD) that was in town.  Not being experienced with it, we decided to take an amount that was guaranteed to be “good.”  We did that, and then drank a beer while waiting to see what would happen.  After an hour or so we decided that nothing was happening, and that our acid  must not have been as good as claimed – so we took another hit of the same amount.  Since nothing was happening, we decided to walk the mile or so from my house to a college beer bar/dance club called “The Keg” where there would be live music and lots of our friends. To this day I have not decided whether my experiences in the Keg were real, or whether they were just the effects of too much LSD.  I have tentatively taken the position that they were both.  

We walked through town and chatted as if nothing special was happening, which was the case at that point. When we turned the corner to The Keg, we had to walk next to an old three story brick hotel.  Suddenly, the entire building swayed out over the street as if it were made of some sort of soft rubber, then swayed back the other way.  My reaction was to duck so the building wouldn’t hit me.  Then it dawned on me that the building wasn’t swaying, it was only my visual perceptions that made it appear that way.  I looked around to see what other odd things might be happening – but that was all that I could see that looked of the ordinary.  I asked my friend what was happening with him, and he described the exact same experience.  In fact, we both had to duck when the building came back again.  It continued to move with a large vertical wave as we stood and watched. 

Since that seemed to be the extent of the experience, we decided to cross the street and get a beer at pub.  Upon opening the door we were in for the surprise of our lives!  We knew that it was going to be busy since it was a Friday night with a dance band playing rock and roll music.  What we weren’t prepared for was a room full of huge fibrous eggs where people should have been.  We stopped at the door and talked about the oddity of the thing.  I could tell that they were people because I could recognize the image of the people inside of the “eggs,” recognizing friends and others.  However, the striking feature was that they were all encompassed inside of large, glowing “cocoons” of energy fibers that extended a couple of feet in all directions from their bodies. 

I turned to talk to my friend about it, and was startled to see that he looked the same.  We talked about odd phenomena this for some time.  I was quite surprised that we were apparently both seeing the same things since our descriptions sounded exactly the same.  I was (and am) convinced that we weren’t seeing a hallucination, we were finally actually seeing reality.  We decided against getting a beer at that time because it was clear that we really didn’t need one, and it wasn’t at all obvious how we could walk through the crowd because the space was filled with people’s cocoons. 

I noticed that I could move my fibers with the same kind of intent that I normally use to move my body parts.    I could reach out with a long fiber just like I could reach out with my hand or arm.  At that point I realized that I could communicate with others just by using my fibers to connect with the other person’s fibers.  As a test, I projected a fiber across the room and touched a girl on the far side of the crowd.  She looked over at me and just followed the fiber back until she was standing in front of us talking as if it were the most natural thing to do.  My friend had been watching this experiment, and expressed great surprise at the results.  The girl soon left us to go dancing, and that allowed us to experiment a bit more. 

We found that both of us were capable of this feat, and that we could see each other doing it.  It was kind of neat because it made it so easy and fun to draw people over to talk to us.  We spent quite a long time with this activity, but finally decided it was time to attempt getting a beer from the bar.  It turned out to be easy to walk through the crowd; the cocoons were soft and comfortable to slide between.  Upon approaching the bar I was surprised to see a couple of male figures sitting at the bar who didn’t have the cocoons.  My friend expressed concern that instead of being fibrous, they were black.  I noticed that they were not only black, but that the black was more of a void than a color.  They were featureless and the color of the inside of a dark cave – there was no color and no light at all.  These men were solid so you couldn’t see through them, but they seemed to absorb all of the light that touched them.   At first I was tempted to go up and talk to them, but then realized that they frightened me in an odd way.  Not in a way that they would do me bodily harm, but in a way that was more like they would somehow damage my cocoon.  My friend and I decided to stay away from those guys.  We couldn’t figure out if they were dead, would be dead soon or maybe they were not humans.  I don’t know what we were seeing, but they clearly were not the same as the rest of the folks in the bar, and were not something that we cared to play with.   We quickly agreed to leave these guys alone; whatever or whoever they were was not our concern.

We spent the rest of that night enjoying the music, enjoying the interactions with the egg people, and basically having a good time.  After closing time we walked up to my friend’s house on the hill.  Along the way we found that everything was sparkling, and that all of the living things had their own – but unique – cocoons.  We finally got to his house in the pre-dawn hours, where I laid back on his couch and watched huge, glistening snakes intertwine with one another where there should have been a ceiling.  I found them to be beautiful and in no way frightening.  It was not like watching a movie because it was in full 3-D and in the room with me.  However it wasn’t at all scary or upsetting because it was clearly just the effects of the drug.  I rather enjoyed the show. At this point my friend and I were no longer “connected” and seeing the same thing.  He was describing his hallucinations, and I was describing mine, but they were different.  Finally the sun came up and things seemed to slowly get back to a version of “normal.”

Experiences of improbable “coincidences” happen to all of us on a regular basis.  They have the feeling of being magical or otherworldly, but are they?  How improbable does an event, or series of events, have to be before we put it into the realm of the “great unknown?” This story of finding old photographs of my brother is an example where I have to conclude that I just don’t know.  It remains a mystery to me.

Experiences of improbable “coincidences” happen to all of us on a regular basis.  They have the feeling of being magical or otherworldly, but are they?  How improbable does an event, or series of events, have to be before we put it into the realm of the “great unknown?” This story of finding old photographs of my brother is an example where I have to conclude that I just don’t know.  It remains a mystery to me.

On a summer night in 1954 my brother was coming home from his grammar school graduation party with a friend in a station wagon driven by his friend’s father.  They pulled onto a main two lane road from a side road; the driver of the car on the main road was going too fast, and did not have his headlights turned on; he crashed into the side of the station wagon without applying his brakes or slowing down.  This was before the days of seat-belts, and most of the occupants of my brother’s car were thrown out of the windows.  My brother’s friend who had been sitting in the back seat with him went through the side window first, and died instantly from a piece of glass though his head.  My brother followed him out of the now open hole, and landed on the ground.  The dead boy’s mother was killed.  The father, who was driving, managed to hold onto the steering wheel and was severely injured but did not die. 

My brother had lots of very severe injuries; the most severe one was that his liver was torn in half and almost totally destroyed.  He was in the hospital for a long time. He was in the critical care unit, so I couldn’t visit him except to stand in the parking lot below his second floor room and wave to him.  It was good to see his face through the window, even though we couldn’t talk – at least I knew that he was alive.

He was still extremely sick for weeks after coming home.  I remember that he kept a two pound coffee can next to his bed that he would periodically fill with blood and mucous with a great hacking, body contorting, cough.  He couldn’t do much except lay in bed.   I would stay and talk to him as long as a seven year old boy could.  The memory of his coffee can full of blood and mucus remains vivid to this day.

After a long time his liver finally did that amazing thing that livers can do; it healed and regenerated itself.  Then there was the legal action trying to get him some compensation for the events of that night, but with little success. The lawyer wasn’t very aggressive and ended up settling the case for almost no money.  I heard the discussions about this, but was too young to understand or care. I had my older brother back, which was all that mattered to me.

About ten years after the accident I was walking around the plaza at our home town of Sonoma.  The town has a large square in the center of town which is ringed by old Spanish style buildings containing various stores, restaurants and other establishments.  Many of the buildings are separated by narrow alleys leading to courtyards in the back out of sight from the plaza.  Most of these courtyards were used as parking lots for the people who worked in the stores.

As I was walking past one of these alleyways, I had a strong desire to go through the alley and explore the back of the building to see what was there.  This was not something I had ever done before because I had always felt that the alleys led to private property and were off limits to me.  I screwed up my courage and went down an alley to the parking area.  There were several 50 gallon garbage cans lined up on one side of the parking lot.  I felt compelled to go to them and lifted the top of one of the cans.  The can was full of trash, but right on top was a bunch of large, black and white photos.  I picked them up to see what they were of, and found that they were a set of nighttime photos of an automobile accident.  For no particular reason, I “stole” the photos and took them home. 

When I next saw my brother I showed him my find.  He immediately recognized the photos; they were photographs of his accident!  Over the years I had often heard stories, but this was the first time that I was able to see any photographs or other evidence of the accident.  I guess it was just a coincidence, but it was totally out of my normal way of doing things, and it all seemed so “natural” – every action felt like the right thing to do at the time.