Of Men and the Wind: A Story of Dharma

By Robert Lee

Naturalists notice things. Scientists attempt to explain the natural world. Religions attempt to give meaning to human life. Writing as first-person narrative history, a naturalist explores, noticing things and the inner struggle of growing up and living in a Christian culture while science continued to bring new discoveries and knowledge into human grasp. This work is about the joy of a free mind noticing things and breaking free of one of humanitys primal afflictions: the ide fixe. It is the account of the evolution of the mind of naturalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781462838707

Robert Lee

Bob sold his first short stories to Young Ambassador and Omni magazines when he was twelve. For nearly forty years, he only wrote fiction works and poetry for friends, until he was convinced by them that his writing was very compelling.Bob Lee’s career kept him focused on business communications for much of that period. He wrote and produced a series of training videos for Loss Prevention Group Inc, wrote hundreds of business plans, feasibility studies and market analyses, along with scores of training manuals, handbooks and guides for his clients.He is the author of more than two hundred and fifty blog posts, white papers and articles for national and international clients. His own blogs have a viewership exceeding 353,000.His freelance works include radio pieces for CBC (Now or Never and Definitely Not The Opera)and Corus Entertainment.Since 2011, he has written and published seventeen books under his name (www.robertflee.com) and ghostwritten eight more books and novels in a variety of genres.His career in business support services and as a private investigator have provided him with a rich source of material from which to draw inspiration. Many of the people who he encountered were so noteworthy as to be featured in his non-fiction works such as Wild People I Have Known and What We Have Lost.Few writers can match the engaging writing style of Robert Lee. His minimalist method of enticing mental images from a single phrase, or urging complex emotion from a few sentences drives action throughout his works. Yet, Robert can draw us meticulously and inexorably through the most detailed or complex scenarios, while captivating us with each word.Whether you are absorbed in the convoluted mental struggles of Lawrence Mason (Inferno Inside), the unworldly twists and turns of the Sentinels (Council of the Pure),the ethereal adventures of the nymphs and sprites (Gypsy Lee’s Fairy Tales, Fables & Yarns), or the heart and tragedy of true life anecdotes about murders and rapists(Wild Animals People I Have Known), you will bond intimately with each of Lee’s characters.Fiction or non-fiction, Robert Lee brings you immense and unique reading experiences that will compel you to call for more of his works.

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Copyright © 2010 by Robert Lee.

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CONTENTS

Prolegomenon

Chapter 1:   A Brief Meander In Paradise

Chapter 2:   The Ancient Mountains

Chapter 3:   Return To The West

Chapter 4:   Monte Vesuvio And The Atlantic Ridge

Chapter 5:   The Gallatin River

Chapter 6:   Chaos

Chapter 7:   Mt. Mazama And The Pumice Mantled Basin

Chapter 8:   Mount Tacoma

Chapter 9:   Pilgrimage To Yosemite

Chapter 10:   La Gran Canyon

Chapter 12:   The Incarnational Ecologist

Chapter 13:   Rare Stuff

Chapter 14:   True Stories

Chapter 15:   Pine Trees

Chapter 16:   Fire

Chapter 17:   Fresnel Flashers

Chapter 18:   An Ineluctable Discussion With The Void

Chapter 19:   Presenium

Epilogue

Glossary

Literature Cited

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my birth mother Irene who gave me life and my parents Claire and Louise who gave me a life.

PROLEGOMENON

There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond us all, beyond the heavens, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in our heart.

Chanandoga Uphanishad

S everal thousand years ago the buddists postulated three marks of existence. The first is anicca or the impermanence of things. Everything changes. The Romans coined a term evolutio to describe the process of changing Roman civilians into soldiers of the roman legions. It is still used by modern militaries, including the American, to cover changing a civilian into a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine. In more recent times the term was somewhat erroneously applied to the simple observed fact that life forms change over time. Evolution became the coverall word to signify decent of organisms, sometimes with modification, from their ancestral stock.

After Charles Darwin proposed the Theory of Natural Selection to explain the observed changes in the natural world of life; Evolution became a charged word. Natural selection challenged the ancient Mesopotamian, Ugarit, and Hebrew beliefs as to a recent creation and fixation of species by a divine instigator. The Abrahamic religions espoused by some fifty percent of the global population of hominids on Earth find a dissonance between arisal from ancient organisms by strange stochastic processes and the notion of creation by an extranatural being of immense yet unfathomable powers.

Evolution can be applied to human culture and even the individual human mind. Some humans are aware they are undergoing evolution in their minds and find it a journey of discovery and elation. Others become terrified and seek to close doors with challenging new pathways behind. This book explores, among other things, the mind of the author who finds the journey an elation despite frequent trials and desire for change to slow down.

The book is based on the premise that humans now so dominate the planet that understanding the working of the human mind may determine whether we evolve into a cosmic intelligence such as the kind we search for in SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) or manage to extinguish the fragile flame that has developed in our frontal cortex over the last several hundred thousand revolutions of the earth about a middling star.

I am in most respects an ordinary American like you might see in a U.S. Post Office on any Wednesday. I was given for adoption at age 6 months to a wonderful, childless, mid-life couple, one a bootstrapped science and engineering genius, the other a stay at home mom, who loved birds, wildflowers, and romance. My family lived in northern New Jersey at the boundary of the cultural center of the world at the time, the New York Metropolis and the still rural New Jersey highlands. Here I grew up where there were still some residual wild lands and nature abounded. I learned mainstream Christianity as my religion as that was what existed albeit in competing versions in the community I was emersed in. I learned science from my father. Science was ascending in the culture and there were conflicts between ancient scriptures, religious beliefs, and new revelations from seminal thinkers about the nature of the universe. At least for those who thought about them.

Growing up in the immediate aftermath of World War II gave me a glimpse of what man could do when advanced civilizations followed megalomaniacs into abject violence against their own species. I heard from teachers and peaceful neighbors of horrors they experienced on the battlefields of Europe and pacific atolls. One said, I was so thirsty that I filled my canteen from the pond and took a long drink. While wiping my mouth on my sleeve I saw the dark phlegm from the dead German soldier oozing into the pond a few yards away. But I was so crazed and thirsty I drank anyway. These image told by war veterans were bothersome for many years. Yet the world seemed full of hope and promise, peace, and a certainty that American life would overcome all evils, even the atheist communist threat that elementary grade students hid under historic school desks in survival drills against attacks of atomal fire from the sky.

I started off as a rather puny, physical weakling, more socially inept than not, a high level daydreamer, but always finding in myself a friend who I liked to be with, even when things got rough. That friend is named Uther in this book, a metaphor for my conscious and in different parts of this book there is a dialogue between myself and Uther as if we were separate persons. Eventually having survived grades k-12 in Eastern Society, not noted for its humility, I tried something considered by my culture as complete heresy. I migrated to the west and became like the tumbleweed a wanderer over those enchanting lands.

This book had its conception in late October 1999. I resided at the time in the Great Basin Desert of Oregon, North America. In that October the first strong winds of Autumn had broken several tumbleweeds from the place they made as a home, a place where they may have felt secure. The wind had other notions for them and they tumbled across an open field. Some came to cluttered piles on the barb wire fences above one of my favorite haunts on Silver Creek, a little known wash in the cold sagebrush Desert. I often found myself singing Tumbling Tumbleweeds, the noted song of Bob Nolan composed in the 1930’s. I had played the version by Gene Autry over and over when I was very young. It seemed a synopsis of my life.

The tumbleweed or Russian thistle Salsola kali, is one of the ubiquitous sights of the American West. Like me it came from another place. An immigrant from central Asia it arrived in the 1800’s along with another ecological agent, the Caucasian white man who also has a very short pedigree as a native of North America.

One day I was watching the weeds and felt the wind on my face while some Geyer willow leaves blew about and alit on the shallow water behind a beaver dam. Suddenly a strange raucous noise emanated from behind the willows. Some natorial creatures were in fright. Disturbed from dabbling the creek bottom, five mergansers pausing on their Autumnal migration, had noted my presence and became alarmed, scurrying upstream in great haste. I was pleased with their interruption of my silent musings and wished they would have stayed a while. I had no intent against them and would have greatly enjoyed a visit, but mergansers are often mistaken for more desirable game ducks and must, as a matter of survival, be wary of Caucasians sitting under willows.

I turned again to the tumbleweeds, several of which had been taken by a strong updraft over the barb wire fence. They sailed into long flight over the sagebrush on the hard basalt flows above Silver Creek. I thought perhaps some of their tiny seed will try an opening in the sage to see if next year they can find a home. But even if they do I suspected the wind would find them and next autumn they shall be moved willing or not. I realized I had found a metaphor for my life.

While I was thinking about this there came into my mind the great saying attributed by the evangelist to Jesus.

The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou heareth the sound therof but cans’t tell whence it cometh, and wither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.

John 3:8

For a number of years, I held the scriptures of the Holy Bible to be in some mysterious way the word of God. I was afterall taught that firm truth not only by the church preacher but by my grandmother. These were in those days powerful authorities. I believed the stories were literally true and never in conflict with nature. I believed in the God of Genesis as the creator and in some unexplainable way as having a plan and a personal interest in his special piece of work, man. But I also knew there were inexplicable and contradictory passages and stories that greatly conflicted with what I lived with in nature and started learning from science.

Today America seems rife with sophists who tell us where the wind cometh from and whither it goes. We can rely on their pronouncements since they know the truth, the absolute truth, they tell us. I now often reflect on the idea I heard from a lecture by Joseph Campbell who took the idea from the Tao, that the only one who knows is the one who admits he doesn’t know. So Jesus said of those born of the spirit.

Eventually I decided to write some stories, to tell an account of how I came into the western lands, and about some of the characters I lived with. From them there were many things one could learn about the spirit and also the terrible conundrums in the psyche of man. It was not until mid life I began an inquiry into the origins of my beliefs and the sacred texts of my once learned religion. I struggled with what I learned from teachings and what I learned from experience.

Too often there were impassable chasms that could not be rectified. Recorded are encounters with the earth and its living denizens. There is a quest for who or what it was that I met at a famous glowing pillar in the Navaho sandstone of Utah. There a strange event occurred that changed my life. The short event has often seemed more of a fictional tale or a waking dream, yet I retain it in memory just as real a happening of life as any occurrence I ever had. The stories are written much as Thoreau did when he went to Walden, a piece of private business not any attempt at lucubration.

The stories tell of my struggle with why some well known authors like Aldo Leopold could not live without wild things or Edward Abbey found a Paradise right here on Earth, while others are driven to change everything about them, exploiting the orb and its citizens, for a brief flare of pecuniary or political dominion. They tell how some few are coming to grasp an ever expanding knowledge that a human body is a living community, that emerged from a very long experiment undertaken by the universe. There is a growing consensus that a human body consists of 1X10 to the 13th power eukaryotic cells and 1 X 10 to the 14th power prokaryotic cells. So for every animal cell there are 10 bacterial cells. So just what is a human body? A bacterial colony supported by animal cells or as I hold a synergism of the two great kinds of life that have emerged on the planet. The mobile community that is a human has developed powerful ways of adapting to many other communities and ecosystems. This strange and awesome experiment is being carried in the global laboratory we call the biosphere. The biosphere is essential to our being and without remorse likely the cause of our eventual demise. Recorded is the struggle with a once taught and cherished notion, that man arose by a special creation, was endowed with dominion over the earth, and the raison d’ etre for other life forms is to be of service to him.

It may help readers to know I am is a certified Meyers Briggs INTP (intuitive, thinker, perceiver) and according to my Brain Works scan endowed with high intuition, average logic and feelings, but was apparently absent when organization skills were installed by the creator. In this regard the book is written much like ecosystems that often are not orderly places where everything has its place and everything works according to plan. Ecosystems are filled with chaos and strife. They create order that lasts for a period of time then undergo change where the old order dies and a new one swirls into existence.

Recorded in the stories is a great conflict that has raged in my inner being, a conflict that I believe most curious thinkers struggle with. This is a book about the American struggle of a large portion of our people living by belief in words of ancient sacred texts and long standing beliefs that are no longer congruent with knowledge coming from man’s great exploration of the universe and it’s living beings. It is about things long unseen that now we know plainly exist in this universe. It explores the similiarity of how life changes by decent with modification and how sacred texts and religious tenets, even what the term creator or God mean, also change by decent with modification, though these changes are often not recognized by adherents. It shows how seemingly insignificant chance events have major impacts on the denouement of the story of life and of human lives.

The stories told in this book, unless otherwise disclosed, are factually true as best as I can remember them. The first chapter is a concatation of two rather than a single trip through the western landscape. Some, like many old testament stories, are not in chronological order. In extenso the book illustrates an America that has evolved into a very different society and culture, a different oikos, for its citizens in less than the lifespan of a single generation.

CHAPTER 1

A BRIEF MEANDER IN PARADISE

Puppy Love

I first entered the fabled lands of the American west in the summer of 1958. I knew of their legends from watching the Lone Ranger and Roy Rodgers clean them of outlaws and desperados in the early days of television. I did not want to go to the west in the summer of 1958, but my family was taking a long peregrination and since I was not of legal age was not afforded the choice to refrain. This journey led to a great rift in my psyche. I became like a man in love with two beautiful women, to one I was lawfully wedded, the other a secret mistress.

I had my heart set on spending a second summer in the midlands where the year before I stayed all summer with relatives. That former summer, in the magic of July, in an old house that smelled of coal dust, in the quiet of a sweltering twilight, while the maple leaves dangled still in the breezeless air and my heart fluttered wildly, I first kissed a young girl. It was her wide, deep, alluring eyes, young feminine eyes, that drew me inexorably to her lips. Now, I was fourteen and convinced I could learn a lot more from her than by touring the west with my parents. I wanted to know what that was as there were serious stirrings inside that needed to be understood.

It was not to be and after passing by where I wanted to get off we spent our first night in Hannibal, Missouri. Mad, I shut off all outside information while brooding on my misfortune. I was unaware that in Hannibal in1835 Jane Lampton Clemens created Mark Twain so I missed a chance to acquire an important educational experience. The second night we spent somewhere in Kansas, and a second night of misery for it appeared this voyage was going nowhere but into an ever flatter void. Not even trees existed, just a faraway horizon over a monotonous patina of wheat. In my imagination was the image of a beautiful face I could not touch.

In the morning we had breakfast at a vibrant Kansas plains café where my sister ordered a double ham and eggs to prepare her, I assume, for a hard days ride in the car. My father suggested I have a hearty breakfast also but I was angry at him for making me come and ordered cold cereal.

Rocky Mountain National Park

It was late in the afternoon that our 1955 Chevrolet Bel-Aire plunged into the mouth of the Big Thompson Canyon in Northern Colorado. Dad was google-eyed at the towering canyon walls and laughed uncontrollably while I kept my eyes down, glared at the plunge pools of the fast rushing river. It took about an hour to ascend the canyon where we arrived at Estes Park and took up residence in a darkly stained log cabin.

There were wildflowers in bloom and pine trees around the cabin that now assaulted my, greatest of all sins, pride. I was by this time quite knowledgeable of the names of eastern pines and many wild plants. I don’t know why that became something I had to know, it was a matter of seeing a great beauty in plants that I must have been born with and to know them by name a passion. Or perhaps I got it from my mother who thought knowing wildflowers was just a great joy with no further reason. Now these western ones were all strangers and I felt bewilderment, like a backwoodsman at a regal ball.

That evening, just before nightfall I left the cabin and ran as hard as I could up the side of a great hill on which the cabin perched. My body was not yet acclimatized to the elevation of this Park and my lungs struggled and my sides heaved and there were sharp pains like a spear thrust into my ribs. I pushed on needing to make the top if for no other reason than to defeat the bewilderment of not knowing the plants and to burn the anger of being here in the first place. The pain in my side was better than the pain of thinking I was 1500 miles from the wonderful mystery I thought of as my girl. At the summit I collapsed on a rock while my body gulped at the thin air. For some time I could do nothing but let my young lungs catch up with my driven brain. It did not occur to me that I did not have enough red blood cells to satisfy my need for oxygen after a sudden rise from sea level to a mile and half above but I was young and in good condition and no real harm was done.

When the breathing caught up I first reached out and touched the needles of a small pine growing out of the rock. I did not know its name and that bothered me but I discovered it had 2 and 3 needles to a cluster and nearby was a larger one with golden furrowed bark. I sat up and looking past the pine, with my eyes now clear, I saw for the first time, face to face, the great Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Rising mighty and laying silent, standing in full snow clad glory, the range welcomed me into its fathomless domain. Alone, like it or not, it was just me and the mountains. In the quiet I sat there, still angry not open to the greeting, unaware that one day I would live and work in the forested skirts of these mountains, seeking answers to questions about the tree next to me, the great conifer of the west, The Ponderosa Pine.

Realizing I had conquered the Rocky Mountain I was sitting on and not knowing its name I named it myself; Mount Victorious. I sat there wondering if I could ever forget her first kiss. The answer was then and still is never. The sweetness of her tender lips and the innocence in her deep wide eyes stays put and no effort will dislodge it. The mountain greeting stayed also even though I was not ready to receive it. I was not ready for her lips either but life goes expeditiously forward. The night air began to chill my sweat soaked body and cooled the anger. I walked down the mountain side and came to the cabin where it was now clearly bedtime for us transcontinental travelers.

Mom asked, What did you find out there?

A big hill.

That’s all?

Yea.

I see.

I, a certified teenager, did not want to talk about it and crawled into bed. In the dark stained log cabin I spent my first night in the Rocky Mountains and breathed a share of their cold clear air. The mountain air became a part of my body and I belonged now a little to the mountains. We were now of the same stuff. What did I dream of that night? Of a young girl with a flowing skirt and sassy eyes running among wildflowers on the side of Victorious Mountain, wildflowers that I did not know the name of. My dreams are of the lucid kind. I participate in them and they seem a moment in some reality, perhaps like the ancient sages thought a spiritual reality, incorporeal, but real.

In the morning we entered Rocky Mountain National Park, declared so January 26, 1915 by President Woodrow Wilson, and drove up Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous road in the United States. Arriving at timberline it was the Krumholtz, dwarfed, stunted, oddly shaped firs and spruces that captured my attention. Battered by strong winds, buried under snow these trees survive as grotesque dwarfs of the same tall species whose seed had placed them in more favorable places. But these had the luck of the wind to be placed at the border of the alpine tundra and to add insult to their natural difficulties named in German krumholtz that means in English, crummy timber. What bad luck can do to fine genetic stock? I wondered what kind of self absorbed man would see these staunch characters as only crummy timber. Surely one with a greedy heart and a cold spirit of which the human kind has abundance. My time with the Krumholtz was short. We were, after all, tourists and the Alpine tundra awaited our inspection. Venturing onto the tundra the wind reminds the visitor that the summer here, like human life, is short. It must be enjoyed fast. I spied the first plant I could give a name to, Old Man of the Mountain Rydbergia grandiflora." The U.S. National Park Service, overseers of the realm, had noted the name on a visitor display of these plants of the Composite or Sunflower family. The Rydbergias are phototrophic, that is, their bright yellow flower heads usually face the east; greeting the rising sun as they stand over their more diminutive neighbors like the rock jasmine and alpine forget me not. Some people are like the Rydbergias and become great leaders. What I really liked about the Rydbergia’s was their absolute distinctiveness. No question about what they were and what they did. Like Einstein or Thomas Jefferson these mountaineers just won’t fade into the masses. What they do they do well, don’t do it for money, and be darned if anyone else notices or not. I walked along the trail to the summit of Fall River Pass where the rocks lie in shattered talus on the face of the mountains. I took in Specimen Mountain, an extinct volcano that once spouted lava and pumice millions of years after the first up-thrust of the Front Range. Suddenly a storm came up and the sky quickly darkened. People scrambled down the trail while the tundra seemed to brace itself for a summer lashing of snow pellets or hail. We all got back to the parking area where a car pulled up smartly, a pretty young girl bailed out, and immediately threw up. The high elevation, thin air, the electricity from the storm, the sudden change in the gay tundra flowers closing against the darkened sky disturbed the psychic balance in the human visitors. I felt sorry for the girl who was most likely embarrassed while I felt for the first time the fear that only a mountain storm can cast upon you, one of the most alive times a man can experience. I could not leave the sight of this pretty young female, even throwing up. She was raw nature in all her glory, fully arrayed like the alpine dryads, the bearer of future life.

We descended from the tundra to find at lower elevations a return to a peaceful summer day. If you don’t like the weather in the Rocky Mountains just wait a few minutes; nature will change it for you. I retain vague memories of moraines, great heaps of earth and gravel piled at the boundary of long receded glaciers but that evening one memory was nailed to my cross beams in earnest. I stuck my nose in the cleft of one of the large yellow barked trees near our cabin. The vanilla like aroma, much like the first kiss, stays. The visit to trail ridge road would stay also and come back to me far in the future when I was conversing with a deeply troubled man by a swift creek in the Oregon Cascades. While sitting on a stump, drinking beer (against the rules) at a Forest Service Guard Station high in the Cascades, he would tell me of his days as a young man working on the crew that blasted trail ridge road over the summit of the Colorado Rockies. Now at 48 years of age he was a laborer on a summer crew, separated from his wife in a marital dispute, and missing his kiddies terribly. He was the best worker on our crew always slightly ahead of the line of Pulaski wielding brush choppers flailing planting lines through ceanothus and manzanita chaparral that had taken the gapping clear cuts by storm after enormous old growth Douglas firs had been stripped from the fertile pumice soils for conversion into the wooden cells of subdivisions and landfill trash by the ferocious industrial machine that came to dominate the North American Continent. I did not know it then but the machine used people the same way it used oil or coal, it burns them for fuel and forgets about it. Profit would become king and a culture that could unify people and prevent marriages like his from foundering was not advanced. One that could marvel at the courage of the krumholtz was displaced by one that saw those unlucky trees as only crummy timber. I had a lot to learn.

For three more days we lived in Rocky Mountain National Park. We hiked a short trail around Bear Lake and absorbed the towering majesty of Hallett’s Peak framed by Engelmann spruce and alpine fir. In perhaps my first utterance of the day I asked my father, Who is Hallett?

My father unaccustomed to being unable to answer a question with authority admitted, I don’t know who Hallett is. I wondered what he did to get a mountain of this stature named after him. I found out that Long’s Peak, the highest in the Front Range, was named after major Stephen H. Long who led an expedition to the area in 1820 but never came close to the mountain bearing his name. I wondered if Hallett ever came close to his peak. At night I first experienced a Park Ranger in the traditional smokey bear hat give a fireside talk by a dancing fire to a host of tourists like me. Surely I thought some like me did not want to be here but most seemed to be enjoying themselves. It is always troubling to be at a party when you don’t feel like partying and that is how I felt. Yet I was feeling a secret allure, some kind of call from the vast wild around me. I wished my girl was here and I could see the dancing embers of the fire in her eyes. That was all that was missing. My father said after the talk Now what other nation would hire a Park Ranger to speak to us on the mysteries found in the mountains and rocks of a cathedral like this? I had no clue how many nations would do this but it seemed just fine to me if our nation wanted to do this.

Great Sand Dunes National Monument

In the morning we left the mountain theater and headed for the great southwest. Like most tourists we had limited time and my parents wanted to see it all. I watched for lengthy hours as grasslands passed and we made our next stop, the Great Sand Dunes of the San Luis Valley. Piled six hundred feet high the shifting sands have been carried particle by particle on the winds sweeping from the lower San Luis valley until they are slowed by the Blood of Christ Mountains, draining their energy of the capacity to hold the sands aloft. These are the largest sand piles in the United States and attest to what can be accomplished by a determined agent with time on its hands. A sand dune never stays the same either, so what I saw then in 1958 was unique. No one can ever see it again. You can never climb the same sand dune twice.

There was one strange thing I came to know. I don’t recall at all how I came to know it. Once there were men of a religious order that lived in the Blood of Christ Mountains. They were called penetentes because they beat themselves until the blood ran as an act of imitation of the scourging of Jesus. I tried but could make no sense of this discovery.

I was brooding silently on this finding when Mom, said, You could be a little more talkative you know. But it just did not seem I could bring this out. In those days there were things one did not discuss. The whole idea seemed so strange and repulsive to me I could find no words to describe or even ask about it.

Upon leaving the dunes we were waived down by a Colorado highway patrolman.

Keep your windows up and don’t pick up any hitchhikers, he said. We got a wild one loose.

You mean an escapee? my father said.

Yep, escaped from Canyon City Prison this morning.

We kept our windows rolled up but no wild men were spotted to my disappointment. I always thought there were wild men but had never seen one. I guess I held some secret admiration for wild men and seeing one would have been magnificent.

I still did not much want to be on this trip but somewhere lost to memory we made a stop in a vast sea of blue green bushes. Most people consider this kind of thing a wasteland but I walked over to one of the bushes and touched it. There was a curious aroma in the air and I sniffed the blue green bush. They say love at first sight is a fiction, but no one I have ever read gives love at first smell even a hearing let alone a judgment. Too bad and in fact I don’t think the sages and philosophers have given it much thought. The pungent unforgettable aroma of the Southwestern Big Sagebrush infiltrated every cell of my body. I believe our memory resides not only in our brains but in the cells of our body. I believe it because on this day the big sagebrush engulfed every cell with its lovely, seductive, and amorous perfume. Just like the first kiss could never be erased so this first smell has stayed and it wasn’t even from a girl, it was from a desert shrub. Unseen and unheard the sage aroma grasped my very soul and has never let go. My soul and the sagebrush learned something. Like the writer of the Katha Upanishad discovered: if pure water rains on pure water it becomes one.

One of the creation was joined to me that day. My destiny, unbeknownst to me, was being forged. A deeper kinship with plants of desert places often scorned as useless hindrances by industrial Caucasians was brewing with no effort on my part. This was of course a dangerous liaison. The culture had better uses for its newly minted teenagers than to commune with desert shrubs and the smell of the universe. I looked about and saw no wildflowers in bloom; the desert seemed in some type of hibernation. But then I looked more closely at the sagebrushes themselves. Here in the July heat the bushes had put on early flower heads. Even in the summer heat these lovers put out flowers to adorn the desert and fulfill life’s great urge to recreate itself. It was ridiculously hot in the car but I paid little attention. I was too enrapt with my new found love to notice.

Mesa Verde National Park

We moved on heading for Mesa Verde National Park. There are mysteries here I am sure but hard to experience. The tourist crowds had become so large that no one is allowed to enter un-chaperoned, the ancient cliff dwellings of a vanished race. Without limitations the sandstones would be pulverized by hordes of feet in a few seasons and any artifacts removed for trophies to adorn garage shelves. I found it better to retreat to an area where there were no attractions, to a rather nondescript area of desert pines, a place where the tourists would be bored anyway and just sit there with the desert aroma. I made acquaintance with the pinyon pine here Pinus edulis the two needled kind, the great desert pine of the American Southwest a friend to all who come to it in peace. For centuries these trees provided pine nuts to the native peoples. Now I had a new friend.

Later, there being no choice, we took a ranger chaperoned tour of the Cliff Palace largest of the Pueblo Period cliff dwellings. Dated to have been occupied between 1200-1300AD these ruins were built by a people who lived mainly on the mesas but the archaeologists theorize may have been driven to the more secure cliffs by invading hostile tribes. That violence was not unknown to these people was clear from an inspection of a skull in the visitor’s center, a skull of a woman with a stone arrow point embedded. So here in the American Southwest many degrees of longitude away from the massacres of Europe, violence and killing were the lot of the human animal. Viva the noble savage. I spent some time trying to feel what it must be like to be struck in the head by a stone arrow. Afflicted with a vivid imagination I saw marauding warriors draw their bows at the woman’s head while she pled for her life. Then, suddenly I saw her with a tribe of starving hunters shooing a deer into a thicket. Her mate, who loved her intensely, drew his arrow, aimed at the deer’s heart. Swish went the arrow that missed its mark, ricocheted off the deer’s back, and drove into his wife’s skull. The heartsick hunter mourned for many moons over his terrible loss done by his own hand. Did the woman’s natural endowment of endorphins blunt the pain and send her into a tunnel of light to be met on the other side by a great loving father or did she die too quickly for such adventures? We all get to know the answer about death once but it is one of natures most jealously guarded secrets.

Leaving the dead to entertain other tourists we headed into the baking desert where mesas and buttes of many shapes passed in review. I recall a car pulling a dilapidated trailer that we followed staying a hundred feet behind. Suddenly a strong side wind caught the trailer broadside from one of the small washes and the whole rig swayed violently. Luck was with this driver and the outfit stayed upright. I have been hit by those winds many times since and an Indian once told me, Those are the cough of ailing spirits who get colds just like we do. You see, the spirit world and the world of grass and water are not so very separate as the white men say.

We stopped at a Navajo trading post where mom purchased a red and white woven rug of sheep hair, the kind that are very famous I found out later, the only ones that can be called a Navajo rug, except for the counterfeit ones made in Pakistan and Mexico. Forty four years after the fact I realized the value of always carrying a pocket notebook. If I had I might have recorded a genuine set of instructions on how to tell a real from a counterfeit Navajo rug. But, woe, I had not yet learned the principle and thus this part of the book is lacking in that knowledge. Notes on our passing over the Painted Desert and through the Petrified Forest were also not kept. More significantly missing is my impressions of one of nature’s most awesome temples, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Perhaps it was too sublime, or perhaps the student was not ready, as the Zen Masters know, for the teacher to appear. I only remember staying in a brown cabin on the north rim and it was beastly hot.

Zion National Park

We moved northward with Zion National Park the target. Zion, the word means a hill, specifically a hill in Jerusalem, Israel, the site of the temple and symbolic center of Jewish national life. Also heaven, the heavenly city. I had a little trouble with there being a heavenly city in the Utah desert. At that time I thought of heavenly cities as taken for granted solely on the basis of the American education system, the general public view that such things were well established facts, the magisterium of the protestant church, and the fact that my parents had not negated such ideas. There was little critical thought required on subjects like this anywhere in the culture I grew up in so heavenly cities just existed as natural facts that one learned in the normal course of business.

And David and all Israel went to Jerusalem which is Jebus

Where the Jebusites were the inhabitants of the land. And the inhabitants of Jebus said to David, Thou shalt not come hither. Nevertheless David took the castle of Zion, which is the City of David.

1 Chronicles 11:4,5

So here we were on our way to a place named after a castle, washed in blood by the conquering Israelites, a place continually washed in blood to this day. The rocks of the southwest are red but from iron oxides instead of blood. That seemed a better way to color rocks to me. When we entered Zion it did not seem to hold much promise but perhaps like the Israelites it is not what is outside but what happens inside that counts when one passes through or settles on a place. It turns out that some 150 million years before 1958 (thus eons before the Jebusites were displaced from the other Zion) that here a great sand dunes was created, one that exceeded the Great Sand Dunes of the San Luis Valley by far. For millions of years the sand accumulated eventually solidifying into the Navaho sandstone of great thickness. In recent times after the Colorado plateau was uplifted the Virgin River sculpted the rocks by its fast flow into many forms that appear to rise thousands of feet above sea level but were really cut from the top down. The ghosts of the ancient sand dunes stare at the visitor unmistakably from formations like the Checkerboard Mesa. There are places like the Temple of Sinawava that rise from the Virgin River where dripping misty waterfalls emerge from the rocks and tumble to the canyon floor. I had never heard of Sinawava. Something to do with the Jebusites? Something to do with Jewish national life? I had not a clue as to the meaning of Sinawava but the name sounded like it should mean something. The same for the Kolob canyon. What or who would name a canyon the Kolob? I had gone through the required classes and been confirmed according to ritual, and informed I was a full believer, and parish member of the Methodist Church, and honored with being an usher each Sunday morning at the heavily attended services. There was an absolute truth and man had advanced beyond the pagan notions of things like Temples of Sinewava. Temples were for the true God. Faith was imparted to us by learned men who assured us there was unquestionable truth based on ancient authority. I believe it was my grandmother who assured me that ministers were more fully endowed with this unassailable truth than ordinary people like her.

We stayed somewhere on the canyon floor. I went for a walk at night as I was accustomed to do most of my life. Here the Milky Way gleamed brighter than I had ever seen before while the stars, brilliant in the clear desert air, seemed closer, like I was among them not a far off witness. Then I saw it. In Zion there is a high monolith of white sandstone that Caucasians named the Great White Throne. Monumental, it stood its ground; effulgent in the starlight. Strangely, without effort, I was open to the wonder offered freely by the western landscape. Like when I first kissed my girl something took hold. The glowing rock had shadows and fissures, concavities and secret scars that my imagination made into a noumenal face staring back at me, a face that said, I will capture your heart with my mystery, my beauty, like it or not.

And so it was. That night, alone, before the Great White Throne I first came to love the western lands and desired to explore their secrets and irresistible allure. Here without effort I experienced what the writer of the Maitri Uphanishad called a Samsara and it took place in my own mind. Dimly and imperfectly, I acquired the ancient wisdom that what I thought I might become.

Later, back at the lodge I informed my father:

You got me. This is pretty good.

I wondered if it was the Mormon influence that gave Zion so many religious epithets. Great White Throne, who sat upon the Great White Throne? Was it the God of the Angel