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.  

This event took place when I was a single, twenty-one year old college student.   I had been invited to a “theater party” put on by the cast of the latest play produced by the students of the college theater department.  I really liked these parties; they were always the best parties in town as far as I was concerned because there were always lots of interesting people, lots of food and drink, and many beautiful girls. I couldn’t ask for anything more.  These parties were attended by the gregarious theater types who seemed to know how to have lots of fun without just getting too drunk or stoned.  Even though I was never really part of their crowd, I was often invited and always felt welcome.

The theater party following the last performance of the latest play was lively and well attended as usual, but on this particular evening I didn’t feel in a party mood.  The party was being held in a large old Victorian home owned by one of the theater professors.  I just felt like sitting on a sofa in an out of the way room and observing the action from afar.  By early evening there were about thirty people milling around in the large living room, eating little finger snacks, talking and enjoying themselves as rock and roll music played in the background.

While I was sitting and watching the action, a nice looking girl came and sat down next to me.  We didn’t know each other, so I started making the inane small talk asking questions about where she was from, what her major was, and similar easy but not particularly important topics.  As is common for me, the conversation got around to a discussion of “non-ordinary” topics; topics of a spiritual or metaphysical nature.  At the time I was playing around with practicing transcendental meditation as presented by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, taking some beginning psychology classes, and periodically going to presentations at the college put on by traveling mystics and spiritual men. She seemed interested in these topics, which was a relief for me.

The conversation turned to the idea of hypnotism, a subject that has always fascinated me.  I had been attempting to learn how to do self-hypnosis, but had never successfully practiced it or watched anyone being hypnotized other than during small town-stage shows near my hometown of Sonoma.  I suggested that it seemed pretty easy to do from what I had read. She thought it would be a fun thing to try and asked me to hypnotize her so she could experience what it was like.

I was a bit nervous about this, mainly because I didn’t know what I would do if for some odd reason I were successful.  How would I know if she were really hypnotized?  If she was, what should I do then?  Should I have her do something dumb like act like a chicken?  Maybe do a strip tease?  I wanted to think of something that wasn’t too conspicuous at the party but since there was really no goal except to see if it could be done, I was at a loss about how I should proceed. I have since come to realize that practices such as this should only be done for a purpose, with some intention. 

However, she persisted, so I said I would give it a try.  That decided, the next problem was how to do it.  I thought about things that I had seen in movies such as a swinging pocket watches, but didn’t have one.  I considered all sorts of improvised things that could move back and forth, but was afraid that all of these approaches would be kind of conspicuous and might draw attention to us.  I finally settled on the simplest and least conspicuous of them all, just using my voice.  The method chosen didn’t really matter to me at the time because I was very confident that it would fail.  I was just humoring her in order to continue our time together; I had no desire or intent to actually hypnotize her.

I decided to count slowly from 10 down to 1.  I told her to follow my voice and to let herself sink further and further into a calm, deep sleep as I spoke each number.  I told her that she would remain aware of my voice and where she was.  Then I started counting down.  As I did so she sat back comfortably against the sofa we were sitting on, and relaxed.  By the time I got to 1, she was out!  At first I figured she was just relaxing so I waited a bit for her to open her eyes and talk to me.  However, that didn’t happen.  She just sat there in a very peaceful-looking state.  She was obviously not asleep, but not awake either.

I asked her some questions, such as whether she could hear me.  She indicated that she could, but clearly her response was from some place in a very deep trance.  She spoke as if she were a dreamy state, as if she were a million miles away.  At this point I didn’t know what to do.  I tried “testing” her trance by asking her to do some silly things like raise her arm, make funny noises, etc.  I had her hold her arm out in front of her and just hold it there.  No problem!  She was like a robot.  Whatever I suggested she do, she did! She would do what I asked, and then become perfectly still until directed to do something else.  It was all very weird, and a bit scary.

I wondered what the possibilities were.  Maybe this could turn into something pretty exciting, or pretty dumb, or sexy or something.  I thought about all of those options, and as attractive as they seemed, but taking advantage of her in any way clearly wouldn’t be the right thing to do. I finally decided that since we didn’t have a project to work on, and I didn’t have anything more to do, that we were done. However, it wasn’t obvious how to get out of this situation.  I started to panic a little as I realized that she had gone far beyond what I had expected, and far beyond anything that I was prepared for.  I worried that maybe she was psychotic or something and I had initiated a permanent episode or change. 

I recalled that I had read somewhere that hypnotized people wake up as easily as they fall into a trance.  So I tried the obvious, and had her follow my voice again.  I told her that I would count from 1 to 5, and that when I reached five she would wake up, feel very refreshed and content.  I then counted to her and when I reached 5, she just opened her eyes and smiled nicely at me.  She thanked me for helping her feel so nice, and got up and said goodbye.  So much for keep her around by entertaining her with this parlor game. She just walked out of the party and my life.  I never saw her either before he evening or since. 

The whole event spooked me to the point that it was many years before I attempted to hypnotize anyone again, and the one other time that I have tried since then I was not successful.  It was just so odd to watch her go so easily and deeply into a trance.  It seemed like there was a great opportunity to do good, or bad, with this tool – but I felt that I didn’t know enough about it to depend upon myself to make the right decisions. 

It was too much like riding a motorcycle to me.  I really love driving motorcycles: it is exhilarating and freeing.  However, I keep wanting to go faster and faster, beyond my skills and into great danger.  I finally stopped riding because I became aware that I was taking far too many risks.  Hypnotizing that girl felt similar.  It was neat and fun to be have the “power” of a hypnotist, it made me feel in control and important – but it also felt like it might be leading into dangerous territories where I didn’t have the necessary skills and experience.  It seemed best to just stay away from that particular game.

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.

This story takes place in 1961 or 1962 when I was 14 or 15 years old.  It would have been during the cooler months of the year, so it was probably either on a Christmas or Easter break.  My mother, father and I had decided to spend a week at our favorite camping place the Turtle Mountains south of Needles.  We enjoyed looking for gold, Indian artifacts, and just nosing around in the desert.  What we found on this trip was totally unexpected and has remained in my memory as one of those “great unknowns.”

As was normally the case, we got up at about 2:00 am to get a nice early start on a long drive to the desert from our home in Sonoma.  This early start would get us into our camping spot in plenty of time to set up camp before dark.  On these trips I usually slept in the car until we were about in Bakersfield, waking up in time for breakfast before continuing over the Tehachapi Pass to the Mohave Desert.

The trip through the desert was uneventful, but beautiful as always.  I especially liked the part of the desert from Mojave to Needles, passing through old railroad stops in alphabetical order – Amboy, Bagdad, Cadiz, Daggett, Essex, etc.  At about 3:00 pm we pulled off the highway onto the faint track across the desert toward Mopa Peaks and “our” campsite next to a small oasis at the foot of North Mopa Peak. 

When we got to the beginning of the road into the wash that winds its way up the canyon to the oasis we were stopped by a cable strung across the road.  There was a white painted sign hanging in the middle of the cable.  The sign said, “Keep out, Government Project in Progress.”   The first thing that struck me was that while the lettering was stenciled in black, the paint had run down the sign so that it was really amateurish, not at all like a government sign.  If the government does anything right, it is that they make good looking signs.  Because of that, we decided that whatever was going on was not related to a government project.  In some ways that made it even more perplexing – after all, this is government owned land, nobody has the right to post keep out signs. 

My dad decided that the best thing to do was to wait for a bit before going past the blocked off road.  We set up camp for the night at a nearby rock wall. When we first started going to the Turtle Mountains the “rock wall” was just a campfire with a couple of piles of rocks to provide a wind break.  Over the years we added a few rocks on each trip, and the wall started to get much bigger.  Apparently others did the same, and it eventually began to look like the remains of an old cabin.  In fact, the BLM show it as the remains of a cabin, but it is actually just a wind break.

We set up camp and in a short time heard a vehicle slowly making its way down the sandy wash toward the sign and our camp.  My father and I walked over to the sign to intercept them and find out what was going on, and to find out if we could gain access to the places we had come to explore. Once at the gate, we only had to wait a few minutes until a jeep station wagon with three men in it drove to our location.  The driver got out to open the cable gate and stopped to talk to us.  The two others stayed in their vehicle.  I don’t recall exactly what they were wearing, but they were all dressed appropriately for the desert. 

After exchanging hellos with the driver, we told him that we had driven in a couple of hours before and were camping over by the rock wall.  The driver said he knew that because they had seen us when they flew over earlier in the day.   This was a surprise since we had seen no aircraft, and there was really no place that seemed likely to act as a landing place for an aircraft.  We asked what they were doing flying around in that area, and he said they had been working on their spacecraft and were test flying it following some repairs.  I asked why they were there in the first place.  They said that they were scientists and had been performing a survey of the planet when they developed trouble with their vehicle and were forced to land it to fix the problem. I asked why they had picked this location to work on their spacecraft, and the answer was that they had flown over much of the area and this spot appeared to be the “least contaminated with humans” that they could find.   

Once it was clear that this conversation was headed in rather unusual directions, I started to pay a bit more attention to these guys. One of the odd features of the older gentleman sitting in the back seat of the jeep was that he had quite large (actually, very large) ears.  This was before the time of Star Trek and Dr. Spock, but there may have been movies with spacemen having large ears.  I thought it was kind of comical that these guys who claimed to be spacemen should have such big ears.  I then noticed a much more intriguing thing, which was that while I was talking – they weren’t.  I could “hear” and understand what they were saying, but it was as thoughts, not as sounds! I was “hearing” them, but their mouths weren’t moving and it felt more like a thought than a sound.   This was most unsettling to say the least. 

The conversation continued for some time.  One of our concerns was to be able to get to the spring to get water because we didn’t bring enough to last the week that we hoped to be there.   They showed great revulsion at this idea, saying that there were lots of little wiggly things in the water and that the water was therefore not fit to drink.  We tried to explain that since there were things living in the water, that meant that it WAS fit to drink, otherwise the water would not have any life in it.  They weren’t convinced at the logic of this.   We asked if we could go to the spring to get water, but they said that we were not allowed to enter the valley, and they agreed to bring us water when they came back from town. 

The conversation went back and forth in this odd way for awhile, until they finally said good bye and drove away.   As they were driving away, my father (who is normally a most level headed guy), turned to me and excitedly asked if I noticed that they weren’t talking, but rather were just exchanging thoughts with us.  Now THAT really freaked me out.  I had kind of decided that I was just making the thought communication thing up because the topic of the conversation was so odd.  However, to have my father bring up the topic meant that if nothing else, it wasn’t just my imagination running wild. If so, his was running wild in the same way.  We went back to camp and by the time we got there we were talking a million words a minute telling my mother what had just happened.

We spent the night there by the rock wall, but they never came back so we didn’t get our extra water. The next morning my curiosity got the better of me and I hiked up to the top of a nearby hill in the hopes of getting a view of their space vehicle.  However, I couldn’t see anything of interest from that vantage point because of the twists and turns in the valley and I didn’t have the nerve to approach any closer.

We decided to go to the nearby town of Vidal Junction to get breakfast and fill our jeep cans with water.  The town was very small, consisting of a California Agriculture inspection station, a small motel, a restaurant, an old fashioned service station and a few houses.  I guess the total population was less than 30 people.  We went to the restaurant for breakfast.  We ordered our meals and when they were served, my father told the waitress that we were camping near Mopa Peaks and asked her if she have any idea about what was going on out there by Mopa Peaks about 30 miles from town.  She didn’t answer, but rather finished serving us and then left.  In fact, everyone left the restaurant.  The other customers got up and left, the waitress left and so did the cook and helper.  We were soon by ourselves.  When we finished there was nobody to take our money, so my dad just left what seemed about right on the table.  We went outside to get water and top up on gasoline, but there was nobody in town to help us.  The service station was open, but empty.  We went across the street to the inspection station and it was empty.  We thought that maybe someone might be at the motel, but when we checked, it was also empty.  It appeared that everyone had abandoned the town after my father had asked that question.  We finally got some water from a tap at the service station and went back to our camping spot.

We didn’t hear anything more from these self-proclaimed spacemen, but also didn’t go to our favorite spots because the cable and sign were still across the road.  The whole thing was weird enough that we didn’t want to push our luck.

We returned the following year to see if they had left any signs of their activities, but could find nothing. That was the end of the story for about forty years until years later when my father and I got to talking about that day.  He said that the most unusual part of the whole thing for him was that they were there in a big, fancy, black car that couldn’t possibly be driven in the part of the desert that we were in.  He just couldn’t figure out how they got there.  Not only that, but he couldn’t figure out why they were wearing suits and ties in the desert!

This was really weird because I remember seeing folks in a jeep and clothes that made good sense in the area.  My father recalls experiencing something entirely different.  Over the years I have often wondered that if they were really spacemen, how did they get their clothes and the Jeep?  Maybe they didn’t have to get anything, maybe they merely allowed us to visualize then in the cloths and a vehicle that we knew about.  Maybe they didn’t have to be able to speak English, or have these vehicles; maybe they only had to get us to think.

I guess I will never know what really happened that day, but I will not soon forget it either.  The whole thing stands out as a very strange “close encounter” of a weird kind.

The summers in Sonoma California were times of high adventure for me as I was growing up.  I spent much of my time hiking in the hills (we called them “mountains”) between Sonoma and Boyes Hot Springs, swimming in one of the six public swimming pools within my “territory,” hanging out with friends, or riding my bicycle. 

One of my bicycle haunts was down by Sonoma Creek, about two miles from my home.  Next to the creek was a grove of oak trees in what must have been part of a park at one time.  The grove consisted of a couple of acres of flat land with trees that were either planted, or thinned out, to make nice shady picnic areas next to the creek.  The creek was normally almost dry during the summer months.  There were small ponds with warm water, green scum, and giant bullfrog polliwogs in between the large, rounded boulders lining its bed. 

At the end of the grove of trees there was a dirt road leading down to the creek bed.  The road angled steeply down for thirty feet or so, and then bent sharply to the right, going around an “island” of land that rose on all sides – creating a peaked hill about 15 feet tall.  At the top of the hill was a single oak tree spreading its shady limbs over the hill and part of the creek below.  The side of the hill facing the creek had been eroded into a vertical cliff falling away from the tree to the boulder-filled creek more than twenty feet below the peak of the hill.

I liked to visit this part of the creek because there were fish, frogs, pollywogs, crawdads and other creatures in the pools.  It was also a great access point for hikes up or down the creek.  During that summer, each time I visited on my bicycle I would ride down the first part of the dirt road and up the side of the island, hoping to make it all the way to the top.  I would get part way up, run out of speed and fall over – tumbling back down the hill.  I knew that if I went fast enough I could make it to the top, but since there was just barely enough room on the top to park the bike before going over the cliff I had to be careful to judge my speed to avoid that possibility. Every time I tried it I would go a little faster and get a little higher up the hill before falling over and tumbling back down the hill.

One day I decided that it was time to get to the top. I started far back in the grove of trees and pedaled as fast as I could.  I was really going by the time I got to the road, bouncing around on the rough dirt road.  I flew down the road, turned up the hill and didn’t slow down at all!  In a flash I was at the top of the hill, into the air, and still climbing. 

As I flew up into the air,   I felt that time almost stopped.  It was like I was suspended in time and space. I had all the time in the world to check out my new predicament. I looked down and saw that I was well past the edge of the cliff, headed upward in a nice gentle curve that had a trajectory leading me to the middle of the creek below – right into the place with the biggest and nastiest looking boulders.  I thought about stopping, but since I had long since left the ground it was obvious that wasn’t an option.  I let go of my bike, feeling like I was hanging almost motionless, and bike-less, in the air. 

On my right side I noticed a big limb of a tree reaching out over the creek, the limb was right next to me, parallel to my flight path.  I reached over and grabbed onto that limb. The next thing I knew I was swinging from the branch, watching my bicycle continue through its arc and then falling front wheel first onto the rocks right where I had predicted.  The bike bounced and then crashed with a resounding smashing sound, ending up in a scum covered pond with broken spokes and a bent frame.  I swung from the limb for a little bit imagining what it would have been like if that tree hadn’t reached out and caught me.  I think that might well have been the end of my adventures for that summer. I finally reached up with my legs, encircling the limb – holding on upside down.  I inched my way back to the trunk of the tree onto firm ground and went to rescue my bicycle.  It was a little bent, but still usable.  It was covered in long, green, pond scum.  After cleaning it up as best as could, I was back on the saddle, no harm done – thankful to that grand old tree that was just waiting there to catch a boy in its arms.