The Reference Point: Journey to the Origin of Belief

By Johnny Bock

The Reference Point begins by telling of an attempted murder gone good. Usually murder, attempted or otherwise, is thought of as a thing gone bad, but with a little help from irony, stress, and mystery, bad intentions slipped into another direction and the participants found themselves in a state that defied earthly description.

Like it or not, states that defy earthly description filter into our earthly lives often enough to create whole industries trying to explain or exploit these phenomena.  (Google "religion," or better yet, "spirituality.") We want a vital connection with a higher state, and with most of us, "maybe" is not an option. We see that humanity, unlike water, seeks higher than its own level, and we see that people have a need to go there.

The Reference Point tells of people who went there. First they are seen on a wild and primitive tour by boxcar through the Northern Rockies, up the Alaska Highway in a VW Microbus, and down the Yukon River in a canoe. And there they are seen again in a little mountain cabin built next to a big creek flowing into a deep lake.

Outwardly, the people in mention are tramps, preachers, dog mushers, innkeepers, nut cases, hitchhikers, homesteaders, students, prospectors, and (saving the best for last), you. Why you? Mostly because you are likely to see your self in here, in harmony with the others, pushing back the superficial, cutting through the clutter, so when you step off your last mile, you can look back and say, "Not only have I held, but I have also risen."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lunchbreak Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201573447

Book preview

The Reference Point

A Journey to the Origin of Belief

by

Johnny Bock

Lunchbreak Press, Box 703

Oshkosh, WI54903

Copyright 2008 by Johnny Bock

All rights reserved

Purely by Reflex

But so is Economics

With No Darkness In Between

A Song for Those Who Cared to Listen

Just a Little Note from Fairbanks

Old Bones Pulled Out of Ashes

The Mockingbird

At the End of the Workday

And Became Lake

The Thinnest of Lines

Effort Has Made Thought Visible

So Did It Remind

And a Melody in a Person

Hoping for Three Score and Ten

If You Don’t Mind

Off the List of Things that were Mine

Watch Them When They’re Sober

A Voice You Can Trust

Lucky Shot

Put Our Ages Together

Loading the Boat Early

Walking Home with Jimmy

Part of the Job Description

There, but Unrevealed

To truth

and to belief,

and to the belief

that the pursuit of either

can lead to the other.

Also dedicated to

patience and mystery.

It one is the first number,

what is the last number?

Purely by Reflex

In less than ten minutes the irony would be complete. His attempt at murder would save his own life.

But first he had to get that butt in the boxcar. It was a cold day in late winter, bitter and unrelieved, which made everything difficult except death by deep freeze. Compounding the difficulty was a wooden attachment to his foot—a 2x4 about the length of an ax handle. He had stepped on it, blindly, and as fate would have it his foot came down on the part with a long nail facing up through the wood. The point punched through the sole of his shoe, through the middle of his foot, and, to the others of us already standing in the boxcar, appeared as a glistening spire through the top of his instep.

In another setting and with different players, his impalement would have been cause for more than a casual response. But this was the Northern Pacific train yard and we were tramps. Tramps don’t dwell much on matters of compassion. Having a Master’s Degree in Sympathy is not part of the job description. If somebody screws up, at best it’s entertainment and a laugh, at worst death and a shrug. Life goes on, and on you go. With tramps, traveling light and in step with the moment is seen as freedom. If the future is a place of random offerings rather than a complicated vision to be made real with savvy from the past, life is a series of satisfactions and setbacks, mostly good luck or bad luck or no luck at all. If fate puts a nail through your foot, well, tough shit. Watch your own step and never mind someone else’s. With tramps, stark and simple independence was a prized personal possession—and sometimes the only one—so you don’t ask and I don’t ask and let’s not offer either.

Trains a tramp depended on, but that kind of dependence only added to independence. You had to be there. A political document? Some political paper gave you independence? What a load. Independence was thousands of points connected by a parallel set of steel rails, and in the view of your average career tramp, the trains plying their lines were simply a given. They needed no maintenance, no commitment, no obligations or promises, not even a hi, shit, or goodbye. There were no worries about breakdowns, flat tires, low gas or no oil or the distance to your destination because, primarily, movement was your destination. Tramps liked to travel. Once the slack came out of the couplings and the steel wheels started to squeal, the journey and the destination became one and the same.

With that kind of mindset I was looking out from the inside of a boxcar and barreling across the eastern Montana prairie without a worry in the world. The late winter sun was high and warm, and the air was preparing for spring. All across Minnesota and North Dakota it had been the same. When the train hugged the highway it equaled the speed of the motor traffic, which was 65 legally but 75 in actuality. When the train swung away from the road, the open door of the boxcar presented a view of a prairie so vast that speed seemed irrelevant, and almost nonexistent, if one were to take the long view.

Along with the view, the train gave rhythm to the ride. Once up to speed, this weren’t no train that just went. This train had moves. It rode rails like a dancer to his own drum—rocking, surging, and here and there doing a tap dance. And the sounds. A steel­ wheeled symphony conducted by motion, and there you were pressed into the action not for want but for necessity. The train was a sparring partner and rodeo ride all rolled into one. You leaned left when it leaned right, and right when it snapped back—and just that fast. It was sometimes so subtle you only had to move your head, like a nod, and sometimes so hammerlike—like when speeding over rough track—that there was no choice but to hold the walls and flex the knees to keep ye olde guts from pounding down through yonder asshole.

My kind of time, life, and weather.

All soon to change.

The weather changed first.

First there was the sight of it. A hundred miles west, walls of solid white mountains warned of colder temps to come. Closer, it was a crispness coming into the air, and the fact of the train beginning to labor. I was far enough behind the locomotives to escape the smell of their exhaust, but close enough to hear the sound of their efforts. You know you’ve seen the last of the prairies when the train can no longer shoot across the land almost lawlessly. At the wrinkles before the Rockies the law of gravity comes into play, and the train obeys. Formerly a tireless iron horse, the train here behaves more like a worm. To look out from the boxcar is to see the head seeking the lower approaches to the horizon. There are mountains further up, frozen interlocking ranges not to be taken on their own terms. To penetrate their space the train must be strategic. As the level land rises to connect with the higher ground ahead, the train seeks out shallow grades, shifts gears, and from the front you hear doubled efforts, while from the rest of the train there are sounds of strain on steel, and the groan of reluctance from wheels wanting to roll back downhill.

Which wasn’t such a bad idea when you considered the weather in the higher reaches. There had been a blizzard there, the day before, and as usually happens after a blizzard, the temperature dropped with a thud.

That would be a dangerous thud for a tramp with no respect for the road. Me though, I had partial immunity by being a packsack man. In the descriptive literature of tramps, a packsack man is one of those road-rummies who carries extra weight to make the burden lighter. The extra weight was a fork and a frying pan, and a change of clothes and a bedroll. (The emphasis here is on bedroll, as in make sure you have a warm place to hide when Old Man Winter wants your balls in his martini.) The whole schmeer fit neatly in a small pack that doubled as a seat just in case The Great Northern, The Burlington, The Erie Lakawanna and all the rest failed to supply their riders with personal padding.

For doubtful reasons, some tramps put a packsack man on the same level as fishie poop. "He’s a packsack man, those tramps utter to one another, contemptuously, as if your packsack was some kind of contagious physical deformity. Why? It was all illusion. It was all born of the fact that a tramp talking like that was a tramp by necessity rather than a tramp by design. Bad habits instead of broad horizons got him on the road, and the worst kind of a bad habit is being in the habit of bad habit protection. That particular tramp lives under the lie of being down on his luck." He’s on the road by accident, in his eyes, and soon circumstances will lift him to a big house on a hill. For him, a packsack is getting a little too close to gritty specifics. He’d rather play the role than play the game. Anything less is a handshake with defeat.

Which was a shame because, in some situations, as when the train labored westward, and as the land rose and the temperature fell, obedience to an illusion was a lousy choice over carrying a small thing that made a big difference. When I pulled out my bedroll I thought to myself, If Old Man Winter wants to freeze a tramp tonight, he’s going to have to find one too proud to pack one of these.

When you sign up for a tour on the tramp, one of the fringe benefits in the package is hippings. Hippings got their name from their ability to soften the ride in the area where a sleeping body needs it most—the area between the top of the leg and the bottom of the belly. To sleep with the hip in contact with a hard floor is to wake up often, and often stiff and sore. And if that same floor is being subject to shocks and shakes that are just fine for knocking cores from castings or pounding rocks into dust, well, you’re not going to get any sleep at all. But this is where hippings come in, and if you’re one who has memories of long nights made longer by floor-shock, then you’ve picked a boxcar overflowing with scrap paper and cardboard, which, when crumbled and placed nestlike under your bedroll, becomes hippings, and with those hippings you sleep blissfully through the night, jostled gently instead of bruised and abused, and with no need for further adjustment for comfort unless you just so happen to be one of those kidney-active creatures who can’t put in a full night’s sleep without having to roll out at least once to respond to the need to pour off a puddle of piss.

Just short of noon the next day the train pulled into the yards at Helena. It was one of those noons that tried to make up for a lack of heat by piling on the glare. There was no getting used to it. I didn’t even want to look out, but there were shouts outside.

The shouts were from other tramps, and they were running to the train even before it stopped. They sprang from a camp under a nearby overpass, sprinted from one boxcar to the next, and when they found an empty with lumber scraps, literally threw themselves on board. The lumber they would toss out the door, and before it had a chance to hit the snow, the tramps were back down and running to the next open boxcar.

War effort. Apparently their night had been much colder than mine, and apparently, judging by the desperate quality of their quest for firewood, they were loath to suffer another one.

The train had stopped for a crew change. Stops for crew changes never last more than a minute or two, so you couldn’t blame the tramps for getting all the wood they could in as short a time as possible.

If you were going to blame them for anything, it would have to be for the fact that a lot of the wood they tossed out was full of protruding nails and a lot of the wood landed nails-up.

This is where he came in.

While most of the tramps left their camp temporarily to raid the train, three decided to call it quits. Helena’s too goddam cold, one of them said as he climbed into my boxcar. I’ll be a sonofabitch if I’ll spend another night in this town. His buddy, a ragged-looking veteran with a soup-bowl haircut and a face full of weathered wrinkles that could pass for scars, nodded and grunted in agreement. They stood there then, shivering, and looked back at the camp like two tired workers unable to keep up with the demands of a machine.

I looked back too—with them—and turned my eyes just in time to see the third tramp step on the nail. He was headed for our boxcar, chanting or singing, stumbling, and carrying a bottle in one hand. Now he had a 2x4 nailed to his foot. That had to hurt, but no, instead of stopping in response to pain, he just kept on coming like someone dragging a ski put on all half-assed and sideways.

Jesus, I heard one of the other tramps say.

When he got to the door of our boxcar, the train was starting to move. Ahead, you could hear the locomotives pulling the slack out of the couplings. Reflexively, we who were already on board braced ourselves for the sudden forward jerk we were going to get when the slack was pulled from our coupling. When it came, the poor bugger with the bottle and the nail had his chin, arms and upper body on the floor and was struggling to get the rest of him to follow.

He would have fallen back if not for help from below. A warmly dressed black man, who had earlier thrown wood off and was now gathering it up, stepped in and did a double rescue. He scooped up the dangling legs and gave them a forward boost. But before the legs could scuttle out of range, he grabbed an ankle and said, Hold it a minute, Chief, and with a yank and a twist and a grin had in his hand a piece of firewood that had almost gotten back on the train.

By then the train was moving, but instead of watching its progress through town, I turned my attention to our most recent rider. I was waiting for a reaction. You’d think from the impalement and the extraction—rude as it was—that he would by now be putting on some sort of display. I expected major cursing, plenty of foot-grabbing, and maybe the removal of the shoe for a better estimate of the damage. But when there was no reaction, only more chanting, rocking, and sitting there, there was nothing for me to do other than to consider some added aspects of this gentleman.

The reason he was called Chief, as in Hold it a minute, Chief, was that he was an Indian. And not a small one either. He had on a dark, broad­ brimmed western hat, had a few gray hairs among the black, and was wearing a gray overcoat—a surprisingly clean overcoat considering his calling and considering that for the past few minutes the garment had been serving more as a rug than a coat. In fact, the longer I looked at him the more I had to admit he looked—at least outwardly—better than the rest of us. Those other two guys had matted hair, like mine, no shave, like me, and clothes more than a little off-size, out-of-style, and ragged. Like mine.

The Chief though, was clean cut, could have passed for stylish on the streets of any western city, and had a facial arrangement that could have easily put him in the category of a ladies man.

But man, was he drunk. Or something. Maybe he was nuts too, I thought, besides being drunk. Sometimes the two go together, or one follows the other. It would be interesting, I thought too, to find out what was in the bottle. He still had it with him and had a firm grip on the neck, like a farmer who caught a chicken after a long chase. The bottle was unlabled and half full of a clear liquid, probably vodka or maybe Everclear. It certainly wasn’t water. When a tramp holds onto a bottle the way he was holding onto his, you knew it had to be more than mere and simple water.

Sometime after the train left town but before it headed up the pass between Helena and points west, the Chief reacted. Only instead of reacting to his punctured foot, he reacted to me. Me, like some fool who looked too far over the edge of a cliff and then slipped off the lip, I’d looked a little too long at the Chief. I’d stared, actually, and with tramps that’s a no-no. With tramps, you don’t ask names, you don’t ask business, and you don’t stare.

Instantly he was on his feet—and I mean right now. He raised his bottle too, but not to take a drink. When I saw he meant to clobber me with the thing, I stepped back, steadied myself by grabbing a channel iron built in at the edge of the doorway, and in the same motion reached out with my foot to impede his progress, although a credible witness might have described my movement as a sincere and open effort to kick him in the nuts.

Technicalities aside, my foot missed his family jewels and continued in an upward arc, nicking the brim of his hat.

At that, he became more calculating. He stayed just out of range, and would feint with the bottle, with his head and with his feet, and would hiss and bellow and threaten to kill.

I had both hands on the channel iron then, which was no small advantage when it came to balance and reach. Remember we were in a moving, rocking boxcar. The lay of the track was always changing, so in effect standing in the boxcar was not much different than standing in a boat hit with waves and ripples, leaving your balance unreliable.

His balance, that is, since mine was secure with a firm handhold, with one foot squarely on the floor and one foot loosely on the floor, ready, like a rock in a sock.

From past rides, I knew there was a tunnel up ahead. It was a long tunnel, and when our train would slip inside, the light would gradually fade until you could see nothing. The darkness would be total, and the sound would be loud. Noise made by the train would easily override any sounds made by an advancing attacker.

Apparently the Chief was also aware of the upcoming tunnel. He seemed to have newfound patience, smiling maliciously instead of pressing the attack, and nodding as if to say, Soon we will both be blind. Then I will have my apology in blood. Don’t ask names, don’t ask business, and stare at your own peril.

There was still time to make some assessments before entering the tunnel. I glanced over at the other tramps to see what their involvement was going to be, if any. At the meeting of our eyes both tramps looked away, passively, safely. So it was just me and the Chief.

Here the speed of the train was not much more than a walk. The grade to the pass was steep, with the rail bed cut into the side of the mountain. To the right the mountain ascended nearly straight up, and to the left—where we were standing—the wide-open door gave a panoramic view of the long drop a person would take if he were to fall or be pushed.

The Chief could not look at me without muttering threats and could not look out at the scene below without smiling, so you knew what was on his mind. On my mind was the realization that I was never more ready, ever, for anything. My hands should have been cold from their bare, tight grip on the channel iron, but they were hot and ready, and they would stay that way.

Good thing for him, too, because as fate would have it, our boxcar rolled over a seep. In certain places, water seeps out of a mountainside, gets under the track bed and freezes, and the freezing water raises one of the rails, usually the one near the uphill side. When our boxcar hit the seep, the floor did a quick tilt to the downward side of the mountain and tipped the Chief out the door. There was no warning.

Purely by reflex, my left hand shot out and had him by the coat. Somehow my fingers ended up on the inside of his collar, allowing a better grip. He swung outward, and I leaned out partway with him until he came to the end of the swing. Here my right hand—still wrapped around the channel iron—held its grip and swung us both back inside. Only when we were safely in the boxcar did I realize how heavy he was.

In the normal world of tramps that would have been the end of if. I would have taken my hand away, he’d have straightened out his clothes, and then we’d’ve grunted and nodded and plodded on to the next thought or act, apart.

But as he found his balance, and as I let go of the collar of his coat, there was a contact of eyes.

And suddenly, stunningly and inexplicably, we were one person and we were everything.

The experience was overwhelming, total. We looked, but we could not speak. There was a sense of unexplainable Totality, a sense of a state where no description could apply because there was nothing to compare it with. It was everything, and it was all at once. The Totality could only be registered, not measured, and it registered as complete, unrestricted awe.

What followed was exhaustion and a profound sense of relief which also came across as a cleansing. Here we were distinct again, in that we had awareness of individuality, and with individual awareness our awe broke down into sobs. Out of relief and humility, we could not stop weeping. A sense of time returned, as if time had been a thing suspended, and with its flow our condition gradually faded to a consciousness of self.

Consciousness of self devolved into a state of self-consciousness, and there we slowly parted. I sat down where I was, and he made his way to the back comer. It was dark back there, but you could see him sitting with his back to the comer and his arms folded over his knees and his head down, sobbing.

While I was wiping my own eyes, I started to think, which took me by complete surprise because it suddenly occurred that during the recent unusual experience there was no thought involved—only impression and registry.

As the experience was receding, it was being replaced by a joyous curiosity. What was that? Did we visit or were we visited? I held my mind open, invitingly open, hoping whatever it was would come back, but it continued to recede. Like lightning it had struck instantly, and like mist faded gradually. I felt insightful, buoyed, and understanding. So that was the true meaning of understanding, I thought. Being, only being. Anything less than totally being is only a varying degree of sympathy, and is not understanding.

And gradually, I did not understand. I became myself, and saw myself as a form of isolation, a form of ignorance and separation. I slipped back into being me and reconnected to what I remembered to be as me, and felt a deep sense of loss from the impression that my five senses were not senses at all. They were filters. They were there to keep everything else away, and with their restrictions I could no longer have understanding. It was impossible, irretrievable, maddening.

As understanding became frustrating and impossible—as even the bare concept itself faded to the dull, traditional concept of understanding, I felt doubtful, dejected, abandoned.

Stupid too, and embarrassed. I couldn’t look at the Chief anymore, and I didn’t dare look at those other two tramps.

Instead I looked at my hand. The one that had reached out and grabbed the Chief. It was starting to hurt, and no wonder. The nails on three fingers were torn back, and blood was dripping off the ends.

To keep the nails from snagging up on something and coming off entirely, I used my other hand to press them back into position. Then I squeezed the injured fingers at the bases and worked towards the tips, still squeezing and forcing out more blood. The idea was to cleanse the wounds with my own blood, and from the inside.

Even if what I was doing hurt and gave me the creeps, I was actually glad to be doing it. Ironically, tending to my fingers helped me get my mind off how they got that way in the first place. What was initially so awe-inspiring now had me feeling like a pure and naked fool. Everything had changed so fast, and all for the worse. I wanted to hide. Thank God the tunnel was coming up. It would be dark in there, and it would give me time to think and to hope. I hoped by the time we came out the other end no one would remember any of this. This was a bunch of shit. How in the hell I ever got involved in such a mess was beyond comprehension. It wasn’t me. Acting like a fool in the bright light of day just wasn’t me and if anyone wanted to say otherwise I was just going to have to tighten up my jaws and buff off my boots and kick some major ass.

But So Is Economics

That Thirsty is a good riding man. From the tramps around Missoula, you heard those words a lot. Also you heard, That Thirsty is a pest, and, Sometimes I’d like to take that Thirsty by the neck and jam a big potato in his mouth.

Thirsty was also a packsack man, but he carried his packsack proudly. Any contemptuous whispers condemning him as a packsack man, were met by a cheerful, The Sisters gave me this. It ain’t big, but this is real leather, these straps, and this thing on top, it keeps the rain off. You’re gonna carry the Good Book, the Sisters says to me, you’re gonna need something good to carry it in. Yup, and you know as well as I that something good is always better if it’s shared.

Here his Bible would come out, and here’s where Thirsty was in danger of going from "a