“I have observed dreams and visions carefully, and am certain that the imagination
has some way of lighting on the truth that reason has not.
— W. B. Yeats
While I was trying to channel my inner Impressionist, Greg had spent the afternoon giving his sister the “grand tour,” and they chattered excitedly about the cave, the lush spring on the south shore, and the views from the shoulders of Dis Butte and Dat Butte. We took our food and implements out to the open spaces near the lake so we could cook, eat, and talk while enjoying the blue-green water as the setting sun backlit the sentient granite faces in Altamira’s west wall.
The most remarkable thing to this point in the trip was the weather. Suzanne, Greg and I kept looking at each other in sheer wonder: “It is so nice up here!” Indeed, I had never seen such a sequence of perfect weather days anywhere in the world. The soothing atmosphere gave one the impression that it was exactly body temperature, like a nurturing womb. We deliciously floated around in a dreamlike trance; the better to savor the delicate nuances of the amniotic fluid. I was reminded that one does not need mind-enhancing substances to have a supernatural experience.
Suzanne looked up into the muted sky, which was turning steel gray and translucent. “This is going to be awesome when the stars come out.”
Greg and I looked at each other, then back to her and said in unison, with sincere agreement, “You have no idea.”
The brighter stars were already settling into their seats in the firmament when we decided to move our sleeping bags out in to the open, the better to watch the show unfold comfortably. Our necks were getting stiff from craning this way and that to take it all in. We arranged the bags around the campfire, and I quietly took the spot that I knew would be upwind from the smoke. As I remembered, the night breezes usually rise up from the warm valley at night and come to dance with the lake’s waves. Greg had his transistor radio tuned to the Dodgers’ game with an earphone as usual, and we settled into the gentle camping rhythm of wafting smoke and popping wood from the fire, low conversation, and the drawing of the curtains for a breathtaking window on the universe.
I played a game where my eyes staked out a corner of the sky and strained to catch a glimpse of any emerging star. They sort of snuck up on you, even if you were looking right at them. They had not the even-paced behavior of a light on a dimmer switch being slowly turned on, but seemed to shift into position like a subatomic particle. I watched this happen several times, and each star appeared as if there was a gathering of miniscule points of light that suddenly appeared out of nowhere. First there was a dim impression, a sort of “template” for the star’s light, and then suddenly there it would be: twinkling and shifting the beams of its photons from light years away. Before I could prepare myself for the onslaught, the sky was filled with stars laughing merrily at the splendid joke they had pulled on me.
The air remained comfortable and crystal clear, as the stars crowded the sky in their billions. First in clusters; then in glittering sheets of starlight, they took on great depth and texture. The violet-clouded arm of the Milky Way reached across the sky, and satellites trundled across the field of our vision, hurrying to nowhere. We let the fire burn down; the better to see the show. The moon had not yet risen. Other than the dull orange glow of the dying embers, the stars gave off the only light. The quicksilver luminosity reflected off the white granite all around us; sometimes in subtle shades, and other times bright like snow.
“Tell me the story again of how you guys saw the UFOs.” Suzanne had already heard all there was to hear about our mass hallucination years before with Chris, Al, and Joe. This was her way of shifting the conversation to create reality from the spoken word; a favorite pastime of hers. Evidently, she wanted to have an “alien experience,” because she soon purloined Greg’s radio (the Dodgers had lost), and tuned in to the ubiquitous Art Bell. Even my father had become enamored with this late-night radio host, whose stories and callers focused on the existence of extraterrestrial life, and their frequent visits to our planet, as if Earth were some sort of cosmic Disneyland.
We told her again of the three lights in formation that had sped off to opposite horizons, and of the soft “landing pad” of sand up on the ridge to the east of our camp, and of the “standing stones” that were arranged enigmatically nearby. Suzanne had been very gullible as a child, and could be fooled into believing most everything – a proclivity used to full advantage by her older brothers. This was the first time I had spent longer than a few hours with her as an adult, and I was impressed by her sincere level-headedness and tolerance. She listened to our stories, told us we were full of shit like a good little sister should do, and with consummate female guile somehow left us wondering whether she really believed us or not.
If there had been any alien scientists out looking for specimens that night, a signal fire would have led them right to us, laid out like cadavers on a medical school table. That was the last thought I could definitively attribute to my waking state that night, although an epic movie unfolded. I have reflected a great deal on the “events” of that particular evening, and have been unable to distinguish the fantastic intuition of dreams from the accurate recollection of reality. I typically remember very little about my dreams when I awaken, and those sparse impressions fade fast. If I don’t jot them down or mentally catalog them, what might have been a profound psychological insight is lost forever. On the other hand, the realities of the situation were, and remain, very compelling. My true memories of that night’s dream-waking are lost in time, and made more doubtful by my emotional attachment to them.
The facts are this: it was Friday, September 20, 1996 up until midnight. That was the day my father died of a heart attack, alone in his apartment in Reno, exact time of death unknown. He was not discovered until Sunday by a friend, and I didn’t hear anything about it until I walked into my home after a long drive back on Sunday evening, and saw my sisters crying on the couch. (More on this later.)
~
The next dawn, I woke up in a twisted position yards away, and on the opposite side of the fire from where I had set up my sleeping bag. It was soaked through by heavy morning dew. Teeth chattering and shaking uncontrollably, I restarted the fire and looked around. Greg and Suzanne were gone – no sleeping bags, but the radio and all our dinner stuff lay scattered, as if it had fallen out of the back of a truck. I looked at the sandy ground where my companions had been, which was easy to distinguish because they had removed all the pebbles to be more comfortable. There were short, shallow gouges in the sand as if something smooth and heavy like a log had been pulled away. These petered out to nothing, and no other signs could be seen. Where my sleeping bag wound up was on solid rock (which had awakened me), and there were no scrapes or gouges between there and where I had started. It was just as if we had all been lifted up from our places, and I had been dumped back down.
I found Greg snoring inside his sleeping bag about halfway back to camp, in a very peculiar position with his head in a bush. We had slept in the open, about 50 yards from the main camp under the trees, where I found Suzanne just awakening. She said she had moved there during the night to get away from Greg’s snoring and the increasing moisture. I showed her Greg’s position, and she laughed and poked him with a stick. At the time I thought nothing of all this, it was just a very strange night where I felt I didn’t get much sleep and had tossed and turned a lot. I was very sore, as if I had been beaten up all over. My sleeping bag looked like an old gray wad of chewed-up gum. I cleaned it off as best I could and spread it out to dry, and reflected on my dreams.
One dream was of my dad, calling me to show me something, and I was following but could never catch up. That is all I remember. Another dream was about aliens, as if I had been taken away to participate in some sort of communion rite. This latter impression I laughed off at the time as fancy, and then I remembered there was a profound sense of sameness between my dreaming and waking states. How does one know that one is dreaming until one awakens? What is the nature of a memory, after the present moment has passed? The memory becomes all there is. At that time, I didn’t yet know my father had died, but I reflected on my own death, wondering if I would remember anything – the good times or the bad. Maybe death is just another kind of awakening, when we finally realize with great relief that we have been dreaming, and the nightmare wasn’t real after all.
Actually, dying is an event for which we can never really prepare fully. We want to control our life experiences by preparing for them, but most of them never happen the way we anticipate. We concede the inevitability of death, and yet, it is an event for which it is impossible to plan. Oh sure, we can buy cemetery plots, write our Last Will and Testament, and work towards an honorable legacy, but we never get to experience them. The only possible way to prepare physically for death is by planning in advance to make it easier for others – but we spend precious little time making it easy on ourselves.
“Death is a final separation from all we have worked for, all we have built up, all that is near and dear to us. It is too bad that dying is the last thing we do, because it could teach us so much about life.”
— Robert M. Herhold
This day was Saturday, and we planned to do some exploring. I excitedly pointed out to Greg and Suzanne all the clues at the “abduction scene” where we had watched the stars. Greg pondered, as if he half wanted to believe my theory that we had been whisked away by aliens and deposited back in random spots, but Suzanne was kindly tolerant of the mentally ill. It seemed her enthusiasm for alien stories had turned into a skeptical denial. We cooked breakfast in the same spot, and I warily checked over my shoulder to make sure there were no little gray men lingering in the bushes. Greg and I felt watched. Suzanne was amused by our paranoia, and went down to the lake to fetch bathing water.
“What if it’s true? We know what we’ve seen up here.” Greg didn’t want to hear about it at first, but what I was saying had resonance. “You were way down there, and I was over here. I know something different happened last night. I feel it all over me.”
Then I noticed the spot on the inside of my right wrist. It was located near the radial groove where the pulse is taken. I knew this because I’d had anatomical training, and was working then as a medical assistant. The spot was round and slightly red, and had a darker red point at the center that I rubbed and rubbed to see if there was a hole. Greg checked his wrists, but he had no similar marks. “It’s a mosquito bite, you moron,” he said, not convincingly. Both of us knew it looked nothing like a mosquito bite, because we had many real ones for comparison. The spot was round and flat – not raised or swollen – and it had a curious green-gray tinge when I turned it at an angle.
The spot soon faded, and remains a mystery. It could have been pressure from a rock or something, because I had basically slept in the gravel. My face had pits and marks from rocks (according to Greg because I had no mirror), but those looked and felt very different. Once the spot faded, we had nothing more to look at, and hadn’t thought to take a picture of it. My left hand strayed often throughout the day to feel the spot where it had been; as if to check my own pulse and make sure I was still alive.
After breakfast, we headed into the lovely forest on the southeast side of the lake, which we modestly referred to as Lothlórien, home of the elves. This was a thick stand of hemlocks, with a few Ponderosa mixed in, and they were extremely healthy. The stands of noble trees stood at attention among an assortment of random, odd-shaped boulders, that obviously tumbled down from the rim ages ago. Somewhere underneath the thick carpet of needles were the springs and still-melting ice that fed the lake, and the trees were siphoning off that nourishment for themselves. Exuberant bursts of boughs stretched out in the sheltered spaces between the dark trunks, unlike the scraggly, isolated specimens back on the lakes hore, where the icy winter winds tore through the basin and discouraged a broad reach. Nearby was the deep crack that Chris and I explored years before, which we called Sitch Tabr, after Dune. To our left and north was the huge pile of jumbled car-sized boulders that formed the cave we called Baggins End, and there were probably pockets and crevices all throughout this area. It seemed this modest three-acre wood was overstuffed with literary references. Anyway, the trees were loving life, and we respectfully navigated through them accompanied by choruses of birdsong, in an upwardly angling route to reach the crest of Dat Butte and its enigmatic standing stones.
We postulated that the stones had been there for millennia, and would remain until the sparse earth and gravel around them wore away, and they tumbled down to join the pile near the cave. Among those curious monoliths, I felt like a mouse meandering through a set of bowling pins. Eight to ten feet tall, the boulders stood arranged in a grid-like pattern for no apparent reason. One could walk through them in many different routes of small twisting paths; in some places too narrow for a man to pass. We searched for different vantage points to ascertain their pattern, and could see how they were like separating columns of basalt, or the tips of the fingers of some giant stony hand, just breaking the surface of the mountain. Whether they were peculiar alien artifacts, or a natural geologic formation, they were pretty damn cool!
From there, it was an easy hop up to the top of Sphinx Rock, nearly 2,000 feet above Bear Creek, which we had pointed out to Suzanne from the trail. The view was incredible, as always. On this day, the air was clear enough to see Mt. Eddy to the northeast. Ridge upon ridge of dusty gray-green mountains marched off to the horizons like petrified waves of granite. It was so easy and right to sit perched on the crown of the Sphinx for what seemed like hours, our hair being gently tousled by the updrafts. Nary a cloud was to be seen anywhere. There had to be moisture in the air, but the droplets weren’t getting together anytime soon. The living sky reached out far and wide like a calm, upside-down ocean; no more expanded than our souls.
The dogs were demanding our attention. Suzanne had tied Sierra and Rogue to a stout root so they wouldn’t fall off the cliff, which made me remember Shirelle so many years ago, when we feared she might jump off into space after a stick. This was by all accounts the most serious cliff in the area. I leaned out as far as I dared, to see the angling down of the great totems of granite that inspired us to name them after the Pharaohs. I dropped a few sticks and a pine cone, to watch the tumbling effect, and stepped back respectfully when I saw them twist in the updraft and careen wickedly off the rocks. Eventually we untied the dogs to stop the whining, and moved on with regret, and a sense of loss.
“I could have sat there forever,” Suzanne said plainly, giving voice to all of our thoughts.
We headed due south along the ridge that makes up the southeast rim of Little Bear Lake. This involved winding through small and large trees that were crowded by tall, scratchy manzanita. By weaving gently between the rough brush and trees, we felt more like part of the lush tapestry than conquerors of it. The dogs were very good at this game, and led us along paths used occasionally by deer and smaller critters. Soon the trees thinned out, and the bushes got smaller, until we were stepping over and in between them. We suddenly came upon the landing pad. It had been years since I had seen it, and the first sight gave me chills just like it did back then. I have already described it, and it hadn’t changed a bit: it still looked incongruous with the natural terrain, as if it was being used for something. We tarried here a while, grateful to be able to walk without anything trying to poke us or grab at our socks. The views to the south and Bonanza King were clear, but extensive logging scars marred an otherwise impressive mountain ridge. Off to the southwest lay the taller peaks of the Trinity Alps Wilderness, some with flecks of snowfields even this late in the year.
We wanted lunch, and chose a direct route back to camp. This brought us right down the side of the rim, like descending stairs from the upper deck of a stadium. Within a few dozen steps, we were back inside the healthiest part of the forest, and the birds hadn’t stopped singing all day by the sound of it. They chattered away in a song beautiful to the ear, but were most likely quarreling vigorously about what little food was left before retiring to lower altitudes for the winter. In the sheltering embrace of the trees, it seemed as though no time had passed since we had walked through in the morning. Our growling tummies told us otherwise! We passed right by a very mysterious set of lean-to boulders that suggested an ancient campsite from Middle Earth. Our sudden return to camp triggered a general rodent panic, as the chipmunks were interrupted in their fruitless attempts at larceny. They dropped their bolt cutters, acetylene torches, and tiny little goggles and scampered back to the crevices of the rock pile with great alacrity. Sierra and Rogue chased here and postured there, as if the noble guard dogs were responsible for their hasty exodus. Our modest foodstuffs were safe within their chew-proof containers, and we enjoyed a hearty meal, accompanied by lively conversation about the provenance of the amazing natural features we had revisited.