A Leaf In the Wind - From Sherwood Forest to the Amazon Jungle.

By Christopher Bark

A Journey deep into Nature, Shamanism and Alternate Realities. It describes the author's roots and early travels. Followed by, a lifetime of travel adventures into India and the Peruvian Amazon, among others. A major theme is the writer's use of psychedelic plants and his progression into the ancient world of Shamanism. An incredible story told with honesty and humour.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781326893354

Book preview

blood.

Chapter 1

Early Travels

‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less travelled by.

And that has made all the difference.’

Robert Frost

As a boy, I was the unlikeliest of future travellers. I would get travelsick on the regular four-mile bus journey to my grandparents’ home and would usually have to exit the bus halfway there and walk the rest of the way. I never expected to travel far because nobody in my circle of family and friends ever had.

I began travelling as a teenager and as the years rolled past I went on some rather long and interesting journeys - most notably, my unexpected two years in India, twelve years in sleepy and surreal rural Ireland, two years in the wild and magical Peruvian Amazon and several years in the gigantic and ancient landscape that is Australia. My style of travel has, for the most part, been the budget variety. Sometimes I make the accurate, but somewhat tongue-in-cheek, boast that I have been homeless and broke on four continents.

I grew up in the 1960’s, but there was little flower power in the small, Nottinghamshire, coal-mining town where I lived. There were Teddy boys, Hell’s angels, Skinheads, and Mods on Italian scooters. Hippies couldn’t thrive in such a hostile environment so they were never able to take root there.

I had been born in a nearby pit village, which was dominated by the pit tip or slagheap - a black mountain of waste coal - and the pit chimney that gushed out sooty smoke, twenty-four hours a day, covering the entire village in a fine, grey dust.

But, I had also been born, and grew up in the oaken heart of Sherwood Forest, or at least, what was once the centre of it.

The pit tip and the remains of Sherwood Forest were my playgrounds - a mixture of coal dust and outlaw fantasies.

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My childhood was a tad unconventional. Between the ages of six to sixteen, from Monday to Friday, I lived in the town with my mother. It was the Sixties and my mother, newly liberated from her marriage to my father, worked six days a week, ten hours a day, as a hairdresser, and then went out dancing at night to let her own hair down. I spent a lot of time alone in my room, studying my wildlife encyclopedia. I was fascinated by Tigers and Macaws, the large, brightly coloured Parrots of the Amazon Rainforest. I spent many hours drawing and painting pictures of them, and daydreaming of seeing them in their natural habitats.

As a young boy, I was allowed into the exclusively female territory of my mother’s hairdressing salon. Men didn’t dare enter hairdressing salons in those days, in my town - it was a cultural taboo. New medications were all the rage, and the women exchanged pills as they sat under the hairdryers - a couple of Valium for a couple of Librium, and so on. Fortune-telling was also a big part of the hairdressing world. Many of the women were proficient at reading tea-leaves, (tea-bags didn’t exist then). Often mediums and professional fortune-tellers came to give the women readings. There was even an Ouija board in the back room, where the tea was made.

At the weekends, I would take the four-mile bus journey to stay with my grandparents in the pit village where I had been born. There, I would spend most of the time with my friends - walking in the local fields and woods, climbing trees in Sherwood Forest, swimming in rivers and lakes, looking for bird’s nests and generally getting into mild forms of trouble or running away from it. Nature was my great love and I identified more with animals and birds than I did with human beings.

I didn’t enjoy school; I hated being cooped up. Primary school was okay, but the teachers didn’t seem to approve of me, as I often asked difficult questions. One time, a young schoolteacher drew a simple diagram on the blackboard, and explained that - 'Trees breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. Human beings breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide'. My naive young hand shot up and said - 'Please Miss, why do we cut down so many trees then?' I received no answer. Almost fifty years later, I still haven’t heard a good answer to that question.

At ten years old, I passed an IQ test designed for eleven-year-olds (a leftover from the British eugenics program), and so entered an all-boys grammar school. I had a choice of six, and chose the one with the best football team. I spent the next five years staring out of the window and wishing that I were somewhere else.

School was deadly dull for me so I won’t mention it again. I will share a few more stories from my childhood though before I move on to the 'meat' of my travels and my adult life.

Near to my home in the town was a field, more of a waste ground actually, but it did have lots of trees, bushes and wildish grassy areas on it. There was an area at the top of the field where the grass had been worn away by years of boys playing football. I loved playing football and would spend many, many hours up there from about the age of eight onwards. The football games sometimes had teams of over twenty a side. There were lots of wild mice living on the field and most of the local boys were experts at catching them. It was a relatively simple affair. We would look for something flat lying on the ground, such as a broken sheet of asbestos or a rusty old sheet of corrugated iron and we would be fairly sure that there would be a mouse’s nest beneath it. One of us would quickly lift the sheet and another of us would simply grab one of the mice as it tried to escape. My close friends and I would usually just examine the mouse and enjoy the feeling of holding that small, warm, wriggling creature in our hands, before releasing it. On occasion though, we would take the mouse (sometimes voles and shrews too) home and keep them for a few days as temporary pets before returning them to the field and releasing them.

One day I caught a particularly large mouse and decided to take it home for a few days. I placed the mouse into an old shoebox with some shredded newspaper bedding and some food before I went to sleep. In the morning, I eagerly opened the box to see what my new pet was up to and... I had never seen such a thing. My mouse was much, much smaller than the night before, and pressed up against it were lots of tiny, pink, squidgy things. I decided to call in my mother, as she was the local expert on wild creatures. (We often had wild things in our house, and local people who found injured birds and animals, would bring them to my mother. I remember once, we couldn’t use the bath for several weeks because my mother had made a home for an injured skylark in it). My mother looked into the shoebox and said - 'Ah'. It was 'The birds and the bees' time. She explained to me that the small pink things were babies and that my pet mouse had been a pregnant female. I took the mother mouse and her babies back to where I had found them and carefully placed them into the still intact nest.

Not all the boys were as kind to animals and sometimes after a game of football; some of the older boys would catch a mouse and start to do terribly cruel things to it. This always made me react and I had no control over the reaction. I would fight the boys. I would fight them with all I had and they could never stop me. I became something of a celebrity amongst those older boys, although an 'oddity' is perhaps a more accurate term. It didn’t matter if there were two or six or ten of them and it didn’t matter how much older or bigger they were. I attacked them with tooth and claw. I didn’t intend to hurt anyone; my efforts were only concerned with defending the mouse. During these fights, one part of me always felt disconnected from the boy who was fighting. I became an interested observer filled with a sense of curiosity at the passion of the fighting boy who couldn’t be subdued. I sometimes wondered if, somehow, the mouse had entered my body and was using it to fight for its own life, but I knew this was impossible.

The older boys, despite their cruelty to the animals, never tried to hurt me but just tried to pin me down. They never could though and I was a source of amusement and wonder to them. I remember them shaking their heads and laughing at me. I also remember that they stopped being cruel to animals when I was around. I was treated as a joke, but I didn’t care because they stopped hurting mice.

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Another animal that my friends and I liked to hold and take home for a couple of days was the common frog. There were many frogs at that time. The municipal park in the centre of town had a small stream that flowed through it. There was also a large and very high stone wall that was part of a railway embankment. We used to search along the bottom of the wall and would always find dozens of frogs resting up against it. (In more recent years I have taken my own children to the same place to look for frogs but we couldn’t find any¹). My friends and I were in the habit of holding frog races in the narrow passageway, at the bottom of the stairs that led up to my mother’s flat. I had one frog that was the champion racer and I formed a strong attachment with that frog.

One day a mystery came into my life. I was with my frog at the bottom of the stairs (I was nine or ten years old). I popped upstairs to the toilet and quickly came back down again. I had been gone for one or two minutes at the most, but my frog had disappeared in the meantime. I searched everywhere for my amphibious friend, but could find no trace. It made no sense at all, and the mystery remained with me for the next six years. I would often lie in my bed wondering what could have happened - there was just no explanation.

When I was fifteen years old, my mother sold the shop and the flat, and we moved from the town to another of the pit villages. In my bedroom was a carpet and we were taking the carpets with us. We moved my bed and rolled up the carpet. Under the carpet and directly beneath the centre of my bed was my long lost friend - flattened and desiccated - a perfect specimen of a mummified frog.

The whereabouts of my missing frog had been revealed but another mystery had taken its place. How on earth, had my frog climbed up two flights of stairs, found its way into my bedroom, crawled under my bedroom carpet and found its final resting place in the exact spot beneath the centre of my bed? This mystery also stayed with me for years.

When I was in my thirties, I was reading a book on British folklore and customs and came across an old custom that far from solving my frog mystery, added to it. The story was that it was common practice for adults to hang the body of a dried frog around the necks of children, to protect them from evil spirits. I wondered if my mother had put the frog under my bed to protect me, (She denied it when I asked her about it). I pondered over the fortune telling women that were around at the time in my mother’s salon and if they had played any part in it. The thought even crossed my mind that maybe the frog had somehow sacrificed itself to protect me - I really did love that frog after all.

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Around about the same time that I was defending mice and racing frogs, I was having a recurring dream, every night for many weeks. I say a dream, but it was without doubt, a nightmare. It was always identical in every way and I consistently woke up screaming at the same point in the dream. It went something like this - I was floating above a scene; I was not directly involved but merely an observer. There was a circular room and the ceiling sloped downwards from the central apex to the edges. The room was all white, except for where the sloping ceiling met the walls of the room; here there were dark, glass doors around one half of the room. Next, my vision turned to the direct centre of the room where there was a white table. It was anvil shaped. A person was lying on the table. What appeared to be, two or three doctors or surgeons were standing around the table, all dressed in white, with masks that prevented me from seeing their facial features. As I looked closer, I could see that the surgeons were dissecting the man on the table. I watched as they cut him into six pieces - arms, legs, head and torso. A trolley carried these body parts towards the dark glass doors. I watched as the doors opened and could see that it was some type of cold storage area. I could see many human body parts hanging there on metal hooks, as if in a butchers shop. My view then began to widen and I started to see the room in its entirety. I saw a queue of people passively waiting in turn to take their place on the operating table. My vision went down the line of people until I got to the last person in the queue - It was me!

That was the point where I woke up screaming every night. Eventually my mother took me to the doctor, who gave me some drugs, which made the dream go away. I never forgot the dream however, and it would come to mean different things to me at different periods of my life. It was soon after this time that I decided I didn’t want to eat meat anymore. I didn’t want to be a vegetarian though, as I had never heard the word vegetarian. Vegetarians, like Hippies, didn’t exist in my part of the world.

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At fifteen, I left school and started work and I must say; I found that sudden change from boyhood to manhood disturbing. I went to the local colliery and took their aptitude tests. The results suggested that I should train to become a colliery manager, but I didn’t like the idea of bossing my friends around, so I applied to become an electrician instead. A routine medical examination, however, revealed that I am colour-blind, which is an attribute rarely sought in electricians. Therefore, I began work as a collier, digging coal underground. I didn’t like it; not in the least.

In those days, the pay and conditions for coalminers were atrocious, but personally speaking, one of the worst things was the shower after the shift ended. It was how I imagined prison bathhouses to be - large, open, communal showers with lots of grubby, naked men milling around, soaping themselves and each other. My sensitive fifteen-year-old self just didn’t enjoy having his arse flicked with towels and didn’t care for washing the coal from the older men’s hairy backs, which was the custom.

Being underground in the pit was dreadful. On some winter days, I saw no daylight because I had been underground all day. One day, one of the older men asked me how long I was going to stay at the pit. I replied that I wouldn’t stay long and would find a different job soon - 'Aye', he said, 'That’s just what I said forty years ago'. His comment unsettled me; within a year, I stopped going to work.

I continued to get up at five AM and leave the house at six as though I were going to work, but then I would veer off to the local woods and just walk around and hang out with the trees and the birds all day. I worked one or two days a week - in order to show my mother some wages on paydays. I got away with this for a while, and then I was sacked. I was secretly delighted at this but was unable to express my delight because of the stigma involved with rejection by the pit.

I cheerfully entered a period of unemployment during which I educated myself by reading hundreds of books on every possible subject. Then, I got another job, this time in a factory, making plastic road cones. It was mind numbing and soul destroying but at least it wasn’t underground.

Life was very uninspiring in my hometown and it was difficult for me to envision any form of enjoyable future. I was expected to be like everyone else - accept my place in life and make do. But, the books I had been reading must have had some effect and although I still wasn’t thinking about travelling, somewhere in the back of my mind, I believe that an escape plan was forming.

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Together with a friend, Olly, I started to hitchhike around the country. With no destination in mind, we would just set off to see how far we could travel before hitching home again. We didn’t always make it back on time, and on those occasions, we would usually sleep in a hedgerow or under a bridge. A few times, we made it to the seaside town of Blackpool in Lancashire. As we were always moneyless, we slept in the seafront lifeboats, under the tarpaulin, before returning home in the morning.

On one occasion, we were wandering around Blackpool late at night. I was fifteen and Olly was a couple of years older. We came across a man on the seafront. He was drunk and slashing at his wrists with a penknife. Without thinking (as usual), I snatched the knife from him and threw it into the sea. In the morning, we went to our hitching place only to find the suicidal man standing there, hitching a lift himself. We were afraid of him, so we went and hid until after he got a lift. It didn’t enter our heads that he may have been grateful.

At fifteen, I also started to follow my local football team - Nottingham Forest. At the time, they were in the second division, but had recently appointed a new manager - Brian Clough. I used to go to every game and particularly enjoyed the away games. I liked seeing the different towns and landscapes. Brian Clough became the most successful manager that Nottingham Forest has ever had. He soon gained them promotion to the first division, and they won the league title in their first year. This meant that they gained entrance into the European Champions Cup.

The first time I left the UK was for Forest’s initial away game in Europe. They were playing A.E.K Athens in Greece. At that time, England, and in particular the town where I lived, was a violent place. Football hooliganism was rife and there were fights at every game.

Forest won the game and the two hundred supporters who had travelled with our team were very happy with the result, but we were also afraid of the reaction from the local supporters. The gates opened, the police were absent, and at the bottom of the steps hundreds of Greek fans were waiting for us. We all expected to be beaten up, but the Greeks surprised us by wanting only to shake our hands, pat our backs and exchange scarves and hats. My horizons had started to widen. Not every place is the same.

I travelled to every game that season and Forest won the cup. The following season I again attended every game until Forest played Grasshoppers Zurich in Switzerland. I went to the game on a bus. At the game, I met up with my friends, and together we watched Forest win again. After the game, I decided to hitchhike back to England and a good friend Paul, who was a couple of years younger than me (I was nineteen), decided to join me. We did okay for a while, but then as darkness fell we were dropped off at a roundabout, close to a motorway. There was traffic on the motorway but none on the road where we were standing. We decided to chance our luck, and walked onto the motorway.

We stayed in the hard shoulder away from the traffic, but we walked with our thumbs out at the same time. We walked in single file, and I was a few yards in front of Paul. Suddenly, something alerted me and I turned around. I saw a car leaving the motorway and veering onto the hard shoulder. I watched it drive straight into Paul. I saw Paul thrown high into the air. The car didn’t slow down but instead, accelerated and drove on, narrowly missing me. I held Paul and begged him not to die, but soon I heard a terrible noise from his throat, and I instinctively knew that it was his last breath. He died in my arms.

It was a desperate time for everyone involved. For my part, I blamed myself. I was two years older than Paul, and I had encouraged him to join me in hitchhiking back to England.

I did learn at a relatively young age, however, that travel is not always the romantic adventure that we hope it to be, and the important lesson, that bad things do happen to good people. I turned to alcohol for solace.

The next couple of years are hard to describe but also difficult for me to remember. I started to drink a lot, every day. The women in my life - my mother and my girlfriend at the time - saved me. They made me realise that the car’s driver (who didn’t come forward and was never found) should carry the blame. Their wise words and love comforted me greatly, although, to this day, I still feel partially responsible for Paul’s death.

I continued to work at the plastics factory for another year or so, and then Halliburton Services² in Dubai offered me a job. I worked for Halliburton for two years as a pipeline tester. I worked offshore on a small boat, ‘Ekofisk Moon’, in the Zakhoum oil field of the Arabian Gulf. I enjoyed that time. The work was interesting and at times exciting and dangerous. It