aumdadaGospel 21: it's the berries

I am walking barefoot down a dirt road on a mid-summer morning. There is no known destination. A small yellow butterfly appears to be following me, floating in its fractal patterns but always returning to the line I’m following. It finally rests on a branch of red ripe raspberries, their sun-warmed fragrance rising with the rising warmth of the sun-drenched day. I lean over and pick several of the juicy ones until I have a hand-full.

A chipmunk scurries across the road as I resume my walking and the butterfly its floating. I pick a berry from my mouth and place it on my tongue. The outside is warm but its bite is juicy cool. A breeze moves the high branches of an oak tree. Two crows fly by. I place another berry in my mouth. A flash of something moves through the woods. There’s a sound of a splash in a nearby brook. Another berry. A single cumulus cloud forms in a cobalt-blue sky, changing shapes as the wind softly fingers it edges, now a turtle, then a heron.

There’s still a few berries in my hand so I pop the rest in my mouth. The sun goes down. The sun comes up. Dinosaurs are turning into bluebirds. Oceans are turning into canyons. I’m standing at the edge of a sunburnt mesa, waiting for the total eclipse of the moon. A raven turns to talk to me. “You’re really making quite a day of it,” its vocals echoing off the rainbow cliffs as feathers shimmer with the blackness of absolute light. I stub my toe on a rock in the road and feel the stars of fourteen billion years. A coyote laughs in the distance, before the universe was born. So I am too.

aumdadaGospel 20: exit stage left

We dropped the mescaline at sunset and by nine o’clock I was driving a car full of lunacy through a swath of headlight-lit ever-changing quicksilver forms of strange particularity come alive for just a moment until others took their place for just a moment in a string of moments this dance of transformation was creating from out of the nothingness of night. In the back seat sat Joey and his two younger cousins. In the front seat was my cousin Paula. Joey’s cousins had never taken hallucinogens before and their reactions were loud and getting louder. Although Joey was attempting to lead them towards a quieter place of appreciation, he was losing the way himself and his laughter at their antics was beginning to outdistance their own clamor. Between the visionary chaos through the windshield and the cacophony of sounds within the car itself, I was beginning to lose the ability to follow the way of the road. So I turned to Paula and whispered loudly, “I think I need your help; I’m starting to freak out!”

This was a first for me. All previous trips had been enjoyable. There had been intense moments but never anxious ones. But although I had never had one, I knew enough to know a bad trip when having one. And I was having one, my eyes were telling Paula. “I know a place,” she said. “It’s near the Center. Some friends of George have an apartment there. Good people.” She emphasized the good. Her words were like a rope and I grabbed on to them. They led me to the state highway and down to Center Homestead where I stopped at her direction. Joey’s cousins were screaming something but I ignored them, as I also ignored the fact we hadn’t seen George all this summer and he wouldn’t be too happy about Joey invading his newfound secret territory.

I don’t remember any of the introductions or even the faces of the people I met. All I remember is the couch, the music, and the egg. For a timeless span of the album Brave New World played repeatedly, I disappeared into the supple folds of a blue couch. At first I felt relief like none ever experienced. Every anxious thought dissolved into the low-lit ambience until the only thing remaining was the wonder of music and a marvelous couch. It wasn’t as if I had disappeared completely but had simply become music and couch. I had always been music and couch. And music and couch were just this one thing. “God...” I finally spoke.

Paula must have heard me, because she suddenly appeared before me, and said previous to our leaving, I need to visit the egg room. I followed her away from the music and couch and she pointed to a door. I walked though it alone and found myself inside an egg. It was completely yellow. On the yellow floor there was a yellow bean bag chair. I sat. Paula closed the yellow door. A small yellow lamp glowed softly from a yellow wall. There is this interesting fact I now note: because everything was yellow, there was no yellow. And because there was no yellow, there was no room. There’s a crack called space-time through which the world appears and I had come back through it to see my original form.

aumdadaGospel 19: the frogs of war

Children can be cruel and we were nothing if not children. It was a Tuesday morning and David and I were headed to our cousin Paula’s cottage to play some ping-pong, listen to some music on her porch, and maybe make a little noise. David had secretly scored some Black Cat firecrackers from a cousin who had visited during the weekend. So we walked along the road leading to the public beach detonating a few explosions on the way.

When we reached the shore, we were confronted with a resounding spectacle of frogs. There were hundreds of them, as if the wind-driven waves washing along the weedy section of the shoreline were turning into living creatures. They were hopping in a passionate celebration of existence. At first we looked in wonderment and felt their fervor in our blood. It was almost overpowering to the mind.

So it wasn’t long before the fact of frog and firecracker combined in our thoughts, emerging as some ghastly mutant creature. It wasn’t difficult at all to catch the first frog. And it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination to gently clasp its little emerald body while forcing a firecracker into its tiny mouth. Lighting the fuse was just a simple spark of action, and then we let it loose to hop along the golden sands like a funny cartoon character smoking a small cigar—until its head exploded in a mush of green and yellow guts.

Oh how we laughed—we laughed our heads off and it felt so good! And then we did it again. And again. And over and over again until the killing grounds disgusted even us. We left them there to rot in the growing sun and continued our morning walk to Paula’s and listen to some top forty radio, munch on some cookies, and drink some orange soda. When the noontime news came on and started droning on about some B-52 bombings beginning in Viet Nam, we turned it off. It was time for ping-pong.

aumdadaGospel18: a season of listening

Rock & roll was our bible and the garage beneath Joey’s cottage was, for one summer, our church. It was unusual for a lake cottage to have a foundation; it was a summer cottage after all. But a garage was just strange. The Tylers never used it for their car, and although there was a couch and a coffee table, they never were down there to use those either. So we did. Joey had a portable record player and we played whatever albums were popular amongst us. That’s how I discovered Surrealistic Pillow.

It was Diana’s choice; she had turned a little hippie-wannabe the previous winter, discovering bell-bottoms, tie-dye, pot, and some fascinating musical selections, including Al Kooper, Steve Miller Band, and Jefferson Airplane. They all grew on me as we played them over and over and over again that June, July, and August. But there was something about Surrealistic Pillow.

I had heard of the Airplane, and actually owned the 45 of White Rabbit, but I thought of them as nothing more than a one or two-hit wonder. And on first hearing, that rest of the record appeared sluggish and unexciting for the most part. Maybe it was the pot that changed my mind. A garage with an open door was the perfect place to share a joint. It provided the welcome secrecy of someplace inside while guaranteeing the outside air needed to filter the sweet aroma. Throw in a couch and record player and there’s the textbook setting for our summer of love—one year late.

3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds! It started the second side, and we always started that record with the second side. It provided the initial jolt for conversation and cleared the mental space for profound revelations. Like: “It was like there,” Diana patiently explained. “Wow,” David looked and saw. “Where?” I asked. “If you can’t see it, I can’t say,” she answered, emphasizing each and every single word. “Oh, there!” I too saw it now. “But where is it?” Joey giggled nervously, still unable to see it. I was silent for a minute, and Joey repeated his question. I looked at him and finally responded, “I think I lost it.” And then everyone would break out in that crazy high incurable laughter.

When both the laughter and the record ended, and most of the time it was curiously simultaneously, we would flip it to the other side. About ten minutes later, “Today” began to play, and we were slipping into private universes of otherworldly introspection. If you weren’t careful, this was where paranoia could appear; people are undeniably strange and who really knows the other? Otherwise, if one went further, one could really see some stuff. But no words can be spoken to this point.

aumdadaGospel 17: new moon waters

Next door to my Uncle Charley’s cottage sat the Upton’s summer house. Benjamin Upton owned a wood mill in Bluefield, a small mill town about ten miles south of New Moon Lake. His business was, I had overhead my parents say, a lucrative one. Besides his mill, his fortunate sons and daughters, his white Cadillac Coupe de Ville, his large motor boat with dual inboard engines, his house in town built on a landscaped hill with nothing in view but his property of meadows and woods, and his summer house of varnished golden pine with French doors and louvre windows, he was a political leader of the town, and his wife was deeply involved with the First Baptist Church of Bluefield Parish.

One early July Saturday morning, I was sitting with my aunt and mother on the grassy promontory overlooking the beach and lake. David was inside finishing his Cheerios and I was waiting for him to join me for a morning swim. Suddenly a crowd of people dressed in Sunday best gathered on the Upton beach. A man in black appeared from out of the crowd and walked right into the water, shoes, pants, and all. He held a book in his hands and began reading what was obviously Bible scripture. A heavyset woman dressed in white emerged and joined him in the lake. It was Joanne Upton.

At first her dressed flowered in the shallow waters but then it sunk around her as they walked further and deeper. She was also wearing a large straw hat with a white ribbon securely tied to her chin. Exchanging some words with the minister at first, she held her hand out to someone in the crowd. A woman also dressed in white appeared and joined Mrs. Upton and the minister in the waist-deep water. The Reverend spoke some words and lightly touched the woman’s forehead. Joanne Upton held the small of the woman’s back and then dipped her beneath the surface. I saw the Holy Spirit above the effervescent expanse of outgoing ripples, and small white doves with wings of fire descending in our midst. Our minds dissolved into the depths of New Moon Lake and we were always swimming in the youth of ten thousand summers.

aumdadaGospel 16: a summer thriller

No season can be spent without trouble being bought, even in the days before sex and drugs and rock & roll. One day, David discovered a spool of party-favor paper, printed with blue balloons and teddy bears all over. It was the leftovers of a birthday party held in the cottage where the New York people lived. We knew them only by sight, exchanging hellos when walking along the shores of their beach while heading for the swamp at the north end of the cove, but nothing more than that. Our parents may have held deeper conversations but never shared any of them with us. The only way we knew they were from New York was the golden Empire State license plates on their automobiles.

Their driveway was almost at the beginning of the Gold Coast Road, which began at the state highway and followed the properties along the waterfront of the cove, past all our cottages, until it reached the county way. The New York people kept their trash cans near it at the end of their driveway, and the roll of paper was lying on the ground there. We had been walking down the road toward the highway when David spied it reflecting the late evening sun. At first, we tore some pieces off and waved them like streamers behind us. Then Joey had an infamous idea. “Follow me!” he shouted running off for the end of the way.

There was a large pine tree with wooden signs of the names of those who lived along the lake. It was at the corner where the dirt road met paved highway beneath a street lamp, and Joey was tying an end of the roll of paper around it when we caught up to him. His evil genius was apprehended by us almost immediately. David grabbed the spool at the finish of the knot. We waited with him as cars rolled past us, speeding north and south to destinations other than this summer country one. When the coast was clear, we bolted across, and David tied the further end of the long span of paper on another tree. We then ran across the highway again and waited from a secure place on the side of our dirt road.

Joey heard a car approaching from the north. “Here comes one!” he howled. There was a short stretch of straight highway in that direction before it passed our road. The paper glowed softly in the twilight, and then flashed as the headlights of the oncoming car picked up the traces of its length about four feet above the black pavement. Suddenly it appeared like a solid silver chain stretching across a mysterious thoroughfare. God knows what the driver thought. But brakes squealed! A white car came to a stop and a man almost flew out its door.

By then we were laughing uncontrollably. “Roadblock!” Joey screamed. “Identify yourselves!” I roared. “Hands-up!” David barked out an almost scripted order. The man looked over at us as something registered in his eyes. He hollered out something and another man got out of the passenger side. They exchanged words and then came running at us. “They’re after us!” Joey screamed out the obvious. “Run!” I echoed. “Follow me!” David cried and went running up the dirt way.

It was nearly dark now but the surface of the road reflected the remaining light that lit the cobalt sky and it glowed before us with high adventure. David turned off at the driveway of the New York people, threading his way in-between several cars towards the shadows of the right side of the cottage. We heard angry voices behind us as we followed him into the darkness and out the other end of beach, free shore, open lake and clear sky.

The New York people were all inside. We ran for the freedom of the water and waited. The two men must have given up the chase, or were knocking on the door of the cottage waiting to ask New York people whatever two irate men who left their car in the middle of a state highway at twilight in late July would ask such strangers from New York. We knew we’d never find out and we laughed about it amongst ourselves as we headed for the safety of our swamp.

aumdadaGospel 15: oberon, what the puck?

I had a dream. It was summer 1968 and King and Kennedy had both been assassinated that spring. My parents were watching the Democratic National Convention on TV, and Senator Ribicoff was speaking out about the violence outside the hall on the streets of Chicago. Mayor Daley rose and had to be restrained from bolting for the podium and biting off the head of the respected Gentleman from Connecticut. “You lousy motherfucker! Go home!” he screamed and called in the riot police instead. They trooped down the corridors pounding any delegate not pledged to Hubert H. Humphrey into bloody submission. It’s true; Dan Rather took this picture.

Clean Gene eyed the bloodshed from the balcony. There was no time to find a phone booth. He ripped off his white shirt and thin black tie, revealing an eye in a pyramid imprinted on a red, white and blue spandex undershirt. “For truth, justice and the American way,” he cried, swooping down into the action on the floor, where Ed Muskie met him with a piece of green kryptonite. It’s true; Norman Mailer wrote this book.

Lyndon Baines Johnson rubbed his forehead asking over and over again what monsters had he let loose. Abbie Hoffman came in through a side door and answered with a left hook. Bobby Seale raised his fist and punched a gaping hole through the convention hall ceiling. The stars poured in. George McGovern looked up and saw the black hole of 1972. Richard Nixon was smiling like a Cheshire cat licking up the Milky Way. Jerry Rubin took the next bus for Wall Street. It’s true; Mia Farrow acted in this movie.

I woke up. The house was quiet. The night light in the kitchen gave out a shadowy glow. Everything was a lie. Walking past the refrigerator, I grabbed a can of Coke, and went into the living room. Embers still glowed in the fireplace; it was a cool August night and I watched their final performance. There was a long road before me, with dead man’s curves and disappearing straight-aways. There were long stretches of falling asleep at the wheel. There was an accident or two. But there was something there is that keeps one going.

aumdadaGospel14: an early ending

The end of summer is not the beginning of the fall. It’s the return of books, pencils and paper, and back to school. That was always the Wednesday after Labor Day, so we would most often leave the lake on the Tuesday in-between, although most everyone else left the afternoon of the holiday. All the docks and rafts and boats would be pulled in to the shore, leaving the lake in its wilderness condition of nothing but a smooth blank mirror.

The Francis family summered on the lot next to my Uncle Charley’s. Actually it was the lot one over from his; there was an empty lot of trees between the two, right across the picture window of our cottage (today there’s a large all-season house sitting there). My father would sit at the table in front of the window and stare through those trees almost every evening he was there, ruminating on the life spans of the congregating moths at the light shining from the table-lamp.

There were nine children in the Francis family, although there were only eight on this particular summer. The oldest had been killed in Viet Nam the previous spring. They had been slow to arrive that summer, but they finally did almost en masse for the Fourth of July, and kept more to themselves than usual, breaking camp early the Sunday of Labor Day weekend.

By Monday late afternoon, everyone else had disappeared but Paula and myself. We walked down to the Francis waterfront and sat on the blue raft now pulled on to the shore. The matching blue docks were stacked behind it. Wooden shutters had been nailed to the windows of the blue cottage. The beach was clean of toys and blue Adirondack chairs. We stared out at the lake and discussed the events of that summer. Jane and I had finally become a thing after two years of flirting with the possibility, but had broken it off after less than two passionate months. Paula had started up something with George and wondered what it was and where in the world it was going.

“He seems serious about us,” she was saying, “but he doesn’t want to have anything to do with anyone else. It’s kind of intense.” She was now matching his intensity with her own natural obsessive nature.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I don’t think I even saw him the entire month of August.” Even after Jane and I had broken it off, we had returned to flirting again with the possibility, so the last couple of weeks of the month had been back and forth ones of dueling obsessions, away, looking for another, and near, longing for the same old same. I really didn’t have a chance to miss George at all.

“I know,” she replied. “We weren’t separated at all this last month. I hardly saw any of you guys either.” I said nothing more but it had occurred to me as well the George and Joey rift had finally cracked us apart.

We continued to look out at the water. Ah, the summer was over. “It’s never going to be the same,” the lake reflected my own sad silent voice back to me.

aumdadaGospel13: strange love, strange world

Jane and Diana lived just off the point that watched over the cove which formed our developing world each summer. Their cottages neighbored each other on the waterfront facing the open vast expanse of empty lake. A small dirt road ran past their driveways. It left the county road, which bridged the outlet of the lake, at the hillside property of George’s parents and ran along the opposite shore of the cove, past the yawning grounds surrounding the point, continuing on past Jane, past Diana, and towards the entrances of other greater forbidding lakeside properties.

In the day, the road was always in the shadow of trees. At night, it would become exceptionally murky. It was the darkest I had ever experienced, and I appreciated the puddles of moonlight splashing the surrounding atmosphere with shadows of sight on those nights we journeyed upon it. One early evening, David and I walked over to visit with Jane and Diana to watch the movie, Dr. Strangelove, on TV. This was before the advent of pre-recorded video and so the event was considered something awesome and auspicious.

We had waited all week to see it, looking forward to Peter Sellers and his triumvirate of exceptionally diverging roles. So we watched it attentively, laughing at almost every line, and especially the rich pantomime of Strangelove’s uncontrollable extremity—we never even noticed the time passing. After the world had finally ended, and the necessary small talk had come to a close, we said our goodbyes. David and I walked through the light of the driveway to the darkness of the road. It wasn’t long before we realized the stark truth: there was a new moon over New Moon Lake.

I literally could not see my hand before my face. Needless to say, I couldn’t see David at all. It was only the sound of our voices which kept us together. Of course we had no flashlight, and the road was a rambling more-than-a-quarter-mile course running in-between roadsides of brush, bush, tree-stumps, trees, and the occasional stick with sign indicating a driveway leading to an undetectable cottage far below. We bumped many of those things that night.

It was slow going. Step-by-step, we searched out the road like two blind men. I was still a little high from the joint we had smoked outside before the movie. Not that Dr. Strangelove required anything to make it strange, but we thought it might be a good idea to match the consciousness of its particular brand of sanity with something similar ourselves. And now that consciousness was walking in the blackness of a world gone dark. There was nothing there but me, and I was just this bodiless entity stumbling in the emptiness of night. I was free to re-invent the world in any way I saw fit. In fact, there was nothing else I could do.

aumdadaGospel 12: this and thou

There was a general store a mile north on the state highway where most of our needs during the week were satisfied. Often we would walk that mile just for something to do. By early afternoon, all the attractions of the lake and shore had dimmed, so we would pull on socks and sneakers, ask our parents if they needed any supplies, and even if they didn’t, walk that mile up the highway, looking forward to some snack or drink or whatever worldly itch which required rubbing or scratching.

The general store itself was small but contained a spectrum of provisions from worms to steak, and a cornucopia of packages and cans in-between. There was a soda machine outside, and a rack of candy, cakes, and chips standing by the counter inside. There was also a small newspaper stand with comic books and copies of Mad Magazine. For my purposes, these three regions provided everything I needed—a can of Coke, a bag of chips, and the latest Spiderman. No thou! Or no thou, that is, until Jane appeared in my life.

The summers could be divided into ‘before Jane’ and ‘after Jane.’ And ‘after Jane’ evolved into a crowd of beautiful faces, each one becoming the flavor of the day, week, or month. But Jane was the first, and not in some sexual way, because that was not to be, and not in some kind of childlike crush, because there had been plenty of those before, but in a manner much more mysterious and human. It felt like a dream when I was with Jane.

That dream turned into a summer night on a beach with a bonfire rising to the stars. A circle of friends glowed in the flickering light. Around the flames, a spark of something illicit but delightful was being passed from person to person. Jane was sitting with me on a blanket and we were talking about nothing much, just listening instead to our voices slowly intertwining. That was something enough. The night grew colder, the stars larger, and the bonfire smaller. At first, we found our arms around each other. Then we discovered we were kissing. Before we knew it, we were lying on the blanket in a remarkable embrace, lost within that timeless unbounded expanse of utterly nothing but thou.

aumdadaGospel 11: elaborating manifestation

Three sisters summered in the woods on New Moon Lake. One was my mother, Gloria. Our cottage stood on a non-waterfront lot across the road from her younger sister, Daphne. Down the road and deeper in the cove lived the third sister, Lillian, the ping pong connoisseur. My cousin David was Daphne’s youngest of three sons. Her husband, my Uncle Charley, worked all day long from the cardinal song of dawn to that batty time of lingering dusk, despite the fact this was his weekend getaway. But he had survived the terrors of Bataan and work was welcome therapy.

He had built the cottage from scratch, using massive unfinished pine logs centered around an immense central fireplace created from enormous field stones. He had also landscaped all the grounds, including a grassy promontory, supported by lofty stone foundations, resting beneath the shade of eastern pine trees overlooking the lake, his dock, the rowboat he had built, and a raft he had also built complete with platform diving board. That’s where the three cousins played today.

Paula was sitting on the side of the raft, her legs kicking up a splash of waves in the revitalizing water. She was Lillian’s daughter. In the more mundane seasons of autumn, winter, and spring, her family lived in the apartment above that of David’s family, in a house both families owned. Our grandmother lived on the third floor, and by then, my family lived less than a quarter-mile down the road on the same street, Oak.

David was on the diving board. Actually he was on the railings of the platform that held the diving board, maybe ten feet above the deep blue water. I was treading water underneath the diving board, studying carefully the process David had perfected, which involved climbing carefully to one railing, then steadying both legs on both railings before lifting one foot off while pushing off with the other sideways, simultaneously raising both hands and clasping them together in a prayer-like salutation to the lowering late afternoon sun and then diving into the empty space of the world, before disappearing into its sparkling reflections.

Aum Dada Gospel 10: the unfinished mountain

From what the previous owner of these properties named the Golden Coast of New Moon Lake, one can see the prominence of Prospect Mountain rising almost directly above the far opposite shores of Hollywood Beach. The locals call it Blueberry Hill, though, and so we do too. As a young child, I saw it as something distant, vague, and unapproachable. But the older I got, the smaller it seemed to become, until one day it was so decided we should climb to its cobalt summit. There were seven of us: George, Paula, me, Jane, David, Diana, and Joey. It was a lucid summer day and that’s about all the plot one needs in the summer for seven souls on a gigantic quest.

The way to the mountain begins as a dirt hill-country road climbing its eastern shoulder. No dwellings line either side. Ramshackle stone walls fence in young rambunctious forests. Some old white pines appear here and there. The seven of us talk continually, sometimes splitting into smaller groups, sometimes forming a single unit. If there’s anything resembling a couple at this point in the story, it’s David and Diana, but they’re still at the flirting stages of a developing relationship, so there’s no real confidentialities being exchanged, except for an occasional push and shove—no holding hands or arm in arms.

This is the first summer the seven of us could be considered a gang, and even that is beginning to appear diffuse and impermanent. George really doesn’t get along with Joey. One is mostly an unassuming country boy and the other is almost a city loudmouth, the opposite ends of the spectrum for this group. The rest of us fall somewhere in the more central bandwidth of the town. So while the conversation appears to blend among the seven of us, it really gets no larger than six, with either George or Joey not participating at the group level.

A gap appears in the stone wall bordering the west side of the road and George hollers, “This is the road up the mountain, gang. My uncle’s blueberry trucks have worn it nice for hiking.” So we turn and begin the steeper ascent through rocky fields of low blueberry shrubs. Some of us pick a few berries after George first stoops down to pick a handful and rises with an uplifted fist, crying out: “What Kent doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him!” Joey replies with something more acidic, “I don’t know if we should trust that silence. He’ll probably own you in a year or so; he owns everything else around here.”

Willingly ignoring that remark, George walks briskly ahead leaving the six of us to follow in his disappearing wake. The hill gets steeper. We grow quieter. Joey is starting to fall behind, his stocky overweight stature beginning to feel the strength of gravity. George looks back. He can’t help himself: “Hey, if you wait until Monday, my uncle Kent can give you a ride up, Joe.” Joey raises his arm in defiance and throws him the bird. George snickers, “Yeah, good idea, Joe. Save your breath. You’re going to need it.” And continues to climb like a man with a plan. The remaining five of us are trying to keep up on the one hand, and delay on the other, but the line is stretching thin.

Aum Dada Gospel 9: the yielding center

Through a culvert flowed the single outlet for all of New Moon Lake, just large enough for a canoe to maneuver through if the person paddling all but disappeared. On one side of the culvert was our cove of cottages and boats, and on the other side was a little country stream. Above the culvert was a road that started at the state highway and ran past George’s grandfather’s great ancestral farm, then past the country estate of George’s uncle (who had sold most of the land on which these summer cottages stood), continuing towards a rural hill country where the paved road quickly turned to dirt and for all I knew turned into the earth itself.

As for the outlet stream, it disappeared into a land of trees towards a missing section of my mental geographic map, although in a few years, it would be dammed a few miles down to create a man-made lake which George’s uncle named after himself in order to make an even larger killing than the one he had made on New Moon Lake. But today it was just a place from where David and I played around the culvert.

The culvert was made of cement, and we were looking through the long chamber, sending our rebounding voices through its length towards the locket-sized appearances of lake and lakeside on the other end. That was fun, until David attempted to scale a rock right through the entire length, and that became even more fun. Every now and then a projectile would make it all the way and we would jump and cheer in utter delight. It was as if we were in exile and our rocks were messages to the world, not to run and rescue us, but to come and join us.

After a couple of hours, we tired of the play and sat by the streamside, watching the water flow towards a paradise of clay banks, willow trees, and sun. This was when David and I were best of friends, cousins who summered at this enchanting lake, and lived less than a mile apart during the other mundane seasons. In time we would drift apart, but today we were together in this fantasy of Eden.

I listened to the occasional vehicle bound either for the busy state highway or the quiet hill country. I touched the gentle trickle of water exiting the large expanse of lake to drop into this secret stream. I luxuriated in the middle of the summer, seemingly far away from the fall of town and school and homework. Through or over this opening of culvert, all the world went off in its varying directions. But here there was absolutely no direction. We had discovered our center of the universe and found there was nothing to it.

Aum Dada Gospel 8: isha and the silly birds

A red fluid fills a tall glass bird. It is wearing a little yellow hat. Suddenly it dips its beak into a cup of water. The bar on which it sits is separating two men playing with picture cards. One man throws four cards down and chants, “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, and three is nine.” With one hand, he moves a metal peg above a wooden board filled with rows of holes, while lifting a chalice to his lips with the other. The man sitting across from him throws down his four cards next and sings in exaggerated delight, “Nineteen!” The bird dips its beak into the cup of water again.

A boy is watching the glass bird with fascination while listening to the men sing out their mantras. He has had a busy day rowing in a boat and his mind is wandering away from the comic book he was reading. Now his tired body becomes the bird and he wonders what force is regulating this perpetual motion, pumping his beak back and forth into this transparent surface of water. He listens to another mantra. “The kitty isn’t that much better. A pair of eights for two, and the matching jack makes three.” But the dissatisfaction appears practiced.

He flies to the beam that spans the open living space and looks at the dark and empty brick red hearth. Where does the fire go, he wonders. Another mantra floats to his ears and he sees that he is now submerged in the glass of water which has grown to giant Alice-like proportions. Swimming past a scuba diver and a pirate ship, he thinks it odd he’s never noticed all this wonderful ambrosia surrounding him before.

How could he have ever been thirsty? Why has his head been moving up and down seeking what’s so obviously all around him? Nothing is making sense right here and now. Even the mantra that’s breaking through the surface sounds outlandish to his ears. “That is the whole, this is the whole; from the whole, the whole becomes manifest; taking away the whole from the whole, the whole remains.” The sun breaks through the picture window; New Moon Lake is coming through the door.

Aum Dada Gospel 7: splashing in the void

We were tired of the girls in our gang so we decided to look for new ones. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that David was at odds with Diana, I had never been even with Jane, George was off somewhere with my other cousin Paula, and Joey was always looking for a girl to call his own. He had spotted a trio of fine hot chicks, as he called them, on the shore across the point from where Diana and Jane summered. So we clambered into his boat, pulled the black Merc into life, and took off for the territories as all ravenous boys will do.

Three girls about the same age as us were lounging on beach chairs catching the rays of mid-July like sunbathing sirens of New Moon Lake. We crashed upon the shoals of longing. Sinking in awkwardness, we howled inside as the lake began to drown our greatest expectations, when Joey grabbed the lifeline of their dock and cried, “Would any of you girls like to water-ski today?” Smooth as the unruffled waters of that hot and humid afternoon.

The tall lithe blonde object, whom we would soon know as the sharp-tongued subject named Melissa, yelled out, “Sure, do you know someone who has a shipshape boat that can pull a lightweight like me?” Joey grinned while David and I howled out loud. “Oh, I think this tub of fiberglass can do the trick,” he threw the ski rope toward the shore. “And I can always teach you if you don’t know how.” Forever on the ready, that Joey.

She certainly knew how and showed us a few tricks that afternoon. Her friend, Susan, did not though and rode in the boat with us, while the third, Sandy, kept her company, alternating with Melissa as both took turns jumping wakes and riding waves. Joey kept the throttle active, David coolly manned the rope, while I tried to say a word or two to Susan, as she filled my world with memory and desire. I remembered Jane, but wanted her. A boy’s heart is a great dark permanent void easily filled by the nearest luscious evanescent object.

Aum Dada Gospel 6: catching light in a bottle

We are looking for old bottles. George collects them, and knows the best place to find them is in the resurrecting wilderness of old cellar holes. There, after the wood frame house has been removed by owner, stranger, or act of god, the remaining wound of foundation and whatever items were left behind are healed over time by the hands of vegetation and the sweet breath of nature’s nurse.

George had stumbled upon this one deep in the woods while wandering alone in his divining ways. Now, we were approaching its ruins so George can continue his search for kismet in a more leisurely and thorough fashion. This was the summer before ‘Lord of the Rings’ so we aren't in any character but for the ones we really think we are: pirates looking for the buried loot.

George is inside the surrounding mound where the remaining foundation has been buried in more than a century’s worth of leaf mould and wind-blown dirt. David is apprenticing, and I am busy rhapsodizing about the lilacs that once in the dooryard bloomed. Already I have visions of poetry dancing in my head. Falling through the leaves, the light of a youthful summer breaks upon our bodies like a waterfall of reverie and splashes back into the air with stained glass wonder.

“Look at this beauty!” George sings out. He is holding a small triangular-shaped green-tinted bottle looking like it once contained a medicinal cure for aging, a decanted fountain of youth. It appears pristine. The cork is still in it. And on closer inspection, a small amount of something fluid washes around its bottom.

“Open it up!” cries David, and George carefully obliges. Twisting the cork off, he brings the bottle up to his nose and smells. And smiles. David takes a whiff and begins laughing uncontrollably. George holds up the bottle to me and I gingerly sniff. I see the house new and varnished. A little girl is playing with a doll on a swing in the front yard, where an apple tree grows, its fruit still green with promise. The woods spread out like the light hair on a young boy’s arm.

Circling the earth, a web of life is reaching to the sky, first flexing down from particle and wave to atom down to molecule and then the reflex up to single-celled life to organic vegetation up to creatures roaming on the surface of the earth to these three boys looking for a message in a bottle that the world is here and now becoming conscious and aware it is a singular light within the all-encompassing light of the light of light. “God!” I proclaim.

Gospel of Aum Dada 5: sanctum sanctorum

And then there was the summer when thoughts ran away with themselves, as well as the spoon, the dish, the dog, the moon, the cow, the fiddle, the cat, and I felt as if I were a bystander watching a parade of pesky androids, humanoid engines like swarms of motorized lawn mowers normally so singular and domestic becoming multiple and outlandish, increasing logarithmically as if directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself until they even broke from his control and ran off in all directions randomly and vigorously but without any malice, and there was nothing I could do but watch this larger thought roll in like an unattainable tidal wave emanating from the unconscious depths of New Moon Lake, recognizing its size and shape and chaotic demeanor and knowing it was named panic! And all the other thoughts were swamped. And I, myself, was swamped. Panic was everything and everywhere. Panic was king. Panic was country. Panic was panoramic, pantheistic, a panoptical panoply of pandemonium and pang!

My mother recognized the monster, having been attacked by one called agoraphobia for almost all her life. My father knew it all too well, having lived next to one like it for the entire length of his marriage. Both tried to talk me down as if I were standing on a cliff about to jump. I couldn’t tell them not to worry. There wasn’t any cliff. Panic had destroyed that as well.

But it slowly dawned on me, for after all I still existed, there I was and here I am, that I wasn't who I thought I was, nor were all those submerged thoughts really mine. And I wasn’t even this overwhelming wave of panic. They were something separate from the core of what I was. And so I rested in that sanctuary, almost pleasantly schizophrenic in my comfort as I watched panic roaring like a freight train turning toward tornadic fury with a Kansas concentration, and waited for it to leave for some other state.

Something cracked that summer but it wasn’t me. I emerged for the very first time, popped my head out, looked around, and waited for the time to be right to be. Maybe I even chirped a little tune.

Gospel of Aum Dada 4: Let Love

My thoughts were going back and forth like a ping pong ball. I should tell Jane I love her. The woods were a luminous emerald green today. Of course, she loves me too. A bluebird flew by. Life will be splendiferous! Turning, I watched ten thousand suns swimming in the golden lake. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a crow settled on the beach. What am I thinking? I watched it vomit out an earth-wrenching caw. Of course I shouldn’t tell Jane I love her. A cloud passed under the sun and the world became a territory possessed by shadow. She loathes me. My stomach growled; I obviously had been poisoned at breakfast. Life will be humiliating! “Your serve!”

My aunt interrupted my endless internal volley. She had just defeated my cousin, and it was my turn to take on her latest challenge. The ping pong table was half-way between her cottage and the shore, underneath the shelter of tall pine trees. When not diving off the raft or sitting on the porch playing crazy eights, I could often be found here improving my low fast awesome serve.

But not today. Although I had been sitting on an Adirondack chair ostensibly watching my aunt and cousin volley back and forth, I really was lost in this latest quandary. I absolutely loved Jane. I loved her heaven-sent, earth goddess, lake nymph ways. I loved the timeless tender mystery of her soft ethereal breath becoming tangible laughter in my ears. I loved all the missing meaning in the flirtatious tone of her voice speaking everlasting words that only I would hear. Oh, ye gods of New Moon Lake, take pity on this poor suburban boy, for here this summer in this paradise of earth, wind and water, I have fallen—in love with Jane!

“Sorry,” I replied in visible pain to my aunt. “I’m feeling a little under the weather. I think I’ll go burn for awhile in the sun.” And I thought I did.

Gospel 3: Just Another Electric Acid Dream

“But Legolas, you have the chronology all wrong,” I replied, because I had said I would in the preceding chapter. “Nay, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, not only do you have time all wrong, you have also mistaken space as something more than just an artifact of the mind.” I looked at him as if he were Albert Einstein relating ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ while standing on a weedy shoreline, the existence of which I had not yet known. I mean Einstein’s paper and not the weedy shoreline, which I took for granted as existing back then. Now, not so much. “So take this Elven lembas bread and tell me what you see,” Legolas chanted as he faded to green while continuing, “although you may notice I'm not here myself.”

We were walking down the tree-lined dirt road that ran past my parent’s cottage and down the hill toward Joey’s. The smell of raspberries baking naturally in the mid-July heat wafted through my nostrils. Sounds of children playing in a splash of water floated to my ears. My eyes, though, were locked on David’s two hands which cupped a few small dots on wax-like paper. “It’s like Orange Sunshine except ten times better,” he enthused. He then spoke as if in a church, hushed and reverent. “I forget what the real name is but I like to call it Tangerine Truth.”

“Wow!” I responded. In a few hours, I wouldn’t be so loquacious.

“Yeah, wow is definitely the word, cousin. Here, have a hit of some fine fresh air,” he said, as he tore a piece of paper with a tiny speck of a spot of a tangerine dot and handed it to me. It felt like a sacrament, as I gently held it in the fingertips of my two upraised hands. In Nomine Leary, et Kesey, et Owsley Stanley. “Just let it rest on your tongue for a few minutes and then swallow the whole fucking logic and proportion down,” he smiled. “and get ready to watch the grooviest movie, man.”

Which I did. Except I wasn’t really watching the movie, as much as the movie was watching me. Time expanded; space contracted. From the dock down at the public beach, I watched as the universe stared at me with ten thousand eyes that looked a lot like mine. Slowly I moved my mouth and the man on the moon spoke. Slowly I moved my arm and a falling star streaked across the freaking sky, its quicksilver trail refusing to disappear, burning the diamond night with traces of my own eleven fingers. Far out!

“Did you hear the moon?” Joey whispered.

“I think it was a loon,” David spoke in acid awe.

I was silent. No, I thought very slowly to myself, Joey was absolutely right. That moon was definitely speaking to us. Full moon over New Moon Lake. Mead Moon. Buck Moon. Thunder Moon. Hay Moon! Speak a little louder! I pointed to it. Then I tried to repeat what it was saying. I failed. I couldn’t say a single word. It spoke again. Damn! I had nothing. The reflection on the water answered instead. Waves and waves and more waves.

First, it would be many years until I heard those words again and it wouldn’t be the moon speaking them. Second, I’d like to say, for posterity’s sake, I regret that particular trip and the ten or more that followed, until one of them tried to kill me before I was ready to die. But I don’t. Third, maybe you’re a better listener.

Gospel of Aum Dada 2: Lords of the Lake

As a child, I spent all my summers at the lake in New Hampshire. New Moon Lake. It wasn’t so small as to be invaded by algae and it wasn’t so large as to be invaded by monstrous hordes of motor boats. Rather, it was just the right size as to be invaded by a few curious children. We could canoe around its shores in less than half-a-day, and see across the lake in whatever time it takes for light to travel one mile. Of course, the white sands of Hollywood Beach probably sped that light along; such appears to be the nature of this entrancing silver screen of dreams.

Sometimes we would walk around the lake on backcountry roads. And one summer we walked around the lake while playing characters out of ‘Lord of the Rings.’ George was always Gandalf because he was a local country boy familiar with all the unknown paths and secret geographies. He had also whittled himself a striking walking stick with a smoothly carved oaken head of a penis, and that was magic enough for boys our age. My cousin David was always Bilbo. He had begun reading ‘Lord of the Rings’ by beginning at the beginning, which was ‘The Hobbit,’ and he had fallen in love with that primordial world of dragons and dwarves and wargs. I was Aragorn, because sometimes I could be King Elessar Telcontar, and sometimes I could be just good old Strider, the lost sovereign of Gondor.

Although there had been other fantasies played as a child, this one took on larger-than-life qualities. Maybe it was the lake and the stands of white birch trees that hugged the shores like a broken crown. Maybe it was the coming-of-age quality of our uncertain lives. Or maybe it was the book itself, which held a supernatural although vaguely familiar quality. But this Middle Earth dream had more of the tinge of the real than so-called reality itself, and so we loved it. That’s why it wasn’t unexpected when, off on my own one morning waiting for the others to appear, I met Legolas, the great elf of the Woodland Realm. I was chasing darting minnows on the shore when I suddenly saw these tall green leggings rise out of the water. I call them green, but they shimmered like silver birch leaves in a cool silent breeze. “Strider,” he exclaimed. “We cannot tarry any longer in this world. We must make haste for the reality of Rivendell!”

Now, I think he said ‘world’ but he may have said ‘wood,’ and I think he said ‘reality’ but he might have said ‘realty,’ because elves do talk in such strange tongues. And his chronology of the story was all askew, as I would tell him in the following chapter. But I’m afraid I did tarry for the next thirty and some odd years. If I had followed him directly then and there, despite the overwhelming fear I had of doing so, I may have seen through this dream world much earlier, toward that pure truth of Rivendell. But, as I would later ask myself, if not then, then why not now?